On July 29, 2025, British Prime Minister Keir Starmer declared that the United Kingdom would recognize a State of Palestine unilaterally unless Israel and Hamas reach a ceasefire by September 2025. If terrorism is a wildfire, Starmer and French President Emmanuel Macron — who announced on July 24 that France would also recognize Palestine — have chosen to pour gasoline rather than water on it.

Put aside Starmer’s factual confusion: Hamas, not Israel, refuses both a ceasefire and the release of the Israeli hostages it seized on October 7, 2023, during a previous ceasefire. Pictures of cerebral palsy patients and Yemenis and Syrians do not equal starvation in Gaza; nor does a growing population suggest genocide.

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What Starmer and Macron have done both to virtue signal and to appease their country’s growing Islamist constituency and leftist radicals is to not only reward Hamas for its terror, but to allow Hamas to leapfrog from defeat to becoming the model for Palestinian politics, especially as a free-for-all looms after the death of the 92-year-old Palestinian Authority chairman, Mahmoud Abbas.

Creating a Palestinian state will not bring peace. It will guarantee war. 

Hamas and many ordinary Palestinians take a maximalist approach: They do not want a two-state solution with an independent Palestinian state formed based on the 1949 Armistice Lines between Israel on one hand, and Egypt and Jordan, respectively the occupying powers in Gaza and the West Bank, on the other. As the dispute continues, Europe has shown Palestinians they can use violence and Europe’s latent anti-Semitism to advance their own interests more effectively than diplomacy and compromise.

But why should the Palestinians be the only beneficiaries of such a strategy? Many people seek their own state: Somalilanders in Somaliland; the Southern Movement in Yemen; Kanaks in New Caledonia; Catalans in Spain; Biafrans in southeastern Nigeria; Tigray in Ethiopia; and Anglophones in Cameroon. Kurds in Turkey still want their freedom and will likely take arms again if the Turkish government does not take advantage of its ceasefire offer to negotiate sincerely. Tibetans, Uyghurs, and Mongolians in Inner Mongolia all want freedom from China. Both the United Kingdom and France face their own latent separatist threats in Scotland and Corsica.

With the world ignoring peaceful movements in Somaliland and South Yemen but prioritizing Palestine due to Hamas terrorism and “Pallywood” media spectacles, future aspirants for freedom will conclude the best way to achieve it is by following the Palestinian model. The same holds true for Biafra, Ambazonia, and the Kurds where, respectively, the Finns, Norwegians, and Swedes have served as agents of Nigeria, Cameroon, and Turkey in order to punish civil society leaders who belonged to independence movements back home. True, each of these movements wage local insurgency, but they may soon conclude that the way forward is to kill Europeans, not trust in them.

Just as Palestinians rose to world attention storming schools, hijacking airplanes, and even attacking the Olympics, new aspirants can now study the Hamas case — and Paris and London’s response to terror — to try to win international support by targeting European airlines and taking European hostages. Europe will react with revulsion (as it should), but Macron and Starmer demonstrate that, with time, moral equivalence, if not inversion, will win.

HOW ISRAEL–GAZA CONFLICT ARRIVED AT INFLECTION POINT

Nor will the process be organic. Hamas survives on the Iranian, Turkish, and United Nations’ dime. State sponsors and international organizations matter. India should expect Islamist money to flow to Kashmiri terrorists; Russian money could fund Scottish, Catalan, or Quebecois separatism. In each case, militants and extremists could hijack what today are peaceful movements.

Unprincipled leadership fueled by anti-Semitism, perhaps Qatari money, and a desire to appease constituents can have profound effects on international security. What happens in Gaza does not stay in Gaza. By validating Hamas’ choices, European leaders today promote Hamas as a model. Ultimately, those who pay the price will be in the streets of Paris and London, not in Gaza and Ramallah.

Michael Rubin is a contributor to the Washington Examiner‘s Beltway Confidential. He is director of analysis at the Middle East Forum and a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.