Recognition of Western Sahara as Moroccan

Debate between Fabian Hamilton and Daniel Kawczynski

Wednesday 8th May 2024 Westminster Hall

[Fabian Hamilton (Leeds North East) (Lab)]

The hon. Gentleman mentions Members of this House who have family connections to Morrocco. Does he agree that the fact that my late great-uncle was the Jewish major of Tangier during the second world war proves the point he is making?

[Daniel Kawczynski]

I am very aware, through our discussions, of the hon. Gentleman’s family connections with Tangier. I pay tribute to him and his ancestors and relatives, who played such a critical role in Morocco at a particularly difficult time.

Mohammed V, in response to Vichy and Adolf Hitler, said, “There are no Jews. There are no Muslims. There are only Moroccans.” He refused to comply with the diktat of Pétain and Hitler and did not cave in to those demands. I think that is testimony to the way in which the royal family of the Kingdom of Morocco protects all religious minorities. I heard from one journalist that the late Yitzhak Rabin, the former Israeli Prime Minister, said that when he had difficulties with the Moroccan Jewish population, he sought the advice and support of the late King Hassan, who had such close links with that diaspora in his own kingdom.

Secondly, I want to talk about women’s rights. During my many visits to Morocco I have met women who are far more empowered in Morocco than in many other Arab nations. Having met many female journalists, civil engineers, women who work in construction, female politicians and female diplomats, one gets the impression that Morocco, out of all of the Arab League members, understands and recognises that it will become a true modern society only if women are empowered and supported, not only through the education system but by being able to reach the very top of all sectors in society and the economy, including those that have historically been dominated by males.

Finally, I turn to democracy. On my many visits to Morocco I have witnessed and experienced what I perceive to be a greater freedom of the press than I have come across in any other Arab nation. There is greater protection of citizens under the constitution, a genuine Parliament, a genuine system of checks and balances, and genuine power of the opposition. Having spoken to many opposition MPs in Morocco, one gets the sense that it is a genuine thriving democracy where the rule of law is protected and people can debate and challenge one another in the most robust way without fear of retribution.

The key issue facing Britain today is the growing spread of the malign Iranian influence across the middle east and north Africa. That evil, despotic regime, which came about after the fall of the Shah in 1979, with the mullahs that control Iran—I visited Tehran when I was on the Foreign Affairs Select Committee—is one of the most dangerous, violent, authoritarian regimes in the region. It suppresses and abuses its own people and throws gay people off buildings. It is a very dangerous country and its malign influence is spreading across the region.

I will briefly mention the allegations of Iranian influence in the disturbances and difficulties that Bahrain faced in 2011. Iran filled the void in Iraq, which Mr Blair helped to create in the second invasion of Iraq, and its malign influence is growing there. Our miscalculations over Syria have given the Iranians the ability to enter the country. It supports Hezbollah in Lebanon, Hamas, and the Houthi rebels in Yemen. Its influence is extending to north Africa, Libya and Algeria through its support of the Polisario movement.

In contrast, Morocco is a thriving democracy. When I went to Morocco, I saw the massive effort to stem the flow of illegal migration to Europe. I met many officials and heard how they have managed to prevent over 300,000 illegal crossings into the Spanish enclave of Ceuta and the Canary Islands. Bearing in mind how we are getting increasingly agitated and frustrated about the illegal migration operating in the English channel, we have to pay tribute to the extraordinary support and vision that Morocco has in policing its own borders and making sure that illegal migration does not end up in Europe and ultimately through Europe to the United Kingdom.

With the restrictions in the Red sea and ultimately the Suez canal as a result of the conduct of the Houthi rebels, the waterway around the Moroccan coastline will be even more important for our security and defence capability.

There are of course huge commercial opportunities. Between 700,000 and 1 million British tourists visit Morocco every year. We also have a company, Xlinks—its chief executive officer is Sir Dave Lewis—that seeks to export green energy by funnelling solar and wind power from Morocco through an undersea cable to Britain. That aspiration could ultimately lead to 8% of British energy requirements being provided by Morocco through green energy.

Earlier this year I visited Western Sahara, including Laayoune and Dakhla, with General Sir Simon Mayall. We spent a week together in Dakhla and the wider area. The highlight of our visit was our meeting the Foreign Minister of Morocco, Nasser Bourita, with whom we spent an hour and a half. Instinctively, when we started to talk to him, although, of course, I am not going to reveal the intricate discussions we had—[Interruption.] Does the hon. Member for Glasgow North (Patrick Grady) wish to say something?

Holocaust Memorial Day

Debate between Fabian Hamilton and Daniel Kawczynski

Thursday 23rd January 2020 Commons Chamber

[Fabian Hamilton]

I thank my hon. Friend for his intervention. Every day in this place—I have been here 22 and a half years—we learn of colleagues who have a connection to a Jewish past, and my hon. Friend has just told us about his.

