Date: 2023-04-20
Liam Byrne: Let me add my thanks to the hon. Member for Dundee West (Chris Law) for securing this debate, and associate myself with every word of the condolences that he offered to those who have lost loved ones. We must send a clear message from this House this afternoon that the spiral of violence has to stop. It has to stop because the dream of Palestine, the dream of justice and the dream of dignity are disappearing before our very eyes. They are being destroyed outrage by outrage, stun grenade by stun grenade, and bullet by bullet. Palestinians today are now losing all hope that there will ever be a future where two people and two nations can co-exist side by side in peace. I am afraid that I have to tell the Minister that there are now too many people in this House who see this Government as standing by idle, in silence, when they should be taking the initiative, when they should be acting, and when they should be determined to ensure that there is justice for Palestine. This House today has already heard a catalogue of horror. We have heard about the 98 Palestinians who have lost their lives already this year--far more than in previous years--the Israeli citizens who have been killed, and the children who have been killed with live ammunition. We have also heard about the 1,000 Palestinians in Masafer Yatta who are at imminent risk of forced transfer, which is in complete violation of Geneva conventions. We have heard about the brutality at the al-Aqsa mosque, where even UN observers said that there was blatantly excessive and unjustified force, with stun grenades and rifle butts used in a holy place. All of us in this House would stand four-square behind Israel's right to self-defence. Many of us would associate ourselves with the words of the hon. Member for Henley (John Howell) that we should be proscribing organisations such as the IRGC and taking a tougher line on Iran. Most of us here know that the Palestinian Authority needs radical reform, and most of us would condemn the brutality of Hamas, but all of us also know that this is not a time for whataboutery. This is a time to call out the root cause of the violence today, which is the radical spread of settlers illegally through the west bank. The fact that we now have 279 settlements, almost all of them illegal and now home to 700,000 people, must surely draw our attention to the root cause of the problem, and that is the fundamental sin that the Government should be calling out. If the Government are serious--and they might be--about their idea of a rules-based order, then we in this House must insist that those rules also apply in the west bank, in Gaza and in Jerusalem. If the Government do not insist that the rules-based order extends to the places that the Palestinians call home, how can we ever be credible in our arguments for peace and justice for Palestine? How can we avoid the charge of double standards in international affairs, and how can we contribute meaningfully to keeping the dream of a two-state solution alive? It is time for the Government to turn their rhetoric about a rules-based international order into some red lines. We have to ask this: when are the Government going to accept that those red lines have indeed been crossed? When we have a UN rapporteur saying that what is going on is now getting close to the legal definition of apartheid, how much more evidence do the Government need to call out a violation of the red lines? When we have Israeli Cabinet Ministers appearing in Paris before a map of greater Israel that includes the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan, and when we have members of the Israeli Cabinet leading the protests for the expansion of settler communities, how much more evidence do we need? It is time for the UK Government to act. My constituents are very clear about the five things this Government need to do. They need to implement a ban on settler goods. They need to ensure there are no trade deals with Israel until it demonstrates a fundamental respect for human rights. They need to ban weapons sales until it is clear that there is a strong regime for supporting human rights. They need to start using UN mechanisms for delivering accountabilities and, as many people in this House have said and have voted for, it is time for immediate recognition of the state of Palestine. Those are practical, determined steps that we can take--and take now. I conclude by reminding the House of what was in the Balfour declaration. When this country said that  it would support the establishment of a state of Israel, it came with the words, "it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine". The rights of those communities are being violated every day, and it is time the Government not only called that out, but did something about it.