Rewarding Terror: Britain and Europe’s Dangerous Fantasy of a Palestinian State

By recognising a phantom Palestinian state, Britain and France are not advancing peace but replaying their very misjudgments that set the Middle East ablaze a century ago.

Emir Faisal with British officer T.E. Lawrence and his entourage at the Paris Peace Conference, Versailles, 1919. During World War I, Britain courted both the Arab and Jewish sides.

The United Kingdom led by Prime Minister Keir Starmer, along with France, Canada and a handful of Western nations have recently ‘recognized’ the State of Palestine. The announcement, intended as a moral gesture to check Israel in Gaza, is in fact a grotesque exercise in political fantasy which risks repeating historical blunders of more than a century ago.

To understand this folly, one must look to history and the duplicitous roles essayed by Britain and France in Palestine during the twilight of the Ottoman Empire. Prior to World War I, Palestine was a peripheral Ottoman province, home to Arab peasants, small Jewish communities in Jerusalem, Hebron, Safed and Tiberias, and a growing influx of Jewish immigrants driven by Eastern European pogroms. With the Ottoman Empire in terminal decline, nationalist movements - both Jewish and Arab - emerged, each with competing, irreconcilable ambitions.

Historical Misjudgements

During World War I, Britain courted both sides. The 1915–16 McMahon-Hussein Correspondence promised Arab independence for a swathe of the Levant, while the secret Sykes-Picot Agreement carved the region into British and French spheres of influence. In 1917, Britain issued the Balfour Declaration, pledging support for “the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people.” Britain promised the same land to two opposing groups, and then blamed the inevitable violence on the victims.

After the war, the League of Nations entrusted Britain with the Mandate for Palestine (1920–1948), tasking it with establishing a Jewish homeland while protecting Arab rights. British administrators proved unequal to the task. They vacillated between suppressing Jewish defence groups like the Haganah and placating Arab mobs, often simultaneously. Incidents such as the Nebi Musa riots of 1920 and the Hebron massacre of 1929, in which 67 Jews were killed and survivors expelled, were warnings ignored. The Peel Commission of 1937, which proposed partition, was rejected by Arab leaders and only cautiously accepted by Jewish leaders.

Britain’s solutions were sometimes absurd: in the 1930s, officials floated proposals to relocate Jews to East Africa to appease Arabs. This was not a compromise; it was bureaucratic lunacy, treating human lives as chess pieces. When the Holocaust erupted, Britain’s White Paper of 1939 severely restricted Jewish immigration, condemning thousands to almost certain death.

On the Jewish side, figures such as Chaim Weizmann, David Ben-Gurion and Moshe Sharett navigated a perilous and politically volatile landscape with diplomacy, foresight and organizational acumen. Weizmann, a consummate diplomat, tirelessly lobbied British and American officials, at one point arranging secret meetings in Washington to secure recognition of Jewish statehood. He argued that a Jewish homeland would not only fulfil moral obligations but also serve Allied strategic interests in the Middle East. In Palestine, he negotiated directly with Arab landholders and Jewish settlers, sometimes walking perilously close to violence to ensure that Jewish land purchases went through.

Ben-Gurion concentrated on the practicalities of state-building, organizing the Haganah into a disciplined defence force capable of protecting Jewish communities from escalating Arab attacks.

Sharett, later Israel’s first foreign minister, emphasized realism in an environment dominated by ideology and emotion. He repeatedly warned British officials that appeasing Arab extremists would only embolden violence. Sharett foresaw that without enforceable guarantees for Jewish communities, promises and commissions would crumble under pressure.

On the Arab side, Haj Amin al-Husseini, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, became the embodiment of uncompromising opposition. In the 1920s and 1930s, he organized demonstrations and instigated riots, including the 1929 Hebron massacre. During World War II, he travelled to Berlin, meeting with Hitler and other Nazi officials, broadcasting anti-Jewish propaganda, and even attempting to form Arab SS units. His ideological commitment to the eradication of the Jewish presence in Palestine hardened Palestinian resistance and poisoned prospects for compromise.

