Meeting of the Parliament 03 September 2025
The Scottish Conservatives are open to supporting the motion that is before the Parliament today. It has been quite carefully drafted; one can add different interpretations to it. Whether that is to accept all the content from the Scottish Government is a separate matter. We will be listening with care to the way in which the debate is conducted and in relation to any amendments that might be passed.
The chamber is once again debating the middle east, a region that is too often characterised by tragedy, and today by the conflict in Gaza. We remember that we are not speaking in abstract terms but of human lives—of Israeli families who live under the terror of rocket fire and of Palestinian families who are trapped between the cruelty of Hamas and the failure of international institutions to protect them.
Every statistic that we hear represents men, women and children whose lives have been torn apart, and far too many of those statistics are the lives of men, women and children in Gaza.
Let me be absolutely clear in the context of the unfolding of this event that Israel, like any sovereign nation, had the right—indeed, the duty—to defend its citizens. Hamas is not a government and it is not a liberation movement; it is, as Anas Sarwar recognised, a terrorist organisation. Its massacre of Israeli civilians, its kidnapping of the innocent and its relentless rocket fire are not acts of resistance; they are acts of terror. No responsible state could have sat idly by in the face of such atrocities.
As I posed in my question to the First Minister, we should also reflect on the language that is used to describe the conflict. When Russia invaded Ukraine, it was rightly called Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, and when Iraq was invaded, what was spoken of was Saddam Hussein’s war against Kuwait, but when Israel is attacked and forced to respond, it is too often referred to as Israel’s war. Rightly or wrongly, that phrase implies for many, and particularly for the Jewish community, that an entire people—the Jewish people—are responsible for the decisions of their Government. That is a dangerous double standard.