Middle East

Lord Bishop of Leeds Excerpts

Monday 1st September 2025 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Chapman of Darlington (Lab)]

As the noble Baroness should know, we do not comment on future sanction designations.

[The Lord Bishop of Leeds]

My Lords, I totally endorse what has been said about Sudan. I was there a year ago and am in almost weekly contact with people there at the moment. But I am slightly worried about the terms in which we debate some of these matters, such as Gaza and Ukraine. The crisis in Ukraine did not begin on 24 February 2023; the crisis in Gaza and the Middle East did not begin on 7 October 2023. Our attempts to simplify the conflict, perhaps for conceptual reasons, do not always help us. It is immensely complex, it goes back a long way and 7 October cannot be the justification for everything that follows. Does the Minister agree?

[Baroness Chapman of Darlington (Lab)]

I agree in that, obviously, the situations that the right reverend Prelate refers to are deeply rooted in history. Many of us understand and study this and appreciate what he is saying, but I cannot respond to anything that mentions 7 October without saying that that most hideous of attacks changed the nature of that conflict. It was always going to lead to a response from Israel. What is happening now, though, is beyond what anybody anticipated would happen as a consequence of that heinous attack, but nothing should diminish the appalling events of that day. The accounts and footage from that day that many of us have seen will haunt us forever. Perhaps if there were similar accounts and footage from Sudan that were as visible to us all now, we would at least be having a different set of conversations. But I agree with the right reverend Prelate about complexity and the need to understand the historical origins of these conflicts.