By Jonathan Cook
JonathanCook.net
September 29, 2025
Britain's Keir Starmer is already pulling the rug from under his own grudging declaration. The only hope of change is of the unintended consequences variety
Middle East Eye - 26 September 2025
The reluctant recognition of Palestinian statehood by Britain, France, Australia, Canada this week is a con - it is the same switch and bait that has been blocking the creation of a Palestinian state for three decades now.
Imagine that these four leading western countries had recognised Palestine not in late 2025, when Palestine is in the final stages of being eradicated, but in the late 1990s, during a period of supposed Palestinian state-building.
That was when the Oslo accords were signed with western backing. The Palestinian Authority was established under Yasser Arafat with the apparent aim that Israel would gradually withdraw from the territories it still occupies in Gaza, the West Bank and East Jerusalem and begin ruling an emergent Palestinian state.
At Israel's insistence, let us note, the Oslo accords carefully avoided any mention of the ultimate destination of this process. Nonetheless, the message from western politicians and media was the same: this was heading towards a Palestinian state living in peace alongside Israel.
Looking back, it is evident why that did not happen when it still looked feasible.
The Israeli leader of the time, Yitzhak Rabin, told the Israeli parliament that his vision was not of a state but of "an entity which is less than a state": a glorified Palestinian local authority utterly dependent on its bigger neighbour, Israel, for its security and economic survival.
After Rabin was assassinated by a far-right Israeli gunman, his successor, Benjamin Netanyahu, was propelled into power by a majority of the Israeli public on a mandate to stop the Oslo process in its tracks.
He repeatedly reneged on commitments to withdraw Israeli soldiers and Jewish settler-militias from the occupied West Bank. In fact, in this period of supposed "peace-making", Israel colonised Palestinian land at the fastest rate ever.
In 2001, during his time in opposition, Netanyahu was secretly caught on camera, explaining how he achieved this reversal.
He said he had held on to Palestinian territory, in violation of the Oslo accords, by imposing "my own interpretation to the agreements" so that vast swaths could continue to be defined as "security zones". He added : "I halted the fulfilment of the Oslo accords."
Was there not pushback from western powers, he was asked. "America is something that you can easily manoeuvre and move in the right direction," he replied.
Sabotaging peace
What that meant in practice, since the effective end of the Oslo process a few years later, was a series of US presidential initiatives ever-less favourable to the Palestinians.
In 2000, Bill Clinton's Camp David summits between Israeli and Palestinian leaders failed to hammer out even a minimalist Palestinian state that Israel was willing to accept.
George W Bush's Road Map for Peace in 2003 half-heartedly tried to resuscitate Palestinian statehood but was stymied by the US accepting 14 impossible Israeli "preconditions" for negotiations, including continuing settlement expansion.
Barack Obama entered office with a grand vision of peace that was quickly sunk by Israel's refusal to stop expanding its illegal settlements and stealing more land in the West Bank needed for a Palestinian state.
Donald Trump's 2020 hyped "deal of the century" plan - conducted over the heads of the Palestinian leadership - dressed up annexation of large parts of the West Bank as Palestinian statehood.
Trump's team also considered a plan to economically incentivise - on the most charitable interpretation - Gaza's Palestinians to relocate to Egypt's Sinai desert.
In reality, these two decades of time-wasting while Israel carried on brutalising the Palestinians and taking their land, incentivised not peace but greater Palestinian resistance, culminating in Hamas' one-day break-out from Gaza on 7 October 2023.
Israel's response was a genocide in Gaza - one in which Joe Biden became an active partner from the outset, sending bombs to help level the enclave and providing diplomatic cover. Meanwhile, Israel accelerated its de facto annexation of the West Bank undisturbed.
Trump's latest contribution has been unveiling a " Gaza Riviera Plan", in which whoever survives of the 2.3 million Palestinians there is "cleaned out" and the enclave rebuilt with Gulf money as a playground for the rich.
Reports this week of a watered-down version of the plan suggest Tony Blair, the war criminal who oversaw the destruction of Iraq two decades ago with George W Bush, may be appointed effective "governor" of a Gaza in ruins.