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Sir Gerald Kaufman (Manchester, Gorton, Labour)
House of Commons Debate on Gaza
Thursday, 15 January 2009

http://www.theyworkforyou.com/debates/?id=2009-01-15a.396.0&s=speaker%3A10218#g445.0

I was brought up as an orthodox Jew and a Zionist. On a shelf in our
kitchen, there was a tin box for the Jewish National Fund, into which
we put coins to help the pioneers building a Jewish presence in
Palestine.

I first went to Israel in 1961 and I have been there since more times
than I can count. I had family in Israel and have friends in Israel.
One of them fought in the wars of 1956, 1967 and 1973 and was wounded
in two of them. The tie clip that I am wearing is made from a campaign
decoration awarded to him, which he presented to me.

I have known most of the Prime Ministers of Israel, starting with the
founding Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion. Golda Meir was my friend, as
was Yigal Allon, Deputy Prime Minister, who, as a general, won the
Negev for Israel in the 1948 war of independence.

My parents came to Britain as refugees from Poland. Most of their
families were subsequently murdered by the Nazis in the holocaust. My
grandmother was ill in bed when the Nazis came to her home town of
Staszow. A German soldier shot her dead in her bed.

My grandmother did not die to provide cover for Israeli soldiers
murdering Palestinian grandmothers in Gaza. The current Israeli
Government ruthlessly and cynically exploit the continuing guilt among
gentiles over the slaughter of Jews in the holocaust as justification
for their murder of Palestinians. The implication is that Jewish lives
are precious, but the lives of Palestinians do not count.

On Sky News a few days ago, the spokeswoman for the Israeli army,
Major Leibovich, was asked about the Israeli killing of, at that time,
800 Palestinians�the total is now 1,000. She replied instantly that

"500 of them were militants."

That was the reply of a Nazi. I suppose that the Jews fighting for
their lives in the Warsaw ghetto could have been dismissed as
militants.

The Israeli Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni asserts that her Government
will have no dealings with Hamas, because they are terrorists. Tzipi
Livni's father was Eitan Livni, chief operations officer of the
terrorist Irgun Zvai Leumi, who organised the blowing-up of the King
David hotel in Jerusalem, in which 91 victims were killed, including
four Jews.

Israel was born out of Jewish terrorism. Jewish terrorists hanged two
British sergeants and booby-trapped their corpses. Irgun, together
with the terrorist Stern gang, massacred 254 Palestinians in 1948 in
the village of Deir Yassin. Today, the current Israeli Government
indicate that they would be willing, in circumstances acceptable to
them, to negotiate with the Palestinian President Abbas of Fatah. It
is too late for that. They could have negotiated with Fatah's previous
leader, Yasser Arafat, who was a friend of mine. Instead, they
besieged him in a bunker in Ramallah, where I visited him. Because of
the failings of Fatah since Arafat's death, Hamas won the Palestinian
election in 2006. Hamas is a deeply nasty organisation, but it was
democratically elected, and it is the only game in town. The
boycotting of Hamas, including by our Government, has been a culpable
error, from which dreadful consequences have followed.

The great Israeli Foreign Minister Abba Eban, with whom I campaigned
for peace on many platforms, said:

"You make peace by talking to your enemies."

However many Palestinians the Israelis murder in Gaza, they cannot
solve this existential problem by military means. Whenever and however
the fighting ends, there will still be 1.5 million Palestinians in
Gaza and 2.5 million more on the west bank. They are treated like dirt
by the Israelis, with hundreds of road blocks and with the ghastly
denizens of the illegal Jewish settlements harassing them as well. The
time will come, not so long from now, when they will outnumber the
Jewish population in Israel.

It is time for our Government to make clear to the Israeli Government
that their conduct and policies are unacceptable, and to impose a
total arms ban on Israel. It is time for peace, but real peace, not
the solution by conquest which is the Israelis' real goal but which it
is impossible for them to achieve. They are not simply war criminals;
they are fools.