Since July 2024, British policy towards Israel and the wider Middle East has increasingly substituted declaratory positioning for strategy. Ceasefires, recognition, sanctions, settlement pressure, humanitarian access and preservation of the two-state formula have progressively been elevated into objectives in themselves, without sufficient attention to the security and political conditions required to make any of them durable.
The result has been a marked erosion of British leverage with Israel, a weakening of the UK’s ability to shape post-war arrangements, and the accumulation of policies whose second-order effects may be making a viable two-state settlement less, rather than more, attainable. This is not principally an argument that the government has been too critical of Israel. Nor is it an argument against Palestinian self-determination, against scrutiny of Israeli conduct, or against the objective of two states. The criticism is more fundamental. The government has too often mistaken a preferred constitutional destination for a strategy capable of delivering it.
The Foreign Secretary’s statement to the House on 8 September 2026 described the two-state solution as the government’s ‘North Star’. The phrase is revealing. A North Star can indicate direction. It cannot provide a route through obstacles. It says nothing about who disarms Hamas; who prevents the rebuilding of its military infrastructure; who ensures that a future Palestinian state possesses a monopoly of legitimate force; who supplies an enforceable security guarantee capable of sustaining Israeli withdrawal; or how Saudi and wider Arab normalisation are restored. Until those questions are answered, reaffirming the destination does not amount to a strategy for reaching it.
