Miliband to tell Labour conference its former Palestine stance 'fell short'
In his first conference speech as foreign secretary, Ed Miliband will tell campaigners they were right about Palestine — and pledge to ban goods from illegal Israeli settlements.
Ed Miliband will tell Labour’s party conference that the party’s former stance on Palestine “fell short”, using his first speech as foreign secretary to pledge a reset of Britain’s approach.
In remarks briefed in advance and published by The Guardian on Monday, Miliband is expected to tell campaigners and party members who raised the plight of Palestinians that they were right. “I want to say to the millions of people in this country and indeed elsewhere who have been moved and outraged by the plight of the Palestinian people: we hear you, you were right,” he will say.
He will pledge to “match words with actions”: banning imports of goods from illegal settlements and disrupting “the supply lines of British finance, British construction and British services for illegal settlements”. “We call out ethnic cleansing by the settler terrorists in the West Bank. We call out the evidence of war crimes in Gaza. We call out Israel’s illegal occupation of Palestine,” the briefing says.
The speech, delivered under Andy Burnham’s leadership, will frame the reset as a “new age of diplomacy” in which Britain leads like-minded countries. Miliband will say the sanctions on trade with Israeli settlements announced since he took the job — since followed by 12 countries including France and Canada — marked a definitive change in Labour’s Middle East approach. His tribute to campaigners will raise questions over whether the government reviews the proscription of Palestine Action; police arrested demonstrators outside the conference hall on Sunday.
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