The resolutions being tabled for debate today in the House of Commons are all available on the Order Paper for the day, which is available here.
The resolutions range from the appropriate demands of the SNP, through the weasel words of Labour, to the government's weak position that will do nothing for the millions who are suffering.
All but the SNP demand, in various ways and with varying hints, that Hamas be removed. This, I think, is why we can be sure that they are not serious.
I condemn what Hamas did and still do, as I once unequivocally condemned what the IRA did, and as I might have done ANC violence at one time.
But, my point by referencing both those situations is obvious. Sinn Fein was the political wing of the IRA, but the First Minister of Northern Ireland is now from that party. The ANC, for better and sometimes for worse, has ruled South Africa for a long time. There was no political solution in either place without involving the heirs to those who committed terror. Nor will there be in Gaza, whether we like it or not.
We can and should condemn Hamas, but to pretend that they have nothing to say about the grievances of the people of Gaza would be absurd.
Until that fact (for a fact, I think it is) can be recognised and a way of bringing people who reflect the agenda of the people of both Gaza and the West Bank into debate can be found, there can be no progress.
Looked at like this, demands that Hamas be removed make no sense, however much they might appropriately be considered terrorists. That is not to apologise for terrorism: that is to reflect the political reality that has given rise to it.
I worry that too many of our politicians seem to think they have a right to dictate who should represent the people of Gaza. They do not. That is for the people of Gaza to decide. And, of course, they may not decide on Hamas, which would be their absolute right. But there will be no peace until their voices are heard. Why is that so hard to understand?
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I’ve ran out of things to say about Gaza.
I’m glad you haven’t.
It’s not just running out of things to say, it’s the impotence of not even having any voice in the appalling policies of the two major parties – literally the absence of democracy in this country has been laid bare over the bodies of those killed (of any ‘side’) in this enduring horror (and I mean 1948 onwards, to include British murdered by Begin and his terrorists).
Thank you and well said, Richard.
You rightly point out the role of politicians.
We should not underestimate the role of their advisers. I find, increasingly and in London and overseas, political advisers are gaining prominence over career diplomats, regulators etc. and even getting these roles traditionally reserved for career officials and career bureaucrats are having to tell politicians what they want to hear. There’s no reward for contradicting them.
The best way to ‘eliminate Hamas’ is to guarantee that the Palestinians have a viable state of their own. Not one where Israel has a say over ‘security matters’ as they do in the West bank and routinely harass Palestinians and forbid them to use certain roads etc.
If people have a viable route available it is usually more appealing than more violence-as we saw in Ireland and South Africa. If people don’t have hope they face a choice of acceptance (capitulation in their eyes) or resorting to more violent means.
The tragedy is that we could well have been there decades ago if the Arab proposal of 2002 had been taken up. Israel and the USA have consistently vetoed UN resolutions for Palestine to be a state. The UK ( along with some other western nations) has usually abstained. I suspect 1) because the US wouldn’t like it if we supported the resolution 2) a powerful internal lobby with a lot of ‘pull’ with the BBC and print media.
The US veto has contributed to the present situation and the Palestinians deserve some reparations. Commencing with stopping US made bombs falling on them.
In my view both Hamas and Likud should be sidelined but that is just me.
Thank you, Ian.
My family is Catholic. Many and friends have visited the Holy Land and are outraged at the harassment of Palestinians, including children going to and from school and our co-religionists to and fro worship. Pilgrims are also prevented from giving business to Palestinians. It’s not just the soldiers, many of whom have accents from Europe, North America and Australia, but settlers, too. The settlers have these accents, too. “Overweight colonists from Brooklyn and London playing at soldiers.”
May I conclude that, as with so much else and as in the past with the ANC, coverage of Hamas, which won the 2006 elections, in the western MSM differs a lot from what one sees in the MSM and alternatives outside the west.
It suits the MSM and its adherents to pretend that Palestinian resistance is really Muslim fundamentalist, i.e. Hamas. How does that explain Christians like George Habash and his family and the PFLP, Nayef Hawatmeh, Leila Khaled and Hanan Ashrawi?
A new generation has been radicalised. The IOF and the west are the best recruiting sergeants for whatever succeeds Hamas.
Sorry to ask: MSM?
Mainstream media
Thank you
I haven’t been there but what you write agrees with what I’ve read. I agree with your conclusion.
The Liberal Democrat deputy leader Layla Moran has a Palestinian Christian mother and some of her family live in Gaza. You may have seen the program Kuenssberg where she was a guest, fairly early on in the war. She told Laura Kuenssberg her family were sheltering in a church and discussing where they might choose to die. I have not heard what happened subsequently. But I hope she can influence the Lib Dems-little has been reported of where they stand. They have only 14 seats but had more votes in 2019 than the SNP-such is our system.
Sunak said today that a ceasefire ‘was in no-one’s interest.’
He seems to have little idea of the real world. It would be in the interest of the people who would not be bombed in the coming weeks. And aid could be distributed -as called for by the ICJ. At the moment they can’t do that effectively and people will soon start to die of non other things without it. The young, the sick and the old dying first. Trauma can disable and kill long after the events which caused it have ceased. Many of the two million will be suffering from PTSD -possibly for life.
Continuing the war to ‘eliminate Hamas’ is futile and counter-productive.
An interesting set of comparisons. The SNP motion is focussed on the present killing and stoping it but doesn’t name Hamas terrorism, though it calls for the release of Hamas hostages. It also does specify what is happening as killing – “the slaughter of innocent civilians”.
One clear and relevant focus, one mistaken silence and one piece of verbal honesty.
