Chair of Foreign Affairs Select Committee rages at ‘delusional’ pro-Israel lawyer in parliament meeting
Emily Thornberry in 2017
Imran Mulla reports in Middle East Eye on 22 April 2025:
A British parliamentary hearing on Israel and Palestine on Tuesday afternoon became unusually heated when a pro-Israel lawyer clashed with the chair of the foreign affairs select committee over Gaza.
Natasha Hausdorff, director of the pro-Israel advocacy group UK Lawyers for Israel (UKLFI), was grilled by the committee of MPs, which scrutinises government policy. The MPs heard evidence from Hausdorff as part of an ongoing inquiry into the Israel-Palestine conflict.
Hausdorff’s organisation, UKLFI, recently threatened to mount a legal challenge against the British government over its partial suspension of arms sales to Israel. Middle East Eye revealed last September that UKLFI asked the Israeli government for help to fight the threat of legal action by two NGOs working in the occupied Palestinian territories.
The session got off to a rocky start when senior Labour MP Emily Thornberry, the chair, repeatedly asked Hausdorff what a positive future would look like for Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank. Hausdorff responded by calling for the defeat of Hamas and an end to “indoctrination and incentivisation to terror”. Thornberry, unimpressed, said, “let’s keep ourselves calm,” and restated the question.
Hausdorff eventually suggested a “start-up culture in the West Bank”. “The public will have heard your answers,” Thornberry concluded. As the session went on and MPs put questions to Hausdorff, Thornberry became visibly more frustrated.
The lawyer insisted that Israel has sovereignty over the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem – areas that the United Nations, International Court of Justice and British government consider to be Palestinian territory under Israeli occupation.