Leaders of the UK and Canada faced domestic criticism on Sunday after they officially announced that their countries recognized a Palestinian state alongside Portugal and Australia.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu immediately condemned the announcements, saying he was considering Israel’s response to the countries and vowing that a Palestinian state would never be formed.
But opposition also came from within the countries that recognized a Palestinian state.
The United Kingdom’s Conservative Party leader, Kemi Badenoch, decried her country’s step as “absolutely disastrous” in a post on X.
Badenoch responded to British Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s announcement of the decision, saying that the UK “will all rue the day this decision was made.”
The move “leaves hostages languishing in Gaza and does nothing to stop the suffering of innocent people caught in this war” while simultaneously “rewarding terrorism with no conditions whatsoever put in place for Hamas,” she added.
Meanwhile, the head of the right-wing Reform UK party, Nigel Farage, condemned the announcement in a conversation with Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar on Sunday evening, the Israeli minister said in a post on X.
“I thanked him for his friendship and told him that in Israel, we know to distinguish between the British people and their government,” Sa’ar wrote, adding that the two had discussed Hamas’s praise of the British government’s decision.
Meanwhile, Canadian opposition leader Pierre Poilievre attacked Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney in an X post on Sunday, saying that his decision to recognize the “Hamas state” was “another effort to distract from his record of rampant crime, costs, debt, immigration and job-loss.”
“Carney’s priority is creating a Hamas state that will reward terrorists for raping civilians, taking hostages, oppressing Palestinians and launching a war,” he added.
He did, however, express his hopes for a Palestinian state in the future, writing that “conservatives will always stand for Israel’s right to exist and defend itself, living next to a future demilitarized, terror-free, democratic and peaceful Palestinian state.”
The deputy leader of the Conservative Party of Canada, Melissa Lantsman, also blasted Carney’s decision in an impassioned video she released on Sunday.
“While people who wave terrorist flags and chant genocidal chants in our streets are surely celebrating right now, nobody else is celebrating, not one bit,” she said.
“Almost two years ago, hundreds of innocent civilians, including Canadian citizens, were murdered, maimed, raped, and taken hostage by Hamas in the deadliest day for the Jews since the Holocaust. We know that some of these civilians remain in captivity today. Left to pray for their rescue while they are left to starvation and tortured confinement on a daily basis. We hope that they will come home as soon as possible. And we know that others who were taken hostage will never come home because their lives were stolen during imprisonment, and Hamas refuses to return those bodies too.”
Lantsman called Hamas’s actions “warfare of the most inhumane kind” and said the Canadian government had given them “the biggest gift that they could ask for.”
“There’s a reason our country had a long-standing tradition to never negotiate with terrorists. It’s because it encourages the very terrorist activity that we should be opposing as a country. Already, Hamas is telling the world that this recognition of statehood is a vindication of what they did on October 7 and that we should expect to see even more days like October 7 moving forward,” she added, saying that because of the decision, “the world is more unsafe, our country is less respected by our allies, and once again, a small but vocal minority here at home notches another win on behalf of the terrorists and the Jew-haters.”
Lantsman vowed that she and history would “hold [Carney] accountable,” calling the recognition of a Palestinian state “a betrayal of the hostages that remain in Gaza, the Canadian citizens who were killed on October 7, and our basic Western values of freedom, justice, and the rule of law.”
The coordinated announcements from the UK, Canada and Australia came a day before the opening in New York of the annual United Nations General Assembly, which will feature a significant focus on the recognition of a Palestinian state and a two-state solution. Saudi Arabia and France are hosting a summit on Monday in New York, at which more leaders are set to recognize Palestinian statehood.
Portugal made its announcement shortly after the other three on Sunday.
Norway, Spain, Ireland and Slovenia all announced recognition of a Palestinian state following the outbreak of the Gaza war, along with several other non-European countries.
Overall, at least 142 countries now recognize or plan to recognize Palestinian statehood, according to an AFP tally.
Israel has rejected calls to recognize a state of Palestine, arguing that this would endanger Israel’s security and that recognizing one in the wake of the October 7, 2023, Hamas onslaught that started the ongoing war would reward the terror group for its bloody rampage, even while it still holds hostages.
AFP contributed to this report.