While I was in Paris, I went to Drancy and met the maire adjoint—the deputy mayor—of that small township. We went to the holocaust memorial centre on the housing estate that had become a concentration camp in 1940. While we were there, there were demonstrations in the small town of Sarcelles on the outskirts of Paris—the very town my great-grandmother, Raina Sevilla, came from. The demonstrations were against the Jewish people there. People were calling on the community to burn the synagogue down. This was in 2014, at the very time I was going to commemorate the death of my great-grandmother in the holocaust.

In 1985, I received a surprise phone call from my father, who sadly passed away in 1988. He was doing some research into his family history, and had discovered something quite extraordinary: his family, who he assumed had been murdered in the holocaust—while he was at school here in England and then volunteering for the British Army—had actually survived their incarceration in Bergen-Belsen.

My grandfather was born in Salonica—Thessaloniki in modern Greece. It is important to know that the Nazis invaded Salonica somewhat later than many parts of Europe. That meant that many of the Sephardic community of that great city survived, My grandfather’s brother’s wife, Bella Ouziel, not only survived, but, in 1985, was alive and well at the age of 93. My father asked whether I was free at the weekend, and we flew via Athens to Salonica. We met this magnificent old woman of 93, with her painted fingernails, her Jaeger dress and her coiffured hair. We sat down with her in her apartment, and we discussed the war experience.

My father had not seen Bella since 1934, when he was 12. However, he had kept photographs—Bella’s had been destroyed when she had been arrested with her daughter and her granddaughter and taken to Bergen-Belsen. We discussed at great length. Luckily, we had a shared language, French, which was my father’s first language and the language of many of the educated Sephardic Jews of Salonica—indeed, I speak it fluently as well—so we had a very good conversation. We laid out on the coffee table the photographs she thought she would never see again, but which my dad had kept, and which I have had electronically scanned. At the age of 30, for the first time in my life, I heard a first-hand account of life in a concentration camp. That is something I shall never forget, nor should any of us ever forget it.

The Holocaust Survivors’ Friendship Association was set up in Leeds and covers most of the north of England; indeed, my hon. Friend the Member for Huddersfield (Mr Sheerman) drew attention to its work in establishing the Holocaust Exhibition and Learning Centre at the University of Huddersfield. It did that by gaining grants from the national lottery heritage fund, the Pears Foundation and the Association of Jewish Refugees, as well as many personal donations. It set up an exhibition called “Through Our Eyes”, for which it interviewed 20 holocaust survivors over several days, many of whom have since died. The idea is that, once their physical presence has left us, their presence will still be felt through a series of interactive holographic videos. Visitors can go to the centre and actually interview some of the people in those videos—many of whom are not with us anymore—and ask them about their life. What a great tribute to the people who survived, and survived for so many years. What a wonderful thing for our children and grandchildren to have when the physical presence of those individuals is no longer with us.

I have to pay tribute to the wonderful Lilian Black. Her father, Eugene, was a survivor from Auschwitz-Birkenau. He was 16 years old when he was there. He died a few years ago, and I remember him well. Lilian has taken the memory of her father and the experience he had, and she has worked with the HSFA and the survivors to create this fantastic centre. If hon. Members have not been there, they should please go—it is absolutely brilliant, as my hon. Friend the Member for Huddersfield said.

I also want to pay tribute to the survivors who still live and, indeed, to those who are no longer with us. My constituent Arek Hersh, who lives in the village of Harewood, has a wonderful mix of Polish and Yorkshire when he speaks English—it is a great accent. A room at Yad Vashem in Jerusalem has been named after him. He wrote a wonderful book about his experience, which I recommend. He is 91 now; he was an 11-year-old boy when he was taken off the streets of the Lodz ghetto in Poland. He was then taken to a number of different camps. When I met him at Yad Vashem, he was with his friend Jacob. Jacob and Arek had shared a bunk in every camp they were in from the age of 11 until they were liberated at the age of 16. How they survived is quite a miracle.

[Daniel Kawczynski]

The hon. Gentleman is making an eloquent and powerful speech. He has referenced Poland on several occasions. I hope he will join me in remembering the millions of Poles who were killed during the holocaust, many of whom, like a member of my family, Jan Kawczynski, were shot by the Germans for hiding their Jewish friends and neighbours. The hon. Gentleman will know that Poland was the only occupied country with the death penalty for helping and protecting Jewish citizens. I would be grateful if he could acknowledge the suffering of the Poles in helping their Jewish friends.

[Fabian Hamilton]

I thank the hon. Gentleman for that powerful intervention. I have always believed that the Poles played the most extraordinary role, and paid a high price for it, in the second world war. My heart goes out to all my Polish friends; I have many, and one of my best friends at school was Polish. He could not go back to Poland until after the end of communism, because his parents had fled the communist regime there. The Poles are a wonderful, brave people. They did so much to resist the Nazis and so much to protect their Jewish population—the largest in the whole of Europe before the second world war. My heart goes out to all Poles who played a vital part in protecting their Jewish citizens as well as their own, who suffered so much.

