The PM's Israel ultimatum is empty and dangerous

Britain's pledge to recognise a Palestinian state by September is as empty and as dangerous as its recent commitment to airdrop aid into Gaza. It makes Westminster's mandarins and politicians feel better, but it will kill more people than it saves.

- SAM KILEY

Sir Keir Starmer has demanded that Israel’s prime minister end the “appalling” situation in Gaza and abandon plans to annex the West Bank, which is currently occupied by Israel. If Benjamin Netanyahu doesn’t do this, then the UK will recognise a Palestinian state. Some 144 countries — including UN Security Council permanent members Russia and China — have already done that, but Netanyahu has continued his onslaught on Gaza.

The UK can and should go much further. Thirty-one prominent Israelis have demanded, in a letter to The Guardian, that their own country be subjected to immediate economic sanctions. Britain must rally to their side to save Israel and cauterise the infection of its relentless violence against Gaza before it spreads.

On Monday, the heads of five major Israeli universities called on Netanyahu to share the mortal imperative “shaped by the trauma of the Holocaust” to do “all we can to prevent cruel, indiscriminate harm to noncombat men, women and children”, and warned that Israel risks being complicit in crimes against humanity.

Its targeting of the enclave leaves Israel charged with meeting all the definitions of ethnic cleansing, and multiple experts, including Israeli human rights groups, have accused the government of genocide. There would be a lot less parsing of the realities versus the interpretation of terms if any other nation was starving, bombing, shooting and shelling civilians in such quantities.

And this, for Starmer, is the issue. He appears worried that criticism of Israel is automatically antisemitic. But he is behind the ethical curve. Israel should not be being threatened with the meaningless recognition of a “Palestinian state” that Netanyahu has said he is opposed to anyway.