[Order Michael Finch’s new book, A Time to Stand: HERE. Prof. Jason Hill calls it “an aesthetic and political tour de force.”]

Now Keir Starmer has gone and done it: he’s broken with decades of his country’s foreign policy and, in synchronicity with two other appalling leaders, Mark Carney of Canada and Anthony Albanese of Australia, who have made the same announcement at the same time, has announced his country’s recognition of a “state of Palestine.”

Starmer hasn’t offered any hint as to the borders of this new state, nor explained why he thinks the 3,500-year history of the Jews in Judea and Samaria (which is where most of that new state would be located) should be ignored, or why he thinks he can simply forget about the League of Nations’ Mandate for Palestine, that in 1922 assigned all the territory “from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea” to be included in the area subject to the Palestinian Mandate, which would in time become the Jewish state of Israel. Nor has he shown any awareness of UN Security Council Resolution 242 — written largely by the British representative to the U.N. Lord Caradon — which allowed Israel to retain territory it won in the Six-Day War that it deemed necessary to hold onto if it was to have “secure and recognized borders.”

Nor has Keir Starmer said anything about what would happen, in this “state of Palestine,” to the 500,000 Israelis who have been living in Judea and Samaria for decades, or to the 200,000 Israelis now living in east Jerusalem, all three areas having been claimed by the most “moderate” of Palestinians to become part of their state. The non-moderates, of course, lay claim to all of the land “from the river to the sea,” by which they mean the disappearance of Israel, the expulsion or killing of all of its Jewish inhabitants, and its replacement by a twenty-third Arab state.

Jake Wallis Simons casts a cold eye on Keir Starmer’s betrayal of an ally here: “Starmer’s shame,” Jake Wallis Simons, September 21, 2025:

…Polling published yesterday revealed that 90 per cent of Britons thought it a bad idea, and for once the majority view is the right one. For evidence of this, one need look no further than Hamas, which has responded with unbridled glee and has wholeheartedly congratulated Starmer.

As I wrote in my Sunday Telegraph column today, a special kind of blindness is required to pretend that the Palestinians are the good guys. To take just one example: shortly before October 7, Mahmoud Abbas, the supposed “moderate” leader currently enjoying the 21st year of his four-year term, said in a speech:

“They say that Hitler killed the Jews for being Jews, and that Europe hated the Jews because they were Jews. No. It was clearly explained that they fought them because of their social role and not their religion.” And what was that role? “Usury, money and so on,” he said.

This is the man who was welcomed so warmly to Downing Street last week, while the Israeli prime minister would face arrest were he to set foot on these shores….

No demand was placed on Hamas in return for a Palestinian state. Not the release of the hostages; not the disavowal of terror; not surrender; not disarmament. No demand, for that matter was placed upon Mahmoud Abbas, who would have benefited from encouragement to refrain from spreading Nazi-style antisemitism to an impressionable and fractious Palestinian population, and to refrain of paying financial rewards to anybody convicted of terrorism.

It could not be clearer. Britain is now on the side of Hamas. Starmer may belatedly tack on sanctions targeted at the terror group, but that fools nobody; in fact, the most revealing sentence of the Telegraph’s story reporting it was, “the preparation of fresh sanctions is especially significant as it will represent the first concrete action taken by the Labour government against Hamas”….

So we return to the point that I have been making since the very beginning of the war. If only the international community had consistently backed the democracy under attack rather than the jihadis who attacked it, the hostages would be home and the war would have been over long ago.

This is Britain’s most shameful hour since before World War II, rivaling in its immorality and stupidity Chamberlain’s betrayal of Czechoslovakia when Great Britain agreed to let Hitler seize the Sudetenland in 1938.

Fortunately, the Israelis have a powerful military and cannot be pushed around. And they will treat Starmer’s “recognition of a state of Palestine,” and all the similar recognitions of “Palestine” now being declared by Macron, Carney, Albanese, Sanchez and the other leaders in that deplorable galère, with the contempt they deserve. The dogs bark, the caravan moves on.