On Sunday, British prime minister Keir Starmer announced that his country would recognize Palestinian statehood. In July, he had threatened such a move if Israel did not declare a ceasefire. This already told us that this was more about distancing himself from the Israel Defense Forces’ (IDF) onslaught than recognizing Palestinians’ inalienable right to self-determination.

Speaking on Sunday, Starmer again posed Palestinian statehood in vague, conditional terms. He said that recognition was about “acting to keep alive the possibility of peace and a two-state solution.” He went further than before in recognizing Israeli responsibility for mass starvation in Gaza. Yet while he commented that Israel deserved to be “safe and secure,” a future Palestinian state need only be “viable.”

For Starmer, this “two-state solution” meant that “Hamas can have no future, no role in government, no role in security.” It remained unclear how this version of self-determination is to be made a reality, and Starmer did not explain why Palestinians’ statehood alone depends on their form of government. Israel’s government is today led by a wanted war criminal, but few would suggest that Israeli statehood depends on Benjamin Netanyahu handing himself over for prosecution.

Britain was, from late in World War I, the main imperial power in historic Palestine. From then until the era of decolonization, it played a key role in shaping and imposing limits on the new states created across its former empire, in the Middle East and beyond. Starmer’s statement on Sunday thus referred to Britain’s long support for a “homeland for the Jewish people.” Yet he had nothing to say about what a peace process might look like in Palestine now — or what Britain would do to help the newly recognized Palestinian state stand on its own two feet.

Netanyahu damned even Starmer’s symbolic move, insisting that there will never be a Palestinian state west of the Jordan River. He made clear how illusory it is to imagine that Israel will submit to moral pleas from its European allies. Refusing to put material pressure on Israel, Starmer’s statement seems to be more about his own image-management than taking action to uphold Palestinians’ national rights. But having notionally recognized a Palestinian state, his government could at least take a few steps to begin recognizing that Palestinians are human beings.

1) Provide effective aid to the Gazan population

People in Gaza may eventually benefit from international recognition of Palestinian statehood. For now, they are being massacred and starved by the hundreds of thousands. With a host of genocide experts and organizations — including, last week, a United Nations commission — declaring that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza, Britain has a clear responsibility to stop it. This duty is especially incumbent on a prime minister who earlier in this war falsely claimed that Israel has the right to shut off food, water, and energy to Gaza.

Activist initiatives like the Global Sumud Flotilla, headed by figures such as Greta Thunberg, aim to break the Israeli siege. But most of all, they shine light on what is happening — and demand that more powerful actors, able to deliver massive aid, actually do so.

The British government has every duty and capacity to do this. It could start by providing military protection to those delivering aid to Gaza, not least the British citizens directly involved. Better, the British government should force the opening of naval routes to aid Gazans and militarily protect the delivery of supplies from Israeli forces. The IDF, after all, already killed three British aid workers in a targeted strike, recorded by UK military surveillance in still-unreleased footage.

2) Welcome Palestinian refugees

In February, Prime Minister Starmer was angrily asked in the House of Commons why a Gazan family had been able to claim protection in the United Kingdom. Tory leader Kemi Badenoch alleged — it later turned out, inaccurately — that these Palestinians were exploiting an offer to take in Ukrainian refugees. Her comment and Starmer’s reaction, as he promised to close the relevant legal loophole, were a sickening demonstration of double standards on refugees’ lives.

In late July, a High Court ruling pressured the government to reassess that Gazan family’s case. Yet the right to protection surely extends beyond them alone. The plans offered to Ukrainians fleeing war, and the official government support for housing them, could indeed offer a basic starting point for welcoming Palestinian refugees to live in the UK. Yet the British government has consistently refused such an idea, with its lawyers warning that this risks opening the “floodgates.”

3) Stop selling Israel the weapons to kill Palestinians

While the British government talks of a peace process in the Middle East, the Israeli government is busily destroying the bases of a future Palestinian state through the massacre of its population, the razing of cities, and the destruction of basic infrastructure. The British government should stop selling Israel the weapons to do this. A year ago, Britain suspended a few dozen arms export licenses to Israel. Yet this included massive carve-outs, notably an exception for the components for F-35 aircraft — each of which is about 15 percent British-manufactured. The British government has refused to acknowledge the genocide in Gaza also because to do so would force it to impose a full embargo.

4) Impose economic sanctions

In May, the British government broke off talks on a further-enhanced trade and partnership deal with Israel in response to the starvation of Gaza. Yet this stopped far short of putting real economic pressure on Israel, even with regard to its ongoing colonization of the occupied Palestinian territories.

The existing commercial pact between Britain and Israel excludes produce from the post-1967 occupied territories from the preferential treatment accorded to Israeli goods. Yet far from punishing Israel economically, Britain does not even sanction the import of goods from illegal Israeli settlements, in the manner of its ban on imports from Crimea.

Spain’s center-left government, which recognized Palestine last year, has already imposed an arms embargo and shut off Spanish ports and airspace to the IDF’s suppliers. That the British government has not even gone this far shows its unwillingness to put meaningful economic pressure on Israel.

5) Punish the architects of the genocide

The destruction of Gaza is not the work of just a handful of Israeli leaders or the most extremist members of Netanyahu’s coalition. Repeated polls have shown large-scale Israeli public support for the expulsion of the Gazan population, and the IDF’s actions have relied on support by governments across the West, notably the United States.

Yet given Britain’s alleged commitment to international law, it could at a minimum enforce the arrest warrants issued by the International Criminal Court (ICC) against those most responsible, namely Netanyahu and his former defense minister Yoav Gallant. In response to the warrants, the British government danced around the question of whether it would enforce them, feebly insisting that the ICC is ”independent.”

Declaring top Israeli officials criminally responsible for their actions ought to be the bottom line of upholding international law. Instead, Starmer pushes to normalize Israel and circumscribe the responsibility for its criminal actions. Earlier this month, he even hosted Israeli president Isaac Herzog at 10 Downing Street.

6) Admit his own guilt

It is likely too much to expect Starmer to do any of these things after a long career of pursuing a slavish pro-Washington foreign policy, including during the age of Donald Trump. Advice to Starmer’s defense secretary last year insisted that denying F-35 parts to Israel was unthinkable on these grounds alone: it would “undermine US confidence in the UK and NATO at a critical juncture in our collective history and set back relations.”

To recognize Palestinians as people with lives and rights like any other would also mean recognizing them as victims of one of the worst crimes in modern history. To hold their Israeli executioners to account would also shine a light on those abroad who have supported these crimes, with weapons as with words in their defense. Ultimately, that would also mean Starmer admitting that he, too, is complicit.