[Mark Pritchard in the Chair] — Backbench Business — Palestine

Part of the debate – in Westminster Hall at 4:30 pm on 1 December 2014.

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Photo of Grahame Morris Grahame Morris Labour, Easington 4:30, 1 December 2014

If my hon. Friend does not mind, I am just going to finish this point. I have been generous in giving way.

Although the EU and UK Ministers have criticised Israel, it is clear from the 2012 “Trading Away Peace” report that the EU imports 15 times more goods from illegal Israeli settlements than from Palestinian enterprises. We have reached a contradictory situation in which we economically sustain the very obstacles to peace—the illegal settlements—that we so often condemn as individuals in government.

Settlement products are the proceeds of crime. They are illicit goods, the product of a brutal occupation and the exploitation of the occupied and their resources. By trading with those who produce them, we financially encourage them. Those settlements are built on the foundations of immense suffering—that of the Palestinians who have seen their homes destroyed, have been expelled from their own land and are living under brutal oppression—yet we make the illegal settlement enterprise profitable for the occupying power. That seems to me a gross injustice. Personally, I do not think that we should have to boycott settlement goods; we should not be allowed to buy them in the first place. The UK Government should work at EU level to ensure that such products of suffering and exploitation are banned.

On the point made by my hon. Friend the Member for Oldham East and Saddleworth, there is overwhelming evidence that we should also end the arms trade with Israel, based on United Nations evidence that serious breaches of international law occurred before, during and after the most recent assault on Gaza. One need not be an expert in international law to know that shooting tank shells at children sleeping in UN shelters, launching missiles at small children playing on the beach in Gaza and bombing sick and injured patients lying in hospital beds are immoral and criminal acts. The UK should have no part in them or in supplying arms and components that allow such things to happen.

I will give way now to my hon. Friend Ian Austin, who was keen to intervene.