The Economist‘s Bagehot comments on the House of Commons vote to recognize Palestine as a state:

As a backbench motion, the coalition government, which asked its ministers to abstain during the vote, can choose to ignore it. But as an indication of where British, and European, sympathies increasingly lie on this issue, it will be profoundly unsettling for Benjamin Natanyahu, Israel’s prime minister.

If there were any evidence that Netanyahu was concerned with such things, that might be the case, but I suspect that something closer to the opposite is true. The more Western support that there is for recognizing Palestinian statehood, the easier it is domestically for Netanyahu and his political allies to dismiss what most Western governments have to say on the issue. He will consider the fact that the vote is non-binding to be more important than the message that the vote was meant to convey, and he would ignore the message in any case. The Israeli government would presumably prefer it if no other government ever recognized Palestine, but nothing is going to change in its policy for the better because Sweden or Britain chooses to do this. The current government has proven to be impervious to foreign criticism, and has almost seemed to revel in the increasing isolation for Israel that its actions have helped bring about. Perversely, the more that Israeli policies alienate the country’s Western supporters, the less likely it is that those policies will change for the better.

Nonetheless, as Matt Hill points out, the Commons vote is a sign that Israel really is losing ground even among some of its otherwise reliable supporters in the West:

If you need proof of just how friendless Israel’s hard-Right government has become, consider the statements last night from MPs who would normally count themselves the country’s natural allies. Arch-Tories such as Nicholas Soames (whose grandfather Winston Churchill is Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s political hero) spoke eloquently in favour of Palestinian statehood. And Richard Ottoway, chair of the foreign affairs select committee, said that despite having been “a friend of Israel long before I became a Tory”, its recent policies had “outraged me more than anything else in my political life”, concluding: “If Israel is losing the support of people like me, it is losing a lot of people.”

The unfortunate thing for Israel is that its government and a large portion of its people no longer seem to care.