The below are speeches made in favour of the motion by the Lib Dem Friends of Palestine executive committee and our allies, as well as the prepared speech by our executive member Miranda Pinch.
The motion was passed. See the full text here: https://www.libdems.org.uk/conference/motions/autumn-2024/f32
LDFP Chair, Cllr Anne-Marie Simpson
Speech commences at 21m11s.
Hello conference, I am going to ask you to look past the numbers written down, the 40,000 plus Palestinians killed, the 1100 plus killed in the 7 October attacks, the 100 plus hostages and see a person YOU know.
For some of you, this is painfully real. I am sorry.
Think of your son, your daughter, your mother your father, your sister your brother. Your grandmother, grandfather, cousin, your aunt, your uncle. Your friend, your neighbour, your work colleagues, your school mates. Gone, suddenly, traumatically, brutally, tearing your heart, mind and soul apart.
The apocalyptic scenes coming out every day from Gaza, the escalating violent images and destruction from the illegally occupied West Bank, the hostage families demonstrating on the streets of Israel can leave us in no doubt that we need an immediate bilateral ceasefire – we needed it over 11 months ago.
For Gaza this cannot come soon enough, with over 2million people displaced and zero safe zones.
Nobody who heard it can forget the frightened, young voice of 6 year old Hind Rijab, trapped in car with her dead relatives, pleading to be rescued in an over 3 hour phone call to the Red Crescent, before she too was killed.
The Liberal Democrat Party should call on Israel to lift the ban on foreign journalists accessing the Gaza strip. Until the media has access, it should be assumed that Israel has acts it wishes to hide, which means the conduct of genocide is all the more plausible.
The role of Iran in destabilising the region is noted. We should also call out Netanyahu for actively working to prevent peace and for his government’s role in destabilising the region.
If Netanyahu abandoned his belief that Jerusalem is exclusively the eternal and indivisible capital of Israel and that Judea and Samaria are part of Israel, and instead recognised the Palestinian people, and their inalienable right to self-determination, the world would come together to construct the two state solution, based on the rights of each party under international law. Iran would then find itself completely isolated.
The Israeli governments words and deeds have led to a marked increase in Settler violence against palestinians which goes unchecked by the IDF, so I welcome the call on government to uphold international law and international courts, ban trade with illegal Israeli settlements, and bring sanctions against anyone in the settler movement that uses or incites violence.
The motion calls on government to end the use of arbitrary administrative detention of Palestinians by the IDF, where prisoners are held without charge or trial, however it fails to mention the systematic torture of Palestinian prisoners, particularly under this policy, including sexual violence and rape.
Israeli politicians have explicitly defended and justified this.
This goes well beyond anything we would consider to be ‘legitimate political differences’, and is not something we can or should tolerate from a state we call a friend and ally. These human rights violations have been well documented by NGOs and most recently in Israeli human rights organisation, B’tselem’s report, “Welcome to Hell”.
It is right to call for the immediate recognition of the State of Palestine and press for a two state solution. We have long understood, as the International Court of Justice has confirmed, that the occupation of the Palestinian Territories is illegal, not just immoral. Israeli and Palestinians alike deserve peace, equality and justice – including an end to the occupation. It is time for the Palestinian people to be recognised and treated as equal human beings and not just numbers.
Please support this motion. Thank you, conference.
Peter Price, former MEP and Co-Chair of the Euro-Arab Group in the European Parliament