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.

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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.

The central strategic problem since 7 October has not simply been the absence of an Israeli-Palestinian political agreement. It has been the continuing capacity of armed rejectionist movements, above all Hamas, Hezbollah and the wider Iranian regional network, to veto accommodation through violence. The government itself recognises elements of this diagnosis. In today’s statement, Ed Miliband condemned Hamas, acknowledged the threat posed by Iran, announced sanctions against Hezbollah’s financing arm, reimposed major economic sanctions on Iran and reiterated that Hamas must decommission its weapons and dismantle its terrorist infrastructure.

Yet this recognition does not organise the policy. Against Israel and settlement activity, Britain now possesses an increasingly elaborate set of instruments: import prohibitions, sanctions on individuals and companies involved in construction, infrastructure, finance and real estate, restrictions on advertising, expanded human-rights sanctions and additional arms-export controls. Against Hamas and the broader rejectionist architecture, the government largely states outcomes which somebody else must somehow........

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