The UK has warned Israel not to retaliate against its decision to recognise Palestine as a state by annexing more of the West Bank. Announcing the move yesterday, Keir Starmer rejected Hamas’s claim that recognition was “one of the fruits of October 7”, saying the terror group had “no future”. Gatwick has been given the green light for a £2.2bn second runway, clearing the way for what is currently Europe’s busiest single-runway airport to host 100,000 extra flights a year by 2030. The government says more airport capacity is essential to boosting growth. Charlie Kirk’s widow, Erika, told mourners at a huge memorial event last night that she forgives her husband’s killer. Donald Trump told the 63,000-strong crowd in Arizona that the late right-wing activist “did not hate his opponents”. “That’s where I disagreed with Charlie,” the US president continued. “I hate my opponent.”

The two-state solution is a fantasy

As someone who wrote speeches for three foreign secretaries and one prime minister, says David Blair in The Daily Telegraph, I played a small part in pushing the dream of a two-state solution in the Middle East. But the truth is that “a Palestinian state will not and probably cannot exist”. The core of any such state would have to be the West Bank, the roughly Devon-sized territory captured by the Israelis from Jordan during the Six Day War of 1967. Israel has “sliced and diced” this land into a jumble of zones and enclaves, building more than 140 settlements – now home to 500,000 Israelis. So for a genuine Palestinian state to emerge, Israel would have to give up territory, tear down settlements and forcibly deport hundreds of thousands of its own citizens. That is never going to happen. “You might as well expect a British government to shut down the NHS.”

Practical issues aside, the Israelis believe that whenever they give up land, “they get more terrorism”. It happened with Hezbollah after their withdrawal from southern Lebanon in 2000, and again with Hamas when they left Gaza in 2005. Look eastwards from any Tel Aviv high-rise and you’ll see a range of green hills “close enough to touch”. That’s the West Bank. Can you really imagine an Israeli government handing control of the high ground overlooking their biggest city (and their only international airport) to an “implacable enemy”? No politician will ever publicly acknowledge all this because the two-state solution is the only peaceful way the Arab-Israeli war will ever come to an end. But that doesn’t mean it’s possible. The sad reality is that the Holy Land’s future is not two states, or peace, or even a peace process. It’s “indefinite conflict”.