Palestine and Israel

Lisa Nandy Excerpts

Monday 13th October 2014 Commons Chamber

[Lisa Nandy (Wigan) (Lab)]

By introducing this motion today, my friend the Member for Easington (Grahame M. Morris), has given voice to the hopes and aspirations of the Palestinian people, who have been denied justice for far too long. Like me, he will have watched with horror and anger as an ailing peace process has descended into a cycle of violence, much of it directed at children, and like me he will stand with all those Palestinians and Israelis who reject this, and who understand that every single action taken in anger makes Israel less secure and the prospect of peace for both sides diminish.

The only path to real security lies in political, not military, action, but the political process is failing. I say this to those Members who have sought to argue that the motion would make the situation worse: what are those Palestinians who have remained committed to the peace process meant to say after a summer that left 800 dead and more than 5,000 injured and resulted in yet another announcement from Israel that it is expanding its illegal occupation—and when the product of this process is half a million more settlers in the west bank and the occupied Palestinian territories in recent years, children shackled by the ankles in the military courts, and living with the daily humiliation of life under occupation? They have had 48 years of military occupation; if not today, then when will this country and this House give the Palestinian people the hope that things will get better? Too many Palestinians can see, as I can, that this process is not a negotiation between equals. The current situation, to which the UK remains wedded, allows Israel—in practice if not in principle—a right of veto over Palestinian statehood. In what sense can those negotiations be called meaningful?

This is why I support and welcome the amendment tabled by my right hon. Friend the Member for Blackburn (Mr Straw). Equality is an essential precondition for peace. A two-state solution requires two states with equal status. They must be equal partners, with an equal future. It shames us in Britain, with our historical obligation to the Palestinian people, that 135 nations have now taken the step of recognising Palestine while we remain among the handful of states in the United Nations that refuse to join them.

Half the population of Gaza is under the age of 18. Their lives are characterised by suffering, humiliation and despair. As Jonathan Freedland wrote recently, their childhoods have been

“broken by pain and bloodshed three times in the past six years”

while the UK stands by and watches. The UK, not Israel, determines our foreign policy. We are members of the European Union and the United Nations, we are in a special relationship with the United States of America and we are permanent members of the UN Security Council. As such, we occupy a privileged position in world affairs, and it is about time we showed the world why.