Meeting of the Parliament 26 June 2024
I am grateful to Humza Yousaf for lodging his motion and for securing the debate in the chamber. I echo other members’ comments that recognise his leadership on the issue.
I know that many people around Scotland will be watching us to see what we in Parliament say and do about the awful genocide that is wreaking death and destruction across Gaza. I believe that those of us who have consistently been calling for a ceasefire for more than eight months, and for the world to recognise the state of Palestine for much longer than that, will, in time, be shown to have been on the right side of history.
We desperately need peace in the lands of Palestine and Israel—and it must be a just peace. The on-going conflict between Israel and the Palestinians has roots that go back more than a century. A peaceful resolution, although not simple, is a moral imperative. We come to the debate after the deaths of tens of thousands of civilians, the murder of children and healthcare workers and the destruction of hospitals, universities, libraries and schools. We come to the debate at a time when Israeli occupation forces have used an injured Palestinian as a human shield, strapped to the front of a military vehicle. We come to the debate when Israel is not just bombarding Gaza but restricting services and support across the occupied territories.
Israel has stopped transferring tax that is collected from Palestinians to the Palestinian National Authority, so public sector workers have not been paid for months. Israel was given control over Palestinian tax and customs in the Oslo accords in the 1990s. The Oslo process saw the then Palestinian Liberation Organisation recognise the state of Israel. Indeed, the PLO did what was asked of it in those accords, but it was consistently undermined by the forces of occupation and apartheid, as the Palestinian Authority has been. Education is an inalienable human right, but the education of young Palestinians is being restricted because the Palestinian Authority has not received the money that it needs to pay teachers’ wages, if, indeed, they still have schools to teach in. The same restrictions apply to healthcare, which is another inalienable human right.
I will say a bit about the attacks on the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East—UNRWA. When the International Court of Justice instructed Israel to ensure that sufficient aid was provided in Gaza, the immediate response was not to make that aid available but to claim that UNRWA was implicated in the 7 October attacks. No evidence of that has ever been produced. More UN workers have been killed in this war than in any other. Hundreds of aid installations have been destroyed and damaged, which has compromised UNRWA’s ability to do its life-saving work.
International humanitarian law—particularly the Geneva convention—emphasises the protection and assistance of civilians. Defunding and otherwise compromising UNRWA’s attempts undermines those protections. We must apply all the international pressure that we can on Israel to stop it from acting in bad faith, and so that the UK and the US reinstate support for UNRWA, stop sending arms to Israel and recognise the state of Palestine. A just peace cannot be achieved by the obliteration of a people and the destruction of their world.
I have a different position to others on the issue of a two-state solution, one that is shared by many workers for peace in Israel and Palestine. The occupation of east Jerusalem makes such a proposal unworkable, I believe, as do the illegal settlements in the West Bank. I urge colleagues to read Jeff Halper’s writing on that. However, that difference does not diminish my support for the immediate recognition of the state of Palestine, for an end to supplying arms to Israel and for a ceasefire. The Palestinian people should be given the power and the means to determine their own future.
To conclude, I will share the words of Shahed Bdeir, a 13-year-old Palestinian child whose poem, “Mother Palestine”, has been on display in the Scottish Poetry Library as part of the Hands Up Project’s “Moon Tell Me Truth” exhibition:
“Sadness in her eyes
as everyone dies
She remembers the old days
How beautiful she was
But no one can realize
that she wants to survive
Everyone, everywhere, must realize
that Palestine deserves life.”