Palestine: Road Map to Peace Debate
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Andy McDonald
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Palestine: Road Map to Peace
Andy McDonald Excerpts(2 years, 5 months ago)
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Andy McDonald (Middlesbrough) (Lab)
It is a privilege to serve under your chairship, Ms Rees. I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Birmingham, Hall Green (Tahir Ali) on securing the debate, but I must say, very sadly, that the prospect of peace in Palestine looks more distant than ever. With each illegal home the Israelis construct, the dream of a viable Palestinian state is dealt another blow. The Palestinian people are subjected to yet more intolerable brutality and oppression, with Israeli forces giving settlers licence to attack Palestinian civilians.
The human rights group B’Tselem has documented a staggering 451 incidents of settler violence against Palestinians since early 2020, and Israeli forces failed to intervene to stop the attacks in two thirds of cases. The organisation has also recorded how settlers have been used as a tool of the state to expropriate 11 square miles of Palestinian farm and pasture land in the west bank over the past five years alone.
There is no other way to look at this than as a state-sanctioned project of colonisation and ethnic cleansing. A Human Rights Watch report published in April this year concluded that
“the Israeli government has demonstrated an intent to maintain the domination of Jewish Israelis over Palestinians across Israel and the OPT”—
that is, the Occupied Palestinian Territories. The report goes on:
“In the OPT, including East Jerusalem, that intent has been coupled with systematic oppression of Palestinians and inhumane acts committed against them. When these three elements occur together, they amount to the crime of apartheid.”
The crime of apartheid cannot be allowed to stand, but thanks to the international community offering little more than hollow words of condemnation, the Israeli authorities wilfully continue to break the law, safe in the knowledge that they will not face the repercussion of proper sanctions.
If the Government will not provide moral and substantial leadership on this issue, it will be up to civil society to do so, through the boycott of, and divestment from, companies engaged in violations of Palestinian human rights. The Government need to lead the international community in providing more than mere denunciations. We need actions and sanctions, and we need them now.