Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s prime minister, called the UK’s recognition of Palestine on Sunday “an absurd prize for terrorism”.
In remarks to ministers released by his office, he said Israel would have “to fight both in the UN and in all the other fronts against the slanderous propaganda aimed at us, and against the calls to create a Palestinian state that will endanger our existence and constitute an absurd prize for terrorism”.
In a post on X, Israel’s foreign ministry wrote that the UK recognising Palestine as a state was “nothing but a reward for jihadist Hamas”.
“Hamas leaders themselves openly admit: this recognition is a direct outcome, the ‘fruit’ for the October 7 massacre. Don’t let Jihadist ideology dictate your policy,” the post read.
Israeli officials have been making this argument in recent weeks as they sought to head off the growing momentum in the UK, France, Canada, Portugal and others towards recognition.
Yaakov Amidror, a former national security adviser to Netanyahu, said Hamas could now say to the Palestinians that without its 2023 attack, which killed about 1,200, the recognition of Palestine by the UK and others would not have happened.
“It will be understood as a reward to them, and Starmer has lost any leverage that he had … and [a Palestinian state] is not going to happen anyway,” said Amidror, an analyst at the conservative Jerusalem Institute for Strategy and Security and the Jewish Institute for National Security of America in Washington.
“Israel is determined to destroy the terrorist organisation that is called Hamas. Some of our friends around the world have decided that Hamas should survive and Israel should leave the Gaza Strip, taking our hostages … There is a gap here that cannot be bridged with nice words.”
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But successive opinion polls in Israel have shown strong demand for a negotiated end to the conflict in Gaza. Support for Netanyahu’s coalition government, the most rightwing in Israel’s history, has declined further since the prime minister called last week on Israelis to accept the country’s growing international isolation and become a “super-Sparta”.
Tens of thousands demonstrated in Israel at the weekend against the government and for a deal that would bring back the Israeli hostages seized during the 2023 raid and held since by Hamas in Gaza.
A coalition of groups representing the hostages’ families said on Sunday it condemned “various nations’ unconditional recognition of a Palestinian state while turning a blind eye to the fact that 48 hostages remain in Hamas captivity following the October 7th massacre”.
The leader of the opposition Democrats party, Yair Golan, said the recognition by the UK was a grave political failure by Netanyahu and his far-right finance minister, Bezalel Smotrich.
“This is a direct result of Netanyahu’s political recklessness: refusal to end the war and the dangerous choice of occupation and annexation,” Golan said. “The issue of a demilitarised Palestinian state can and should be part of a broad regional arrangement led by Israel that guarantees our security interests.”
A question now is how Israel responds. Analysts in Israel suggest that Netanyahu will make a decision only after his forthcoming trip to Washington at the end of the month.
Smotrich and Itamar Ben-Gvir, the far-right national security minister, called for wholesale annexation of the occupied West Bank.
“The days when Britain and other countries would determine our future are over … The only response to this anti-Israeli move is sovereignty over the historic homeland of the Jewish people in Judea and Samaria, and permanently removing the folly of a Palestinian state from the agenda,” Smotrich said on X.