RUTHFULLY YOURS

If you want a state, kill some Jews. That’s the sick message Sir Keir Starmer has just broadcast to the world. He says his recognition of a State of Palestine while Hamas continues to hold half-starved Jews in its dank tunnels and still dreams of annihilating the Jewish State is not a ‘reward for terror’. He isn’t fooling anyone, possibly not even himself. Somewhere in the recesses of what remains of his moral sensibility, even he must know that bestowing legitimacy on a ‘state’ part-ruled by a neo-fascist militia is an act of lethal cowardice that benefits no one but the neo-fascists.

Starmer made his Palestine statement in true neo-imperial style. In a glossy video message, he said his act of recognition is an attempt to counter the ‘growing horrors’ in Gaza and to ‘keep alive the possibility of peace and a two-state solution’. The Foreign Office has already updated its maps of Israel and the Palestinian Territories to reflect the PM’s decree that a State of Palestine should exist. Do these people think it’s still the 1920s and puffed-up ministers in London’s opulent offices of state have the ‘right’ to redraw the map of the Middle East as they see fit?

The most maddening part of Starmer’s Palestine posturing is his claim that this is about ‘keeping alive’ the hope of peace. That was also said by the other states that recognised Palestine yesterday: Australia, Canada and Portugal. Their imperious arrogance is outdone only by their geopolitical obliviousness. The idea that it assists peace to give an army of anti-Semites what it wants less than two years after it slaughtered more Jews in one day than anyone else since the Nazis is preposterous. In truth, it emboldens the enemies of humanity, the neo-medieval murderers of Hamas and their allies in the regressive Islamist project, by telling them that butchery works. Mass murder brings benefits. Rape a Jew, get a nation.

Starmer criticised Hamas, calling it a ‘brutal terror organisation’. He said it can play ‘no role’ in this State of Palestine the aloof leaders of the West think they can magick up with grand talk. He can have as many pops at Hamas as he likes. It will do nothing to alter the galling truth that, objectively, in a truly material sense, he has handed a victory to this genocidal terror outfit founded with the express intention of destroying the Jewish nation. During a time of unforgiving war between the Jewish State and a militia of Jew-killers, he has taken action that directly boosts the moral fortunes of the latter. Shameful doesn’t cover it.

Hamas itself recognises this. ‘Hamas claims victory after Starmer hands out a “prize for terrorism”’, says the front page of today’s Daily Mail. This follows Hamas’s gloating over Starmer’s ‘prize’. Starmer’s statement is ‘a victory for Palestinian rights and the justice of our cause’, the terrorists said. And it will ‘send a clear message’ to Israel, they crowed. Hamas refers to Western leaders’ recognition of a State of Palestine as ‘one of the fruits of 7 October’. This will be your legacy, Sir Keir: you gifted ‘fruit’ to the mass killers of Jews. You pleased the men who beat Shani Louk to death by assenting to one of their aims. You brought a smile to the faces of fascists.

It’s this simple: if you take action that isolates the Jewish State and delights its murderous foes, then you have forfeited your right to be considered a serious leader or even a moral person. This isn’t about whether we think there should be a Palestinian state in the future. It’s not about whether people think the two-state solution is still a goer or is dead in the water courtesy of Hamas’s fascistic pogrom. That debate will continue. No, it’s about the fact that, right now, a bloody war is raging between the Jewish nation and the Jews’ enemies, and what our leaders do and say in that moment really matters. It impacts on the battlefield over there and on the political future here.

In his statement, Starmer raged against Israel as well as pleasing Hamas. He slammed Israel’s ‘relentless and increasing bombardment of Gaza’. Its actions are ‘utterly intolerable’, he said, and they ‘horrif[y] all of us’. To shame and ridicule an ally as it fights an existential war against the racist militia that invaded its lands and killed its people – what an ignominious new low in British foreign policy. This is surely the most morally abject foreign-policy decision a British prime minister has made since Chamberlain. The nations of the world now know: if you are invaded and pillaged by a 6,000-strong army of terrorists, if your women are raped and your people are murdered, Britain will not have your back. Britain will betray you.

For Starmer to lay into Israel and please Hamas is an act of geopolitical suicide. It harms us as well as our one-time friends in the Jewish State. Violent Islamism is a menace across Europe. Anything that appeases these dreamers of a Caliphate, these soldiers of bigotry who long to punish ‘infidels’, is a calamity for the West, too. Starmer has exposed the soft, yellow underbelly of our own lost and timorous societies, unwittingly inviting other Islamists to seek ‘fruit’ from acts of violence. To advertise one’s penchant for appeasement in an era of profound moral and physical conflict is a folly of incalculable proportions.

Just who is Starmer speaking for when he decrees a new State of Palestine should exist? It’s not ordinary Brits. A new poll has found that nearly nine in 10 Britons oppose the recognition of Palestine without conditions. They clearly see the risk and the lunacy of giving a state to a terror army before it has released the Jews it kidnapped and laid down the arms with which it dreams of destroying the Jewish nation. No, the ‘domestic political pressure’ Starmer is responding to comes from the Palestine obsessives of his own party and his own class – that keffiyeh-adorned section of society that has convinced itself Israel is a demonic entity. This is the most unforgivable thing about his appeasing antics: he has sacrificed our alliance with the world’s only Jewish nation at the altar of the narrowest political expediency; in the name not of democracy but of placating the irrational Israelophobia of a noisy and bigoted minority.

We are still failing the moral test of 7 October. Our societies still fail to appreciate the enormity of the civilisational clash that was birthed by that historically cruel assault on the Jews. Our leaders still dither and appease and fantasise that the violent haters of the West can be pacified with pieces of political fruit. Israel will continue to fight against Hamas regardless of what Starmer and the rest say. It’s us, the Western world, I am worried about.

Brendan O’Neill is spiked’s chief political writer and host of the spiked podcast, The Brendan O’Neill Show. Subscribe to the podcast here. His latest book – After the Pogrom: 7 October, Israel and the Crisis of Civilisation – is available to order on Amazon UK and Amazon US now. And find Brendan on Instagram: @burntoakboy