An affecting account of four years in Israel and Palestine
I had decided to take my young family there to show them where my Palestinian father grew up under the British Mandate and see if we could find the home he'd lost in 1948. But I was also keen to ensure my children had a balanced view and understood the whole story, educating them about what the Jewish people had been through.
I had come from Jordan via Bethlehem and Ramallah and been so touched by the generosity of the Palestinians I met who, despite living under very difficult conditions, were such wonderful hosts, inviting my family in to chat and share delicious home-cooked food. But arriving in lush Jerusalem from the barren West Bank, where Palestinians are treated like cattle, penned in by the wall and multiple checkpoints, was a striking contrast. After walking a few steps through the centre of Jerusalem with its gleaming shops, surrounded by people ostensibly living their best life, I broke down and cried at the injustice of it all.
Growing up in London, people would sometimes tell me they were going on holiday to Israel. 'Have you been?' they would ask. 'It's wonderful.' They didn't know my background, but I was left shocked that they only saw one side of it.
What I loved about Bethan's article is that over the last four years she has immersed herself in life there and deeply felt the positions of both Israelis and Palestinians. If we are going to make progress and reach a fair outcome, we have to put ourselves in each other's shoes and deeply understand each other's experiences.Alexandra LucasLondon
Jonathan Freedland describes Hamas's actions on 7 October 2023 as 'slaughter', while Israel's bombardment of Gaza ever since is just 'killing' Palestinians (A biblical hatred is engulfing both sides in the Gaza conflict – and blinding them to reason, 23 May). The difference in outrage portrayed in these words reflects the lack of equivalence between the life of an Israeli and that of a Palestinian which has been at the heart of the conflict since the start.Chris MatthewsLondon
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The Guardian
an hour ago
- The Guardian
Recognised Palestinian state could develop disputed gas resources, expert says
Recognition of Palestine as a state would put beyond doubt that the Palestinian Authority (PA) is entitled to develop the natural gas resources of the Gaza Marine field, according to one of the experts that worked on the stalled project. Michael Barron, the author of a new book on Palestine's untapped gas reserves, has suggested the field could generate $4bn (£3bn) in revenue at current prices and it is reasonable that the PA could receive $100m a year over 15 years. He said the revenues 'would not turn the Palestinians into the next Qataris or Singaporeans, but it would be their own revenue and not aid, on which the Palestinian economy remains dependent'. Plans to develop the field have a near 30-year history, during which time legal controversies over ownership have stalled exploration. A law firm representing Palestinian human rights groups sent a warning letter to the Italian state-owned firm ENI that it should not exploit the gas fields in an area known as Zone G, where six licences were awarded by Israel's energy ministry. In their letter, the lawyers claim that roughly 62% of the zone lies in maritime areas claimed by Palestine and, as such, 'Israel cannot have validly awarded you any exploration rights and you cannot validly have acquired any such rights'. Palestine declared its maritime borders, including its exclusive economic zone, when it acceded to the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) in 2015, and set out a detailed claim in 2019. Israel is not a signatory to UNCLOS. Barron said recognition of Palestine, particularly by states with large oil firms registered in their jurisdiction, would effectively end the legal ambiguity, and provide the PA with not only a new secure source of income, but regular supplies of energy independent of Israel. Since the legal letter, ENI has told pressure groups in Italy that 'licences have not yet been issued and no exploratory activities are in progress'. Another group, Global Witness, claims the East Mediterranean Gas pipeline that runs parallel to the Gaza coastline is unlawful since it runs through Palestinian waters, and is not providing any revenue to the PA. The 56-mile (90km) pipeline transports gas from Ashkelon in Israel to Arish in Egypt, where it is then processed into liquefied natural gas for export, including to Europe. 'The Oslo Accords agreed in 1993 clearly give the Palestinian National Authority jurisdiction over territorial waters, the subsoil, power to legislate over oil and gas exploration and to award licences to do so,' Barron said. 