Constituents’ meeting bid turned down by local MP Helena Dollimore

On Tuesday 30 June, five people travelled to Westminster from Hastings to attend a lobby of MPs to signal the growing public concern with the ongoing killing of Palestinian people in Gaza and throughout the West Bank. One of the five, Felicity Laurence, a member of Hastings Jews for Justice, reports.

The five Hastings & St Leonards residents who travelled to Westminster on 30 June to try and speak with Helena Dollimore. Photo: Felicity Laurence

We had all written to our MP Helena Dollimore: in my case, I wrote via the lobby organisers, and also personally, as a member of both the Palestinian Solidarity Campaign, which organised the lobby, and also of Hastings Jews for Justice.

I phoned Ms Dollimore’s Westminster office more than two weeks beforehand, and was told that no promises could be made that she would meet us; the day before the lobby, I phoned again, and was informed once more that meetings could come up any time for Ms Dollimore and she couldn’t promise to meet us. I said that I understood this but that we would come anyway and ‘green card’ her on arrival, in the hope that she might be able to spare 5 minutes at least to meet with us.

Lots of MPs came down to meet with their constitutents … but not Helena Dollimore. Photo: Felicity Laurence

This we duly did, with a further reminder to Helena by text that we were on our way. Several of us waited an hour and a half in the sun to get into the hall, but we persevered. After a long wait, we phoned her office, and were told that Helena was in a meeting, no promises, she might come and she might not.

By now, many MPs had come to meet their constituents, while others had sent members of their staff instead, or had sent definitive word that they were unavailable. This meant that those people could at least return home. A further phone call after another hour elicited the response that “she’s in meetings all afternoon” but there was still a direct refusal to give a definitive statement that she would not come down to meet us. Our final attempt to ascertain whether or not Helena would come down was met by her office’s voicemail.

The lobby ended at 5pm. Helena had not appeared, and neither she nor her staff had sent any word whatsoever.

21,000 children

We do not doubt that Helena knows that over 75,000 Palestinians have been killed in the Gaza Strip, including more than 21,000 children since October 2023, and that the real number is expected to be much, much higher, with so many still under the rubble. She will also know that the population has been displaced from the more than 90% of homes across Gaza that have been damaged or destroyed – alongside schools, hospitals, and water desalination plants.

We had wanted to make sure Helena is also aware that the genocide (as now recognised as such by an overwhelming number of authoritative sources) is ongoing, as confirmed by the UN Independent International Commission of Inquiry just last week. This stated that since the ‘ceasefire’ began in October last year, over 1,000 Palestinians have been killed by Israeli attacks in Gaza, and that Israel continues to prevent the UN and international agencies delivering desperately needed humanitarian aid there.

We had wanted to make Helena aware that the UN Inquiry had also – shockingly – confirmed that Palestinian children are being deliberately targeted. The UN report concluded that, alongside the destruction of healthcare and education, this killing and severe injuring specifically of children demonstrate a calculated strategy to destroy the future of the Palestinians in Gaza.

Palantir & polling

We had wanted to raise with Helena a new campaign called ‘Delete Genocide Tech’. Three US tech giants – Cisco Systems, Oracle, and Palantir – are providing IT infrastructure and software that Israel uses to commit violations of international law against Palestinians.

But despite this explicit illegality, they are being awarded lucrative contracts by the British government, by local councils and by universities. We intended to ask Helena to call on the government to exercise the break clause in NHS England’s contract with Palantir for the development of the Federated Data Platform to store NHS patient medical data, and to call for an end to all contracts with Cisco Systems, Oracle and Palantir until they cease their involvement in human rights abuse.

We had also wanted to ensure that Helena is aware of recent polling that shows that Palestine is a major factor in Labour’s plummeting support. Of those who remain in the party, a large majority (61%) are unhappy with the party’s policy on Palestine, and 78% want to ban all arms sales to Israel, as reflected in the vote at the Labour Party conference last year.

We wanted to ask Helena to take action to pressure the government to act on this clear will of the party membership, and indeed of the general public, where a similar proportion (over 60%) oppose Israel’s actions in Gaza and the West Bank; over half also believe that we should stop sending arms to Israel, while only just over a fifth do not.

‘A certain contempt’

Helena’s refusal to communicate with any of us in any way at all seems to indicate a certain contempt for those many of her constituents who remain deeply upset about the situation in Gaza and the West Bank, and our government’s apparent reluctance to exert any significant pressure on the current Israeli Government.

More importantly though, it also reveals a hollowness in her claims to support Palestinian statehood as ‘an inalienable right of the Palestinian people’ even as she continues to back continued UK arms sales to Israel.

I am in close touch with the Palestinian Edward Said National Conservatory of Music, which had a campus – now destroyed – in Gaza. But their teachers there still try their best to gather children and do music with them in the rubble. On a sudden thought the day before our hoped-for meeting at the lobby, I asked whether any of those teachers in Gaza might like to send me a message that I could give to my parliamentary representative – just a couple of sentences. I received three heartfelt declarations of both pain and hope. Here is the message for Helena from Shireen, direct from Gaza.

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A message for Helena from Shireen, direct from Gaza[29/06/2026] Peace be upon you…

I am Shireen, the one who holds onto the strings of melodies so that the sky does not fall upon the heads of her little ones.

Here in Gaza, which has become an open wound on the face of time, we wake up every morning to a heavy question: Will we live to see tomorrow? Or will the bombardment be our appointment with the unknown?

We groan and suffer under the weight of an unending genocide and the burden of displacement that has uprooted us from our roots. Our homes are no longer made of stone; they are memories buried beneath the rubble, and our families have lost leaves that will never return. Yet, despite everything, we refuse to remain silent. We continue our mission, slipping through the cracks of war, running after our students in tents and destroyed schools, searching for their innocent faces so that we may offer them a moment of sincerity.

For us, music is not merely notes played in concert halls. It is a breathing soul; it is a space of light in a dark tunnel; it is a warm embrace for children exhausted by bombs. When we see a child forget, even for a moment, the sound of warplanes while improvising a melody on a broken oud, we feel that life still insists on surviving. In that moment, we believe that hope is not a slogan; hope is a choice. We chose to continue the journey…

But hearts alone are not enough. Our instruments are shattered like our homes, our safe places have turned into rubble, and our students move between fear and exhaustion, while our teachers try to teach musical notes with fingers trembling from fear and pain.

The battle is twofold: the battle for survival and the battle to preserve this last refuge.

Our message to you is the cry of a voiceless soul: carry our heartbeat to the world. Defend the right of Gaza’s children to dream, to knock on the walls of the world’s silence with their melodies. Support the continuation of these programs, for they are not merely lessons; they are the testament of childhood and proof that we have not died yet, and that Gaza is still singing.

And in the end –

Hope is not a melody we hear; hope is to keep playing upon the wound, even if the instruments are broken and our breaths run out, because there is still a melody alive here… the melody of life.

Thank you for listening to this heavy whisper. I hope your support will become a source of strength for the birds of Gaza, so they do not fall before completing their song.

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 (original article from the Hastings Online Times https://hastingsonlinetimes.co.uk/hot-topics/campaigns/a-message-from-gaza-for-our-mp)