Campaign and petition email responses

Statement on displaced Palestinians from their land

We have already seen that some demolitions have taken place since the court ruling as the remaining families await a likely similar ordeal.

SNP MPs will use every opportunity they have in Parliament to ask the UK government to put pressure on the Israeli government to prevent this human rights abuse from taking place, but we know that this Conservative Government wants to cosy up to the Israeli Government to seek a Free Trade Deal with the country as soon as possible, rather than confront them with any hard truths.

The most recent vacuous statement on this specific ordeal by a UK Foreign Office Minister says little to detail what concrete steps the UK Government are urgently taking to see real change realised.

The levels of settler violence have gone up massively in the last few years. Violence and the dispossession of Palestinians from their homes are systemic across the occupied Palestinian territory. Israeli soldiers are acting with impunity, and these are not isolated incidents but are the day in, day out realities for Palestinians, whose lives and livelihoods are targeted by Israeli settlers, backed up by the Israeli state. To make way for the settlements, Palestinian homes and property are liable to demolition. Whole families—men, women and children—are forced from their homes and land, even in the midst of winter storms.

We in the SNP believe that the UK government in Westminster is denying that there are systematic issues amounting to state-sponsored acts of dispossession and ethnic cleansing.

We also believe that this Tory Government in Westminster is frustrating international progress to see a two-state solution realised. Revelations have surfaced that the Prime Minister Boris Johnson criticised the International Criminal Court and opposed their investigation into alleged war crimes in the Israeli-occupied territories in a letter to the Conservative Friends of Israel lobby group.

Actions such as these only serve to embed, rather than eradicate the violence and do nothing to promote peace. The UK government should demonstrate consistency in upholding equal rights and international law. This entails holding to account anyone who breaks that law.

The SNP have urged for unfettered access to be granted to the ICC to carry out its own investigation without hindrance and we call upon the Israeli government to reconsider its position of non-cooperation with this vital impartial probe.

On the annexation of land through demolition, let me be categorically clear, the SNP see these systematic and viscous acts of dispossession as a deliberate attempt to re-engineer the demographic make-up of occupied Territories.

SNP MPs, including the SNP’s Foreign Affairs spokesperson Alyn Smith MP, have signed an open letter calling for urgent and effective measures to put an end to future annexations of Palestinian land in East Jerusalem and the West Bank.

We at the SNP will steadfastly do everything we can in Westminster to change the UK government intransigence on this issue.