Israel: Arab Citizens

Lord Warner Excerpts

Thursday 13th December 2012 Lords Chamber

[Lord Warner]

My Lords, I am sure that we are all grateful to the right reverend Prelate for obtaining this debate and for his constructive, excellent and robust introduction. I should declare my interest at the outset as a trustee of the Council for European Palestinian Relations, an organisation that facilitates visits by European parliamentarians to see at first hand the circumstances in which Palestinians live, in Israel, the Occupied Territories and, indeed, in the external refugee camps. The circumstances in which thousands of Palestinian women, children and vulnerable older people live in many of these areas are, frankly, an international disgrace.

Those of us who regularly raise our concerns about the treatment of Palestinians within Israel and the Occupied Territories are regularly accused of a lack of balance, or told of Israel’s right to defend itself, or reminded of the firing of rockets by Hamas into civilian areas. The disproportionately high levels of Palestinian deaths and casualties, compared with those suffered by Israelis, are consistently and conveniently overlooked. There is always another side to the stories: the Palestinians cannot unite, Hamas is formed of terrorists—even though, somewhat inconveniently, Hamas won a fair and democratic election with international observers in 2006. It is Israel that is the real democracy—an island of democracy in a sea of Arab autocracy. We must not be too hard on Israel, if we want the virtually non-existent peace process to achieve progress and to keep alive the seriously damaged two-state solution. That is the context in which we have come to this kind of debate. Yet year after year, the Palestinians living in this shining example of democracy are seeing their already modest human and civic rights eroded further and further. They are supposed to put up with this without protest. The international community continues to accumulate more and more documents setting out the abuses of Palestinian human rights undertaken by, or at least with the collusion of, the Israeli Government. These catalogues of abuse are simply ignored by Israel, despite strenuous diplomatic efforts on the part of the UK and other Governments to bring them to the attention of Israel’s Government.

The Library’s excellent briefing for this debate identified some of the documentary evidence of Israeli abuses of civic rights and protection of its own citizens. The variety of the sources—UN, US state department, FCO, international human rights organisations, and brave Israeli internal organisations ashamed of their own Government’s behaviour—all lend testimony to the same set of messages, which were extremely well set out by the right reverend Prelate. We are spoilt for choice as to which pieces of documentary evidence we want to alight on. It is striking how little independent counterevidence the Library has been able to find in assembling its excellent briefing.

I want to pick on one document in particular from the Library’s briefing, from the FCO. It quotes from page 206 of the FCO’s April 2012 report to Parliament on human rights and democracy in different countries. In that document the Government drew attention to their continued concerns on Israel and the occupied territories. I quote:

“Our particular concerns included Israeli demolitions and evictions of Palestinians in East Jerusalem and the West Bank; the human rights effects of restrictions on Gaza; the increase in the number of attacks by extremist Israeli settlers; the treatment of Palestinian suspects within the Israel justice system; the high proportion of civilian casualties and fatalities resulting from Israeli airstrikes on Gaza”.

By comparison, they did identify abuses of human rights within Gaza and the Palestinian authorities, but these abuses were modest by comparison with this particular catalogue. I ask the Minister to look at what the FCO, her own department, is citing: the concerns are not the kind of concerns that most British Governments have had with so-called allies and friends. They are on a scale which is fundamentally different in terms of the human rights concerns. Many of the discriminatory actions set out in the various reports are of long standing; but some are more recent, as the right reverend Prelate identified.

I have another example. In March 2011, the Knesset passed laws that authorised rural Jewish and majority communities to reject Palestinian Arab citizens and other “unsuitable” applicants from residency and imposed fines on any government-funded institution, including municipalities, which provide health and education for those commemorating Nakba, the destruction of Palestinian villages and the expulsion of their residents, after Israel’s declaration of independence. That is a recent example of the kind of discriminatory behaviour that is being passed through the Israeli Parliament.

The heart of the problem of Palestinian discrimination is that the status of Palestinians under international human rights instruments, to which Israel is a state party, is that of a national, ethnic, linguistic and religious minority. But the basic laws of Israel do not recognise them as a national minority within the protections that flow from that position. The definition of Israel as a Jewish state makes inequality a continuing practical reality for Israel’s Palestinian citizens. Worse still, they are frequently—and increasingly—seen as a “fifth column”, simply because they are Palestinians.

I do not want to extend this catalogue of discrimination in the remainder of my time, because other speakers will no doubt do some of that. The question is—what should the UK, as part of the international community, do about this established and continuing pattern of behaviour and discrimination? It is a pattern of illegal, inhumane and abusive behaviour. When South Africa was engaged in this kind of behaviour, the international community was so shocked that it imposed sanctions of various kinds to try to change that behaviour. We have tried to brush this issue aside, but we cannot go on finger wagging at the Israeli Government and getting very little in the way of response. The time has come for the UK and its EU partners to start thinking about something else, which is assembling a graduated set of economic and other sanctions to try to encourage the Israeli Government to attend to their duties as a democratic state in terms of removing some of the discrimination against many of their non-Jewish citizens.

Much of the argument in this House in recent times was that we needed to wait for the American presidential elections and get the Americans to help us take this forward. If you listened carefully to the Obama presidential campaign, the speeches made in that campaign made it clear that the time had come for America to do nation-building at home, not abroad. We have to understand that we cannot necessarily rely on activity on the part of the US in terms of pressure on Israel to change some of its behaviour. We have to be a bit more grown up, work with our EU partners, and think about what we as Europeans want to do in trying to encourage Israel to reverse the trend of discrimination against its Arab citizens.