Israel/Gaza

Lord Bilimoria Excerpts

Tuesday 24th October 2023 Lords Chamber

[Lord Bilimoria (CB)]

My Lords, I was privileged to be a member of the delegation to Israel organised by ELNET and led by the noble Lord, Lord Turnberg. We spent a day at the Gaza border at the crossing at Kerem Shalom, with 500 trucks coming in and out of Gaza every day. We looked out on Gaza, next to Sderot, and saw an Iron Dome battery, and 1,000 rockets had been fired in the four weeks before our visit. We interacted with the Israeli Parliament and Ministers, and with Fatah, the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank. We visited the Yad Vashem, remembering and commemorating the 6 million Jews killed in the Holocaust. Yet we came away from that visit dejected by the political situation in Israel at the time. How lucky we are to have the House of Lords. Israel does not have a senate or checks and balances. Fatah and Hamas do not talk to each other. There has been no democracy in the West Bank or in Gaza.

Not once did we feel unsafe. In fact, we were impressed by Israel being on top of its security situation, including with regard to Gaza. Who would have predicted what happened a few months later on 7 October, when Hamas took Israel by surprise and brutally murdered 1,400 Israelis and took over 200 hostages. As the most reverend Primate said, it was a pogrom. Last week, I was shown a film by the Israeli embassy, with footage of the horrors of 7 October. It was horrific beyond belief—cruel, monstrous and barbaric. These are terrorists; these are inhuman monsters. What they did to babies, children, families, old people and Holocaust survivors was horrific beyond the worst possible nightmare. This is just two-an-a-half weeks after 7 October. We cannot forget the magnitude of that horror. Israel must have the right to defend itself. Its aim is to dismantle Hamas and this must be allowed to happen.

However, in doing so the loss of life in Gaza is tragic, with the destruction taking place as a result of the airstrikes and shelling—and this is before a possible ground assault. The Palestinians in Gaza have been asked to move to the south, and yet bombing by Israel in the south continues because Hamas continues to operate from the south. It is firing rockets every day, from north and south, and Israel has to be able to attack the terrorists. But, as many noble Lords have said, Israel must always operate within international law. We must allow aid to get into Gaza for the 2.2 million innocent residents there.

Every Israeli Minister we spoke to mentioned Iran. Why are we not proscribing the IRGC? It is about time we did. Iran is backing Hezbollah, and it cannot be allowed to get into this war.

The hostages must be released now, and not two by two, as the noble Lord, Lord Howard, said.

What is tragic about this war is that it seems to have given rise to huge anti-Semitism. It is not a war between Islam and Judaism or between Muslims and Jews. This is a battle of humanity against Hamas; a battle of humanity against terrorism of the most horrific and worst kind. This is a battle against sheer evil. The UK, United States and NATO must do everything they can to stop the war escalating. We are staring into the abyss. We are staring into the possibility of World War III and it cannot be allowed to happen. The 9/11 attacks led to NATO implementing Article 5 for the first and only time in its history. It led to the invasion of Afghanistan, where we were for 20 years. The Iraq war in 2003 had no plan for after victory, which led to Syria and to ISIS. The Afghanistan withdrawal gave Putin the confidence to go into Ukraine, and Afghanistan is now back in the hands of the Taliban. When are we going to learn?

A few weeks ago, I spoke in the debate on the first anniversary of the Abraham accords: Israel, the UAE, Bahrain and Morocco establishing relations, tourism, business, trade and friendship. In the debate, we spoke about the possibility of Saudi Arabia normalising relations with Israel. How ironic that these developments of progress and peace have led to Hamas doing what it has done now. Peace and friendship are not in Hamas’s vocabulary. Creating havoc and murdering is the objective of these cowardly terrorists, who use human beings and children as shields. The vast—I repeat vast—majority of Muslims and Jews do not want conflict or war; they want peace.

As she was released as a hostage, Yocheved Lifschitz turned around and gripped the hand of one of the masked Hamas terrorists who had kept her captive and said, “shalom”. What amazing dignity. Shalom means peace, harmony and tranquillity, and that is exactly what we need throughout the Middle East and the world today: peace.