'Control over natural resources was an important element of [the] state-building agenda of the Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat. Israeli exploitation of Palestinian resources was and remains a central part of the conflict.' Gas was discovered in the Gaza Marine field in 2000 in a joint venture owned by the BG Gas group, a giant privatised off-shoot of British Gas and the Palestinian Consolidated Contractors Company. The plan was for the gas to be used by the sole power station on the Gaza strip to end the territory's perennial energy shortages. Barron argues in his book – The Gaza Marine Story - that the fate of the project is a microcosm of how Israel worked to increase Palestinian dependence on Israel while at the same time trying to separate Palestinians from Israelis. The project was dogged by issues of commercial viability and an Israeli court ruling that the waters were a 'no-man's water', partly because the PA was not a sovereign entity with unambiguous powers to award licences. The court also did not resolve whether the rights to Palestinian territorial waters clearly provided for in the Oslo Accords included a Palestinian 'exclusive economic zone', a zone that normally extends 200 miles off the coast. The accords were only intended to be an interim arrangement before full statehood and so did not delineate the full maritime border. Territorial waters are normally defined as only 12 or 20 miles off the coast and Israel always argued that any licence for Gaza Marine 20 miles off the Gaza coast should be seen as a gift to the PA by Israel, and not a right. After Hamas took control the Gaza strip in 2007, Israel did not want the revenue to fall into its hands, so it blocked the development, prompting the BG group to put the project on hold and then eventually to quit. In June 2023 Israel approved plans for an Egyptian firm EGAS to develop the field, only for the war in Gaza to start. Gaza Marine is estimated to contain only 30 billion cubic metres (BCM) of natural gas, which is a small fraction of the more than 1,000 BCM contained in Israel's own territorial waters. Barron argued that Israel has its own gas supplies and so long as a Palestinian state with unified governance is recognised, Israel will have no motive or legal right to block Palestine exploiting its single greatest natural resource. The whole controversy around private sector investment in Israel's acknowledged occupation of Palestine moved centre stage with a report published last week by the UN special rapporteur on Palestine, Francesca Albanese, warning corporations against sustaining what has been declared an unlawful occupation by the international court of justice (ICJ). She claims ICJ decisions place on corporate entities a prima facie responsibility 'to not engage and/or to withdraw totally and unconditionally from any associated dealings with Israel, and to ensure that any engagement with Palestinians enables their self-determination'. Her claim has been rejected wholesale by Israel.
The Guardian
2 hours ago
- The Guardian
From Gaza to Ukraine, peace always seems just out of reach – and the reason isn't only political
The quest for peace in major conflicts has rarely been so desperate and so seemingly futile. In Gaza, talk of ceasefires, truces and pauses typically ends in tears. In Ukraine, the war is now well into its fourth year with no end in sight, despite Donald Trump's new 50-day deadline. Syria burns anew. Sudan's horrors never cease. Last year, state-based conflicts reached a peak – 61 across 36 countries. It was the highest recorded total since 1946. This year could be worse. The sheer scale and depravity of war crimes and other conflict-zone atrocities is extraordinary. The deliberate, illegal targeting and terrorising of civilians, the killing, maiming and abduction of children, and the use of starvation, sexual violence, torture and forced displacement as weapons of war have grown almost routine. Israel's killing last week of children queueing for water in Gaza was shocking, made doubly so by the fact that scenes like this have become so commonplace. 'Blessed are the peacemakers,' said Saint Matthew, but today, impartial mediators are in wickedly short supply. Surely everyone agrees: murdering and massacring innocents is morally indefensible. So why on earth is it allowed to continue? This same question is shouted out loud by grief-stricken parents in Rafah, Kyiv and Darfur, by UN relief workers, in pulpits, pubs and parliaments, in street protests and at Glastonbury. Why? WHY? The curse of moral relativism provides a clue. The fact is, not everyone does agree. What is absolutely morally indefensible to one group of people is relatively permissible or justifiable to another. This has held true throughout human history. Yet today's geopolitically and economically divided world is also ethically and morally fractured to a possibly unparalleled degree. Agreed, observed standards – what the American writer David Brooks terms a 'permanent moral order' – are lacking. The collapse of the international rules-based order is mirrored by this crisis of the moral order. Without accepted universal principles, the peaceful settlement of conflicts, foreign or domestic, becomes highly problematic. 'We have no objective standard by which to determine that one view is right and another view is wrong. So public arguments just go on indefinitely, at greater levels of indignation and polarisation,' Brooks argues. What's left is coercion and manipulation. No individual better personifies the moral-relativist confusion permeating contemporary life than Trump, the master coercer and manipulator. He believes, for example, that he deserves the 2025 Nobel peace prize. Yet Trump, in collusion with Israel, did bomb Iran recently, and killed numerous civilians. In his morally muddled view, that illegal act of aggression was justified because it restored the peace he had just broken. In a world wedded to war, Alfred Nobel's venerable peace prize looks increasingly anachronistic – and politicised. Barack Obama won it in 2009 