Iby Knill was born in Bratislava. Later, she was smuggled across the border to Hungary, where she spent the first part of the war fighting the oppression of the Nazis, until she was eventually arrested as a communist and taken to Auschwitz No. 2 camp. While she was there, she teamed up with all the other women nurses, doctors and dentists—medically qualified people. She did that because, as she says in her book “The woman without a number”—again, I recommend it to all Members here—if people stayed together in solidarity, it was very hard for the Nazis to pick them off individually. She saw Dr Mengele every single day, but because she went to the camps in 1944, she survived.

Iby married a British Army colonel after the war. After his death, she began to talk about her experiences. She had come to Leeds in the early 1960s, and she taught at universities and worked for the local authority. Now, at the age of 96, my constituent Iby writes, lectures and gives talks. Indeed, eight or nine years ago, she did a talk for Members in Speaker’s House, with the blessing of the former Speaker, John Bercow. Some may remember it; it was a very moving occasion.

Iby has written another book, called “The Woman with Nine Lives”. In her books, she talks about the fact that she never had the tattoo. When people ask her about that, she says, “I do not know why I was not tattooed. Maybe it was because they ran out of ink, or maybe the officer concerned simply had to go to the toilet.” Iby’s first-hand accounts are well worth reading, and it is extraordinary that, at 96, she is still able to go around our schools and educational institutions.

Trude Silman is another survivor. She came from Bratislava during the war, on the Kindertransport. She is 91 now. She is a very close friend of mine and my wife’s: we see her every other week if we possibly can, and I was with her at the weekend. She is a contributor to the exhibition at Huddersfield University, and figures large in it. Eugene Black I have mentioned. John Chillag, who died recently as well, was another holocaust survivor in the city of Leeds. But the person I want to end my contribution by describing is someone who was born on 14 February 1920—two years before my own father was born—and died on 1 January this year, six weeks before his 100th birthday. His name was Heinz Skyte.

Heinz was absolutely extraordinary. He was the founding director of the Leeds Jewish Welfare Board and the Leeds Jewish Housing Association, organisations that have done so much for so many Jewish people who have been so underprivileged and have had so many problems in their own lives in the city of Leeds. He made an incredible contribution. He was also a great supporter of Leeds United football club. But the one thing I remember him for—I will finish with this short anecdote—is that in 1998, a year after I was elected to this place to represent my constituency, he gave a talk on the 60th anniversary of Kristallnacht. We are talking about a number of anniversaries today, Madam Deputy Speaker.

Heinz was a student of the University of Hamburg. He was born in Munich, but he went to Hamburg to study. One evening, he received a phone call on his landlady’s telephone. “You need to get out of there,” said his mother. “They are going to ransack the synagogues. They are going to arrest and beat the Jewish people of Hamburg. Go to the park, and stay there all night.” It was four o’clock in the afternoon. So Heinz stayed there all night. He saw the fires. He saw Jews being arrested, being beaten, being brutally attacked. He saw the Torah scrolls being removed from the synagogues and burnt in the streets. He saw the destruction of Jewish businesses. He told us this from his first-hand experience. It is the kind of thing that you never forget hearing.

After the night of destruction and horror was over, Heinz managed to get through to his mother, and his mother said, “Go and see our family doctor. He has retired from Munich, and he now lives in Hamburg with his daughter. Go to his flat. This is the address.” So he turned up, at six or seven in the morning. He walked through the front door to find the old man sitting on the sofa in his full Wehrmacht uniform from the first world war. If you had been a serving officer in the German army, you were allowed, above a certain rank, to keep your uniform, and there was the old doctor with his pointed helmet with the spike on it, and his Iron Cross First Class.

The Gestapo had broken down the door—they did not knock on the doors, they broke the doors down—to arrest this filthy Jew, and they had found a man with an Iron Cross, in an army uniform, with the rank of major. They did not know what to do. As Heinz said at the time, “Zey didn’t have ze mobile phones.” They could not ring headquarters to get instructions, so they left. The doctor gathered his belongings in shock, with his daughter and with Heinz, and they took the train out of Hamburg. This was in 1938. They went to Denmark, they crossed the sea to England, and they came to Leeds. The doctor lived until the 1960s. I do not know what became of the daughter.

That is a story that I wanted to share with the House because it is a story that Heinz told us from his first-hand experience. Here was one of the last living witnesses of the horrors of the holocaust, someone who himself made a recording, and—I am very proud to hear this—at his funeral on 5 or 6 January at the Jewish cemetery in Leeds, his son Peter said that until his dying day, Heinz was a member of the Labour party. He never lost those values. He was never prepared to give them up, in spite of what he did not like in our party.

So it is with that tribute to Heinz Skyte that I finish my remarks. I thank Members for all the contributions that are being made today, and I thank them for indulging me in talking about my own family’s history.