Palestine: Road Map to Peace Debate
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Jess Phillips
Main Page: Jess Phillips (Labour - Birmingham Yardley)Department Debates - View all Jess Phillips's debates with the Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office
Palestine: Road Map to Peace
Jess Phillips Excerpts(3 years ago)
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Jess Phillips (Birmingham, Yardley) (Lab)
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship, Ms Rees. I thank my hon. Friend and neighbour the Member for Birmingham, Hall Green (Tahir Ali)—in fact, my own MP—for bringing forward this debate. As my hon. Friend the Member for Batley and Spen (Kim Leadbeater) said, the idea of a free state of Palestine—the desire of my constituents and hers, and I am sure all of ours—seems so far away, so I wanted to focus on the things that we can do and, as my hon. Friend the Member for Birmingham, Hall Green, and others have mentioned, how we in Britain should facilitate the development and support of civil society in the region.
My constituents, like many others, have been writing regarding Israel’s decision to criminalise six Palestinian human rights and civil society organisations and label them terrorists. When I was last in Palestine, I met Omar Shakir from Human Rights Watch, who was constantly facing deportation, the suggestion being that he had something other than peace and the people of Palestine at his heart, which was completely unfair, as it is unfair today. The accusation is that these are terrorist organisations, despite a 74-page dossier prepared by the Israeli security services providing little concrete evidence of links between Palestinian human rights groups and designated terrorist groups. These organisations include the most well-established Palestinian human rights groups that work in the Occupied Palestinian Territory. They provide healthcare to the most vulnerable communities, they organise legal support for those detained and they collect evidence of human rights violations—which I suspect is where the problem is.
The work that these organisations undertake is integral to supporting the most vulnerable and to understanding the reality on the ground for Palestinian people. As others have mentioned, what we have seen in other conflicts, such as in Northern Ireland, is that without strong, stable, supported civil society, a pathway and a plan to peace can never be realised on the ground, let alone around the world in fancy buildings such as this one. I ask the Government to seek to support capacity building of Palestinian civil society.