The Labour and the Conservative government amendments both refer to Hamas terrorism, in differing degrees of detail – the Conservatives using the word “slaughter”, but both employ passive terms for what is happening now – i.e. actual killing. Labour’s amendment can summon up “intolerable loss of Palestinian life”. Loss? Singular and what? Accidental?
The Conservatives only recognise that in “Gaza….too many innocent civilians have died”. Really? What from?
Both the Labour and Conservative amendments pontificate on “a two state solution”, citing not a single real world step towards it ,save empty declarations and of desirability. For this fantasy flourish they will claim to be seriously addressing the issue – while ignoring the people of Gaza, whose killings they cannot record honestly, nor name their killers.
None of these efforts are perfect – but it is starkly clear which one is serious. Which one will the House endorse? Or will self-interested games playing record the true quality of Westminster?
The answer to the final question in my post seems to be that Westminster is again playing games when what is really needed is serious decision. The Speaker has so changed the rules that his own clerk has registered his disagreement in writing and the SNP, having trustingly given the entire day to the issue (by withdrawing their second debate), has been shafted. Thus, if Labour’s amendment passes, the SNP motion will never be put. Yet without that motion and choice of debate the Commons would have remained silent on the plight of Gaza. Mumbledumb by Thames!
See my latest post…
Your latest post (on the reported Labour strong-arm tactics and the ‘Speaker’) is spot on, Richard. What a tawdry scandal amidst a debate which is going to be, as Mhairi Black reminded the House, drawn over a timescale during which another one hundred Palestinian civilians will die from the effects of this pitiless and pointless war.
I think it was Tony Benn who once said that every terrorist he’d ever met had ended up as President of his country.
The career of the second President of Israel (I think), Yitzhak Ben-Zvi, is instructive.
The West = US, UK, France, Germany, Canada, Australia et al all view Palestine through colonialist eyes. After all, Palestine used to be ruled by the British from 1918 to 1948 under a League of Nations mandate. Now the US has assumed the imperial positin that the once mighty British Empire enjoyed. Therefore the “natives” of a colony must be kept down, kept quiet because the power and glory lies with their masters.
Thank you, Andrea and Bill.
See what Churchill had to say about the Jewish settlement and displacement of Arabs.
I remember an RAF pilot, posted to Iraq in the 1930s, calling the Arabs he was bombing “sewer rats”. This was a documentary, C4 if memory serves, about western involvement in the region around 1990.
Your final sentence reminds me of a letter written to the FT by two British academics a couple of years ago. This was around the time of churches and some government buildings being set on fire by dispossessed natives. The academics pointed out that British based firms and merchants benefitted from that dispossession and this ought to be addressed by the British government (and academia) as much as the Canadian government.
You mention France. One of the biggest cheerleaders for Israel is Bernard Henri Levy. No one ever points where his family made their money and who was dispossessed by that. The celebrity philosopher found running a business rather tiresome, if not troublesome, and a distraction.
I have just sat for a moment, in a break from exam marking, with my head in my hands, desolate at the state of the world. I was born into a ravaged landscape of bombsites and grubby housing, in a poor area with declining economy (Oldham), in 1951. My life has been a benefit from the post-war collective agreement to better the lives of the population as a whole, and to bring peace to Europe. Yes, it was socialism.
All so easily destroyed by greed for money and power, a once viable democracy now shattered, and the greatest threat of all (climate change) ignored – or those protesting, arrested.
So many of us oldies who are aware of the real state of affairs, not the sanitised and confected consumption and exploitation society fed to us by the MSM and polity, must confront a vision of Hell that will be our bequest to our grandchildren (in my case 14,12,8, 6, 2 and Florence at 6 months). My still deeper sadness is for all those children blown apart, shot or starved, yet are merely gross statistics and empty words on a politicians lips.
I only hope that some of the monsters will meet their just end.
Thank you
It is worth noting that Hamas’ precursor the Islamist charity movement Mujama al-Islamiya was supported, enabled and funded by Israel since the 1970s in an attempt to divide Gaza from the West Bank where Yasser Arafat’s secularist Fatah was strong and thus weaken the Palestinians by setting them against each other. Mujama al-Islamiya morphed into Hamas which has received massive funding from Qatar, enabled by Netanyahu.
From Analyst News:
‘In a 2019 Likud party meeting, Netanyahu gloated to his compatriots: “Anyone who wants to thwart the establishment of a Palestinian state has to support bolstering Hamas and transferring money to Hamas. This is part of our strategy — to isolate the Palestinians in Gaza from the Palestinians in the West Bank.” ‘ in order to prevent the two-state solution from coming about.
‘And an Israeli Ministry of Intelligence document published by +972 magazine on Oct. 30 makes it even more explicit. In it, officials refer to the option of the Palestinian Authority taking control of Gaza as the worst possible outcome — because it would remove “one of the central obstacles preventing the establishment of a Palestinian state.” ‘
From Haaretz:
“For over a decade, Netanyahu has lent a hand, in various ways, to the growing military and political power of Hamas. Netanyahu is the one who turned Hamas from a terror organization with few resources into a semi-state body.”
See:
https://www.analystnews.org/posts/how-israel-helped-prop-up-hamas-for-decades
https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2023-10-20/ty-article-opinion/.premium/a-brief-history-of-the-netanyahu-hamas-alliance/0000018b-47d9-d242-abef-57ff1be90000
There are good people who would like to promote peace on both sides, unfortunately they are insulted and shoved aside by the extremists. Anyone interested in reading a very civilized novel centered around two families, one Palestinian, one Israeli both of whom have lost children killed by the other side but still determined to try for peace, read the Apeirogon by Colin McCann.
Until the US stops supporting Israel no matter what this awful violence will continue.