Palestine

George Galloway Excerpts

Monday 1st December 2014 Westminster Hall

[George Galloway (Bradford West) (Respect)]

There were not thousands of Israelis killed over the summer, but there were thousands of Palestinians killed over the summer, and 500 of them were small children, I dare say a little older than the grandson of the hon. Member for Ilford North (Mr Scott)—I congratulate him on his grandson’s birth—but in many cases not much older. There has been an air of unreality about this debate so far. I had thought that Parliament, in this regard, was catching up with public opinion, but the speech that we have just heard and previous interventions seem to indicate otherwise.

The Under-Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs, the hon. Member for Bournemouth East (Mr Ellwood), who is here in Westminster Hall today, is on record as saying that

“Israel lives in a tough neighbourhood”.—[Official Report, 13 October 2014; Vol. 586, c. 92.]

The problem is that Israel is living on top of somebody else’s neighbourhood, and the attempt to equate violence from the illegally occupied with violence from the illegal occupier is preposterous, and yet it has been repeated over and over again already in the short time that this debate has been going. It is a legal and moral right of an occupied people to rise up against their illegal occupier. And after all, it is not as if the occupation has just started: the west bank and Jerusalem have been illegally occupied for 47 years. How much longer do we expect the occupied people to wait for their rights?

All this poppycock about peace talks and the rest—there are no peace talks and there is no peace process. Contrary to what the hon. Member for Harlow (Robert Halfon) just said, there are not “two countries” involved in this. There is only one country, which is occupying the land of another. You would think, and perhaps it is the case, that Members in here have no idea how all this started in this very building, almost 100 years ago, when Mr Balfour, on behalf of one people, offered to a second people the land that belonged to a third people, without consulting any of the three peoples involved. We have a historic obligation greater than any other country’s to side with the victims of Mr Balfour’s act, yet there is no sign of it here.

Parliament recently took a decisive and important decision, but the Government have not caught up with it. They continue to support Israel and to license the export of arms to Israel. Israel is the criminal in this picture: in 1967, it was ordered by the United Nations to withdraw from the land it had illegally occupied, yet it continues to refuse to do so. We should not be trading with it, exporting anything to it or allowing the importation of anything from it. After all, that is what we do with other international law breaker.

I have very few seconds left—[Hon. Members: “Hear, hear!”] They don’t like it up ‘em, Mr Pritchard. Well, some of them do. In the 15 seconds I have left, I can say only this—

[Grahame M. Morris]

Does the hon. Gentleman recognise that the Balfour declaration, short though it was, insisted on protection for non-Jews, Palestinians and Christians in that territory?

[George Galloway]

It did so insist, but it was apparently written in invisible ink, for it has been forgotten by successive British Administrations and certainly ignored entirely by the state that came into being, decades later, as a result of the Balfour declaration.

In my remaining 45 seconds, let me say this. If hon. Members think that Gaza has been an erupting sore of enormous international strategic importance—and indeed it has been—they better start thinking about Jerusalem. The ethnic cleansing of Jerusalem, the Judaisation of Jerusalem, the driving out of Christians and Muslims from Jerusalem, the closure of the al-Aqsa mosque for the very first time since Israel illegally got its hands on it in 1967 and the fighting that has been alluded to all add up to a crisis about to erupt.