The Two State Solution: A renewed search for the holy grail?

So, Madam Deputy Speaker, I am proud of my Jewishness and unwavering in my support for the State of Israel, and there is absolutely no contradiction between this and my support for the State of Palestine.

Indeed, quite the opposite.

The two-state solution is based on an explicit belief that the only route to security for both peoples is to live side by side in peaceful coexistence with freedom, security, and self-determination.

Our argument is not with the people of Israel, with whom the UK has unshakable bonds.

Our argument is with the conduct of its government.

And I also want to say emphatically to people in Britain and across the world, holding British Jews responsible for the actions of the Israeli government is anti-Semitism, plain and simple.

Ehud Olmert, the former Israeli Prime Minister, has described what is happening as, I quote, a violent and criminal effort to ethnically cleanse terrors in the West Bank.

The former Minister of Health and retired Brigadier General from the IDF, Efraim Sneh, has said, and I quote again, This is ethnic cleansing, to put it simply.

But we have remained silent on the question of the legality of the occupation as a whole, which in two thousand and twenty-four the International Court of Justice concluded was unlawful.

Today I announce that the official view of the British government is that the occupation is unlawful.

Israel has the right not to live in fear of vile terrorism, and the Israeli state has the right to protect its people and defend its territory.

But Madam Deputy Speaker, that cannot justify what has happened in Gaza.

Over seventy thousand people have been killed, at least twenty thousand of them children.

Twenty thousand children.

The vast majority of the population is now displaced.

Nearly two million people who are now penned into just one third of the territory.

Madam Deputy Speaker, today we refuse to be bystanders to further suffering and to the destruction of the two-state solution.

We call out what is unlawful.

I can tell the House that today France and Canada are announcing, alongside Britain, that they will also ban the imports of goods from illegal settlements, joining the Netherlands, Ireland, Belgium, Spain and Norway, which have either banned goods or are in the process of doing so.

With many other countries, Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Poland, Portugal and Sweden, pledging today that they will support further action.