I have been called scum and an apologist for murder for questioning today’s motion which calls for the United Kingdom to unilaterally recognise Palestine outside of any United Nations process or negotiated settlement.
With feelings running high, support for the motion is being presented as a binary test of whether you have sympathy with the Palestinians and support their demands for a state.
Let me be absolutely clear: I have and I do.
Support for Palestine and horror at injustices on both sides in the region is universal within the parliamentary Labour party, as I would hope is desire to help Israelis achieve the security they crave.
But there are, in fact, a great number of my Labour colleagues who doubt whether the best way to secure much-needed justice for the Palestinians is to put ourselves out of step with every other European country bar Sweden and recognise Palestine unilaterally, ahead of the UN route or a negotiated peace deal with Israel.
It has been dismal and distressing to see the death toll in Gaza and near-constant rocket fire on Israeli towns through the summer.
And whatever anyone’s views on the nature of Israel’s response to the terror attacks inflicted on its citizens, the land-grab that Benjamin Netanyahu ordered following the ceasefire was indefensible and another body-blow to peace and moderation in the region.
Faced with a rightwing government in Israel which takes provocative steps like this, it is understandable that people believe radical action is needed to kickstart dwindling chances of peace while a two-state solution remains viable.
But just because a course of action is radical does not necessarily mean it is going to help. A patient with a broken arm is unlikely to thank a concerned well-wisher who takes it upon himself to sever the limb at the elbow in the hope the pain will go away.
Similarly, unilateral recognition would certainly be a major step, but it could well make the chance of meaningful progress at the negotiating table even less likely by further entrenching a sense of Israel contra mundum among that country’s leaders and suggesting to the Palestinians they can bypass the frustrating process of negotiation.
Because, ultimately, negotiation is the only way Israel and Palestine are going to be able to achieve their mutual goals of justice and security through lasting peace.
As Hilik Bar member of the Knesset and general secretary of the Israeli Labor party has written to members of his British sister party this week:
Over the past three decades every advance for peace – for instance, the treaties between Israel and Egypt and between Israel and Jordan – has come about through genuine negotiation based upon compromise and conciliation. Unilateral and pre-emptive moves, by contrast, have only led to more conflict and violence.
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John Woodcock MP is chair of Progress. He tweets @JWoodcockMP
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John, we all agree that negotiation is key. That’s why many MPs are backing the motion.
Israel’s government refuses to negotiate without Hamas, or with Hamas. Unacceptable.
Meanwhile it also continues to allocate massive slices of land that don’t belong to its people to illegal occupation. Unacceptable.
They are stalling, and they clearly see it as in their interest to continue to stall. It is now up to the international community to take a firmer stand.
As a completely separate issue, most countries already recognise Palestine. This is normal, fair, and practical.
– Our failure to recognise that Palestinians have equal national and human rights to Israelis is not only bad for Palestine. Not recognising Palestine is sustenance for those in Palestinian politics who favour the bullet over the ballot, such as Islamic Jihad and the military wing of Hamas. It disadvantages the state builders of the PLO.
– On the Israeli side, non-recognition also benefits the head-banging right, insulating the status quo in Israel for those who favour military only ‘solutions’ or want to continue to settle Palestinian land – despite both being against their own long term interests, which should be based on (genuinely) seeking to achieve a permanent and viable peace.
– Equal recognition increases incentives to voters on both sides to get talking again.
Three pretty clear reasons above that this vote should be backed by MPs who see themselves as being pro-Israel as well as those who wish to back this as a key Palestinian (and Fatah) demand. Especially those who want to see the negotiators beat the militarists on either side.
It’s not working at the moment and the stronger party currently feels it has an interest in preserving that by refusing negotiation and continuing the theft of land. Something has to change this from outside.
“Israel’s government refuses to negotiate without Hamas, or with Hamas. Unacceptable.”
You mean apart from last year, when they were negotiating?
Yes – before he unilaterally ended them, prompting the leader of Israeli Labour to say that he “believes less and less that Netanyahu can or wants to be the one who leads us to a diplomatic solution”.
This being Israeli Labor who initially went into coalition with him, rather than our other far sounder sister party, Meretz.
