Humza Yousaf's cry for humanity
Three years on from October 7, Humza Yousaf, the former First Minister of Scotland, has published Under Fire, a moving account of how he managed to get his mother and father in law who had been visiting Gaza safely out and home again. Earlier this week, he was questioned about the book and the experience by Husam Zomlot, the Palestinian ambassador to the UK.
Almost all of Zomlot's fellow Middle Eastern ambassadors turned out for the event, and what emerged, listening to these two intelligent, thoughtful individuals in conversation, was a powerful sense of the futility of war and how it is always the many who end up suffering for the actions of the few.
In Gaza, UNICEF estimates that over 21,000 children have been killed. That is before the rubble has been cleared, when the numbers are likely to increase significantly
Under Fire by Humza Yousaf
Yousaf was preparing for his all-important first speech as leader of the SNP when the war began, but he was immediately conscious of how he needed to separate himself as a politician and as a family man, and, accordingly, knew getting his family out of Gaza had to be his priority.
As his father-in-law Maged was Palestinian, it was not easy for him to leave his beloved homeland, but, after a series of thwarted attempts, he and his wife Elizabeth eventually made it back to Scotland when the sense of survivors' guilt inevitably kicked in. Yousaf welcomed Andy Burnham's tougher line on Israel, but wanted an end to all arms sales to the state. He said human rights laws had been broken by Israel on such a horrific scale that he would not rest until he saw Netanyahu in handcuffs in The Hague.
Whether we liked it or not, people in the UK, Europe and across the Western world were always going to empathise more with those who looked like them. Elizabeth looked like she could be anyone's granny from Scotland who ended up trapped in Gaza
Under Fire by humza yousaf
Yousaf emerged from Zomlot's empathetic interview - often broken by rounds of applause from his audience - as a grounded man with a strong sense of what mattered in life and what didn't. It was a privilege to have been there, and, afterwards, to have shaken his hand. It was a celebration not of a political career - he freely admitted he got some things wrong with that - but of a human being.
Our world feels broken, but what is broken can be mended. That is why I will not give up. Not on my country. Not on my neighbours. Not on my children's future. Not on the idea that we can be better than this.
Under Fire by humza yousaf
Under Fire by Humza Yousaf is published by The Bridge Street Press, price £25
