Oral Answers to Questions

Debate between Alex Cunningham and Robert Halfon

Monday 11th March 2024 Commons Chamber

[The Minister for Skills, Apprenticeships and Higher Education (Robert Halfon)]

I would be absolutely delighted to visit Kirklees College, and I congratulate my hon. Friend on his apprenticeship fair. I note that the college has a great record on apprenticeship achievements, and that 970 apprentices have started their future. Overall at Kirklees since 2010, there have been something like 12,300 apprenticeship starts in my hon. Friend’s constituency.

[Alex Cunningham (Stockton North) (Lab)]

T8. An estimated 6,000 children in England are attending illegal or unregistered schools that provide limited or no appropriate education, often in an unsafe environment. Does the Minister agree that while efforts to introduce a home education register to keep track of children who are outside a school setting are welcome, more legislation is needed to close the loopholes exploited by proprietors of illegal schools and ensure that children are kept safe and educated appropriately?

Jerusalem (Humanitarian Issues)

Debate between Alex Cunningham and Robert Halfon

Monday 26th March 2012 Commons Chamber

[Alex Cunningham (Stockton North) (Lab)]

Thank you, Mr Speaker, for this opportunity to debate humanitarian issues in Jerusalem. The debate comes in advance of the presentation of a petition to the Prime Minister supported by a wide range of organisations, including the Palestine Solidarity Campaign, the Amos Trust, Friends of Al Aqsa, Jews for Justice for Palestinians and Pax Christi, calling on the Government to take urgent steps to stop the Israeli Government’s gradual but relentless eradication of Palestinian life and culture in Jerusalem. The Minister will not need to take my word for it that Jerusalem is facing a political and humanitarian crisis as people are denied the basic rights of a civilised society. His own UK mission in East Jerusalem issued a joint report with European colleagues last year. They concluded that if current trends of settlement growth and home demolitions

“are not stopped as a matter of urgency, the prospect of East Jerusalem as the future capital of a Palestinian state becomes increasingly unlikely and unworkable.”

The clear and long-standing position of the European Union is that all Israeli settlements are illegal under international law, that East Jerusalem is part of the Occupied Palestinian Territories and that the annexation of East Jerusalem by Israel is illegal and not recognised by either the UK or the EU. Yet that annexation is being reinforced with the Jerusalem municipality openly stating that it does not want the Palestinian population of Jerusalem to exceed 30%. Reducing the population from 38%, where it currently stands before any natural increase, to 30% can be achieved only by resorting to ethnic engineering that would be unthinkable in a liberal democracy and would require illegal and inhumane measures. However, we all know that this mission has been under way for years.

The first of those measures being implemented is the building of the wall that allows the exclusion of tens of thousands of Palestinians born in Jerusalem from their own city. Palestinians living outside the wall but inside the city boundaries have the status of Jerusalem residents and Jerusalem taxpayers but can access the city’s services, schools, hospitals and transport system only with the greatest of difficulty, if at all. The two major checkpoints for Palestinians render movement from outside to inside the wall extremely difficult. This can mean having to wait hours to get through a checkpoint and can put hours on a person’s work or school day, reduce access to religious sites, cause severe delay for a medical appointment and cause huge disruption to economic activity.

Many Palestinian organisations and businesses have been forced to leave Jerusalem as a result, but that could probably be considered a good result by some in the Israeli authorities. The International Court of Justice has called for sections of the wall built in East Jerusalem to be dismantled, but far from dismantling the wall the Israelis are rapidly extending it. Currently, they are building a wall that will completely encircle the small community of al-Walaja on the borders of Jerusalem so that villagers will be able to get in and out of their village only through an Israeli army checkpoint. Many people have gone to al-Walaja to see the wall and speak to the villagers, but the Israeli army does its best to discourage visitors. Only this month soldiers forced 55 Harvard students back on to their bus and arrested the villager Shireen al-Araj who was showing them the wall. That was a clear attempt at intimidation.

[Robert Halfon (Harlow) (Con)]

Does the hon. Gentleman recognise that far from being a wall, what he is describing is a fence, a tiny proportion of which is wall? Does he recognise that the reason it was built in the first place was to prevent suicide bombers from coming into Israel on a daily basis? That is something that it fortunately has achieved.

[Alex Cunningham]

I do not really think it matters whether it is a wall that is 20 feet thick or a fence—it is a barrier to the Palestinian people going about their normal business and I do not think it should be there.

One of the most sinister ways of removing Palestinians from living in Jerusalem is the rule that Palestinians’ “centre of their life” must lie within the Israeli-defined municipal boundary of Jerusalem. This prevents many who study or work for extended periods of time from returning and enriching their city’s experience. The “centre of life” requirement is of course particularly Kafkaesque when Israelis are making it more and more difficult for Palestinians to live and work in Jerusalem because of the wall and checkpoints.