Jon Mendelsohn in the Spectator – The problem with Ed Miliband’s West Bank sanctions:
The Foreign Secretary’s statement to the House on 8 September 2026 described the two-state solution as the government’s ‘North Star’. The phrase is revealing. A North Star can indicate direction. It cannot provide a route through obstacles. It says nothing about who disarms Hamas; who prevents the rebuilding of its military infrastructure; who ensures that a future Palestinian state possesses a monopoly of legitimate force; who supplies an enforceable security guarantee capable of sustaining Israeli withdrawal; or how Saudi and wider Arab normalisation are restored. Until those questions are answered, reaffirming the destination does not amount to a strategy for reaching it.
The central strategic problem since 7 October has not simply been the absence of an Israeli-Palestinian political agreement. It has been the continuing capacity of armed rejectionist movements, above all Hamas, Hezbollah and the wider Iranian regional network, to veto accommodation through violence.
The problem, more bluntly, is that the Palestinians – or the organisations that purport to represent the Palestinians – have repeatedly demonstrated that they have no interest whatsoever in a two-state solution. They want a one-state solution, and the destruction of Israel. Miliband’s self-important moral grandstanding serves to put the blame squarely on Israel for any lack of progress, which is a grotesque distortion that plays nicely to the already rampant antisemitism here in the UK, which sees the Jews as the problem and the Palestinians as the victims. It’s contemptible, to be honest – especially with all that stuff about British values thrown in.
Can’t we do a Miliband swap? – get David back here, and get rid of the ridiculous Ed.
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