Ignore the bluster: as Netanyahu starves Gaza, the world is turning on him – and he knows it | Jonathan Freedland

“NO We love us, we don’t care. “It can be excited on the terraces of the southern London stadium, such as the signing song of the Millwall Football Club, but as a national strategy, it is a disaster.

While a country after another has pointed out a finger accusing Israel, repelled by famine, the devastation and the effusion of blood which he dropped on Gaza, the Israeli officials offered the now familiar middle finger. When Keir Starmer announced the intention of Great Britain to recognize a state of Palestine, he was quickly dismissed by the deputy mayor of Jerusalem as “a lot of note about nothing”.

There was an equally disdainful reaction both to the previous promise of France to make the same diplomatic decision and the announcement of Canada on Wednesday that it would follow suit. Sometimes the register is studied carefree, a shoulder to shoulders; Sometimes it’s anger. But the message is consistent: we will not move. As the Israeli ambassador says to Canada: “Israel will not bow in the distorted countryside of international pressure against it.”

However, for all the Shakespearean references, the “diplomatic tsunami” whose criticisms of Benjamin Netanyahu have warned for many years, and which now seems to have arrived, is not nothing. In addition, and under the Millwall fanfaron, there are signs that Netanyahu knows.

More than 140 of the 193 UN member states had already recognized Palestine, but this club will soon include the great Western powers: the change of France, the United Kingdom and Canada means no less than three G7 members are now on board. This same week saw a special conference summoned to the UN in New York, where 125 countries urged Netanyahu to engage in the creation of a Palestinian state alongside Israel, while they sought to resuscitate the solution to two long-More states.

All this diplomatic activity has aroused a series of objections from Israel and its defenders. First comes the assertion that the criticisms of Israel are soothing. Riposte’s witness tweeted from Netanyahu to Starmer, which included the line: “Soothement towards jihadist terrorists still fails.” Netanyahu often likes to invoke Winston Churchill and here he is again, throwing himself like the biggest British with Starmer like Neville Chamberlain, while his Minister of Foreign Affairs is full of Munich and 1938. As if there was an analogy between Nazi Germany which grasped part of the Czechoslovakia and the Palestinians in search of self-determination in their historic home. It is an insulting argument line in its ignorance.

Then comes the charge that Starmer, Emmanuel Macron and Mark Carney are “enriching terrorists”, awarding a prize to Hamas for the murderous series of atrocities that he organized on October 7, 2023. But it is a strange way to read what has just happened. The New York Declaration of this week, signed by Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Qatar and the Arab League, explicitly condemns “the attacks committed by Hamas against civilians” that day, the first official denunciation of the Arab states.

In addition, the document is unambiguous that “Hamas must end its reign in Gaza and put its arms back to the Palestinian authority”. The same message goes through strong and strong in the declarations made by Starmer and its counterparts: it is the AP, currently led by the Fatah, that they envisage the recognized authority of a Palestinian state. The leaders can be blamed for not having explained how this vision of theirs will be carried out, but the vision itself is simple – and there is no room for Hamas. Difficult to run it as a “reward”.

More energetic is the objection made by those who campaign for the release of the 20 Israeli hostages which were still alive in Gaza. They argue that Starmer was wrongly mistaken in suggesting that the United Kingdom would not go with the recognition of a Palestinian state if there would soon be a cease-fire agreement between Hamas and Israel in Gaza. That, according to activists refuse To conclude any agreement – which should include the release of at least certain hostages – so that recognition in the United Kingdom takes place as promised.

Starmer defenders believe that this line of argument is based on a misunderstanding of Hamas. This group is not interested, they say, in a Palestinian state on the West Bank and Gaza, living alongside Israel. Hamas is not in the sector of the two states, but rather seeks to reign over a single jihadist state throughout the earth, from the river to the sea.

Indeed, given that the international community supported the principle of Palestinian independence before October 7, would abandon it later to reward Hamas, allowing this group to derail the two -state solution that it has been determined to sabotage for more than 30 years.

More powerful, is the burden that these announcements and declarations are a travel activity, gestures that reveal nothing as much as the helplessness of the various governments. There is something to do: diplomatic recognition will not feed a single child in Gaza. When the various Starmer requests on Netanyahu are cheerfully ignored, it will only announce the weakness of the British PM. In a way, the move this week tacitly recognizes this reality. It is based on the concept that Israel continues to act so as to make a solution to two states less viable. Previously, Starmer had always said that he wanted to wait until the recognition of the United Kingdom could play a role in a current and significant peace process. Now he recognized that there is nothing like it, that he was likely to keep a card that turned into dust in his hands. Better to play it now before it becomes fully worthless. As Wes Streting said, the United Kingdom should recognize Palestine “when there is still a state of Palestine to recognize”.

The hope in London, in Paris and elsewhere is that, when the Gaza war eventually ends, the parameters of what should follow will have already been dotted. But, of course, Netanyahu does not listen. He made the decision a long time ago that Israel could ignore everyone – that the EU and the UN, as well as each global institution of the World Health Organization at the BBC, can all be struck off as desperately biased, if not sectarian – with a single exception: the United States. Over the past decade or more, he has gone further, in particular half of the United States, choosing to ignore all Democrats and focus solely on the Republican Party. As long as Israel has the support of the GOP, everything will be fine.

It has always been an reckless strategy and this week has confirmed the danger. On the one hand, Israel needs the support of more than one country. The EU and the United Kingdom may not correspond to the United States as a suppliers of arms, but, economically, Israel needs it as a business partners, on favorable conditions. In addition, the American Republican Party is not a completely reliable ally: a substantial wing of the Maga movement is hostile to Israel. (This week, Marjorie Taylor Greene became the first American legislator to accuse the country of genocide.) And Trump himself does not entirely share the radical contempt of Netanyahu for international opinion. He disdained him, but he also seeks his approval: he wants this Nobel Prize.

At the level, the Israeli public has just seen the price of pariah status that Netanyahu almost cultivated. A small omen is contained in the problem that currently greets Israeli tourists in Greece. This is perhaps the best way to understand the vehemence with which Israeli officials sought to reject Starmer et al this week, insisting in noisy and furious statements that they were not at all disturbed. An increasing number of Israelis know that they do not have the luxury of being Millwall: maybe no one loves them – but many of them care.

• Jonathan Freedland is a guardian columnist

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