Proscription of Hezbollah

Debate between Joan Ryan and Lord Goldsmith of Richmond Park

Thursday 25th January 2018 Commons Chamber

[Joan Ryan]

I absolutely agree with my hon. Friend and I thank him for that intervention, which I take as 100% support for the motion.

I am the chair of Labour Friends of Israel, an organisation that has campaigned for many years on the issue that we are addressing. Hezbollah is a terrorist organisation, driven by anti-Semitic ideology, which seeks the destruction of Israel. It has wreaked death and destruction throughout the middle east, aiding and abetting the Assad regime’s butchery in Syria and helping to drive Iran’s expansionism throughout the region. It makes no distinction between its political and military wings, and nor should the British Government.

In 2010, the Obama Administration labelled Hezbollah

“the most technically capable terrorist group in the world”.

Over the past three decades, it has been implicated in a string of deadly attacks against Israeli, Jewish and western targets in the middle east and far beyond. Its operatives have been arrested for plotting or carrying out attacks across the globe, in Europe, Asia, Africa and South America. The litany of death and violence widely attributed to Hezbollah includes the 1983 murder in Beirut of 241 American and 58 French peacekeepers; the 1986 wave of bombings against Jewish communal targets in Paris, in which 13 people died; the 1992 attack on the Israeli embassy in Buenos Aires, in which 29 people died; the 1994 bombing of the Argentine-Jewish mutual association, which led to the deaths of 85 people; the 1996 Khobar Towers bombing in which 19 US servicemen lost their lives and nearly 500 people were injured; and the 2012 attack on a bus of Israeli tourists in the Bulgarian resort of Burgas, in which six people were murdered and for which two people finally went on trial last week.

Such terrorist acts are promoted, glorified and encouraged by the Hezbollah leadership. Hezbollah’s secretary-general, Hassan Nasrallah, has, for instance, praised suicide bombings—or “martyrdom operations”, as he prefers to describe them—as

“legitimate, honourable, legal, humanitarian and ethical actions”

saying that “those who love death” will triumph over those who fear it.

[Zac Goldsmith (Richmond Park) (Con)]

The right hon. Lady is making a powerful speech. Does she agree that the 1,000 or so people who marched in London under the Hezbollah flag subscribe to the very agenda that she has described? There is no difference between the military and political wings of Hezbollah, as it continually acknowledges. The only recognition of a difference is in UK policy; it does not exist in reality. It is time for that policy to change.

[Joan Ryan]

I agree with the hon. Gentleman and thank him for that intervention. He is completely right to say that there is no distinction and we need to be clear about that.

Hezbollah’s actions are driven by a deep-seated, intractable and vicious hatred of Jews. The House does not need to take my word for it; Hezbollah’s leaders have proudly boasted of their anti-Semitism:

“If they all gather in Israel,”

declared Nasrallah,

“it will save us the trouble of going after them worldwide.”

Nor is Nasrallah a lone voice. Naim Qassem, Hezbollah’s deputy leader, has said that

“the history of Jews has proven that, regardless of the Zionist proposal, they are people who are evil in their ideas”.