by Melanie Phillips, Jewish Chronicle
Parliament should be investigating the hostility, double standards and deafness to facts when it comes to Israel
A recent hearing of the Commons Foreign Affairs Committee demonstrated that Israel’s defenders and its critics appear to inhabit entirely different planets.
The committee, which was taking evidence on “the Israeli-Palestinian conflict”, had invited two of Israel’s doughtiest champions, the lawyer Natasha Hausdorff and the writer Jonathan Sacerdoti, to address it.
For the committee’s chair, the Labour MP Emily Thornberry, this appeared to be not so much a fact-finding exercise as a tribunal in which Hausdorff and Sacerdoti were in the dock.
Thornberry asked Sacerdoti: “How do you see ideally Gaza in ten years’ time? What would be a good outcome?” Sacerdoti replied that this would be a de-radicalised Gaza whose inhabitants were no longer committed to genocidal acts.
But as Thornberry’s subsequent challenges to him demonstrated, the only good outcome for her seemed to be a Palestinian state.
When it was Hausdorff’s turn, sparks really flew. “What’s the optimistic future for a Palestinian mother in Gaza, what’s the best thing that could happen?” asked Thornberry.
In any moral universe, the best thing that could happen to such a mother would be for her to stop telling her children that their duty was to murder Jews and martyr themselves in the process, as so many Palestinian Arab women boast of doing.
Hausdorff, legal director of UK Lawyers for Israel, laid out fact after legal fact puncturing the falsehoods that are inspiring hatred of Israel and attacks on Jews. This provoked a hail of belligerent interruptions by Thornberry. Fury boiled over after another committee member, Richard Foord, asked whether Israel’s strike in October 2023 on the al Yarmouk neighbourhood, which he said killed 81 women and children, was justified in international humanitarian law.