Ok, so we all want a two‑state solution for Israel and Palestine. I do, you do, and so does Ed Miliband.
Let’s suppose for a moment that the Israelis are so appalled by his ridiculous and disgraceful sanctions announced this week that they decide to oblige the UK Foreign Secretary.
Let’s imagine that the Labour Government gets its way and somehow persuades Israel to begin dismantling all the recent settlements in the West Bank. It’s never going to happen, not in the real world; but I want us to think it through.
Let’s suppose the Israelis get out the bulldozers, evict the settlers (using violence if necessary) and then pass responsibility entirely to the Palestinians.
That’s what Miliband claims to want; that’s the objective of his sanctions, isn’t it? A new self-run Palestinian state. And what do you think would happen then?
Well, as it happens, we know exactly what will unfold, because this experiment has been tried before.
In 2005, the government of Israel bowed to international pressure and pulled all Jewish settlers out of Gaza – and when I say pulled, I mean in some cases literally pulled them out by the hair.
They uprooted about 8,500 Israelis and demolished their homes, and then they handed the entire management of the Gaza Strip to the Palestinians – or, more particularly, to Hamas.
Foreign Secretary Ed Miliband speaking in the House of Commons this week as he announced UK sanctions on Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank
Hamas brigades hold a Palestinian flag as they destroy an Israeli tank in Gaza City
You would have thought that Gaza offered in many ways a fantastic prospect for urban development. It has a young and dynamic population; it has beautiful beaches in a stunning Mediterranean location; and it has enough offshore gas to deliver billions in revenues for decades to come.
When Hamas took control of Gaza, they could have been sensible and pragmatic. They could have focused on the needs of their electorate, on keeping the streets clean and crime-free, and putting in good public transport.
And did they? Did they emulate most decent municipal politicians and go for jobs and growth? Did they hell.
If you want to know why Israelis will never agree, as things are, to a two-state solution and why Miliband’s sanctions are a tragic waste of time, look at what happened to Gaza.
The whole tragedy is summed up, for me, by the story of Crazy Water Aqua Fun Park. It was only a few years after the Israelis left that one enterprising Gazan – actually a former Hamas minister – decided to make use of some of the stupendous sums of development assistance that was flooding into the enclave.
In 2010, he built a water park, one of those delightful places full of giant tubular slides through which the human body is propelled like a bolus in the alimentary system until you plop screaming into some splash pool.
We all know and love them, and we have all taken our families to use them. They are universal scenes of joy and fun, in which the sexes mix in suitable bathing attire.
Crazy Water Aqua Fun Park was no exception. It was a hit. Soon the establishment was employing more than 100 people, and it might be there to this day – except for the hatred and jealousy of Hamas.
The zealots objected to the semi-nudity. They shuddered at the proximity of the sexes. They thought the whole thing was un-Islamic and ungodly, and one day they closed it down – shortly before 40 masked men appeared in the dead of night and torched it.
That is a perfect metaphor for the way that Hamas have run the Gazan economy. Instead of unleashing potential, they have incinerated it. They have squandered billions in foreign aid, from the EU, from Britain, from all over the world.
They have either trousered the money themselves or used it to buy weapons; and instead of using the cash to dig proper sanitation or mass transit systems, they have spent the entire time digging tunnels – from which to attack Israel.
On October 7, 2023, as we all know, they swarmed out from their places of hiding, on motorbikes or microlights, and committed the biggest and most horrific atrocity against the Jewish people since the Holocaust.
That is what happened to Gaza when the Israelis pulled out, and destroyed the settlements, and put the Palestinians in charge of their own security. And that is why no one in Israel is remotely interested – right now – in doing the same in the West Bank.
No one with any chance of forming a government in the forthcoming Israeli elections, neither Benjamin Netanyahu nor the opposition, is contemplating a two-state solution – if by a state you mean an armed Palestinian political entity in charge of its own security.
Of course, those Israeli attitudes might change if they thought that there was no risk of attack. If Hamas genuinely decided to renounce violence and get rid of its weapons, then we would be at the beginning of a conversation that could indeed lead to a lasting peace.
I am not completely pessimistic about this; I think it could happen. But where is the UK pressure on Hamas? Why do we keep hammering Israel? This is the seventh package of sanctions imposed by Labour since the October 7 attack, all of them on Israel. And we all know the reason why – because whatever Ed Miliband may say, Labour is now a Corbynista party pursuing radical and sectarian policies designed to shore up the hard-Left vote.
They are bringing forward hopeless and unenforceable laws on so-called Islamophobia – and since the term literally means fear of Islam, we can only conclude that the biggest Islamophobes are in the Labour Party.
They fear Islam, in the sense that they fear being seen – like Keir Starmer – to be too soft on Israel. Andy Burnham fears the finger-wagging reaction in the mosques and among the 57 Labour constituencies where there is a more than 15 per cent Muslim minority.
These pathetic and derisible sanctions are nothing to do with promoting a two-state solution; they are nothing to do with peace. They are all about appeasing a growing and fundamentally anti-Semitic Left-wing feeling against Israel and fending off the challenge from the egregious Zack Polanski and the Greens.
It will not work. Like all acts of appeasement, Miliband’s gesture will only encourage the demand for more concessions from a growing movement that will not be satisfied until the homeland for the Jewish people has been removed, as they put it, from the ‘River to the Sea’.
You watch. The next step will be an announcement, not just by the Labour Party but by the Labour Government, that Israel is guilty of ‘genocide’. That is an abuse of the term and an insult to those who died in the Holocaust.
These sanctions will not help a single Palestinian farmer; they will not support a single Palestinian business – quite the reverse. If they have any effect at all in the Occupied Territories, they will cost jobs among those who need them most.
The only impact they will have on Israeli politics is to boost the extreme Right and strengthen the impression even among moderates that the UK is no longer to be trusted.
The hapless and incoherent Burnham has moved Britain to the outer fringes of the debate – and for what? To feed the Corbynista crocodile.
The whole thing is shameful.
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