Human Rights Protections: Palestinians

Richard Burgon Excerpts

Thursday 20th April 2023 Commons Chamber

[Richard Burgon (Leeds East) (Lab)]

As we have heard today, Israel has elected the most extreme Government in its history. There has recently, rightly, been a huge focus on the threat that this new Government pose to judicial independence in Israel, which has prompted the largest protests in Israeli history. This new Israeli Government have also sparked widespread fears that they will deepen and entrench the illegal military occupation in the Occupied Palestinian Territories, not least because the Government include extreme right-wing figures such as National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, previously convicted of inciting racism and supporting a terrorist organisation and who campaigned in the election on aggressively extending military control over Palestinians. Meanwhile, the Government’s new Finance Minister, Bezalel Smotrich, recently said:

“There is no such thing as a Palestinian nation. There is no Palestinian history. There is no Palestinian language.”

That is truly chilling.

This is all deeply alarming for those of us who wish to see an end to all violence, and a future based on peace and justice. Already, 2023 is set to be even more deadly than 2022—itself one of the deadliest of recent years—with around 150 Palestinians killed in the west bank and East Jerusalem, and 30 Israelis killed. The United Nations has reported that already this year, by the end of March, 16 Palestinian children have been killed in the west bank, compared with two in the same period in 2022.

Today, I want to make a few remarks about the human suffering that I witnessed when, as a new MP in 2016, I visited the Occupied Palestinian Territories and Jerusalem. I met Palestinian families struggling against Israeli state-sanctioned human rights abuses, and I met Israeli human rights groups. In those few days, I got a glimpse of the daily suffering that the Palestinian people have endured for over 50 years under the Israeli state’s illegal occupation of the west bank, including East Jerusalem and Gaza. I saw Israeli settlements that were illegally seizing land, and which do more than anything else to prevent a two-state solution. I visited a Palestinian village that had been repeatedly demolished. I spoke with Palestinians cut off from family and friends as a result of Israel’s illegal separation wall that divided Palestinian communities and annexed more land.

I attended military courts where Palestinian children are tried in a language they cannot read or speak, and in the old city of Jerusalem I visited the home of a Palestinian family who had lived there since 1953, who Israeli settlers were trying to force out of their home. Sadly, in recent weeks, that elderly couple whom I and other Members met—Nora Ghaith-Sub Laban, who is 67 years old, and her husband Mustafa, who is 72—faced imminent eviction. I have written to the Foreign Secretary about this. The spokesperson for the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights has called on Israel to halt any such actions that lead to a risk of forcible transfer, which he said

“may amount to war crimes”.

On my visit, I did not have the opportunity to visit Gaza. It is almost impossible to imagine what it must be like to live on that tiny strip of land, smaller than the Isle of Wight, where 2 million inhabitants are unable to move freely, and whose access to clean water, electricity and healthcare is restricted by Israeli state actions.

A long-lasting peace for both Palestinians and Israelis can only be secured through a solution that tackles the underlying injustices faced by the Palestinian people. A two-state solution means that Palestine must have the right to exist, but Israeli state actions make that ever less likely. As the former colonial power in Palestine, Britain has a special responsibility to do all it can to end Israel’s illegal occupation of Palestinian land, its colonial settlements, its denial of the right of Palestinian refugees to return, the siege of Gaza, and Israel’s violations of human rights and international law.

But words alone are not enough. We need action too. That means—it has to mean—that the British Government should recognise the state of Palestine, as this Parliament voted to do back in 2014. It means that we should end all trade with illegal Israeli settlements, and that we should impose an embargo on arms sales to Israel. The Government cannot pose as an honest broker when Britain has licensed around half a billion pounds-worth of arms exports to Israel since 2015. Without such actions, the Israeli state is effectively given the green light to continue its illegal actions, which are likely to kill all hope of a Palestinian state.