Meanwhile Bibi has instead been spending his time announcing massive illegal land grabs which cut Bethlehem off from East Jerusalem, and ending the lives of thousands of defenceless civilians in Gaza.
Likud is not interested in peace because it is increasingly close to the settler movement, in government with a racist party, and most fundamentally it believes Israel to be in a position of advantage which it can maintain without facing any sanction. As long as that continues, there will be no peace, and the illegal colonisation of the West Bank will continue – which as stated above, is bad news for both peoples.
The Israeli government did not unilaterally end the talks- completely ahistorical. The talks collapsed because of failures on both sides, as detailed in the New Republic piece that was probably the best informed due to its access to a lot of the people involved in the negotiations (‘The Explosive, Inside Story of How John Kerry Built an Israel-Palestine Peace Plan—and Watched It Crumble’).
The other rhetoric has no relation to what I took issue with, but I’m going to take a wild guess that the extension of your argument is to support BDS.
No. Particularly because it doesn’t target settlements, and it also damages the Israeli left. A problem it has in common with simply letting Likud get on with it, and declining to recognise equal rights.
My view is that the international community should recognise both states or neither. Which indeed was the text of the motion.
Further, what Netenyahu has done since negotiations is not irrelevant. It is in my view at least highly relevant.
What do you make of Alan Duncan’s speech? http://www.alanduncan.org.uk/articles/alan-delivers-speech-on-israeli-settlements
If Labour want to develop some policy that will actually hurt Likud and help the Israeli left they can do two things:
1) increased involvement with Labor and Meretz- there needs to be a flow of information & best practice & the like. Considering where each of those parties is and need to be, you could have people involved with the creation of New Labour working with Labor, and those more involved in cost-of-living current Labour working with Meretz.
2) look at DfiD spending in Palestine, and give less to civil servant wages and more to co-existence and peace projects. We fund very, very little of the latter, and lots and lots of the former.
I’m not going to defend settlement policy because I think it’s insane, but if we’re going to say Netanyahu isn’t interested in talks because of that, there’s an equivalent argument Abbas isn’t interested either considering he’s signed a reconciliation with Hamas and continues not to confront. And lots not fall into the trap of low expectations, both are leaders and need to act like it.
Re Alan Duncan- I think there’s a strong thought-police/authoritarian vibe about requiring people to justify their position and then be labelled an extremist if he doesn’t like it. I think he uses purposefully delegitimising language (“colonisers”), that at its root is not simply about challenging the legality of settlements, and it’s the language we usually see from one-staters and delegitimisers. I find it odious to say settlement building challenges Israel’s status as a democracy- I don’t recall anyone challenging Britain or the United States’ status as democracies due to illegal actions, like the Iraq war- it’s a tactic that is solely reserved for Israel. I find it odious to say support for settlement is on par with anti-semitism. Anti-semitism led to the industrial murder of millions of Jewish civilians- where is the comparative link? And I think his comments about lobbying, party funding and the Israeli state totally confusing, particularly after his comments today that “the United States is in hock to a very powerful financial lobby which dominates its politics”.
Jeremy Corbyn and Mike Wood acted as tellers for the Noes in order to force a vote. The other side was that afraid of exposing its tininess.
Justly so.
The votes in favour and the tellers added up to precisely 23 times the number of votes against. Twenty-three times.
I honestly don’t see the logic here. If you promote a two state solution you have to recognise both as such. How can recoginsing Palestine be “radical”? It exists, and I would say that most people “recognise” it as a state. Why isbUnilateral recognition such a negative “step”? It would assit the Palestinian people with the international political acceptance that gives them the ability to negotiate in the way that both Egypt and Jordan in the quoted text. Both of those examples achieved peace because it was one recognised state negotiating with another. By not committing to the morally, and politically, correct thing for fear of upsetting the right wing Israeli government only further entrenches the palestinians’ lack of self determination. Therefore condemning their people to more suffering and the Israeli public to the potential of terror strikes from the former. We should follow Sweden and give the Palestinians their rights of recognition and be clear with Israel that two states means exactly that: human rights for neighbouring countries.