A UK court has now accepted that Israeli citizenship is not automatic protection from persecution and its bad news for Team Keith! Right, so the UK has just granted refugee status to a Palestinian who holds Israeli citizenship, after the Home Office fought it for years and lost. That single decision removes a shortcut British politics has relied on for decades, which is that Israeli citizenship automatically ends any asylum conversation. It doesn’t anymore. And now that assumption is gone, a lot of confident noise from politicians banging on about immigration will sound a lot more alarmed, because the state has now accepted, on paper, that protection from Israel cannot be relied on in at least some cases under existing frameworks, or ones that until recently used to exist. But the bit that will be alarming them most is that this doesn’t stop at one man. It now travels through asylum law, through foreign policy language, through the way ministers talk about borders and international law. The legal precedent has now been set for Palestinians to seek to claim asylum here in the UK, so how can this government of Keir Starmer’s possibly square being pro Israel, especially if more asylum applications start to come in? Right, so the UK Home Office has granted refugee status to a Palestinian citizen of Israel after a years-long fight, and it has done it on the plain, old Refugee Convention test: a well-founded fear of persecution if returned. The man is known publicly as Hasan, his name is being protected, and the legal organisations involved are saying he is believed to be the first Palestinian holding Israeli citizenship to get refugee status in Britain on those grounds. James Cleverly was Home Secretary when the Home Office was trying to pull the grant back, and the account now on record from the organisation that supported Hasan is that ministerial interference has very much been part of the story.