On 21 September Labour prime minister Keir Starmer announced British recognition of a ‘Palestinian State’. While admitting that it would change nothing on the ground, he insisted it would ‘protect the viability of a two-state solution and create a path towards lasting peace’. The British ruling class has been forced into this position as the continuing Palestinian resistance to the genocide in Gaza and the growing international solidarity movement intensify the isolation of the Zionist occupation. Reviving the failed two-state solution now is designed to isolate the Hamas-led armed struggle and bolster the hugely unpopular Palestinian Authority (PA) regime of Mahmoud Abbas. Although the PA collaborates militarily with the Zionist occupation and has received billions in European and US funding, the US Trump administration has set up barriers to UN recognition, including denying Abbas’ delegation a visa to visit New York for the assembly. Understanding these machinations means assessing the question of statehood in the context of over a century of Palestinian resistance to imperialism. LOUIS BREHONY reports.
Statehood denied: a history of resistance
Signing the secret Sykes-Picot agreement in 1916, British and French imperialism carved up the Ottoman Empire between themselves. Britain invaded Palestine militarily in November 1917, capturing Gaza while British politicians agreed to the Balfour Declaration, for ‘the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people’. Backing the Zionist colonisation of Palestine meant violent suppression and mass expulsion as British imperialism created a regional base for its interests. Under the British occupation, indigenous demands for Palestinian independence and an end to Zionist immigration were met with murderous repression, culminating in the 1936-39 revolt. Training Zionist terrorists, Britain bombed entire villages, destroyed food and water supplies and interned and starved political prisoners. Killing over 18,000 Palestinians and disarming the revolutionary movement, Britain paved the way for the 1948 Nakba, which created the Israeli state while displacing around 800,000 Palestinians.
Residing in squalid refugee camps and city slums in Jordan, Lebanon and Syria, many Palestinians put their hopes of return and self-determination in the Arabist movement fronted by Gamal Abdel Nasser’s Egypt. Founded by the Arab League in 1964, the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) called for an independent state in all of historic Palestine, which it linked to the ‘complementary goal’ of Arab unity. Though the leftist Arab Nationalist Movement and others had already begun to organise on broader revolutionary lines, the Zionist regime’s defeat of Egypt-led forces in the June 1967 Naksa (‘setback’) led to a rebirth of the national liberation movement. The Naksa saw Egypt’s regular army defeated by imperialist-funded Zionist weaponry, precipitating another mass exodus of Palestinian refugees as the West Bank and Gaza were annexed by the Israeli state.
The reemergence of armed struggle was heralded by the Palestinian victory over Zionist forces at the battle of Karameh, Jordan, in March 1968, and in the hijacking operations of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP). US imperialism promoted the British-sponsored UN resolution 242. While the resolution called for Israel to relinquish territories conquered in 1967, it accepted its ‘right’ to the portion of Palestine colonised in 1948. The PLO leadership, dominated by Yasir Arafat’s Fatah party, opposed the resolution. Sparking wider debate, the prominent Egyptian journalist Ahmad Baha’iddin called for a Palestinian state on the West Bank and Gaza. Among those responding to these proposals, leading PFLP member Ghassan Kanafani wrote in 1967 that the priority in this context was ‘the creation of a fighting people’ to embody the cause of an independent state. For Kanafani and the PFLP, self-determination would not come through ‘Palestinistan’ – a reference to Britain’s partition of India and Pakistan – but, inspired by the communist-led struggle in Vietnam, through ‘Arab Hanois,’ or vanguard fortresses able to withstand imperialism and Zionism.
In the years that followed, the Palestinian cause was besieged on all sides, and its people massacred by the Jordanian regime, including Black September 1970, and by Israel and its fascist allies in Lebanon. In the wake of the pogroms at Sabra and Shatila in 1982, the PLO leadership was exiled to Tunisia. Speaking at the UN in November 1974, Arafat said he had come, ‘bearing an olive branch and a freedom-fighter’s gun. Do not let the olive branch fall from my hand.’ Barely a decade later, it was the gun that had fallen. The PLO’s Cairo Declaration of 1985 restricted armed struggle to military targets within occupied Palestine and, at Algiers, Arafat affirmed the ‘rejection of terrorism in all its forms’.
At the 19th session of the Palestine National Council in Algiers on 15 November 1988, as the ‘First’ Intifada raged in Gaza, Arafat proclaimed the ‘establishment of the State of Palestine,’ with Jerusalem as its capital. This Palestinian Declaration of Independence hailed the intifada while declaring the belief of this ‘state’ in ‘the settlement of regional and international disputes by peaceful means’. Attached to the declaration were statements on the willingness of the PLO to negotiate on the basis of UN resolution 242, restricting calls for statehood to the West Bank and Gaza and recognising Zionist rule of the remainder of historic Palestine. Referring to left opposition to 242, the Los Angeles Times said that Arafat loyalists saw this adoption as ‘a major victory by Arafat over the PLO’s hard-line wing, led by George Habash’s Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine’ (15/11/1988).
The intifada was effectively aborted by the Oslo Peace Accords, signed by Arafat and Zionist premier Yitzhak Rabin on the White House lawn in 1993 – for which the two leaders were rewarded with the Nobel Peace Prize the following year. The accords signed away 78% of historic Palestine, established the PA in Gaza and a portion of the West Bank, and relegated the ‘final status’ of any Palestinian state to discussions that would never transpire. In the years to follow, the number of Zionist settlements in the West Bank and Jerusalem more than doubled. The fiefdom controlled by the Fatah-led PA was bankrolled by EU, US and British imperialism, which trained and paid the salaries of paramilitary forces, prison guards and bureaucrats. The PA proved its usefulness to imperialism during the al-Aqsa ‘Second’ Intifada, which exploded in 2000 in the face of Zionist violence and the frustrations of Oslo. With British and US backing, the PA collaborated in the imprisonment of leading revolutionaries, including PFLP leader Ahmad Saadat in 2002, and has since been implicated in the murders of Nizar Banat, Basil al-Araj and many other activists.
