Putting conditions on recognising a Palestinian state is a humiliating joke for my people

When I asked my sister in Gaza what she thought of Keir Starmer’s announcement, she laughed – because it means we only gain statehood if we continue to be killed, says Ahmed Najar

Keir Starmer wants us to believe he’s making a bold moral stand by announcing the UK will recognise a Palestinian state.

But look closer, and the truth is far more disturbing. This “recognition” isn’t rooted in justice or principle. It’s a policy so morally upside down, it sounds almost satirical.

If Israel continues bombing children, annexing land and starving a population into submission, then, yes, Britain might recognise Palestine. But if Israel suddenly behaves, agrees to a ceasefire and recommits to peace, then recognition won’t be necessary.

What kind of justice operates on those terms? This is not diplomacy. This is moral blackmail. It is Britain saying to Palestinians: your right to exist is not yours. It depends entirely on the behaviour of your occupier.

When I asked my sister in Gaza what she thought of the UK’s announcement, her first response was to laugh. She said: “I don’t think we really care what the UK has to say about us. We’ll never forget that they’re one of the main reasons we’re in this situation. We’re just trying to survive here.”

Of all countries, Britain should know better. It was Britain that helped initiate our dispossession with the Balfour Declaration. Britain stood by during the Nakba, the displacement of Palestinians when the Israeli state was founded in the aftermath of the Second World War. Britain has armed and funded Israel through occupation, siege and massacre. And now, as Gaza is being starved into history, Britain still can’t bring itself to say: Palestinians deserve a state because they are a people who deserve to live in freedom and dignity.

When my 14-year-old niece asked her mother, “What does it mean that they want to recognise us? Don’t we already exist?”, my sister said the family laughed – not because it was funny, but because it was absurd. Even a child could see the madness: a government saying they might recognise you if your people continue to be killed.

Starmer called Palestinian statehood an “inalienable right”. But a right can’t be delayed, denied or dangled as a threat. If you attach conditions to a right, especially ones dictated by the very state occupying and bombing us, it’s no longer a right but a bargaining chip. What’s worse is that it isn’t even sincere. This isn’t about us. It’s about Starmer trying to appear principled while staying comfortably aligned with US policy, arms contracts and the pro-Israel lobby at home.

What Palestinians hear in all this is painfully clear: your suffering alone isn’t enough. Your history, your dispossession, the killing of more than 60,000 people in Gaza… none of it justifies our support. But if we can use your dead to shame Israel into behaving, then yes, we might finally utter the word “Palestine” without choking on it.

It’s grotesque. It’s like saying to a battered woman: “If your abuser continues, I’ll acknowledge your pain. But if he stops, then you’ll be fine on your own, won’t you?”

Recognition is supposed to be an affirmation of our humanity. But in Starmer’s hands, it’s a punishment doled out to our oppressor. And if he gets his way – if Israel suddenly agrees to a ceasefire and halts annexation – then we, the victims, get nothing. We just keep waiting. Again.

A group of Palestinians pray next to the body of a person killed while trying to reach aid trucks entering northern Gaza through the Zikim crossing with Israel (AP)

This isn’t even neutrality. It’s complicity dressed as strategy. It tells Palestinians that we must continue dying in order to be politically useful. That a ceasefire may be good for Israel – but bad for us, because it might delay recognition even further.

It’s a contradiction so absurd it becomes insulting. The more they kill us, the closer we get to being recognised as human. And the moment they pause, even slightly, we’re erased again. What kind of justice works like that? What leadership reduces human rights to this level of transactional absurdity?

Instead, we are told to wait until our deaths are politically useful. Wait until our grief becomes leverage. Wait until Starmer needs to send a message to Israel. Only then, perhaps, will we be deemed worthy of recognition.

But we have waited for decades. Through every war, every failed “peace process”, every insult, every massacre, every broken promise. We have waited while Britain and the West told us to be patient. While they recognised our oppressors, funded them, armed them and applauded their “restraint” as we were buried under the rubble of our homes.

If this is what recognition looks like, it is no recognition at all. It is a joke. A cruel, humiliating joke played on a people who have already lost everything.

Because if the world’s recognition of our right to exist depends on the mood of our killers, that recognition is not a gift – it is another form of violence. And if Britain cannot affirm our humanity without asking Israel for permission first, then what value does that recognition really hold?

It’s not leadership. It’s cowardice. And it will be remembered as such.

Ahmed Najar is a Palestinian economist and commentator originally from Gaza, now based in London