Meeting of the Parliament 26 February 2025
I thank the Green Party for bringing this important debate to the chamber. Let me say from the outset that I support its calls to end all arms sales to Israel and agree that not a penny of public funding should be going to arms companies, including those in Scotland, that supply weapons or munitions to Israel.
Some have suggested that we are at the beginning of a new world order. I suggest that it more closely resembles disorder than order. We are living at a time when one of our closest allies—which was on the same side as us in world war 2—was, on Monday this week, in the United Nations, on the side of dictators in Russia, North Korea and Belarus. It seems that, whether you choose to invade Ukraine or kill 18,000 children in Gaza, you can now do so with impunity. In the absence of any rules-based order, anarchy will ensue. I suggest that anarchy and chaos in a world with more than 12,000 nuclear warheads poses a real existential threat to humanity.
For those who still believe in a rules-based order—as I suspect all of us in the chamber do—now is the time to ensure that we are, at a minimum, complying with international law and supporting its equal application across the world. That is only one reason why I support calls to halt all arms sales to Israel.
Let me remind members that Israel is a nation that is currently headed by a man who is wanted by the International Criminal Court for war crimes including using starvation as a method of warfare. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is also wanted for crimes against humanity including murder, persecution and other inhumane acts. How can we possibly claim to be a bastion of democracy and a standard bearer of international law and human rights when we are supplying weapons to the man who the highest court in the world has demanded face trial for war crimes? We must choose accountability, not complicity.
I just touched on what I think is the legal case for why we should end arms sales to Israel. Let me end my contribution by mentioning the moral case. The Conservative amendment mentions Israel’s right to self-defence but nothing about the Palestinians’ right to self-defence. There is no right to self-defence for those such as my wife’s 95-year-old grandmother, who was kicked out of her house in 1948 alongside more than 700,000 other Palestinians. Their homes were given away by the British and their land occupied by Israel. There is no right to self-defence for those who have lived under armed occupation for decades and who continue to see the eradication of their land and the erasure of their culture and their identity as a people.
Is there anyone who sincerely believes that Israel’s retaliation to those horrific attacks on 7 October 2023 has been proportionate in its self-defence? Was Israel defending itself from five-year-old Hind Rajab when it massacred her with 335 bullets? Was Israel defending itself from two-year-old Laila al-Khatib when an Israeli sniper shot and killed her while she was eating dessert with her grandparents? Was Israel defending itself from four-day-old twins Ayssel and Asser when killing them in an air strike while their father was registering their births?
That is not self-defence—it is slaughter, and our arms companies, our Governments and our nations must play no part in it.
15:25