Pickthall House is concerned about the decision made by the Israeli government to deny entry to two MPs visiting the country.
Labour MPs Abtisam Mohamed and Yuan Yang, despite having arrived in Israel as part of a parliamentary delegation, were refused entry because they intended to "spread hate speech" against the country and "document the security forces”.
So far, no evidence has been presented by the Israeli government to substantiate these claims.
This is the latest in a series of hostile diplomatic actions by the Israeli government towards Britain. In March of this year, Emily Thornberry, chair of the Foreign Affairs Select Committee, told the committee she had been secretly recorded during a recent visit as part of a delegation to Israel. Israeli deputy foreign minister Sharon Haskell posted a video on Instagram without Thornberry's “knowledge or consent.” The government must respond tactfully but robustly.
PH believes that Britain's diplomatic relations with Israel require review. In addition to the detention and deportation of MPs and the secret recording of a parliamentary delegation, which should be alarming enough, we have seen, since the commencement of the war in Gaza, multiple instances of controversial and inflammatory actions by Tzipi Hotovely, the Israeli ambassador to the UK.
While the Foreign Office has been working to open humanitarian corridors and the government has reiterated that international law must be respected in Israel’s war effort, Hotovely has argued publicly that “every school, every mosque, every second home” is a legitimate target for Israeli bombing. She has also said publicly that she opposes a two-state solution to the conflict - a rejection of the official position of the British government.
Hotovely’s political and ideological differences with Britain's government predate the ongoing war. She has regularly been the subject of protests by Palestinian activists who have characterised her views as “supremacist”, citing her public history of denial of Palestinian personhood, which include addressing the Knesset with an empty book to represent Palestinian history, and calling the Nakba - the expulsion of up to 700,000 Arabs during the 1948 Arab-Israeli war - an “Arab Lie”.
The government must take seriously the fact that Israel, despite being a British ally, has moved further and further to the right, and consequently departed significantly from official British policy, the international consensus on the conflict and from what ought to be shared values of democracy and international humanitarian law.
A first step towards this would be to firmly reprimand the Israeli government, rather than turn a blind eye to inflammatory remarks and hostile actions such as detention and secret recording of British MPs.
