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The UK Government’s ‘Recognition’ of Palestine: a Statement

This weekend, Keir Starmer is due to recognise a ‘Palestinian state’. While this may initially look like progress, it is in actual fact less a stand for rights and more theatre: a bargaining chip offered to a genocidal Israel, a cynical move designed to manage Western public opinion over nearly 2 years of live-streamed death marches, starvation and mass slaughter, rather than deliver any kind of justice.

All this plan does is give cover to Western governments who can no longer justify participation in genocide to their own populations, with recognition becoming a substitute for accountability.Starmer is using this phantom recognition as leverage, not as a step toward real change. If the UK were serious, there would at the very least be sanctions and a halt to arms exports. Not recognition of an imaginary state that no Palestinian leadership is asking for, especially while the government considers a £2 billion project with Elbit Systems UK, and allows 51 Israeli arms firms to exhibit at the DSEI arms fair in London.

The deeper truth is this: the so-called “two-state solution” is dead. It was never viable to begin with. For decades it has functioned as a way of kicking the can down the road, buying time for Israel to entrench its occupation and build ever more illegal settlements on stolen Palestinian land. Today, more than 700,000 settlers live across the West Bank and East Jerusalem. No contiguous, sovereign state can be created under those conditions and Israel never intended one to be.

As Ali Abunimah and others have shown, these new “peace plans” demand disarmament from Palestinians under siege, while Israel, the occupying power, keeps its overwhelming military capacity. Elections would be tightly restricted to those who endorse Oslo’s failed framework. The Right of Return is erased. UNRWA is to be dismantled. And all the while, international law’s recognition of armed resistance under occupation is ignored in favour of insisting Palestinians submit to ’nonviolence’ in the face of overwhelming violence and ongoing genocide.

This is an attempt to contain Palestinians permanently while saving Israel from global isolation, shielding settler colonialism and war crimes from consequences, and repackaging apartheid in diplomatic language. It is a hollow gesture, designed not to liberate Palestinians, but to rescue Western governments from the anger of their own people.

And even as this framework delivers what Israel claims to want in international forums, it will still denounce it. This is because, as the words of Israel’s leaders make clear, their aim is the complete annihilation of Palestine and it’s people.

Make no mistake, even this empty gesture wouldn’t be happening without the outpouring of solidarity for Palestine across the UK over the past two years. Despite what they want us to believe, we are not helpless. We are not powerless. Starmer is reacting to our outrage, to ordinary people organising mass anger and grief into a movement that threatens the interests he represents. We must keep building this pressure.

The Bristol Apartheid-Free Zone will never accept anything short of the full liberation of the Palestinian people, and neither should you. We won’t be beguiled by warm-sounding words that merely attempt to save Israel and Western governments from themselves, and that leave Palestinians to continue to face the wrath of apartheid and genocide. Our solidarity with Palestine and our efforts to organise for justice demand the complete dismantling of the structures that underpin Israel’s violence. Anything short of this is no liberation at all.