In recent months, the British government under Prime Minister Keir Starmer has ramped up the pressure on Israel, harshly criticizing the Jewish state for expanding military operations in Gaza to defeat Hamas.
Speaking in Parliament on June 4, Starmer said that Israel’s actions were “appalling and intolerable.” And earlier this week, he imposed sanctions on Ministers Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben-Gvir, members of the Israeli government.
While he appears to have backed away from recent plans to recognize a Palestinian state, the prime minister reportedly was seriously considering the matter and only retreated under pressure from Washington.
Instead of lashing out with righteous indignation at Israel, Britain would do well to take a long, hard look in the mirror. For while Whitehall endlessly preaches to Jerusalem about justice and self-determination, it conveniently ignores the fact that the United Kingdom itself remains a colonial power in the 21st century.
In other words, Starmer’s hypocrisy is as thick as London fog.
Indeed, Britain retains control over 14 so-called British overseas territories around the globe. Most of these territories were seized during the heyday of the British Empire. And even though the sun set on that empire long ago, they remain under the Union Jack.
Take, for instance, Gibraltar. A rocky outpost on the southern tip of Spain, it has been under British rule since 1713, despite repeated demands from Madrid for its return. Or look at the Falkland Islands, where 8,500 miles separate the local sheep from 10 Downing Street, yet the UK continues to reject Argentina’s claim to the islands and insists on maintaining its sovereignty.
And then there are the Turks and Caicos Islands, a tropical archipelago in the Caribbean some 4,300 miles from London. They are still governed as a British overseas territory, despite growing calls for greater autonomy or even independence. In fact, in 2009 the UK suspended the islands’ self-government entirely, replacing local elected officials with direct rule from London for three years. The move was widely condemned across the Caribbean as neo-colonial overreach.
Yet the same Britain that imposed undemocratic rule over a Black-majority population thousands of miles away feels entitled to chastise Israel for defending its ancestral homeland.
SINCE OCTOBER 7, Israel has been fighting for its very survival against Hamas, a genocidal jihadist movement backed by Iran. Rather than standing unequivocally with Israel, Britain has instead resumed its tired refrain about the need for a Palestinian state, as if that were the key to peace.
Where is Britain’s demand to eliminate Hamas? Where are Starmer’s calls for Palestinians to stop glorifying terrorism and accept the permanence of the Jewish state? Absent. Nowhere to be found.
Instead, British officials want to reward Palestinian intransigence and terrorism with statehood. What they fail to grasp – or more likely choose to ignore – is that every time Israel has ceded land to the Palestinians, it has been repaid not with peace but with rockets, terror tunnels, and hatred.
Furthermore, Britain is hardly in a position to pontificate about how best to defend Jewish lives from those who seek their destruction. Back in 1939, at the time of the British Mandate, then-prime minister Neville Chamberlain issued the infamous White Paper, which severely limited Jewish immigration to the Land of Israel at the very moment when Jews were desperately fleeing Hitler’s Europe. That act of betrayal left countless Jews trapped in Nazi-occupied lands, where they were eventually murdered.
And now, eight decades later, the British government wants to impose another disaster on the Jewish people by foisting a hostile Palestinian state onto Israel’s vulnerable midsection.
It is both galling and grotesque.
Britain's colonial mindset lives on
OBVIOUSLY, BRITAIN’S arrogant colonial mindset lives on, only now it is cloaked in the language of diplomacy and “international consensus.”
But make no mistake: The push for a Palestinian state, especially in the wake of Hamas’s atrocities, is nothing more than a brazen attempt to dictate terms and to strong-arm Israel into relinquishing strategic territory in exchange for empty promises.
What is needed is not more pressure on Israel but a fundamental re-evaluation of Britain’s foreign policy priorities.
Instead of promoting the cause of yet another failed Arab state, Britain should be working with Israel to expand the Abraham Accords, foster economic cooperation in the region, and demand Palestinian accountability.
Moreover, it’s time for British officials to reckon with their own imperial legacy.
As the great Victorian writer Oscar Wilde put it in his classic horror novel The Picture of Dorian Gray, “And what sort of lives do these people, who pose as being moral, lead themselves? My dear fellow, you forget that we are in the native land of the hypocrite.”
If the British truly believe in the principle of self-determination, then let them begin by yielding control over territories such as Northern Ireland, the Turks and Caicos Islands, and others. Let them recognize the hypocrisy of holding on to scattered territories across the globe while preaching to Israel about occupation of its own homeland.
Until then, Britain would do well to keep its unsolicited advice to itself. Because the sight of a former empire clinging to its last colonial outposts while condemning the Jewish state is not only ironic – it is indefensible.
The writer served as deputy communications director under Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.