To British member of parliament, Zarah Sultana

Some of you may be familiar with British Member of Parliament (MP) Zarah Sultana, elected to represent Coventry South in England, a constituency facing serious socioeconomic challenges, including housing pressures, fuel poverty, inequality, and severe constraints on local government funding. Yet much of her public attention appears devoted to making accusations about one foreign country only, Israel.

I have publicly challenged Ms Sultana this week, via her home city newspapers, to explain why this issue apparently receives such disproportionate attention compared with other humanitarian catastrophes such as the persecution and murder of Christians in Nigeria and the destruction of over 10,000 churches since 2009, the treatment of Uyghurs in China, the Rohingya in Myanmar, the oppression of women and girls in Afghanistan, the mass starvation in Yemen and Sudan and the killing and repression of Iranian citizens by their own regime.

Only last week (Tuesday 3rd November ’26), jets and drones bombed a Christian school in Karen state, Myanmar. The day before that, a maternity clinic in Rakhine state was attacked, with a newborn among the 15 dead. That’s 100,000 people killed since 2021, with many being civilians killed by their own government forces with missiles and artillery against undefended villages. Villages not guarded by armed insurgents, or insurgents using schools or hospitals to hide munitions in, or using civilians as human shields! Yet not a word from UK politicians, all busily still decrying only Israel.

As a publicly funded representative, surely it is reasonable to expect an MP to understand the historical facts underlying the serious accusations they make? Her repeated use of the word “genocide” towards Israel in particular deserves detailed scrutiny.

She was prepared to rely heavily upon figures issued by the Hamas-run Gaza Health Ministry following the Israeli response to October 7. Yet recent figures issued by the Health Ministry in Gaza reported 50,227 births and 24,650 deaths during 2025, together with continued population growth, raising one obvious question. Why is she suddenly ignoring Hamas’s own figures? Does Ms Sultana accept official figures consistently, or only when they support her established narrative? An increase in population of 1.2% is a very strange “genocide” indeed.

She also repeatedly describes Israel as an apartheid and colonial state. Pakistan’s National Assembly reserves only ten of its 336 seats for non-Muslim minorities, while Israel’s 120-member Knesset has democratically elected 19 Arab representatives recently without such a quota. Pakistan is overwhelmingly Muslim, Israel is approximately 75% Jewish. So why is Israel routinely labelled an apartheid state while Pakistan is not?

The history of Gaza is also more complicated than Ms Sultana’s rhetoric suggests. Jewish connections with Gaza extend back more than 3,000 years, long before both Islam and Christianity, and Jewish communities existed there throughout different periods of history before being expelled or forced out, including following the violence of 1929 and the 1948 war.

As you are all well aware, Israel captured Gaza, then under Egyptian control, and the West Bank, then controlled by Jordan, during the 1967 war it didn’t start. It subsequently withdrew from parts of the West Bank under the Oslo process and completely withdrew its settlements and forces from Gaza in 2005. How can this so straightforwardly be described as Israeli “colonisation”?

Equally conveniently forgotten by Ms Sultana is how the current war began. Hamas’s atrocities on October 7, including the massacre at the Nova music festival and attacks on Israeli communities, in which around 1,200 people were killed and over 250 taken hostage. I struggle to find comparable public emphasis from Ms Sultana ever demanding the release of those hostages.

There are further historical questions. The creation of Pakistan in 1947 was accompanied by the deaths of perhaps a million or more people and the displacement of approximately 14 million others. Yet Pakistan, or as it was, West India, is vastly larger than Israel, yet isn’t routinely described by her as a “colonial project”.

Some commentators have suggested that large-scale migration can itself constitute “colonisation”. I draw no such conclusion regarding Britain’s Muslim population myself, although it is one that has grown from 50,000 in 1950 to almost 4.5million (44% of the total population of Israel!) today, but this does demonstrate how selectively the word “colonialist” is often applied.

I have repeatedly asked Ms Sultana for her proof over the years, without ever receiving answers. Nor does she appear to acknowledge the basic essence of Zionism as the Jewish national movement seeking self-determination in one small state. Muhammad Ali Jinnah’s demand for a separate Muslim homeland for South Asian Muslims is such a blatantly obvious comparison.

There are now more than 50 Muslim-majority states. Yet the existence of one Jewish state is repeatedly portrayed as inherently colonial, racist or illegitimate. So is Pakistan the same colonial, racist or illegitimate state? The indicators from Ms Sultana suggest this is indeed the case. Furthermore, Israel has biblical roots as a Jewish state, while Pakistan has no such roots.

I challenged Ms Sultana to answer these questions with facts rather than slogans. If she continues to use terms such as “apartheid”, “colonialism” and “genocide”, she should be prepared to demonstrate that she understands both their meaning and the history to which she applies them and can provide proof. Does she? No!

At present, I can only conclude that her approach is either remarkably selective or seriously ill-informed, and neither is good enough from an elected, taxpayer-funded Member of the UK Parliament. And her continual flood of social media messages suggests something even darker that should indeed attract Parliamentary scrutiny – she states she is an MP to generate followers, so she cannot hide behind it being a “personal and private capacity” opinion.

I also go as far as to question her Facebook Post of 08 February 2026, bearing in mind British Members of Parliament must legally take an oath of allegiance or a solemn affirmation to the Crown before they can take their seats in the House of Commons. She has plainly reneged on that oath too.

A sense of entitlement has to be a genuine two-way street. Not one that is used selectively and to follow an often distorted narrative. Her constituents and the UK Parliament deserve better.