ANGUS Robertson was heckled by pro-Palestine protesters outside the SNP conference on Sunday, where party members accused the External Affairs Secretary of having “blood on [his] hands”.
The protesters, some of whom were SNP members, said they had been demonstrating outside the conference for three days in the hope of pushing the Scottish Government to go further in condemning Israel and supporting Palestine.
They are understood to have wanted to engage with Robertson directly after he accepted an invitation to meet with Israel’s deputy ambassador to the UK, Daniela Grudsky, which sparked outrage within the party after it became public.
Video shared with The National shows protesters following Robertson along an Edinburgh street and saying things like: “You’ve shaken hands with the representative of a genocidal state, Angus Robertson. Have some shame. You’ve got blood on your hands.”
They also called for the External Affairs Secretary to resign his position on the Scottish Cabinet.
Inside the SNP conference, which ran from Friday to Sunday, Robertson again apologised over the row – but resisted calls to step down and stopped short of saying sorry for agreeing to the meeting in the first place.
Sundus Saeed, an SNP member involved in the protest, said she felt angry because Robertson had refused to speak with the demonstrators, and at First Minister John Swinney for green-lighting the controversial meeting.
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“What is the point in Angus Robertson or John Swinney talking about how appalled they are with the atrocities committed in Gaza, when they are not doing what they can do in their power to stop the genocide?” she said.
“We all have a right to hold people in power to account. I, for one, do not have blind loyalty to a party if they are saying one thing, and doing another.”
Saeed added: “There seems to be a lot of cognitive dissonance within [the] SNP and the Scottish Government … The day after the former first minister called for an end to arms sales to Israel, Scottish Enterprise gave money to BAE Systems, who provide arms to Israel.
“We all know that the SNP talks a good talk, but they need to walk the walk and not pay lip service. You cannot call for peace or talk about a ceasefire, while giving grants to arms companies that provide arms to Israel used to commit a genocide.”
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Bobby Tennyson, who also took part in the pro-Palestine protests outside the SNP conference, said they were calling “for Angus Robertson to resign for courting a representative of the genocidal state of Israel”.
He went on: “The Scottish Government have a duty set out by the ICJ [International Court of Justice] to stop any facilitation of the genocide.
“We must also have a complete trade and arms embargo with Israel and dismantle the apartheid regime in order to stop their genocide and ethnic cleansing which has been ramped up in the West Bank as Israel operates with complete impunity.”
An SNP spokesperson said: “The SNP conference united around a resolution that restated the party’s support for a ceasefire, the return of hostages, a total ban on arms sales to Israel, and the establishment of a Palestinian state as part of a two-state solution.”
The Scottish Government has since said it will not meet with Israel again until “real progress has been made towards peace”. It declined to comment on the protest.
In July, the UN’s top court – the ICJ – declared Israel’s presence in the occupied Palestinian territories unlawful and called for settlement construction to stop immediately.
In January, an interim ruling from the ICJ ordered Israel to prevent genocidal acts in Gaza but stopped short of ordering a ceasefire.
The war in Gaza has displaced the vast majority of the region’s 2.3 million people, often multiple times, and plunged the besieged territory into a humanitarian catastrophe.
Officials with the Hamas-run health ministry say more than 40,000 Palestinians have been killed since Israel launched an offensive in response to the October 7 attacks which killed some 1200.
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