Israel/Gaza

Lord Godson Excerpts

Tuesday 24th October 2023 Lords Chamber

[Lord Godson (Con)]

My Lords, these are dark times, and they are becoming darker still. We have heard many impressive contributions today which will shape for some time to come national and international understanding of these great issues at stake.

I take particular pleasure in paying tribute to the outstanding contribution of the noble Lord, Lord Stevens of Birmingham, with his courage in calling out the SWP and other entities on our streets that are disfiguring our national debate, and to the noble Lord, Lord Verdirame, one of our pre-eminent Silks, for his outstanding exposition of the issues relating to proportionality and other matters of international law. I also pay tribute to the noble Lord, Lord Austin, and the noble Baroness, Lady Fox, for their contributions and to my right honourable friend the Prime Minister for maintaining Britain’s position in the world and our relevance, so that our voice still counts for something.

I also pay tribute to my noble friend Lord Ahmad of Wimbledon; I am mindful of the debate on the Abraham accords last month in the Moses Room in Grand Committee, the last occasion on which I heard him in person on the affairs of this region. It all seems a tremendously long time ago now. Rightly, those Abraham accords still enjoy widespread cross-party support across the House and I will return to that matter later.

Although our voices will be heard abroad, our particular responsibility, as British subjects, is here in the UK. Our deliberations will have especial resonance on our doorstep. So, too, will the words of high-profile external stakeholders in this country.

It was on 22 October that the Muslim Council of Britain urged its followers on social media to

“Write to your MP. Stop Gaza Genocide”.


Genocide—think of the word. This is an outrageous assertion, to the point of being a blood libel. No reputable authority on international law, whatever they think of Israel’s response to Hamas’s attack of 7 October, believes that her actions come within the definition of the UN’s genocide convention and other key relevant texts. By contrast, it is Hamas’s professed agenda—to wipe out Israel—which is the genocidal one. Incendiary language such as claims of genocide, and old canards of Jews being party to and pushing genocide, have unfortunately played some tragic part in the explosion of anti-Semitic attacks in this country since 7 October, which, according to the Metropolitan Police’s own statistics, are up by 1,353%.

There are policy implications for our country here. The first relates to community engagement. Pre-eminently, the previous Labour Government under Gordon Brown rightly cut contact with the Muslim Council of Britain in 2009, after its then deputy secretary- general signed the Istanbul declaration, calling for attacks on Royal Navy vessels enforcing a UN weapons blockade on Hamas-run Gaza. The Muslim Council of Britain, despite its avowed modernisation programme, still does not resile from that position. Indeed, its present deputy secretary-general, Mohammed Kozbar, has publicly praised the founder of Hamas, Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, as

“the master of the martyrs of the resistance”.

That is why it is right that all successive Prime Ministers, whether under the coalition or Conservative Governments since then, have maintained the ban on the Muslim Council of Britain. Will my noble friend the Minister therefore now reaffirm this non-engagement policy and give further assurances that the policy will be implemented throughout government, including within the Ministry of Defence and other departments? It would also be interesting to know where the Labour Party presently stands on this issue. Will the Minister also ask my right honourable friend the Secretary of State for the Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities to ensure that responses to this crisis should now inform part of the newly reforged extremism criteria, which his ministry is presently working on?

I began tonight with reflections on the Abraham accords. I greatly welcome the work and initiative of figures such as Khalid Mahmood, the Labour MP for Birmingham, Perry Barr, to set up new structures and bodies that will put those accords at the heart of community relations in this country. More than ever, we need the spirit of that greatest interfaith initiative of our times, not least on the streets of this country.