Select committees should be for grown-up scrutiny, not student politics virtue-signalling

We know that Parliament spends far too much time obsessing over the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. This isn’t new.

In the year after October 7, the JC revealed that MPs spent more time talking about Israel than about the NHS, which suggests something about their priorities.

To some degree, this is understandable. A lot of Labour MPs were spooked by the loss (and near loss) of some high-profile candidates at the hands of independents and political parties who used the war in Gaza – and Labour’s more balanced stance on it – to attack them with it.

And, if we’re totally honest, they don’t want to spend time defending Benjamin Netanyahu.

I’m not just talking about the difficulty some find in defending the images of destruction in Gaza – however, justified the reasons behind why Israel is waging this war might be.

But Bibi’s government contains far-right settler extremists and self-identifying “proud homophobes”, not exactly the sorts of folks left-wing MPs are particularly keen to stick their necks on the line for.

Rather than articulating a more nuanced position, it is easier for MPs to – like beauty pageant contestants – pose in front of a camera and wish for world peace.

But MPs’ desire for Gaza-related dopamine hits via clicks on social media shouldn’t get in the way of them doing their jobs and their willingness to talk tough on Israel, to speak up against a country some have cast as a neighbourhood bully means some aren’t asking the probing questions they ought to.

This mentality was on display at the Business Committee on Tuesday. MPs seemed more interested in grandstanding for the cameras than asking useful questions about the government’s stance on arms exports to Israel.

“If you’re dropping a 2,000-pound bomb into a densely urban area … what do you need to understand about the intent in order to come to a judgement that that was just completely wrong?” pontificated committee chair Liam Byrne.

Stephen Lillie, a senior Foreign Office official who was among those answering questions had to explain that: “There's a question of saying it is completely wrong versus saying is it a violation of international humanitarian law. That sounds callous, but that is the difficult judgment that we have to make”.

Frankly I’d have hoped a former member of Gordon Brown’s cabinet would have been aware that urban warfare doesn’t automatically equal humanitarian law violations.

Or that he’d have more issue with the fact that Hamas has built up their terrorist infrastructure – over many years and at likely huge cost that could have been spent on improving the life of ordinary Gazans – in a way that puts Gazan civilians at risk.

Byrne wasn’t the only committee member to make daft assertions.

“The intent, surely, is that the IDF wants to raise Gaza” claimed Labour’s Matt Western.

His reasoning was that Israel’s Ambassador to the UK had mentioned the British bombing of Dresden during the Second World War – along with other cities – to make the point that civilians tragically die in just wars.

“The logic of that is that they want to flatten and destroy Gaza, that is not what we support, is it?”, the Warwick and Leamington MP asked Foreign Office Minister Stephen Doughty.

Doughty swiftly replied that Labour supports a ceasefire in Gaza and had restored funding to Unrwa, “we’ve argued for a ceasefire from day one” he repeated.

This is, sadly, not the only example of performative questioning when it comes to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Last month, a representative from Unrwa appeared before the International Development Select Committee.

Many readers might have hoped that our elected parliamentarians would take an interest in how Hamas were able to construct their terrorist infrastructure without so much as a peep from a huge number of NGOs based in the Gaza Strip.

Or the fact a Hamas data centre was apparently constructed underneath an Unrwa building or that their facilities were being used by terrorist groups to store rockets and drones.

Between the platitudes and softball questions, only one MP asked the agency for Palestinian refugees whether any changes had been brought into their vetting systems.

Vetting is needed, let us not forget, because several of their employees took part in the biggest massacre of Jews since the Holocaust on October 7.

It would be naïve to expect MPs to be completely apolitical in their questioning.

But if the desire to be seen to hold a certain, in vogue, position is more important to some MPs than asking probing – however awkward or inconvenient – questions, then this is a very bad development for democracy and for Parliament.