PARLIAMENT piled pressure on the government to finally act over Israel’s genocide in Gaza and aggression in Lebanon today.
MPs across the Commons demanded that ministers halt arms sales to Israel, sanction its far-right leaders and immediately recognise a Palestinian state.
After several days of murderous outrages in Gaza and Lebanon, political patience with the government’s purely rhetorical criticisms appeared to be running out.
Labour and Liberal Democrat MPs queued to press Foreign Office Minister Anneliese Dodds to take a tougher line, as both parties’ overt back-bench support for Israel appears to have disappeared.
But Ms Dodds, standing in for Foreign Secretary David Lammy, continued to prevaricate and cling to the line that the government was doing everything it possibly could, calling for ceasefires without committing to stopping arms sales.
The debate was promoted by an urgent question from Andy McDonald, who told MPs that the sight of a “patient burning to death while on an IVF drip” in al-Aqsa hospital “would be the abiding image of this genocide.”
The image was not one that Ms Dodds was prepared to acknowledge as a war crime, however.
Mr McDonald pointed out that in Gaza “a classroom full of children has died every day for a year.” He demanded a halt to the sale of F-35 jet components to Israel and told Ms Dodds “that recognition of a Palestinian state is a prerequisite for peace, not a by-product of it and it is time Britain joined the global majority” in doing so.
Ms Dodds agreed that the Palestinians had the right to statehood and said the government would recognise that when it seemed expedient, without admitting that this would be when Washington gave permission.
Leeds East MP Richard Burgon told MPs that Israel had “burned people alive, killed children and fired on UN peacekeepers,” demanding “sanctions on arms, trade and officials.”
Mr Burgon’s Commons motion demanding sanctions over Israel’s illegal occupation of Palestinian territories has now attracted support from 51 MPs from eight different parties.
Other MPs pressed for the government to sanction the two overtly fascist ministers in Israel’s governing coalition, Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich, after former foreign secretary David Cameron revealed he had been preparing to do just that in the last weeks of the Tory government.
The mood was caught by presently independent MP Imran Hussein, who told Ms Dodds to “end the empty words, we need concrete steps” and Labour’s Debbie Abrahams, who pointed out that “voices across the house” were saying “current action is not enough” and that Israel’s misconduct “cannot be allowed to continue.”
Islington North MP Jeremy Corbyn demanded to know why, “if we condemn the actions of the IDF killing people in hospitals and schools, we are still supplying weapons to carry out these activities.”
And Poplar and Limehouse MP Apsana Begum, like Mr Burgon presently denied the Labour whip, said she was “appalled” at the “inconsistency with which international law and human rights” are applied by the government, including its failure to end arms sales or express clear condemnation of Israel.
Flo Eshalomi, Labour MP for Vauxhall, acknowledged that “calling on the Israeli government to change is not going to get anywhere,” but that was all Ms Dodds had to offer.
She repeatedly called out the “intolerable death and destruction in Gaza and Lebanon” yet the government continues to, in fact, passively tolerate it.
Indeed, Liberal Democrat MP Andrew George pointed out that PM Sir Keir Starmer “says he stands with the far-right government in Israel” and had deployed military action to protect it but done nothing “to defend the innocent people of Gaza and Lebanon.”
Defence of Israeli conduct was largely left to the hard-right fringe of Reform UK and the Democratic Unionist Party, joined by a few Tories but far from all.
Conservative backbencher Kit Malthouse urged ministers to “stop hand-wringing and take active positive steps to enforce international law and bring about a ceasefire.”
