Israel and Palestine

Alyn Smith Excerpts

Monday 14th June 2021 Westminster Hall

[Alyn Smith (Stirling) (SNP)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Dowd. We are discussing two very important petitions: the first is a call to recognise Palestine as a state, and the second a call to implement sanctions on Israel for continued breaches of international law. Scottish National party foreign policy is based on principles. It is human-centred, feminist, egalitarian, ecological, multilateral and, above all, about the promotion of international law. We are not an aspiring international rights non-governmental organisation; we are an aspiring state, from my party’s perspective. Small countries need international law in a way that big countries do not, so international law is at the heart of everything that we do. We view Israel and Palestine, and everything else, through those prisms.

I am a friend of Palestine. I am also a friend of Israel. It is worth making a few things clear for the record. We condemn all violence, whoever it is perpetrated by and whoever is a victim of it. We utterly reject false equivalence. There is hurt and heartbreak on all sides of this dispute, and it is not just between two sides; it is far more complex than that. Israel has a right to exist and to security within its borders, and the Palestinians have a right to live in dignity and peace in a state of their own. We do not view those statements as exclusive. We view them as quite compatible, but how can there be a two-state solution, which we all say that we are in favour of, when there is not a two-state reality?

We believe that we should indeed recognise Palestine. We recognise the flaws, which we have heard about, in the Palestinian Authority, and that Palestinian unity is not where it needs to be, but we believe that recognition would level the discussion and give it an impetus that is, sadly, sorely lacking. It is not an outlandish position; we are actually in the majority, as 139 of 193 United Nations members already recognise Palestine as a state. The UK should do the same.

On sanctions, we have a rather more delicate call to make, because we need to consider the effect of any policy change on the ground. I said that Israel has a right to exist and to security, and I will defend that. It does not have a right to annex other people’s land and then to claim victimhood when there are consequences to that illegality. Settlements are, on a daily basis and in fundamental ways, making a viable, just peace less achievable. They are illegal. Their products are illegal. We should not deal in them. The UN agrees. UN Security Council resolution 2334 is clear on their legal status; we should not deal in settler goods, but ban them. At the very least, we should ensure that they are properly labelled.

On the petition’s call to implement wider sanctions on the state of Israel itself, however, we disagree for the moment. We do not think that that would help the situation. We think that it would do more harm than good—just. However, I urge our Israeli friends, who I know are paying attention to the debate, to pay attention to where that call is coming from. We cannot simply say that there must be consequences to the illegality but then not implement any of them. We must do better than we have done to date. We respect individual organisations that feel a need to implement such a policy themselves, though we would stop short of sanctions as a party.

It is not good enough to say that we are in favour of a two-state solution but to do nothing to bring about a two-state reality. We will continue to be part of the problem unless we give impetus to the discussion, and we can do that from here because we are bound to the people of Palestine and Israel by empire and by international law and trade. We have influence. As my hon. Friend the Member for Edinburgh East (Tommy Sheppard) says, perhaps there is a moment for new momentum with the new Israeli Government and the new US Administration. Colleagues, let us seize that moment and build a just peace, which we all want to see.