Last weeks parliamentary vote to recognising the state of Palestine, is the least we could have down given how complicit the British state has been in the plight of the Palestinians from the outset.
Under the Palestine Mandate, we allowed the nakba to happen in 1948. The ethnic cleansing of Palestinian villages under the eyes of British troops over 1948, heralding their exodus and for many the status of refugees with no confirmed right to return. British colonial laws are still used to this day like administrative detention to subjugate Palestinians in the West Bank to house arrests and indefinite arrest, alarmingly particularly to school kids. More recently during the assault on Gaza over the summer, Britain continued to supply arms to Israel.
The least we can do for them is to recognise them as a state along with the other 138 states who have already done so in the UN, giving the two-state solution more impetus on the basis of current British Foreign policy to the illegal occupation of the Palestine by Israel. Indeed when Balfour Declaration was made in 1917 giving Britain’s backing for the creation of a Jewish homeland, the then Foreign Secretary, undertook to uphold the civil and religious rights of the native population of Palestine. On October the 13th, the UK’s parliament voted by 274 votes to 12 to recognise a Palestinian state and has began doing just this albeit almost a century later and not binding on the present coalition government’s position.
In the meantime, a mount of trouble increases in Jerusalem over the holy sites as Jewish redicals are upsetting the fragile religious balance in the holy city.