Two-state solution: an imperialist blueprint
‘Our position is clear – the Palestinian state must be demilitarised. It will have no army or airforce… no party will be allowed to compete in Palestinian elections unless it embraces the principle of nonviolent politics’. (Keir Starmer, writing in Israeli news outlet Ynet on 22 September 2025)
In 1980, then Tory prime minister Margaret Thatcher advised European leaders to ‘concentrate on [the] problem of how [Palestinian] self-determination can be put into practice and reconciled with Israel’s security needs.’ This could only mean a neocolonial settlement of the Palestinian issue, with a ‘self-determination’ meaning ‘statehood’ for a tiny elite willing to repress resistance and submit to a Zionist entity playing its assigned role as imperialist base in the region.
Following Oslo, Labour made the position of British imperialism in the region clear as it imposed savage sanctions on Iraq and supported the bloody 2003 invasion alongside the US. While backing the butchery of the Sharon regime during the al-Aqsa intifada, the Blair and Brown governments simultaneously called for the ‘two-state solution’ of Oslo to be implemented. Having denounced armed resistance and openly collaborated with the Zionists, Abbas’ PA resuscitated earlier calls for UN recognition of Palestinian statehood in 2011.
As leading Palestinian activist and writer Khaled Barakat told FRFI: ‘The “state of the West Bank and Gaza” is a project of the Palestinian capitalist class, not the Palestinian masses. Genuine Palestinian rights are:
• The right of return,
• Full self-determination,
• Liberation of all of Palestine, from the river to the sea.’
7 October 2023 demonstrated the total failure of Oslo and constant Zionist wars to extinguish the revolutionary content at the heart of the Palestinian issue. Isolated by its own inability to drown the West Bank resistance and stake a place for itself in any post-war settlement, the Palestinian bourgeoisie has upped the ante on statehood. Faced by internal movements against the Gaza genocide, ruling classes in European countries including Spain, Ireland, Britain and France have supported this demand. According to Barakat:
‘European governments’ recognition efforts are not genuine steps toward Palestinian statehood but symbolic, toothless gestures. This “recognition” offers Palestinians nothing concrete – no land, no borders, no sovereignty – only a demilitarised entity under occupation.’
In addition, as Starmer and French President Emmanuel Macron have made clear, these manoeuvres are a desperate attempt to politically isolate and eliminate the Palestinian liberation forces which the Zionist forces have failed to crush militarily.
On 29 July Starmer told parliament that Britain would recognise a Palestinian state at the UN in September, ‘unless the Israeli government takes substantive steps to end the appalling situation in Gaza’. PA ambassador to London Hossam Zomlot spent the following months meeting reactionary MPs, including open Zionists like Lucy Powell, a leading member of Labour Friends of Israel. On 16 September, during a week in which the Labour government hosted Zionist war criminal President Isaac Herzog as occupation tanks rolled into Gaza City, Zomlot posed for selfies with over 150 Labour MPs. The event was organised by Labour Friends of Palestine and the Middle East, which condemns the 7 October resistance as ‘shocking, horrific and unjustifiable’, and has as its first demand the release of Israeli hostages. As Britain recognised a ‘Palestinian state’ on 21 September, Zomlot hailed Palestine’s ‘South Africa moment’, calling it a step on Britain’s path to ‘correcting historic injustice’.
Relations with the PA express a deepening inter-imperialist split between European and US powers. Western European countries are promoting the fantasy of a future Gaza free of Hamas, ruled by the complicit – and utterly discredited – PA of Mahmoud Abbas. However, while US imperialism has backed the PA historically, the current Trump administration has cut its funding and, in an unprecedented step this August, denied visas for Abbas and his PA entourage to attend sessions of the UN discussing Palestinian statehood. A US State Department spokesman said that this would ‘hold the PLO and PA accountable for… undermining the prospects for peace.’ In step with shifts in US ruling class policy, Zionist leaders have reverted to the earlier position of denying statehood. A ‘two-state solution’ vote went ahead at the UN on 12 September, with the US among only 10 states voting against.
On 14 September, while Zomlot made nice to Labour MPs in London, PA forces handed over Jenin resistance fighter Obada Rawajbeh to the occupation regime. Far from ‘correcting injustice,’ the limit of British recognition of Palestinian self-determination is a collaborationist ‘statehood’ on the 3% of historic Palestine over which the PA has ever held nominal control. Starmer reasserts that ‘Hamas will have no role in the future of Palestine.’ Like France, Canada and other imperialist powers recognising the ‘state of Palestine’, Britain demands PA reforms, including elections within a year. The absurdity is that Hamas would be a clear winner if these elections were held fairly.*
The roots of these duplicitous moves are found in Balfour, Sykes-Picot and the British Labour movement’s historic and continuing backing of imperialism’s Zionist ally. As Barakat concludes, ‘There are no consequences for the Zionist enemy in these recognition efforts – no sanctions, no isolation. Instead, they further criminalise Palestinian resistance. We must reject illusions of statehood recognition without liberation and fight for a free Palestine, with full rights and sovereignty.’
Isolate the Zionist state! Sanctions now!
* See Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research https://www.pcpsr.org/en/node/997
FRFI 308 October/November 2025
