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British officials fear Donald Trump could recognise Israeli control over illegal settlements on the West Bank in retaliation for the UK, France and others deciding to recognise Palestine.
Government insiders believe the US president is considering granting official recognition to the Israeli communities there, which would be a serious blow to achieving a two-state solution.
Some believe Trump could raise the prospect as soon as his speech at the UN on Tuesday despite Arab and western leaders having engaged in intense diplomacy to try to ensure this does not happen.
UK officials said some of the president’s allies were putting pressure on him to recognise Israeli settlements in the West Bank and Arab leaders were pushing back.
“As always with this president, it is difficult to know which way he will go but we are worried about what might happen,” one said.
The White House declined to comment but a US official said Trump was not married to one solution in the Middle East. They added that he would not be constrained by what he considered to be the failed frameworks of the past.
A number of countries have recognised Palestinian statehood in recent days to coincide with a gathering of the UN general assembly in New York. The Trump administration called the move “performative” but it has not yet changed its policy in response.
Keir Starmer, the UK prime minister, said Britain’s recognition of Palestine was taken “to revive the hope of peace and a two-state solution”. Emmanuel Macron, the French president, told the UN on Monday that “the time has come” for recognition, adding: “It falls on us, this responsibility, to do everything in our power to preserve the possibility of a two-state solution.”
The move was made against the backdrop of an Israeli assault on Gaza City, coupled with an increasingly assertive posture in the West Bank.
Israel is already planning a new settlement known as E1, which would in effect split the West Bank in two. Bezalel Smotrich, Israel’s far-right finance minister, has said he believed the development would “bury the idea of a Palestinian state”.
Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s prime minister, is under pressure from within his cabinet to go further and either annex the West Bank in its entirety or partly, a move that would render impossible a single Palestinian state covering the West Bank and Gaza. He has said he would make no decision until after he had spoken to Trump early next week at the White House.
Starmer spent much of his bilateral meeting with Trump last week explaining the reasons for recognising Palestine, and British officials were delighted when the US president appeared sanguine about the prospect in their joint press conference.
Trump has said little about the Israeli expansion in the West Bank but he is under pressure from some allies to endorse it.
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Mike Huckabee, the US ambassador to Israel, said last month: “I don’t know what the Europeans thought they were going to accomplish [with Palestinian recognition], but by their actions, they’re accomplishing something that I don’t think they wanted to do, and that is to essentially to give a green light or encourage the Israelis to go ahead and take more pieces of Judea and Samaria [the West Bank], either by declaring sovereignty or annexation.”
Others, however, including Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, are urging the president not to undermine the possibility of a two-state solution. Kushner arranged a meeting last month at the White House to plan for a postwar Gaza, which was also attended by the former UK prime minister Tony Blair.
Under Blair plan, which one British government source called “the only game in town”, Gaza would be governed by a UN-backed international transitional authority, without needing to expel Palestinians from the territory.
A spokesperson for Blair declined to comment.
Such a plan would be undermined however if Trump recognised Israeli settlements in the West Bank, which Arab leaders would see as crossing a red line. Trump will see several of those leaders in New York on Tuesday at a private meeting during which they are expected to press him not to back Israeli actions in the West Bank.
Anwar Gargash, a senior diplomatic adviser to the United Arab Emirates, said earlier this month: “In these challenging times, the UAE sends a clear message: annexation is a red line and peace through a two-state solution must remain the path forward.”
The UAE sees itself as the guardian of the Abraham accords, which established diplomatic relations between Israel and a group of Arab states. With Trump’s blessing, the UAE signed the accords in 2020 after Israel agreed to drop a proposal to annex parts of the West Bank.
