Lord Oates
Main Page: Lord Oates (Liberal Democrat - Life peer)
Lord Oates (LD)
My Lords, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Warner, for initiating this important debate. I was once fortunate enough to have him as my boss when he was chairman of the Youth Justice Board. I can record that he is one of the best and most inspirational bosses one could hope to have. It is a great pleasure to speak in a debate initiated by him.
By contrast, there is sadly very little to inspire one in the state of affairs that pertains in the Occupied Palestinian Territories today, most particularly in the position in which Palestinian children now find themselves. My criticisms of the occupation and its inevitable and devastating impacts on Palestinian children arise not out of any hostility to Israel, but, quite the contrary, from a profound respect for the achievements of Israel and its people, and the consequent horror that its values are being so corrupted by the near 50-year occupation and consequent oppression of millions of people.
In 2014, I had the opportunity to visit Israel with my noble friend Lord Palmer on a delegation of the Liberal Democrat Friends of Israel. We visited both Israel and the West Bank. In my visit to the West Bank I met some young leaders in the Negotiations Affairs Department of the PLO. They, like almost everybody in Israel and the Occupied Territories, of course had their own map. I discovered that everybody has their own map and they are all different. Few people agree on anything. But they made a point to me about the restrictions that the settlements placed on everyone. They made the comparison with situations in apartheid South Africa.
I know the Israeli Government and the people of Israel quite understandably feel outraged when comparisons are made between Israel and apartheid South Africa. None of us who have witnessed the reality of the poisonous ideology and its vile application by the apartheid regime would ever make that comparison with the democratic State of Israel. Indeed, I note Israel is the only state in the region in which I, as a gay man, could live freely and under the protection of law. I have a great respect for the values of Israel.
Nevertheless, while there is no comparison between the Government of Israel and that of apartheid South Africa, it is unavoidable and undeniable that many conditions that pertain in the Occupied Territories are similar to those that those of us who spent time in South Africa saw under the apartheid regime: the occupation and settlement of land; the checkpoints; the bulldozing of homes; the military incursions; the detentions of minors; the disregard for legal rights; the night raids; the closed roads; the separate laws; the ongoing humiliations; the deepening anger; the loss of hope; the spread of violence; the settler retaliations; the authorities’ passive and sometimes active acquiescence in the excesses of their own settlers, with whom they inevitably side; and the steady dehumanisation of one side by the other. None of this should be surprising. Whenever one people seeks to rule another through occupation and settlement, it is inevitable that similar methods will be used and similar reactions engendered.
In all this, children are always in the crossfire: oppressed and exploited by the vile Hamas regime in Gaza and suffering under the suffocating Israeli economic blockade and periodic and overwhelming military assaults in response to Hamas attacks. Or else they are radicalised in the West Bank from years of witnessing their parents humiliated and defeated, and their own aspirations curtailed and destroyed. Hundreds of children are killed, thousands maimed and hundreds of thousands traumatised.
Given the occupation, it is inevitable that young people come into conflict with the occupying forces. I will focus in particular on the role of the Israeli military in the detention of children in the West Bank. The Israeli human rights organisation, B’Tselem, recorded that in April 2016 414 Palestinian minors were held in Israeli prisons as security detainees and prisoners, including 13 administrative detainees—that is, those held without trial. Three were aged under 14, 109 were aged under 16 and a further 302 were under the age of 18.
As noble Lords will be aware and as has been referenced, in June 2012 the FCO funded a report into children in military custody, which found that Israel’s military detention system violated six articles under the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child and two articles under the Fourth Geneva Convention. In February 2013, as has also been alluded to, a UNICEF report described the ill treatment of children in the military detention system as “widespread, systematic and institutionalized”. B’Tselem itself has reluctantly concluded that there is no point continuing to file complaints against the military detention system as it has no desire to give credence to a justice system in which there is no justice. A review of developments since the 2012 FCO report indicated that just one of the report’s 40 recommendations had been addressed four years later.
As is often the case when speaking at this stage of the debate, so many of the facts and figures have already been stated by noble Lords. So many arguments have already been made. I will not trespass on the patience of the House by repeating them, but I want to underline that behind all these figures is the reality of lives ruined and cut short, of families devastated, whether Israeli or Palestinian. That is the reality behind the figures.
All of us who passionately believe in Israel need to recognise that true friendship does not lie in defending the indefensible. It exists in having the courage to acknowledge and confront the truth. Organisations such as B’Tselem understand this. Their painstaking work does not, as some detractors suggest, give succour to Israel’s enemies. On the contrary, it bears witness to the enduring values for which Israel was created. After the 1967 war, the founding Prime Minister of Israel, David Ben-Gurion, presciently warned that the continued occupation and settlement of the Palestinian Territories would corrupt the valiant soul of Israel. Nowhere is that more evident than in the willingness of the Israeli authorities to countenance the terrible suffering of Palestinian children as an acceptable price of occupation and settlement.