My Lords, I join with other noble Lords in thanking my noble friend the Minister for his powerful and obviously heartfelt opening remarks.
As soon as I heard about the vile, racist pogrom perpetrated by Hamas, I WhatsApped a Jewish friend who lives here in London and whom I had got to know on a March of the Living trip to Auschwitz-Birkenau and other concentration camps a few years ago. I told him how sorry I was about the tragic loss of life in Israel. He replied to say that he had already flown out and re-joined his IDF unit the day after Hamas’s horrific, barbaric butchery. To a further WhatsApp, he replied:
““Even though you are far away, your prayers and words of encouragement are felt here”.
We may be far away, but we should know that what we say in this Chamber today will be felt throughout not just our own Jewish community but also in Israel. Our Jewish brothers and sisters need and deserve our support at such an unbearably painful and traumatic time so, like other noble Lords, I am grateful for the opportunity this debate provides to express mine. In doing so, I am mindful that I cannot possibly know how it feels to be the target of such racist, brutal bloodlust—that I cannot possibly appreciate the horror of knowing that over 6 million of your own people were exterminated in industrialised mass murder within living memory. How can any of us who are not Jewish understand what it feels like to know that your own state, Israel, is the only thing standing between you and extermination simply for being Jewish?
In case we are tempted to dismiss such fears as melodramatic almost 80 years after the liberation of Auschwitz, Hamas has reminded us that this is not theory; it is fact. My pilgrimage of remembrance to Auschwitz-Birkenau—where so many members of my late orthopaedic surgeon’s Jewish family were murdered only 79 years ago this summer—reminded me of what happens when we prevaricate, equivocate and wring our hands in the face of anti-Jewish abomination.
We have probably all heard about the Wannsee conference of January 1942 at which the Final Solution fate of millions of Jews across Europe was sealed, but
how many of us know about the Évian conference held barely three and a half years earlier to discuss the plight of Germany’s persecuted Jewish population and how the rest of the world could help them? It did not help them; instead, it wrung its hands in sympathy and turned its back on them with tragic consequences.
A few weeks ago, parliamentarians were invited to watch a pre-release screening of the powerful film “Golda”, about Golda Meir, the formidable Israeli Prime Minister at the time of the 1973 Yom Kippur War. Some 25 years earlier, immediately after the Évian conference, she had said to the press:
“There is only one thing I hope to see before I die, and that is that my people should not need expressions of sympathy anymore”.
If the post-Nuremberg pledge of “never again” is not to be rendered meaningless by Hamas’s savagery in the largest single loss of Jewish life since the Holocaust, we have to recognise that warm words of sympathy do not suffice, and that Israel must be allowed to get on with the job of destroying the evil that is Hamas as a matter of urgency. Time is of the essence. I fear that a ceasefire would be a gift to the murderers who threaten us and our values as much as they do Israel—whose very right to exist they deny. They hide behind and glory in the suffering of their people.
My friend flew from London to rejoin his unit because he knows what is at stake—Israel’s survival is on the line. The question is: do we? Do we recognise that unless and until Hamas and its puppet masters in Iran are defeated, they remain a threat to us all?
We all in this Chamber and around the UK, I hope, want peace. But for that to happen, we must be prepared to allow Israel to take the necessary practical steps as soon as possible to remove the primary obstacle to peace: Hamas.
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