for doing nothing. If only Trump would do nothing for the next four years. Worse, he has been nominated by Israel's Benjamin Netanyahu, arch foe to peace and morality. It might be preferable to replace the prize with a Warlord of the Year award – and put a bounty on the winner's head. Making a moral case for peace can be confusing, even controversial; ask any church or mosque leader. For many people, it seems, morality is a dirty word these days. It's fungible, negotiable and emotive – a matter primarily of individual choice and cultural belonging, not of duty, obligation or fidelity to a higher law. How else to explain why so many Americans turn a blind eye to Trump's astounding moral turpitude, illustrated again by the Jeffrey Epstein affair? Social identity trumps social conscience. Much of the Russian public suffers from a similarly chronic moral deficiency when contemplating Vladimir Putin's devastation of Ukraine. Intimidated dissenters avoid the subject. Others believe the disinformation fairytales spun by regime-controlled media. The majority inhabits a state of profound ignorance about the crimes committed in their name. When it's over, Russians may claim, like Germans in 1945, that they didn't know. Amorality is mitigated by mendacity. Israel's denial of peace in Palestine also comes at a high moral cost. Its reputation is in shreds, its prime minister has an arrest warrant issued against him for war crimes. Antisemitism is surging internationally as a direct result. How can so many Israelis live with their army's Gaza rampage, with the spectre of 58,000 corpses? Some say it would all stop if only the last hostages were freed; others that all Palestinians are Hamas. Some on the far right, forgetting their country's history, suggest the idea of a Palestinian nation is fiction. They want all 2 million of Gaza's residents caged in one huge concentration camp. Many Israelis passionately disagree. They desire peace. Their failure to force a change in government policy is moral as well as political. Also at fault are Americans, Russians and all in Britain and Europe, politicians and the public, who fail to speak out, who look the other way, who excuse the inexcusable for reasons of state or personal comfort – or who claim that murder and mayhem, wherever they occur, are relatively morally tolerable if committed, as argued by Saint Thomas Aquinas, in the prosecution of a 'just war'. This very modern failure, this retreat into subjective, made-to-measure morality, this renunciation of shared responsibility, is reversible. Universal ethical standards still apply. They are defined by the Geneva conventions, by other secular instruments of international law, through religious faith and through the social contract. They should be respected and strengthened. They are necessary, sometimes inconvenient truths. Ordinary people in ordinary times may pick and choose their moral battles. But ending major conflicts, and easing the suffering of millions, is a moral imperative that demands a determined collective response from all concerned. That way lies peace. That way lies salvation. Simon Tisdall is a Guardian foreign affairs commentator
The National
2 hours ago
- The National
Backbench MPs should remain loyal to constituents, not parties
The very use of that term speaks volumes about how the party leadership may regard both its troops and any perceived dissension from the party line. This follows a year-long freeze of her Labour credentials dating from a letter Diane wrote to The Observer in early 2023. It also follows the suspension of seven other 'miscreants' who had the temerity to suggest the two-child cap should be history and had no place under a Labour Government. And, of course, the massive recent rebellion over changes to welfare eligibility. Featuring, among very many others, all of the latest MPs to lose the whip. READ MORE: 'Time to take action': What it was like at the national Palestine demo in Edinburgh At which stage, the Labour leadership earnestly assured its flock that it would listen more intently to its backbenchers and absolutely didn't regard the latter as mere 'voter fodder'. Abbott's letter said, not very controversially, that the kind of lifelong racism encountered by black and brown people, differs from the kind of prejudice suffered by Irish people, Travellers and Jewish people. 'Any fair-minded person will know what I meant,' she later said in a statement to BBC Newsnight. Indeed. Surely a textbook example of 'we ken whit she meant'. (Image: House of Commons/UK Parliament/PA Wire) In an interview for James Naughtie's Reflections programme last Thursday, she said she had no regrets about these remarks despite having apologised for them at the time. She reiterated that face colour is an immediate red rag to racists in a way that their identity probably isn't for other minorities. Cue portions of the Labour roof falling on her head. Again. It may be that her real crime was a historical closeness to former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn. At any rate, the Mother Of The House has now been unceremoniously flung oot the Labour house. You might think that a government with a large majority of seats on under 34% of votes cast in a poll where fewer than 60% of electors bothered to use their vote might display some humility. Rather than take a sledgehammer to crack people denounced as irritating nutcases. Especially since their MPs – more than half of them in parliament for the first time – are there to represent a constituency where two-thirds of electors either didn't vote for them, or simply didn't vote. The Labour Party's draconian attitude to dissenters suggests complacency and a tendency for overreaction. It also suggests they hope their hardline stance will result in fewer Labour MPs willing to take risks. Not so much the firm smack of government as political punishment beatings. From a Scottish perspective, the most instructive victim is Brian Leishman, the luckless Labour MP for Alloa and Grangemouth. Grangemouth, you will know, was Scotland's solitary refinery, a place the Scottish Labour leader promised to save during the election campaign. Leishman, unsurprisingly, thought he would therefore be on safe ground when he vocally supported the workforce. Alas, that, plus his stance on welfare reform, meant he would instead get his jotters. Without warning. He said, thereafter, that he hadn't been elected to make people poorer. He also argued that he'd been elected 'to be a voice for my constituents across [[Alloa]] and [[Grangemouth]]'. Not, it seems, if that voice fails to chime with the latest stance of his leader. Anas Sarwar's silence on this matter, at the time of writing, has been positively deafening. READ MORE: 55 arrested in Westminster as protests grow over Palestine Action ban The [[Alloa]] and [[Grangemouth]] MP says that the Scottish Labour leader has not been in touch since a WhatsApp message last January. You might have thought he'd pick up the phone over Grangemouth at least, if not over the latest party row which saw one of his own Scots Labour representatives publicly humiliated. However, Leishman says he still supports Sir Keir's leadership and 'I will be out campaigning to get Scottish Labour candidates elected for Holyrood next year. I'll be doing everything I possibly can to get Anas into Bute House'. Each to their own and all that. Also interesting is the role and function of MPs of all parties. They don't have a statutory one, but they do have a code of conduct based on seven principles of 'selflessness, integrity, objectivity, honesty, accountability, openness and leadership.' However, the code also acknowledges the challenges faced by MPs when the needs and views of their constituents come into conflict with those of the party whose rosette they sported on election night. Or, as the code puts it: 'As members of a political party, MPs are expected to support and promote the policies and principles of their party. However, this should not come at the expense of their duties to their constituents or the wider public interest.' So let's suppose that the chap representing the workforce at Grangemouth was doing little more than exercising his duty to his constituents and the wider public interest. Not even to mention demonstrating integrity objectivity, and accountability. The code does understand the complexity of the MP's role in a way their parties may not: 'At times a constituent's demands may conflict with party policy and your MP will have to decide where their first loyalty should lie.' And woe betide any MP if their first loyalty is not to their party, it seems. Thus far, the people who found themselves minus the Labour whip were, to a man and woman, all demonstrating their commitment to what used to be thought of as traditional Labour values. For other quite mouthy MPs like the usually admirable Jess Phillips there was instead a plea for party unity and a respect for party discipline. So says the MP who resigned from the Labour front bench in 2023 over the carnage in Gaza, having backed an SNP-instigated vote on a ceasefire. Then she said: 'On this occasion, I must vote with my constituents, my head, and my heart which has felt as if it were breaking over the last four weeks with the horror of the situation in Israel and Palestine.' This time, the tune seems to have changed and she says: 'Constantly taking to the airwaves and slagging off your own government – I have to say, what did you think was going to happen?' Maybe, Jess, they hadn't realised voting for the wider public interest shouldn't be a hanging offence in a party which once described itself as 'a broad church'. Or, as Abbott wrote on a social media post: 'Silencing dissent is not leadership. It's control.' But voting with your constituents, your head and your heart is not apparently an option for others whose inner voice tells them their party has simply got it wrong. Angela Rayner, one time darling of the Labour left, confined herself to saying that the Abbott situation presented 'a real challenge for the party' (sure is)! READ MORE: The Chancellor's words don't line up with her actions Rayner is an enigmatic case in point. She was, after all, a prime mover in getting the party to admit Abbott as a Labour candidate after her last long suspension. Labour's very own working-class woman has obviously decided that she can exert more influence as a deputy leader than a serial rebel with a number of causes. You might think that she had rather more in common with Abbott than, for instance, the current Chancellor. But for heavens sake, don't say so out loud if you have a Labour Party card about your person. The moral of this latest debacle is that if you get elected to parliament as a Labour candidate, please be sure to check in your conscience at the door. It has no place in the chamber these days.
