ISRAELI ministers have again exposed how hollow are Western claims to back a two-state solution.

Yet global opinion on Israel’s colonial project has reached a tipping point — and the prospect of real change cannot be dismissed.

National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir leads settlers in a march through occupied East Jerusalem. En route, he calls for Israel to annex Gaza.

Defence Minister Israel Katz decrees: “We will strengthen our hold and sovereignty over Jerusalem, at the Western Wall, and the Temple Mount, forever.”

These are not aberrations: Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has vowed that he will never tolerate a Palestinian state.

Faced with such extremism, any government serious about a Palestinian state would need to impose tough conditions on Israel: full withdrawal from the West Bank and Gaza included.

Yet what conditions do they seek to apply?

British Prime Minister Keir Starmer says Britain will recognise Palestine unless Israel “takes substantive steps to end the appalling situation in Gaza.”

Feeble as that is, at least Starmer makes demands of the aggressor, Israel.

Canada’s Mark Carney decided to lecture the people being massacred. Canada would recognise Palestine — subject to democratic reforms, including elections in which (very democratically) Hamas would be banned.

France’s Emmanuel Macron repeated that an independent Palestine would need to be demilitarised — as if Palestine threatens the existence of Israel, rather than the other way around.

The coloniser’s mindset. Palestine can be “independent,” but only if it chooses leaders we like, and has no means of defending itself.

The excuse being that Hamas, which attacked Israel on October 7 2023, is an unacceptable threat to Israel’s security.

Several answers must be made. One is Israel’s role in building up Hamas specifically to divide the Palestinians: “Anyone who wants to thwart the establishment of a Palestinian state has to support bolstering Hamas and transferring money to Hamas,” as Netanyahu told a Likud conference in 2019.

A second is that however appalling the violence of October 7, it did not come out of the blue, but followed a 17-year blockade of Gaza by Israel and a 75-year occupation that counts Palestinian victims in vastly larger numbers.

A third is that — as suspended Israeli Knesset member Ofer Cassif points out — however much you disapprove of Hamas, it has become part of the fabric of Palestinian society and others cannot dictate who represents them.

Those who use that to imply Palestinians cannot live alongside Israelis should be pointed to the polls showing a majority of Israelis want the expulsion of Gaza’s population, and of the Arab citizens of Israel: Western governments are not extraterritorially banning Israeli nationalist parties as a threat to Palestinians.

No solution to the Palestinian question can be acceptable if it denies Palestinian agency.

That means, as China points out at the UN, recognising Palestinians’ right to armed resistance against occupation under international law.

China — which brokered a national unity statement by 14 Palestinian factions, including Hamas and Fatah, last year in Beijing, and recently renewed its demand for a UN conference empowered to establish a Palestinian state on 1967 borders — recognises that a Palestinian state must take shape on Palestinians’ terms.

By contrast the old European powers and their settler offshoots want to dictate from afar.

Even that, though, indicates that governments are moving under popular pressure, despite opposition from Washington.

If Israel has decided, in its war of extermination on Gaza, that it no longer needs Hamas to divide Palestinians, it is perhaps because its government sees this as the endgame, after which there will be no Palestine at all.

But unprecedented global outrage could turn it into an endgame of another sort, as Western powers are forced to break the ties on which Israel depends.

Those powers were close allies of another apartheid regime, in South Africa, until mass opposition made that impossible. And isolation preceded collapse.

It can happen again.