Actor Benedict Cumberbatch read out a poem by Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish on a London stage last week. In reciting On This Land There are Reasons to Live, the actor gave an airing to the timeless claim for Palestinian statehood.
“On this land, there are reasons to live,” he read. “This land, the lady of lands, the motherland of beginnings, the motherland of all ends. She was known as Palestine; she, forevermore, will be known as Palestine. My land, my lady, you’re a reason to live.”
Days later, France and the UK became the first western permanent members of the UN Security Council and the G7 to take the Palestinian demand as equal to that of Israel. Other nations have followed, including Canada and Australia.
Whatever outcome emerges from Israel's war in Gaza, the tension between the generational claim and present dangers will not go away.
For decades, the British government and its counterparts among rich nations had a policy that set Palestinian statehood as the reward for a peace deal. That old formula which underpinned western policy was a losing battle. The new calculus is equally daunting but it changes the game.
Until now, all the building blocks had to be in place for recognition of the state of Palestine to represent the keystone in the arch. That formula relied on the belief that all the other steps could be taken and these would hold. The arch would stay in place and eventually be capped as a solid edifice.
Now, all that assumption-building has been swept away and these countries are left with a different construct. A new calculation must be tested if the gambit they have just launched can withstand deterioration of the conditions on the ground.
History is at a turning point on the Palestine-Israel peace process.
David Lammy lasted just over a year as UK foreign secretary before he was promoted to deputy prime minister. As he heads to the conference on the two-state solution in New York, he has already made his mark. And it takes diplomacy back to a test that is well-known around the world. The rebel Irishman Robert Emmet declared at his execution that no one should write his epigraph until the boundaries of his nation were drawn.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has made clear that his government will now try to destabilise the new position of the western partners as rapidly as possible.
The British Foreign Office statement on Sunday detailed the target he would have in his sights: “A two-state solution, with a safe and secure Israel alongside a viable and sovereign Palestinian state led by a reformed Palestinian Authority, is the only path to a lasting peace for the Israeli and Palestinian people – free from the horrendous violence and suffering of the last two years.”
The concerns over the conflict in Gaza are clear and grave. The threat posed by Israel’s plans for illegal settlements and a path to annexation through its E1 plan will deepen in the weeks ahead.
The UK is hoping it has a framework for peace that is solid. It has called for reform of the Palestinian Authority, and for those restructuring efforts it has appointed the veteran fixer Sir Michael Barber as UK Envoy for Palestinian Authority Governance.
In its version, France has aligned with Saudi Arabia to offer a new working blueprint to fulfil the Arab Peace Initiative of 2002.
Mr Netanyahu is certainly preparing the Israeli public for a worse showdown to come. In the past few weeks, he has talked darkly of an isolation economy that would rely on Israel’s resilience. This is a far cry from his claims of tech superpower brilliance that he used to see as the legacy of his long leadership of Israel.
For western policy makers who have signed on to this shift and even for others such as Japan and Germany, the difficulty will be how to keep engaged with Israel.
It is hard now because the Israeli officials in charge are not interested in a relationship that takes on board the concerns of their counterparts. Indeed, the actions of the government are aggravated attempts to go in the other direction.
In future, the western governments will act to preserve the ideal that the British and French and other states are signing up to. In this, there is a parallel to the instructive moments both countries engaged in with the Balfour Declaration in 1917 and the Palestine Mandate after the First World War.
Countries backing the two-state solution have moved the process on to a new plane of international politics by taking the position of promoters of the Palestine state.
As the experts at the UK think tank Chatham House noted after the Palestinian recognition announcement on Sunday, the new direction provides a leadership boost for Mr Starmer. It reassures the Labour Party base and progressives as a whole that his government is on the side of principled action against the damage of Mr Netanyahu's forever wars.
That in itself is an achievement that makes the recognition decision a landmark of international leadership.
