Meeting of the Parliament 26 February 2025
Politics is about the particular, and it is right that, in this motion, we are calling for something specific, tangible and measurable, and entirely achievable. There is no excuse for not answering that call. However, political integrity is also about the broader picture, the deeper truths and the longer pages of history.
The anguish of Palestine did not begin in October 2023. It was not then that people were first ripped from their land or first had their homes bulldozed, their trees uprooted, their pathways blocked, their writers disappeared and their children killed with swift or slow violence. By that measure of history, we, in the global north, have failed. Yes, some of us have failed worse than others; we can weigh the complicity of Washington, Westminster, Brussels and Berlin. However, knowing what we know and seeing what we see—and we do see it, unless we choose to turn away—why do the words for what is done, apartheid and genocide, stick so timidly in our throats? When international law is broken so brutally and blatantly, and when our constituents protest, without violence, at the pain of Palestine and for peace, food and lives, why do our police, prosecutors and courts single them out for such exemplary punishment?
We cannot blame the public this time. Labour and the Democrats both know that. Thousands of voters chose independent MPs because this mattered more to them than anything else. Donald Trump was elected because Democratic voters stayed at home, and the issue that kept them there more than any other was Gaza.
Twenty years ago, Desmond Tutu and Jimmy Carter were both talking about Palestine and Israel. They were not afraid to speak of what they saw, to recognise its reality and to call it by its name. In 2006, Carter said of the West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem:
“There, apartheid exists in its more despicable forms, that Palestinians are deprived of basic human rights.”
Tutu recognised that it is not enough to have the right sentiments. We need to take the right actions, too, and that means boycott, divestment and sanctions. In 2014, he said:
“Those who continue to do business with Israel, who contribute to a sense of ‘normalcy’ in Israeli society, are doing the people of Israel and Palestine a disservice. They are contributing to the perpetuation of a profoundly unjust status quo.”
Now, that status quo is even more unjust. The death of a child is a grief that we can know about and understand; it is one that we have probably shared or seen. We have held our arms out to the broken and wept for their loss, but tens upon tens of thousands? Can our minds and hearts stretch that far? Is it the very scale of the agony that makes us turn away? Perhaps it is.
Perhaps we could just follow one family—or what used to be a family, now just a woman and her husband—walking back through Gaza after the ceasefire. They are not going home. They have no home left to go to. They are not looking for its remains in the rest of the rubble. They are only looking, in the bleak annihilation, for the bodies of their two children.
That is why people stand in burning rage or silent vigil in city squares across the world. That is why they march or climb or paint or speak upon whatever platform they can find until they are silenced. That is why we are here this afternoon. We are here for accountability, for integrity, for justice and for peace.
We are here for Palestine.
15:21