Fifty years ago, at the height of the Yom Kippur war, there was a deep fear that the wars between Israel and Egypt might never end. With devastating losses in the Sinai and whole armies facing encirclement by the Suez Canal, few expected the narrow diplomatic openings to lead to a lasting peace between the foes. Today we face a situation just as perilous. Hamas’s appalling terrorism against Israel on 7 October led to the darkest day in Jewish history since the Holocaust, while the humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza is playing out on an unimaginable scale, with thousands of civilians dead, streets flattened and more than a million people displaced.
We must not look away. Instead, once again diplomacy must work urgently to find those narrowing openings. This week, at meetings with foreign ministers in Amman, Doha and Cairo, it became clear to me that an immediate humanitarian pause in the fighting is the most realistic way to immediately alleviate the suffering of civilians in Gaza, and secure the release of the hostages. That is why our position is shared with our major allies, the US and the EU.
I understand why so many are calling for a ceasefire now. We all want the bloodshed and suffering to end. But a ceasefire now would just embolden Hamas. They would still hold hundreds of innocent hostages. They would still fire rockets into Israel. And they would still have the capacity and determination to repeat the horrors of 7 October “again and again”, as a Hamas official boasted last week.
The truth is that Hamas is not seeking negotiations but looking to use Palestinian civilians as human shields and widen the conflict to second and third fronts. A ceasefire will hold only when 7 October can never be repeated.
But even wars have rules. The way Israel fights this war matters. It must uphold international law. The Palestinian people are not Hamas and the children of Gaza must be protected. It is unacceptable that the siege conditions on the strip have not been lifted. The number of dead Palestinian civilians (including children) is shocking and, as Antony Blinken said, Israel must take “concrete steps” to protect innocent lives. And we must redouble our calls to end illegal settlement activity, intimidation and violence on the West Bank.
The Palestinian tragedy extends beyond Gaza. Visiting Ramallah in July last year, I came face to face with a generation in despair. I met young, peaceful Palestinians, totally opposed to Hamas terrorists, who were as impressive as they were eloquent. But their lives told a bitter story of diplomatic failure. Children during the now-forgotten hopes of the Oslo process, their adolescence scarred by the second intifada, they were now facing adulthood under a seemingly permanent occupation, with vanishing economic prospects and ever-encroaching settlements.
Afterwards, I met Mohammed Shtayyeh, the prime minister of the Palestinian Authority, who said the international community, including the UK, seemed to have abandoned serious efforts towards a lasting settlement. I thought of those young lives, and of the fear of a young person I had met earlier in Israel, who had become accustomed to running to bomb shelters in fear of Hamas rocket attacks. With this in mind, I promised that if Labour wins power, we will strive to recognise Palestine as a sovereign state, as part of efforts to contribute to securing a negotiated two-state solution.
Britain, on this essential issue, has lost its way. It is intolerable that no government has put in sustained effort towards a two-state solution since New Labour. Recent Conservative governments have, at times, been dangerously irresponsible, leaving the two-state solution out of their recent UK-Israel road map and announcing plans to move the UK embassy to Jerusalem. The task will be hard and Britain’s influence in the region has limits, but Labour recognises Britain’s historical responsibility. We will appoint a new special envoy dedicated to Middle East peace and recharge diplomacy with all parties in the region to gain maximum influence.
This gets to the core of Labour foreign policy with me and Keir Starmer: our progressivism will be founded on realism. Progressive because our foreign policy will be founded on the belief that every human life is of equal value. This is why we reject the alternative to a peaceful settlement that is being played out on our TV screens and will pursue two states: a sovereign Palestine and a secure Israel. Realist because we will focus on making practical, tangible progress with the world as it is, not as we wish it to be.
This means working with not only the Palestinian Authority and the Israeli government, but our partners in the Gulf, Jordan and Egypt. Tentative conversations have already begun over post-war Gaza and reviving the Palestinian Authority. These narrow openings must be turned into a pathway for a two-state solution.
No one should doubt the difficulty of the diplomatic task ahead, but a committed international community has moved the dial even on this conflict in the recent past. Even at the height of the second intifada, the Bush administration brought Ariel Sharon to the table with Mahmoud Abbas, with Britain contributing meaningfully to the overall effort.
It must not be forgotten, as a result of this concerted push, how close Ehud Olmert and Abbas got in making final status proposals at the Annapolis conference. As war raged in 1973, few would have dared to hope that Egyptian president Anwar Sadat would visit Jerusalem only four years later. It was not an inevitable arc of history that brought this about. It was at first quiet, then intense, diplomacy. This is a habit that needs urgent revival.