North Africa and the Near and Middle East
Debate between Ann Clwyd and Richard Burden(12 years, 8 months ago)
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Richard Burden
That does not alter my view at all. My hon. Friend has illustrated precisely the point that I was making. On both sides of the debate, we can all produce quote after quote to give us an excuse not to engage in dialogue; to decide that our side is right; to decide that the other side are not worth talking to. It is Hamas now, but she may have made a few speeches a few years ago saying the same kind of thing about Yasser Arafat or about Fatah. That does not get us anywhere. It does not get me anywhere to say, because I can produce a load of quotes from someone like Lieberman—or even the Prime Minister of Israel, Mr Netanyahu—that they should be kicked out of negotiations, even if we all then pat ourselves on the back and say that we had done a good job.
If we are serious about peace, we have to contribute to peace. It is an old cliché, but it is right—peace is made not between friends, but between enemies. Unless we are prepared to try to reach out, not to our enemies, but to the enemies in the middle east and try to get them talking, what are we doing other than just acting as cheerleaders for one side or the other?
I was in Israel and Palestine last week. The situation there never loses its capacity to shock. Settlement building is continuing apace, in defiance of international law and despite having been condemned eight times in six months —or is it six times in eight months—by the Government. I know that the Minister is aware of the issue, but I ask him to pay particular regard to an area which became known as Area C in the Oslo process, which is one of the more rural areas of the west bank, and the encroachment of settlements and the dispossession of Palestinians there. When maps of the future Palestinian state are discussed, the focus is often on towns—on Ramallah, Bethlehem, Nablus and Tulkarm. All those places are important, but so too are the bits in between and the people who live there.
As we speak, Bedouin who are already refugees—in the main, they come from the Negev in what is now Israel and have been living in the west bank for decades—face forced displacement and dispossession to make way for settlements. I visited the school of Khan al Ahmar, just outside Jerusalem, which is under threat of demolition. There are two petitions going on, one to demolish the Khan al Ahmar school and one to demolish the Khan Al Ahmar community. One petition comes from the settlement just behind the area and one from the Israeli civil Administration in the west bank. That community, including the civilians—in fact, they are all civilians—and the children, face dispossession. Forced displacement of people by an occupying power is illegal under international law. We should not be scared to say that, nor to require Israel to abide by international law.
Even if those Bedouin were forcefully displaced to a palace it would be wrong. But the proposal is not to displace them to a palace. Instead, Israel proposes to displace them to a site next to Jerusalem’s municipal rubbish dump. I went to that rubbish dump and I saw the pipes that allow methane to escape. I saw a tanker appear, belching sewage from its back, and I saw where the land is being levelled to put Bedouin communities within 500 metres of the dump. As far as I know, that contravenes all health and safety regulations in that area.
Israel is beginning to notice the growing international condemnation of this proposal. It is no accident that access to the rubbish dump is now being blocked off by security blocks like those seen in other parts of the west bank. They have now appeared at the entrances to the rubbish dump—perhaps it has suddenly become a security risk. It may in fact be about stopping foreign visitors—and brave Israelis—from going there to bear witness to what is going on.
These things are wrong, and we should not be scared to say so. Settlement building is also dismantling the chances of a two-state solution before our eyes. The settlement building is not just displacing people to make way for settlers: it is increasingly severing the west bank into cantons or Bantustans that will not be viable as a state—unless we stop it. I hope that hon. Members on both sides of the House, whether we consider ourselves friends of Palestine or of Israel, will demand that that process stops.
My final point is about child prisoners. We have already mentioned the prisoner swap that rightly led to the release of Gilad Shalit and of some 500 Palestinian prisoners. The second phase of that prisoner swap will take place over the coming weeks. There are 150 Palestinian children in Israeli military detention, but so far, none of those is scheduled to be part of that prisoner swap. Several recent delegations to the west bank and Israel—organised by the Britain-Palestine all-party group, which I chair, and other organisations—have been to the Israeli military courts where those children are tried. Like other hon. Members, I had already read the testimonies about how the laws applying to Palestinian children are different from those applying to Israeli children; about how Palestinian children are tried in military courts, but Israeli children, even in the occupied territories, are tried in civilian courts; about how many Palestinian children are given bail compared with how many Israeli children are given bail. But I was not prepared for the sight in a military prison—one of the most secure compounds I have ever visited—of 14-year-old boys shuffling in wearing leg-irons and handcuffs for their court hearings. All members of the all-party parliamentary group who were on that visit made the decision that we were not prepared to shut up about this. Something had to be done. Whatever one’s views on the occupation, on Israel and on the peace process, shackling 14-year-old boys is wrong. It is against the UN convention on the rights of the child and it is inhuman.
Ann Clwyd
Earlier this year, I was invited by the United Nations to a conference in Vienna on the inalienable rights of the Palestinian people. It was the first time that I could remember the UN holding a conference with such a title. There were testimonies from people that made exactly the same point as my hon. Friend. Children are quite often charged without having a responsible adult present or legal representation. The stories that we heard were very similar to those he is describing now. It is an absolute disgrace that many of these children are in prison simply for throwing stones.
Richard Burden
My right hon. Friend is absolutely right about that. The biggest number of accusations is for throwing stones. A range of human rights organisations, including Israeli human rights organisations as well as Palestinian and international ones, and the United Nations have amassed loads of evidence showing how children are visited and arrested in the middle of the night and painfully tied with a single plastic cord in violation of Israeli army procedures. The issue of how the children are interrogated and who is allowed to be present is a matter of real concern. Interrogations are not video recorded. Children continue to be denied bail in about 90% of cases, and many are detained in prisons outside the occupied territories in violation of article 76 of the fourth Geneva convention. Those things are wrong.
