Giles Fraser
Unherd, July 31, 2025
“What is particularly shabby about Starmer’s announcement is that he is playing with people’s lives — with Palestinian and Israeli ones — not because he believes recognising a state of Palestine is the right thing to do at this moment, but because of his own troubled domestic political situation.”
Hamas could stop this war tomorrow and so end the horrendous suffering of the people of Gaza. Lest we forget: on October 7, following the worst massacre of Jews since the Holocaust, Hamas kidnapped 251 men, women and children and hid them away in tunnels as human bargaining chips. Some 50 of them are still being held in Gaza — though over half of these are probably now dead.
For Israelis, this war is about two things: destroying Hamas and returning the hostages. They won’t fully achieve the first objective because this most brutal of wars is only fuelling the kind of burning resentment against Israel that recruits for terrorism, for Hamas or its eventual successors. But until the hostages are released, Israel will continue to fight to get them back, and rightly so. Peace cannot come without the hostages being freed. And nothing Keir Starmer can do will change this logic. He can make things worse, though — and he just has.
Like Starmer, I support a two-state solution. And by the way, if you do too, that makes you a Zionist, because to be a Zionist is simply to believe in a state for the Jewish people in their historic homeland. But Hamas has never believed in a two-state solution. It wants to destroy Israel and eradicate it “from the river to the sea”. … [To read the full article, click here]