Palestinian Children and Israeli Military Detention
Debate between Joan Ryan and Chris Williamson(6 years, 9 months ago)
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Joan Ryan (Enfield North) (Lab)
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Stringer.
The detention and trial of a child is a tragedy whenever it occurs. However, I am concerned that this debate is symptomatic of the disproportionate and unfair focus on Israel that is all too prevalent in the media, international institutions and this House. As my hon. Friend the Member for Rotherham (Sarah Champion) said—I congratulate her on obtaining the debate—this is the second debate in two years. However, we have not debated the fate, for instance, of child prisoners in Iran, where Amnesty International estimates there are at least 80 individuals on death row for crimes allegedly committed when they were under 18, or indeed the fate of others in Egypt, the Maldives, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Sri Lanka, Sudan and Yemen, which have all sentenced juvenile offenders to death since 2010. Israel is, of course, a liberal democracy, and should be held to a higher standard than the likes of Iran, Saudi Arabia and Sudan. We have also never discussed the fate of the 60,000 children locked up in juvenile detention facilities in the United States—many for truanting, under-age drinking or consensual sexual conduct—or the fact that, adjusted for size of population, 5.5 times more minors were arrested in 2015-16 in England and Wales than in the west bank by Israel.
None of that is to suggest that the plight of Palestinian children in the tragic conflict there is not important, but we must make clear our deep and continuing concern at the Palestinian Authority’s policy of inciting violence —a policy intentionally aimed at children and young people.
Joan Ryan
I will not.
We see that policy in the naming of schools and sports tournaments after terrorists; in the newly revised curriculum, which asks students, as a maths exercise, to calculate the number of martyrs in Palestinian uprisings; and in the countless examples of anti-Semitism that litter children’s TV programmes on official Palestinian Authority TV.