Not in your wildest dreams could you have imagined, three years ago, that one day the United Kingdom would occupy the bizarre position it currently does on the Palestine Israel situation. The narrative is incomparable, changing hourly from scolding to encouraging.
You could blend a bathroom scene from a Jacqueline Susann number with HG Wells’ advanced martians, twist it Narnia-ish, spike it with the commentary from the English men’s mags of the 1990s, where enthusiasts submitted naked pictures of their wives (‘and here’s Maureen from Hull’) then wrap the thing in the language of the contemporary liberal arts (‘inclusive storytelling’) and you’d still make more sense than UK’s position on Palestine.
It’s easier to understand the ANC’s position on land expropriation without compensation (EWC). The ANC makes the claim that it aims to expropriate land without compensation, so some smart people then go and tell concerned parties about it. The ANC gets cross with those smart people, accuses them of lying, then invites them to parliament to explain why they’re going around talking like this, where it comes from etc. Held against the mess the UK has invited into its legislature debates, its MP’s surgeries and messaging platforms on Israel and Palestine, EWC is – how do you say – straightforward baby potatoes.
Humans have limited capacity for mystery nowadays. In Israel v Palestine, the mystery of who knew what about the attacks prior to 7th October 2023 would have been sufficient to keep generations guessing. Then, you could have confronted the erratic Liberal Democrat MP Layla Moran, who had claimed she had family in Gaza as she walked on Westminster Bridge. You could have stopped her, calmly asking: ‘what exactly did you know?’ She would have probably called you a racist, and you would then leave, because the last time Layla got into a fight with a man she smashed him in the face. Over a computer cable, apparently.
But mysteries kept popping up, carbuncles on the country’s political judgement that made you suspect something truly wild was fomenting. The paradoxes of MPs, the protests clearly celebrating the attacks, the fatalist language of the emerging Pro-Palestine campus quarters – filled with posh young English boys and girls – the prancing BBC boomers, ‘genocide’, the odd behaviour of the judiciary and then of course, ‘islamophobia’.The Metropolitan Police commander, Sir Mark Rowley, appeared not to understand the law, but then accused his critics of not understanding the law, effectively loading a computer virus from the mid 2000s into the heads of his charges. Not exactly fatal, but enough to slow down thinking.
That was then, and impossible to manage. The mistake was to think things would get more lucid with time.
Keir Starmer quadrupled the sense of confusion last year when he announced his support for the two-state solution (TSS) and the recognition of the Palestinian state. His long suffering wife Victoria was raising their children in the Jewish faith; every Friday the Starmers could be found observing Shabbat at the home of Victoria’s father. I was hanging around some policy people, aggressively supportive of the TSS at the same time Starmer, Canada’s Mark Carney and France’s Emmanuel Macron announced recognition of the Palestinian state. When that news failed to temper the habit of ugly protesting, these guys all looked at each other, helpless and puzzled: ‘even more vicious behaviour in the streets now? Well, this is the last thing we expected’.
Then the latter half of 2026 arrived. At this point the scruffy hippies at Palestine Action had been banned, unbanned, then banned again (the Supreme Court is due to hear Palestine Action’s appeal next month; if the judges are as sensible and learned as the policy advisors, Palestine Action will be unbanned, then told it may no longer exist). More recently, the acclaimed Irish marxist author Sally Rooney rocked up. Just what everyone needed.
Sally is nowhere near as adventurous as Jackie Collins but what she lacks in creativity she makes up for in theatre. She pledged the sale proceeds of her books to Palestine Action, at which point her publisher, Faber, intervened and stopped selling them in the UK. This rankled many people, but none more so than another writer called Sarah Helm.
Sarah is a supporter of Palestine Action, but she also happens to be the wife of the UK government’s national security advisor, Jonathan Powell. Powell, central to the UK’s attempt to try and give away the Chagos archipelago, was also a headline negotiator in the lead up to the Good Friday Agreement. Veterans recalled him being collected from the airport by the members of the IRA they were covertly surveilling.
Sarah’s been at the whole ‘well-Hamas-may-have-a-point’ thing for some time now; under normal circumstances, this conduct, in defiance of the government’s proscribing of Hamas as a terrorist organisation, would be grounds for her husband to be subjected to enhanced (‘developed’) vetting, given he’s living in the same kind of fire he’s supposed to be extinguishing at work. But he wasn’t. Nobody thought to review this.
It is impossible to know today what is going on there, who’s acceptable and who isn’t, who belongs and who doesn’t. Legacy media urges nuance (when they’re not opening supporting Palestine), but even the most delicate of it requires basis. Here, it is as if cock-up and conspiracy have stopped vying against each other to be the first explanation as to why everything always goes wrong, and decided to team up.
The views of the writer are not necessarily the views of the Daily Friend or the IRR.
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