Israel/Gaza

Lord Turnberg Excerpts

Tuesday 24th October 2023 Lords Chamber

[Lord Turnberg (Lab)]

My Lords, I am most grateful to the Minister for his analysis of this terrible situation we face. We are very fortunate to have him in the position he occupies in providing us with the leadership that we need.

It is hard not to be moved by the awful scenes of fleeing women and children in stricken Gaza that now seem such a daily event. However, I want to speak of something else. I fear that there is a dangerous myth that the horrendous activities of Hamas on 7 October were the entirely understandable actions of an oppressed people crushed under the boot of Israel. It is the myth that seems to allow some in our media to excuse unspeakable acts of terror as merely those of militants.

But Hamas is not the oppressed; it is, in fact, the oppressor of its own people. When it was formed in 1987, its founding charter was based firmly on the principle that Israel and the Jews must be destroyed and thrown out of the Middle East, from the river to the sea. In 2005, when Israel removed all its settlements with every Jew from Gaza, it did so in the belief that the huge number of greenhouses and agricultural equipment that they had left behind would allow the Palestinians to have a basis on which they could build a viable state. It even left them plans for a harbour and an airport, but Hamas immediately destroyed the vacated houses and greenhouses and began to remove the representatives of its rival faction, Fatah—some, it threw off their rooftops to make the point.

Since 2005, Hamas has engaged in a war, sending an estimated 25,000 rockets into Israel. Although Hamas is Sunni, it shares its ideology with Shia Iran. Hamas has never wavered from its position. It is why it has refused to install a water desalination plant because it would use Israeli technology and why it has bombed the electricity generator at Ashdod that provides it with electricity, so that it can show the world how terrible Israel is to it.

Hamas has shown that it has little concern for its own oppressed Palestinian people. Far from protecting them, it does not allow them to enter the security of its myriad tunnels; it has not allowed its fellow citizens access to the hoard of fuel and food it has stockpiled; and it has prevented its own hospitals receiving medical supplies it has stored away. There is evidence of all that. Hamas has done all it can to prevent Palestinians from leaving the northern parts of Gaza so that it can callously use them as human shields while some of its leaders are living it up in Beirut and Qatar.

This is not a popular uprising of an oppressed people; it is the murderous activities of a malign organisation that cares little for the suffering of its own people as it pursues its aims, and it should be called out as such. For the BBC and, I fear, the Financial Times to persist in calling it a militant organisation is shameful and dangerous, as it feeds into the growing anti-Zionism—that anti-Semitism by another name—that we begin to see on our streets. They should think carefully about how their messages are taken.

If there is any good for Israel and the Palestinians that can come out of this horror story—and we must try at least to find something good—it can come only when the capacity of Hamas to create harm is removed. We will not get rid of the Hamas ideology by military means—it will pop up somewhere else. However, if it no longer has the capacity to create havoc in Gaza and against Israel, we might have an opportunity for something better.

This comes with the potential change of leadership in both Israel and Palestine. Neither leader has been capable of making any realistic steps towards a just solution to their differences. Perhaps with new leadership on both sides, and with the rest of the world woken up to the serious dangers to world peace of a fraught Middle East, we might see more progress towards what I believe is the only solution offering any hope—a two-state solution. With increasing pressure from the United States, Europe and the UK, together with an increasingly involved set of Abraham accord countries—extending to Saudi Arabia, I hope—perhaps we could see some progress. But none of that can even begin to happen while Hamas remains in power in Gaza. For the sake of the Palestinians as well as Israel, it should be removed, and we in the West should, in our own interests, be supporting that aim.