Israel and Palestine: Humanitarian Aid

Lord Sacks Excerpts

Thursday 24th July 2014 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Northover]

We have very strong safeguards in place to ensure that the money is spent as intended. As the noble Baroness may know, our financial assistance to the Palestinian Authority is provided through the multi-donor trust fund, which is administered by the World Bank, which very closely monitors Palestinian Authority expenditure. It is absolutely right that we need to make sure that the funds reach those who most need them.

[Lord Sacks (CB)]

My Lords, at this difficult and distressing time, which is surely a source of grief to all of us, will the Minister comment on what a Government not blind to humanitarian concerns but seeking to defend their citizens from missile attack do when missiles are stored in schools, rocket launchers are placed beside hospitals, ambulances are used to transport terrorists, entrances to tunnels are set inside apartment blocks and civilians are used as human shields?

[Baroness Northover]

The noble Lord will fully recognise that the most important thing is to have an immediate ceasefire on both sides and to try to move forward a peace process which will bring peace and stability to the benefit of the Israelis and the Palestinians. That is what we must aim for.

Animal Welfare: Methods of Slaughter

Lord Sacks Excerpts

Thursday 16th January 2014 Grand Committee

[Lord Sacks (CB)]

My Lords, I welcome this short debate and thank the noble Lord, Lord Trees, for initiating it, because it provides an opportunity to clarify certain matters about the killing of animals which I believe are still not understood.

I declare an interest, having been for 22 years until recently the chair of the Rabbinical Commission for the Licensing of Shochetim, the body responsible for the supervision of every act of animal killing done in this country under Jewish law. This body exists because for us animal welfare is a matter of high religious principle, which we take with the utmost seriousness. This is why we insist on long years of training, spiritual as well as practical, before anyone can be qualified to kill animals. In Britain, every shochet is licensed, every licence needs annual renewal, and their work is regularly supervised and reviewed.

Shechita itself, the act of animal killing, is designed to minimise animal pain. The animal must be killed by a single cut with an instrument of surgical sharpness, and in the absence of anything that might impede its smooth and swift motion. The cut achieves three things: it stuns, kills and exsanguinates in a single act. We believe that this is the most humane, or a most humane method of animal slaughter. Quite apart from the fact that other methods are not permitted by Jewish law, we have doubts about their effectiveness. Pre-stunning by captive bolt, as your Lordships have heard, often fails at the first attempt. According to the European Food Safety Authority’s report in 2004, the failure of penetrating and non-penetrating captive bolts affects around 10 million animals, causing the animal grave distress.

In Britain, some 3 million cows annually are affected by these failures, compared to the 20,000 cows killed annually by shechita. The pain caused to animals by the use of pre-stunning methods vastly outweighs that caused by shechita, even were it the case that shechita did cause extra moments of pain. However, we are not convinced that such is the case. The failure rates of pre-stunning, and the inconclusive and highly challenged nature of some of the experimental studies done in this field, should give us pause. Therefore, if a case is made for labelling meat to indicate how the animal was killed, this must apply to all methods of slaughter, not just to some. I hope therefore that the Jewish community will continue to work with the Government to ensure that shechita continues to the highest standards of concern for the welfare of animals, which should rightly be the concern of us all.

Middle East Peace Process

Lord Sacks Excerpts

Wednesday 4th May 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Sacks]

My Lords, I welcome this debate because it allows us to focus on both words of the phrase “peace process”. We who pray for peace understand by that word a state in which I recognise your right to exist and you recognise mine. That is what peace minimally means. How can we be speaking about peace when Hamas remains committed as a matter of principle to the elimination of the state of Israel; when it engages in missile attacks against innocent civilians and uses its own innocent civilians as human shields; when it propagates some of the most vicious anti-Semitic myths ever to have inflamed the hatred and to have anaesthetised the conscience of human beings, and two days ago praised Osama bin Laden as a holy warrior; and when it refuses to agree to the fundamental principles laid down by the quartet, not least of which is the recognition of Israel’s right to exist? Until Hamas undergoes fundamental change, there may be a process but there will not be peace. Peace is more than a resting place on the road to war. I cannot make peace with one who denies my right to exist.

No one familiar with the history of the Jewish people through its 4,000 years of history can fail to appreciate how deeply Jews within Israel and outside long for peace, pray for peace and long for the ability to live as other people live—without fear, without hate, without being treated as a pariah, without being blamed for the troubles of the world and without being denied the right to exist. That is why I urge the Government to be resolute in their insistence that the path to peace in the Middle East must begin with the unequivocal recognition of the state of Israel’s right to be.