Israel and Palestine

Caroline Lucas Excerpts

Monday 11th December 2023 Westminster Hall

[Caroline Lucas (Brighton, Pavilion) (Green)]

Like everyone who has watched the footage and read the accounts of the Hamas atrocities on 7 October, and anyone who has followed the utter devastation and mass killing happening in Gaza and the growing violence in the west bank, my overwhelming response is, “How do we stop this?” That is why I urge the Government and the Labour Front Bench to support an immediate bilateral ceasefire.

The UK’s fence-sitting at the UN last week was unforgiveable both morally and politically, as anyone who heard Tom Fletcher, a former ambassador to Lebanon and advisor to Gordon Brown, explain on the radio this morning will know. He recalled that back in 2009, at the height of Operation Cast Lead, the UK took a principled stance in support of ending the killing of civilians and backed UN resolution 1860, which was critical of Israel. In doing so, it shifted the position of the US, which ended up abstaining on that vote instead of opposing it. Bold, creative diplomacy by the UK made a significant difference to the outcome in the UN and, critically, there was a ceasefire a week later. A similar kind of diplomacy is sadly lacking now, and we desperately need it.

Of course, the scale of the deaths and the horror is vastly different now, but the fundamentals of then and now are the same: the lives of civilians in both Israel and Gaza must be protected. This is what these petitions are about: making the suffering stop for the families in Israel who are desperate for their loved ones taken hostage by Hamas to be unconditionally released and safely reunited with them; making sure the perpetrators of the horrific rapes and sexual violence committed on 7 October are brought to justice; stopping one of the worst humanitarian crises in my lifetime—half of the people in Gaza are starving, and starvation is being used as a weapon of war; making the military assault on Gaza stop, and saving the lives of so many children; and stopping not just these immediate crises, but the decades of oppression and dispossession of and discrimination against the Palestinian people by the Israeli authorities, which are an unavoidable part of the context of this war.

A lot has already been said about how to bring this conflict to a close. Decades of expert diplomacy has failed thus far to resolve this seemingly intractable conflict. In the past 15 years alone, there have been five wars, each of which has consigned the people of Gaza to ever-deteriorating and unimaginably impoverished living conditions. None of these wars has stopped the rockets being fired at Israel, or made anyone feel safer. That is because there is no military solution to this conflict, only a political one.

Yet it has served the international community—the UK included—preoccupied elsewhere, to settle for a strategy of uneasy containment in which violence flares up from time to time and just enough supplies and aid are allowed into Gaza to appease Israel’s critical friends and prolong the status quo. However, since October 7, something seismic has shifted. It is now inconceivable that the world could continue to ignore the importance of ensuring that every single Israeli and Palestinian can live safely, securely and with dignity within their own borders or a shared border, if that is what they choose.

We have touched on the issue of speaking with terrorists. Talking to Hamas has already helped to bring some Israeli hostages home to their families. Those lines of communication must be kept open, along with every back and front channel accessible via the other players in the region. Clearly, the US has the greatest influence over Israel, but the UK can play a critical role too. Its links with Qatar and Egypt, for example, should be used to pull every lever possible in support of a consensus on Israel’s right to exist—a fundamental building block of peace.

Chatham House reported that the US and UK position on not talking to terrorists arose almost by accident in 1973, in response to hostage taking by a Palestinian militant organisation. Those hostages were killed. It takes courage to start a dialogue, especially when we have no real idea whether there is even a shared goal, let alone how to reach that outcome, but from Northern Ireland and Colombia to Afghanistan, Iran, Lebanon and Syria, talking has secured positive outcomes for individual cases and more broadly. No dialogue means the death of peace, and at this time we absolutely have to keep the prospect of peace alive.

The eyes of the world may well be on this narrow strip of land right now, but they have been largely absent as Gazans have been forced to live in an open prison, systematically stripped of their dignity and freedom by both the Israeli authorities and Hamas. As Israel has endured the existential threat to its existence that Hamas represents, and as land is grabbed and settler violence erupts in the west bank—an area that now could well see the strengthening of extremists including Hamas—we must not turn our gaze away again. The path to peace feels even more difficult following 7 October. It is more difficult, but more urgent, too. It starts with a bilateral ceasefire now.