Campaign and petition email responses

Stop Israel’s Forcible Transfer of Palestinians for Masafer Yatta

Thank you for writing to me on such an urgent and serious issue.

On 4th May 2022, Israel’s High Court ruled that the residents of 8 Palestinian villages in Masafer Yatta can be evicted, paving the way for over a thousand Palestinians to be evacuated from their homes, the largest eviction of Palestinians since the 1970s.

This ruling sets a worrying precedent if the state of affairs wasn’t already troubling enough.

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

SNP MPs used every opportunity they have had in Parliament to ask the UK government to put pressure on the Israeli government to prevent this human rights abuse from taking place, and to use mechanisms at the United Nations to halt this process.

As recently as the 13th of December 2022, SNP MP Tommy Sheppard, asked the Minister for the Foreign Office “Is it not time to step up the diplomatic pressure on Israel to ensure that it abides by international law and upholds the rights of Palestinians?”

This received a non-response from the UK Government.

The eviction of Palestinian families from Masafer Yatta does not improve prospects for negotiating a two-state solution in the Middle East, something we all want to see and supposedly something the UK government wants to see.

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 does little to detail what concrete steps the UK Government are urgently taking to see real change realised.

What is happening in the village of Masafer Yatta speaks to a wider problem. The instances of the Israeli authorities demolishing homes and evicting families from their land to make way for military training exercises in the Southern Hebron Hills is shocking, but it is not surprising.

For too long we haven’t called a spade a spade when it comes to the horrors that are state-sponsored in Israel and the Occupied Territories. There has been an international blindfold that has been created when it comes to the plight of the Palestinian people and for accountability and change to happen.

The UK government must fully acknowledge that crimes are taking place at the hands of the Israeli authorities.

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 former 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 called 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 vicious acts of dispossession as a deliberate attempt to re-engineer the demographic make-up of occupied Territories.

SNP MPs use every opportunity to raise this issue with the UK Government. In the Chamber of the House of Commons, my colleague Alan Brown MP asked the Minister of State for the Middle East (a dedicated Ministerial position that has since been axed by the Foreign Office):

“When will the UK Government actually take actions to demonstrate that violations of international law do indeed have consequences?”

SNP MPs, including the SNP’s then 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.

2023 should be and must be a turning point for the Israel/Palestine conflict and we at the SNP will steadfastly do everything we can in Westminster to change the UK government intransigence on this issue.