Even though I thought I knew a fair bit about child prisoners in Palestine, I came across something last week that astonished me even more. I spoke to some ex-detainees in Bethlehem. Most of them came from the town of Hebron or thereabouts. They recounted some of the things that my right hon. Friend has said, that I have said and that the UN has reported, but I wanted to pursue this issue of why they were shackled and had leg irons on inside a prison.
I said to the young boys, “When did they put these leg irons on you? When did they shackle you?” They replied, “Before we went into the court and before we went into the prison.” I said, “You were detained, though. You were already in the prison, weren’t you?” They replied, “No, we were in the other prison.”
Many of those children are held not in Ofer prison, in which they are tried, but in other prisons which could be on the west bank or in Israel itself. The young man who was talking to me was held in Tilmond prison near Haifa and he said that that was where they put the shackles and leg irons on him. He wanted to talk to me about other things. He thought that his experience was quite normal. I said, “Hang on, how long were you in those leg irons and shackles before you got to the prison?” I thought that it would have taken one to two hours to drive to Ofer prison, but he said, “About nine hours.”
At that stage, I thought that I was getting some exaggeration because it is nothing like a nine-hour drive between Haifa and Ofer prison, which is between Jerusalem and Tel Aviv. He said, “No, we don’t go straight there. We get picked up at about 1 o’clock in the morning and the prison transport takes us down to the Negev where we pick up some more from a prison there. It then takes us back to Ramleh where we have a break for the driver and then we go on to Ofer prison. It takes about eight or nine hours.”
I asked the young boy whether he was shackled the whole time. He said, “Yes.” Other young men around the room nodded in agreement and said that that had happened to them as well. I asked the young boy where they were being held. He said, “We were in this kind of prison bus which had rooms in.” I assumed that it was like prison transport with compartments. He said, “It was a bit overcrowded, but we just had to stay there with our shackles and leg irons.” I asked, “What happened if you wanted to go to the toilet?” He replied, “We just had to do it where we were.” This is the 21st century. Irrespective of our views on the Israel-Palestine conflict, are we honestly saying that those sorts of things should go on?
I know that the Minister and the Government are concerned about this matter. I welcome the work that both our ambassador in Tel Aviv and our consular-general in east Jerusalem have been doing to raise awareness of these and many other issues. There is another inquiry going on at the moment into the condition of child prisoners. This is an issue that must not go away because it is shocking to me and shocking to anyone who sees it. It is against the UN convention on the rights of the child and it is inhuman.
I have been raising these matters over a period of time —perhaps I have been a bit of a bore on the matter— but it is only in the past few days and weeks that we have seen a change in profile and a number of achievements. Israel has equalised the age at which a child is classified an adult—from 16 to 18. The age is now equal between Israelis and Palestinians, which is good. It would not have happened had it not been for the pressure that has been building up. The number of Palestinian children in Israeli jails is now 150; it was 164 a few weeks ago, so I think the Israelis are susceptible to pressure.
What is incredible is that there has been a campaign of hate, misrepresentation and libel against me and others for having dared to raise this issue. To some extent that goes with the territory, and I am not in the firing line; I am a British MP. I can speak in this place. It is easy for me to do so and it is my responsibility to do so. None the less, there are people for whom we do need to raise our voices. I am talking not just about the Palestinian children but the people who are prepared to speak out both in Palestine and in Israel. I am talking about those who are members of groups such as Peace Now, B’Tselem, Yesh Din, Physicians for Human Rights and Breaking the Silence; the brave soldiers who have seen the conflict first hand and have said that things must change. They are prepared to say that the kind of stuff that Israel and Netanyahu put out in the outside world does not reflect the reality on the ground and that there has to be a different way. Those people are the best of Israel.
Very often the Israeli Government and lobbyists for Israel talk about the danger of the de-legitimisation of Israel. Even members of those groups, Israeli Jews, are accused of de-legitimising Israel because they speak out on what is going on. In fact, those groups are protecting Israel’s legitimacy and democracy and they need our support now because laws are being put through the Knessset that will gag them. Any organisation that the Israeli state regards as political will be outlawed from getting foreign funding of over 20,000 Israeli shekels—about £6,000. All the evidence points to the fact that the ones that will be regarded as political will be the human rights organisations. It will not affect the settler groups that get millions from the United States and elsewhere; it will affect the human rights organisations. Legislation is also being passed that is doing strange things to Israel’s libel laws that will try to gag people from speaking out. There are even laws being passed about how judges and justices are chosen that will restrict the ability of such groups to petition the courts in Israel. Those groups need our support. Our ambassador has been forthright on this matter and I commend him for that.
My appeal is not just to people who agree with me on Palestine but to those who regard themselves as friends of Israel. Are they simply friends of whatever the Israeli Government happen to do or say at the time, or are they friends of Israel, of Israeli democracy, of dissent in Israel as well as of the establishment of Israel? If they are, I hope that they will join me and people throughout the world in standing up for Israeli democracy. B’Tselem and other organisations are bravely saying, “We will not be silenced.” We should not allow them to be silenced either.
Police Reform and Social Responsibility Bill
Debate between Ann Clwyd and Richard Burden(13 years, 7 months ago)
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