Other Arab leaders, such as Raghib al-Nashashibi and Ibrahim al-Khalil, sought more moderate paths, negotiating with British authorities in the hope of securing civil administration and limiting violence. Their efforts were consistently undermined by al-Husseini and rival factions, leaving the Arab political landscape fragmented, incoherent and vulnerable to external manipulation.

Mandate officials oscillated between repressing Jewish self-defence initiatives and appeasing Arab extremists, leaving communities exposed and tensions festering. Land disputes, religious sensitivities and municipal disagreements became flashpoints for widespread violence. This combustible environment, crafted under British oversight, laid the groundwork for decades of conflict, the echoes of which still scorch the region today.

Rewarding Hamas

A century later, Britain seems bent upon repeats its errors. Starmer’s recognition of a Palestinian state effectively rewards Hamas for its October 7, 2023, atrocities on Israeli civilians. Hamas’s charter calls explicitly for the destruction of Israel and the murder of Jews. For all the accusations about Israel allegedly blocking millions of tons of humanitarian aid into Gaza, it is Hamas that has been diverting over 80 percent of this aid to fuel its war machine. Starmer’s stunt is in effect a trophy awarded to barbarism, a slap in the face to every victim of Hamas’s atrocities.

Secondly, just what does this ‘recognition’ amount to? Does it refer to the Palestinian Authority (PA) in the West Bank or Hamas in Gaza? Symbolic recognition is meaningless where sovereignty, governance, and security do not exist.

The danger of a Hamas-led state cannot be overstated. Since 2007, Hamas has ruled Gaza as a terror-state, suppressing dissent, diverting humanitarian aid and indoctrinating children with hatred. Nearly every building in Gaza harbours either a terror tunnel or a copy of Mein Kampf, or both. During October 7, the majority of perpetrators were civilian Gazans complicit in murder, rape and torture. Not a single hostage was protected by locals.

Warped Idealism

Along with British PM Keir Starmer, France too has leapt aboard the recognition bandwagon, with Emmanuel Macron solemnly declaring that reforms in the Palestinian Authority (PA) would somehow conjure up a credible partner for peace.

France’s position is particularly disingenuous given its own historical entanglement with the Middle East and North Africa. From the French Mandate in Syria and Lebanon to the bloody, protracted war in Algeria in the 1950s and early 60s, France repeatedly proclaimed itself the bearer of ‘civilisation’ while sowing instability and resentment.

Since the French Revolution, France has fancied itself the heir to the Enlightenment, forever casting itself as the enlightened conscience of Europe. Yet it continues to be haunted by its colonial past. Millions of North African and sub-Saharan immigrants today form a restless, disaffected underclass within France itself, many alienated from the Republic they were told to embrace.

This demographic reality has shaped French politics for decades. France’s own struggles with Islamist terrorism on its soil – the Charlie Hebdo killings in 2015, the Bataclan massacre the same year, the beheading of teacher Samuel Paty in 2020 - are the direct consequence of an elite class that preaches liberal universalism while ignoring cultural fracture.

Macron, in recognising Palestine, is not merely indulging in fantasy but also pandering to constituencies at home, signalling sympathy to communities with deep connections to the Arab and Muslim world. It is foreign policy masquerading as domestic vote-bank politics.

The parallels with Angela Merkel’s suicidal 2015 decision to fling open Germany’s doors to over a million migrants are hard to miss. What was hailed as humanitarian magnanimity has metastasised into one of Europe’s deepest political divides, empowering populists from Marine Le Pen in France to the AfD in Germany.

Unfortunately, virtue-signalling has become Europe’s foreign policy today: self-congratulatory and catastrophically naïve, replete with fantasy. And Europe’s ‘liberal’ leaders ought to understand that in West Asia where lives hang in the balance, fantasy kills.