Gaza: Humanitarian Situation

Lyn Brown Excerpts

Thursday 24th May 2018 Westminster Hall

[Lyn Brown (West Ham) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Sir Henry. Monday 14 May will go down as a dark day in history. In Jerusalem, crowds listened to Baptist minister Robert Jeffress reading a prayer to mark the opening of the American embassy—a man who has previously made deeply offensive comments about Jews, Muslims, Mormons and gay people. In Tel Aviv, people danced the night away to the music of their new Eurovision winner, Netta. And in Gaza, an hour or so down the coast, 60 people, including children, were killed under live fire.

This is, of course, an emotional debate. It has touched us here, and it has touched my constituents. At times last week, I was receiving emails at a rate of more than one a minute. My constituents are angry and upset about what happened, and so am I. As Members of Parliament, we have a duty to represent that anger, but we also need to think seriously about what happened and what a meaningful response might look like, so I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Sheffield, Heeley (Louise Haigh) for securing the debate. As we heard again this afternoon, she is a powerful, articulate and passionate advocate for the causes she takes up.

Before I go any further, I want to make it clear that I do not defend or dispute the disgraceful conduct of Hamas. They waved swastikas in the protests, which was a simply awful thing to do. They supplied maps to protesters, with directions to homes in the nearest Jewish communities. They spread downright lies about breaches in the fence, manipulating protesters and encouraging them to run towards the heavily armed and fortified fence. They have also claimed that 50 of the 60 people who died on 14 May were part of their organisation. I understand this, and I do not condone it—in fact, I utterly and totally condemn it.

However, I think that most of us can agree that the response of the Israeli Government was massively disproportionate. I think it came from a legacy of seeing the people of Gaza as nothing more than a security threat and shamefully denying their humanity, their rights and the conditions in which they have been living. In every so-called “Gaza war”, we have seen civilians being treated like enemy soldiers. It is a systemic problem.

The testimony of one Israeli defence force officer, given to the Israeli organisation Breaking the Silence in 2014, is a stark example of that. He said:

“The rules of engagement are anything inside”—

that is, inside the Gaza strip—

“is a threat, the area has to be ‘sterilized’, empty of people—and if we don’t see someone waving a white flag, screaming, ‘I give up’…then he’s a threat and there’s authorization to open fire”.

The interviewer asked the officer:

“When you say open fire, what does that mean?”

The officer replied:

“Shooting to kill. This is combat in an urban area, we’re in a war zone. The saying was: ‘There’s no such thing there as a person who is uninvolved.’”

As my hon. Friend the Member for Sheffield, Heeley said earlier, Avigdor Lieberman, the Israeli Defence Minister, echoed that officer’s sentiments just last month, when he said:

“There are no innocent people in the Gaza Strip…Everyone’s connected to Hamas.”

There is plenty more like that. There are similar testimonies describing Operation Cast Lead in 2009, Operation Pillar of Defence in 2012 and Operation Protective Edge in 2014—the repeated bloody episodes that have marked the blockade of the Gaza strip, which has now been going on for more than 10 years.

Again and again, we hear reports of the devastation of life in Gaza, which, in my view, often amounts to war crimes. We are told that such action is legitimate self-defence, but we need to say loudly and clearly that self-defence does not allow free rein to kill, to destroy property and infrastructure, and to effectively enact collective punishment of a people. Avi Dichter, chair of the Knesset’s foreign affairs and defence committee, said that Israel’s security forces

“won’t let anyone put soldiers, and certainly not civilians, in danger”.

Then he said:

“The IDF has enough bullets for everyone.”

He said that last Monday, while the death count was still rising.

Again and again, security is linked with deadly, disproportionate attacks on civilians. I want to add my voice to that of my hon. Friend the Member for Birmingham, Northfield (Richard Burden) when he called for a suspension of the export of arms to Israel. I cannot see that there is any justification for us to continue those exports.

Security was the excuse for Myanmar’s attacks on the Rohingya people. Security is also the excuse for the attacks on the Kurds, who are our allies in the fight against Daesh, and who I feel this Government have abandoned. And, for many years now, security has been used as an excuse for what can only be described as collective punishment in Gaza.

As my right hon. Friend the Member for East Ham (Stephen Timms) has already said, when the blockade began, Israeli defence officials calculated the bare minimum of food needed to avoid malnutrition in Gaza. Surely that was not necessary for security. As my right hon. Friend also said, 54 Palestinians died last year waiting for travel permits, which they needed to receive life-saving medical care outside the Gaza strip. Surely that was not necessary for security. Now in Gaza, as we have heard, there are about four hours of electricity each day; between 90% and 97% of the water is contaminated, mainly by sewage; food is scarce; 80% of people are dependent on foreign aid; and, for some children, breakfast is a cup of hot water with a sprinkle of salt. Is that what security has to look like?

The people of Gaza have nothing, so they have absolutely nothing to lose. Omar Ghraieb, a journalist and blogger in the Gaza strip, said in January:

“Despair isn’t even the right word to describe what’s going on here because things are getting worse and worse”.

Many of the protesters knew that they risked their lives by going to the demonstration last Monday, because the IDF had considerately dropped leaflets to tell them so, but many thousands of people protested peacefully anyway. I think that the protesters’ decision to attend a demonstration when they had been told that doing so would put their lives at risk speaks volumes. They had faith in their future as a nation, but they no longer had hope for themselves individually.

I have to tell the Minister, who knows—I hope—that I hold him in really high regard, that we have reached an absurd situation. We have always said that a decision on the status of Jerusalem would be postponed until it could be part of a negotiated peace. Now the city has effectively been recognised as the Israeli capital by the United States, which is arguably the most powerful country in the world. The United States has seemingly made a unilateral decision on behalf of us all.

I do not think that we can allow this reckless US diplomacy, for want of a better word, to represent the international community, because it clearly does not. In the other place, the International Relations Committee has recommended “serious consideration” of the recognition of the state of Palestine, so I have considered it, and it seems to me that this is the kind of important, pivotal moment when recognising a Palestinian state would do meaningful good.

I do not believe that there has ever been a more urgent need to recognise Palestine. Is there a more opportune moment waiting for us just round the corner? I have been observing and speaking about this situation for years, and a realistic peace process seems to be getting more remote. I honestly think that we need to recognise Palestine now, so that these two historic nations can work towards a shared future together, and so that the people of Gaza can imagine a better future for themselves and their children. I do not believe that prevaricating about when we should do this remains a viable option. The status quo in Gaza is no longer an option. The time is now.