Israel/Gaza

Lord Oates Excerpts

Tuesday 24th October 2023 Lords Chamber

[Lord Oates (LD)]

My Lords, when I spoke in a debate in this House on Israel and Palestine just over three years ago, I said I believed:

“The safety and security of Israel is … critical not only for the Israeli people but for the world at large”.—[Official Report, 27/2/20; col. 355.]

After the horrors of the Holocaust and the centuries of prejudice, pogroms and expulsions, to which we must now add the barbarism of 7 October, the ability of the people of Israel to live in safety and security in their own democratic state is, to my mind, essential to the values of a liberal international order.

That safety and security, as we know, was shattered on 7 October in the most brutal and inhumane manner imaginable by the terror group Hamas: young people slain by the hundreds at a music festival, civilians gunned down or burned to death in their homes, babies brutally murdered in their cribs, and the terrifying footage of Jewish people—citizens of Israel and countries around the world—seized, paraded before the cameras and dragged away to an unknown fate. I know how those images impacted on me. I can only begin to imagine their impact on Israeli citizens and Jewish people around the world—the worst outrage and greatest act of inhumanity against Jewish people since the Holocaust. On that Saturday, I was in touch with a friend sheltering in a bomb shelter in Israel. She later told me that every one of her children knew a teen who had been killed.

In carrying out its attack and in continuing to hold hostages, Hamas is in violation of every international law and of every value that we should hold dear. Those hostages, as other noble Lords have said, must be released unconditionally and immediately. It is beyond me that there are those who could not find it in themselves to unequivocally condemn Hamas after these outrages. That anyone, regardless of their views on Israel and Palestine—and like the noble Lord, Lord Austin, and many others in this House, I have always supported the creation of a Palestinian state—would actually seek to justify such grotesque brutality remains utterly shocking, as does the wave of anti-Semitism that has been witnessed in this country in recent days.

For as long as I can remember, I have felt an affinity with Israelis and Palestinians. My father was an emissary to the then Anglican Archbishop of Jerusalem, George Appleton, in the late 1960s and early 1970s; in fact, he baptised me. In that role my father travelled extensively in the region and, until his death earlier this year, he never ceased in his passionate advocacy for a peace that would allow both Israelis and Palestinians to live in security in their own states—a passion that he imparted to me.

I have been privileged to visit Israel with the Liberal Democrat Friends of Israel with my noble friend Lord Palmer and other colleagues. I am proud to count myself as a friend of Israel and as a friend of Palestine. In fact, I do not believe that you can truly be one without being the other, just as I do not believe that long-term security can exist for either Israelis or Palestinians until it exists for both.

In the face of the barbarous assault on its citizens, Israel has every right in law and morality to take action to eliminate the threat to its people from Hamas. The issue at stake is not whether Israel has that right but how it exercises it in the manner most likely to prevent avoidable civilian death and secure the long-term safety and security of both Israeli and Palestinian people. Whatever the outcome of this war, at the end of it Israelis and Palestinians will have to live side by side. Israel will have to put aside the dangerous delusion that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu seemed to suggest—that Israel could live in security without justice also for Palestinians.

In the immediate moment, Israel needs a military strategy to successfully eliminate Hamas terror. That will be hard enough but, even more importantly, it needs a strategy for how it proceeds at the end of the war. It needs a strategy for peace. After the 1967 war, Israel’s founding Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion, speaking in the Knesset, said:

“our standing in the world will be determined not by our so-called material riches, and not by our military's bravery, but by the moral virtue of our undertaking”.

In the midst of such horror and so many terrible dilemmas for Israeli decision-makers, it is essential that Israel heeds those words. The attachment that many of us have to Israel is precisely because it holds itself to different standards from other regimes in the region. It is essential that, in its response to Hamas, it upholds those standards, abides by international law and allows sufficient humanitarian assistance to reach the civilians of Gaza, who are also victims of Hamas brutality and are suffering devastating hardship.

It is also critical that the Israeli Government act decisively against those settlers in the West Bank who are unleashing violence on Palestinians that has left many innocent Palestinians dead. As the noble Lord, Lord Howard, said in his powerful speech, every life is precious, and every one of the thousands of deaths of innocent civilians is a tragic loss for mothers, fathers, brothers, sisters, sons and daughters.

I support our Government in having stood with Israel in these days of terror, and I fully accept that Israel cannot live in safety with Hamas in control of Gaza. But neither will it live in safety unless the Israeli and Palestinian leadership recognise that, after the war, they must both have the courage to throw aside extremists and make the compromises necessary to deliver a just and lasting peace.