The lobby groups Labour Friends of Israel and We Believe in Israel took a delegation of party activists and councillors to the Middle East last week. The fact it included Josh Williams, the deputy director of Labour Together, the think tank from which party leader Sir Keir Starmer is said to derive many of his policy ideas, is the latest sign of how far the party has moved away from the visceral anti-Zionism espoused by Starmer’s predecessor Jeremy Corbyn. And having met the Israeli Labour leader Meyrav Michaeli and visited sites such as the Kotel and Yad Vashem, Williams sounded impressed.
“We have seen the reality on the ground and how much there is for us in the UK to learn about, and from, the Jewish state,” he told the JC. “I will never forget the experience of meeting with ordinary Israelis and Palestinians and hearing their stories. I thank LFI and We Believe in Israel for organising this eye-opening and inspiring delegation.”
Needless to say, that’s not the kind of sentiment one might have heard during the Corbyn era from his hard left adviser Seumas Milne,who would rather cut off one of his limbs than join a delegation organised by LFI. But welcome as such signals are, they do raise an awkward problem, which for the moment, is far from resolved - Labour’s official policy on the Israel – Palestinian conflict.
For many years, this has stated that a future Labour government would immediately “recognise” a Palestinian state after taking office. Reaffirmed several times by the party’s annual conference, it was stated again in January by Bambos Charalambous, the shadow Middle East minister, who claimed it would prove to be a great way to “kick start” negotiations aimed at a “final status” two-state solution.
That argument was directly inherited from Corbyn, who told the Labour conference back in 2018: “In order to help make the two-state settlement a reality, we will recognise a Palestinian state as soon as we take office.”
Well, that does sound nice. But what, in practical terms, does it mean? And exactly how is this “recognition” going to hurry the diplomacy along?
The first and most obvious question the policy raises is: what exactly would a Labour government be recognising? The Palestinian Authority that governs Ramallah and other cities in the West Bank, led by the ageing Mahmoud Abbas, who is now more than a decade the date when he should have faced re-election? As I revealed to JC readers last year, the PA has become notorious for corruption and the brutal suppression of dissent and, to many Palestinians, lacks all legitimacy.
Or would Labour prefer to recognise the Hamas terror group which, to its residents’ great misfortune, misrule the Gaza Strip? About once a year the two Palestinian entities announce they are going to hold talks to re-establish unity. With utter predictability, they shortly afterwards fail.
There are further difficulties that the policy seems to ignore. Given that in the real world, there is no Palestinian state, and that the West Bank’s “Area C”, which includes most of its countryside remains under Israel’s control, what difference would “recognition” make? Does anyone think that Israel would simply withdraw? And what would this future Labour government do if it didn’t? Would it threaten to sever the UK’s commercial and security links with the Jewish state, so wrecking a close partnership that, with a trade deal thought to be imminent, is about to get closer still?
Meanwhile, there’s yet another issue: what would be the borders of this sovereign state? The pre-Six Day War frontiers? Or something else?
I sympathise with Charalambous’s desire to see meaningful talks re-start. World leaders still talk the language of the Oslo Accords and the two-state goal, but whenever I’ve visited the region recently, it has felt like a distant prospect. But “recognition” of something that doesn’t exist, and can only be brought into being through painstaking negotiations, looks like a strange way to achieve this outcome: a classic example of putting the cart before the horse, involving what I can only describe as magical thinking - as if wishing away the problems outlined above would somehow make them vanish.
Earlier this year, Labour sources were suggesting that the recognition pledge, which figured in Labour’s 2015, 2017 and 2019 manifestos, might be dropped from the party’s next one. For the time being, however, there has been no sign that it will.
I’ve no doubt that Labour’s leadership is genuine about wanting to see final status talks re-start, but it’s going to have to think a lot harder over how to encourage them. As ever, the devil is in the detail, and making empty gestures isn’t likely to help. Figuring out how to alter this policy might be a useful job for Josh Williams and his Labour Together think tank.
