Prime Minister Keir Starmer met French President Emmanuel Macron last week as questions over possible recognition of a Palestinian state moved up on the European agenda.
The meeting, a working dinner in London on September 16, took place amid renewed pressure from other European capitals, The Times and Reuters both reported that Starmer returned to the issue days later in public remarks. Palestinian statehood has found little appetite inside Downing Street so far, the UK has rejected setting a date unilaterally while negotiations stall. Recognition as a state is a diplomatic act, but also opens the door to treaty relationships, UN memberships and question marks over embassy decisions that give a name to state process.
The Israeli government has opposed recognition moves. Israeli ministers have warned that unilateral recognition would reward Hamas, and Israel’s ambassador to the UK described the idea as a “reward for terror” in remarks published this summer. The UK position at the UN has followed the same logic: recognition should come as part of a negotiated process, not as a hand-out over the heads of the parties. The concern has been that premature recognition would simplify Israel’s diplomatic task of defeating Hamas while putting the territorial settlement, a single state’s territory, in question.
The Historical Bottleneck
The United Kingdom carries a particular weight on this issue. The 1917 Balfour Declaration, the UK government agreed to view “with favour” the establishment of a national home for the Jewish people in Palestine, made the British the original author of the state-building idea in the region. The mandate system that followed took the same institutionally weak approach to the two-state idea, and the UK’s own 1937 Peel Commission report proposed partition as the solution. What followed shaped how all future maps of the region have been drawn.
None of that settled into a complete answer. The UN partition plan of 1947, Resolution 181, gave the same legitimacy to a Jewish state and an Arab state on the same territory, but the war that followed left Israel holding more land than the plan drew and no Palestinian state created. Palestinian institutions have since lacked recognised borders, a capital, an army and a currency, and the question of who governs Palestinians has remained in dispute for nearly eight decades.
The Recognition Wave Grows
Yet the diplomatic tide has been turning elsewhere. Among the 193 UN member states, 147 recognised Palestine as a state as of mid-2025 by some counts and the figure to around 150 more recently, most of them added after the 1988 Palestinian declaration of independence and the 2012 UN General Assembly vote upgrading the Palestinian observer mission. Western Europe had for most of the last forty years held the line of waiting for negotiations, before the last two years have changed the pace.
Spain, Ireland and Norway recognised Palestine in May 2024. Slovenia followed in mid-2025. France and the United Kingdom have been notably cautious since; the French line has been recognition at the right diplomatic point, and the UK has refused to commit a date. The Starmer government, while refusing a unilateral move, has not given up on recognition altogether, the same way the previous Conservative government never shut the door. Reuters reported that Starmer told the Commons his approach was not to pre-approve it in principle, but at the point of a viable peace process, in keeping with the UK’s stated settlement policy.
The practical effect of recognition is largely symbolic, though. A recognised Palestine can join the International Criminal Court as a state party, which it already did in 2015. The State of Palestine already sits in various treaty organisations and maintains embassies in most world capitals. The debate in London and Paris is not about whether Palestine is a state in some functional sense today. It is about when recognition becomes a diplomatic instrument.
The Changing Politics of Recognition
The politics behind that timing has changed with the war. In France, and also in the UK, large pro-Palestinian demonstrations have kept pressure on governments to take a firmer line against Israel’s conduct. Polling from YouGov in June found a majority of British voters back recognition. Within Starmer’s own party, calls for recognition have come from a wide range of MPs and mayors, and his administration’s refusal to budge has become a persistent party-management problem.
In Paris the calculation runs differently. Macron had already positioned France as the leading Western voice for a two-state solution, and a recognition statement at UNGA would be a natural closing move. But France also has significant domestic debates about antisemitism and May’s riots, and Macron’s government had initially kept recognition as a lever in the wider diplomacy rather than commit it formally.
What happens next depends partly on the US. The Trump administration has pushed hard for a ceasefire framework, and has linked recognition to a settlement negotiated between Israel and Palestinian representatives. If that track produces an interim governance arrangement for Gaza with a genuine political horizon, Western European recognition would likely follow within weeks rather than years. If it collapses, recognition could go ahead anyway, but as a symbol of Europe’s loss of patience rather than as part of a settlement plan.
Starmer’s meeting with Macron signaled Europe is trying to agree a common approach, at least on timing. Whether the two governments can hold that common line through a UNGA session, with the war still producing images that see as much press as the diplomacy itself, is another matter entirely.