A hearing last week 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.
Hausdorff replied that no international commentator can give a decided answer to that question because it would require assessing the information that was available to the operatives that undertook that strike in advance of conducting it, which is simply not in the public domain. But both the UK and US governments, she continued, with which Israel shared classified information, had consistently said they do not have concerns about Israel’s approach to humanitarian law with respect to proportionality and targeting.
She was not able to finish her sentence in one go, however, because Thornberry repeatedly interrupted her, exclaiming: “Oh no no no, that’s an extraordinary allegation.” Pointing at Hausdorff, she said, “Be careful what you’re saying.” When Hausdorff pressed on, Thornberry cut in again: “Please answer this question accurately and with care.”
Aside from Thornberry’s confrontational behaviour, something else stood out. For some committee members, there were simply no facts that could dent their certainty that Israel was behaving like a rogue state.
When Hausdorff stated that the IDF observed higher standards of humanitarian law than any other army in the world – a view backed by numerous international military experts – Labour MP Alex Ballinger dismissed this as “outrageous” and “a staggering claim”. And he repeated the allegation by Israel’s enemies that its blockade of aid to Gaza was a clear breach of humanitarian law.
Hausdorff attempted to rebut this with facts and context – a huge amount of aid flooded into Gaza during the ceasefire that would last for months; reports of incipient famine had been found to be baseless; and the blockade was a desperate measure to force the release of the remaining hostages.
This was all swatted aside on the basis that all international legal bodies and aid organisations were saying Israel was behaving atrociously. So was Hausdorff really maintaining that she was right and they were all wrong? Well yes, she was. Because that’s the astonishing reality. And this is why.
There’s now an unchallengeable idea among the educated classes that trans-national legal bodies and laws stand for truth and conscience. Nations are held to be partisan in their own interests. Trans-national bodies are assumed to be disinterested and fair. But that’s not how it works at all.
Trans-national bodies – such as the UN or International Criminal Court – represent a world dominated by tyrannies and dictatorships, many of which want democratic Israel destroyed. That’s why the UN, particularly Unrwa (its agency for Palestinian refugees), seems to have been infiltrated by Hamas, appoints human rights abusers to its Human Rights Council and employs people with a record of antisemitic statements, such as the rapporteur on the “Occupied Palestinian Territories”, Francesca Albanese.
At a deeper level, the notion that developed after the Holocaust that international laws and institutions would deliver justice was fundamentally flawed. Law derives its authority from being passed by parliaments representing the will of the people. International laws and tribunals, which have no such inherent jurisdiction, lack that legitimacy and therefore inescapably become instruments of politics rather than law.
As Hausdorff stepped away from the committee table, Thornberry could be heard muttering under her breath “Extraordinary! Extraordinary!” What really is extraordinary is a level of hostility, double standards and deafness to facts when it comes to Israel that’s applied to no other conflict, cause or people in the world. Parliament should hold a committee hearing into that. Then Britain might start to regain the moral compass it has so conspicuously destroyed.
