Gaza ceasefire vote: Why the people deserve better than political manoeuvring from Labour and SNP - Alistair Carmichael

A debate and vote on a motion tabled by the SNP calling for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza will take place in the House of Commons on Wednesday

In 2007 I was part of the first delegation of parliamentarians to enter Gaza following the Hamas takeover there. What I saw then, I described as “moonscape”. God knows what it is like now.

Even then, as we drove around the rubble in armoured people carriers, we met some truly inspirational people doing the best in an already desperate situation.

I remember the-then Mayor of Gaza City pointing casually to the bullet holes in the glass above the entrance to his office and telling us about the most recent attempts on his life.

Onlookers gather around a car that was destroyed in an Israeli raid in Rafah in the southern Gaza Strip, amid ongoing battles between Israel and the armed Hamas movement. Picture: Said Khatib/AFP via Getty Images

I remember meeting John Ging, then head of UNWRA’s office in Gaza, telling us of his work, which was in turn horrifying and inspiring. I heard things then about Hamas which, I am afraid to say, made what happened on October 7 last year less than a surprise to me.

Last week my colleague Layla Moran, Britain’s first Palestinian MP, was also there – not in Gaza, but in sight of it. She still has family in Gaza and describes seeing and hearing the constant artillery fire and drone activity.

Gaza was already a landscape of rubble. Must the rubble be reduced to dust?

Today the House of Commons will debate and vote on a motion tabled by the SNP calling for an immediate ceasefire. Labour has an amendment to that motion calling for an “immediate humanitarian ceasefire”. Apparently there is a big difference.

Somehow our politics seems to have lost sight of the basics here. Call it whatever you want. Nothing is going to get better for the besieged people of Gaza until the killing stops.

The people of Gaza deserve better than the political manoeuvring that I fear will characterise today’s debate. The last time we debated an SNP motion on Gaza, my party reached out to them and asked if they would be prepared to include a reference in it to the need for a political process and a two-state solution. The answer came back – no, this is our motion and you can support it or oppose it as you wish.

As an exercise in consensus-building, it left a lot to be desired.

Twenty-one years ago the Labour MP, Graham Allan, managed to construct an amendment supported by people in all parties to say the case for going to war in Iraq had not been proven. It was not an easy process.

Ultimately it did not succeed. War came anyway, but still it felt like Parliament had done what it was meant to do, in finding a way across parties to focus on those points on which we agreed rather on those that divided us.

My earnest prayer today is that even at this late stage, we can put aside political divisions and to stop trying to gain party advantage from a conflict that brings nothing but death and despair.

The people that I met in Gaza all these years ago, and those who are still there today cowering in basements or shivering in tents, deserve that at the very least.

- Alistair Carmichael is the Lib Dems spokesperson for home affairs, justice and Northern Ireland, and the Orkney and Shetland MP.