Days or even hours after President Trump departs Britain this afternoon, Prime Minister Keir Starmer is expected to confirm that the British government will vote to recognize a Palestinian state next week at the annual meeting of the United Nations General Assembly in New York.
The expected announcement is not a surprise: when Mr. Starmer announced the decision on recognition in July, he made it contingent on conditions — notably that Israel agree to a cease-fire with Hamas — none of which appear any closer to being met.
But it puts Britain at odds with the United States. Mr. Trump is opposed to recognizing a Palestinian state, though he has not made an issue of it with Mr. Starmer, with whom he has developed a warm relationship, despite their divergent politics.
“I’m not going to take a position; I don’t mind him taking a position,” Mr. Trump said during his visit to Scotland in July, when he was asked about Mr. Starmer’s movement toward recognizing Palestinian statehood. “I’m looking to getting people fed right now. That’s the No. 1 position, because you have a lot of starving people.”
Vice President JD Vance was more frank in confirming a split when he visited Britain on a family vacation in August.
“We have no plans to recognize a Palestinian state,” he said before meeting David Lammy, Britain’s foreign secretary at the time. “I don’t know what it would really mean to recognize a Palestinian state, given the lack of a functional government there.”
For Mr. Starmer, recognizing a Palestinian state is driven partly by domestic political imperatives. Pressure within his Labour Party, and from the broader British public, to take the step has mounted enormously, as Israel’s combat operations in Gaza have intensified and the humanitarian crisis in the territory has escalated.
Britain followed in the footsteps of France — as did Canada and Malta — in announcing it would recognize a Palestinian state. But it was also clear that the harrowing images of suffering in Gaza pushed Mr. Starmer, who worked as a human-rights lawyer before entering politics, past a personal tipping point.
“The situation is simply intolerable,” he said in July. “I am particularly concerned that the very idea of a two-state solution is reducing and feels further away today than it has for many years.”
Mark Landler is the London bureau chief of The Times, covering the United Kingdom, as well as American foreign policy in Europe, Asia and the Middle East. He has been a journalist for more than three decades.
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