Starmer’s declaration of a Palestinian state is a deliberate distraction from Starvation & Genocide.

By announcing a vague pledge to a form of statehood that could never be viable, Starmer once again distracts from the immediate starvation crisis.

Imagine this scenario: A man lies bloodied and bruised at the side of the road. He lies outside his home which his attacker stole and forcibly evicted him. When he tried to fight back, the attacker murders his wife and children - and calls the police to restrain him. He is forcibly starved and become malnourished and emaciated.

Everyone in a position of leadership supports the attacker both by their words and actions. But the worse the attacker behaves, the more their support is an embarrassment and undermines what little moral authority they have amongst their own supporters.

So they contrive to do something to be seen to help the victim. Their help is not to immediately feed the starving man. It is not to instantly withdraw their material support from the criminal, to restrain and arrest him. It is not to rightfully restore the man to his legitimate home.

Rather it is to announce that at some point in the future he will offer the victim a new home. The exact detail of that new home are as yet undisclosed - but it is clear it will not be that his house is restored to him. At best he might get the garden shed or the outhouse - but more likely he’ll be offer a small bit of both - with the pathway connecting the two remaining out of bounds. Moreover, he will have to undertake that he will never even try to defend himself from attack, and accept the criminal has a right to his house, and will determine how often - it ever - he will be allowed to enter and exit his new home.

But in between now and that point in the future, nothing will be done to prevent the criminal beating the injured starving man, and no one will guarantee that he is fed.

In short, the alleged ‘help’ that’s being offered isn’t really help. It’s a monumental distraction.

The so-called ‘Two-State’ solution is not a solution. It is a mythical carrot that is periodically dangled in front of supporters of the Palestinian people to give an illusion of a light at the end of a seemingly never-ending tunnel.

The Two-State solution was obviously unworkable when proposed by the UN in 1947 (Stage 2 in the image above) - with each party having three separate zones connected by narrow corridors. By 1948, the Zionist leadership decided it had embark of murderous land-grab. With the assistance of Western powers they destroyed whole villages to dominate the majority of historical Palestine (Stage 3).

As time has gone on, even those bits that the so-called ‘international community’ said were illegally occupied by the Zionist occupation were encroached upon and usurped.

That was before the genocide and acceleration of ethnic cleansing of the past 22-months.

In an article written last week I argued the British governments words were hollow and listed some of the concrete actions they could have taken if they really wanted to pressure the Zionist occupiers. The fact that they have not undertaken any of these is proof of where their loyalties lie.

Those actions they have done are a distraction. They have put individual sanctions on two government ministers whose genocidal rhetoric was made in their capacity as government officials. Over and again the limited actions do nothing to relieve the suffering in Gaza, and focus the blame on an ‘extreme fringe’ rather than the ethno-nationalist supremacist ideology that underpins the occupation and the apartheid system it operates.

Why would anyone believe anything a British government says about Palestine.

You need to have a PhD in Deceit & Treachery to be Foreign Secretary.

In 1917, UK Foreign Secretary made his pledge to Lord Rothschild that nothing would be done to prejudice the civil or religious rights of Palestinians.

Yet Britain facilitated mass migration of European Jewish people to Palestine whilst they held a mandate - boosting the population from 60 000 at the end of World War One to over 600 000 by the time their mandate ended in 1948 - changing the demographics.

Not only that, the British allowed the Jewish population to organised politically under their Zionist leadership (and ultimately militarily) whilst constantly subverting any political or military organisation for the Palestinian population - i.e. no civil rights.

By 2025, the Zionist occupation control access to Al Masjid Al Aqsa and the Church of the Holy Sepulchre - and have assumed total control over the Ibrahimi Mosque in Khaleel (Hebron). They have destroyed mosques and churches in Gaza - i.e. violating religious rights.

These are the fruits of a declaration by a former UK Foreign Secretary on behalf of the British Government.

So when Starmer promises to recognise a Palestinian state at some distant point in the future, we must assume that this is an act of bad faith - not intended to help the people of Palestine but to save face amongst his own supporters whilst doing nothing to fundamentally harm the west’s occupying colony in the Middle East.

Abdul Wahid has been active in Muslim affairs in the UK for over 25 years. He has been published on the websites of Foreign Policy, Open Democracy, the Times Higher Educational Supplement, and Prospect Magazine. You can follow him on X/Twitter @AbdulWahid_X.