The Scottish parliament doesn’t get enough credit for how hard it works. MSPs have been back from recess for just two weeks but my how busy they have been.

There was a First Minister’s statement on Gaza, a Scottish Government debate on Palestine more broadly, and last week Gaza monopolised the third question at First Minister’s Questions.

The First Minister ordered the Palestinian flag to be flown over St Andrew’s House. His statement demanded the UK tear up its free trade deal with Israel, cease military cooperation with the Israel Defence Forces (IDF), and ban the import of goods from Israeli communities in the West Bank.

SNP ministers suspended grants to defence firms that supply the IDF, told public bodies not to provide support for trade between Scotland and Israel, allocated £400,000 for a pop-up hospital in Gaza, and confirmed £600,000 for a Palestinian humanitarian fund.

There has been a government motion endorsing recognition of Palestinian statehood and further motions lodged by SNP backbenchers, one accusing Israel of scholasticide (the targeted mass destruction of education) in Gaza and the other condemning Israel’s membership of Uefa.

Such is the primacy of Palestine at Holyrood that in John Swinney’s first statement outlining his priorities for the new session, Gaza merited a mention before the economy, jobs, the NHS, education or crime. Truly, it’s been all go at the Palestine parliament.

Many people have sincerely, fiercely held beliefs about the situation in the Middle East. The suffering of innocent civilians within Gaza is a heartbreaking reminder of the cruelty of war.

It is only right and decent to want to see that suffering end.

John Swinney ordered the Palestinian flag to be flown over St Andrew’s House

Yet, however strong MSPs’ feelings, they were elected to serve the people of Scotland, to represent our national interest, not that of territories halfway around the world. That will strike some as callous, but it is not said callously.

Empathy is a desirable – I would say essential – human instinct. The difficulty comes when you hold a public office and are bound by duties which cannot, or should not, bend to your whim.

Holyrood has a job to do and for the past two weeks it has been only partially doing it because MSPs will not separate their Middle East political convictions from their responsibilities to the Scottish public.

Foreign affairs are reserved to Westminster, and with good reason.

At FMQs on Thursday, John Swinney declaimed Israel’s ‘unjustifiable attack on Qatar’, described the latter as ‘a state that is working to try to bring some degree of peace to the situation in the Middle East’, and alleged that Israel ‘intended to undermine the very peace process we all want to see happening’.

With these words, he displayed a superficial, amateurish grasp of the region. Qatar has been harbouring the leadership of Hamas. 

It is an authoritarian regime building its global clout by pumping its oil riches into global propaganda, wooing the US and the UK with a joint air base at Al Udeid, and, yes, by posing as the unlikeliest peace broker this side of Genghis Khan.

Even staunch critics of Israel would have cringed at Swinney’s starry-eyed Qatari boosterism. Even more sinister was Ross Greer’s proposal that Scots who have served in the IDF be investigated for participating in genocide.

There is a proud tradition, stretching back to the 1948 Israeli War of Independence, of Britons volunteering to defend the Jewish state from its would-be annihilators.

Any Scot minded to do so in future would have to consider the risk of politically motivated war crimes charges being brought against Israel and what legal culpability these could incur for them back home. It is a spiteful attempt to intimidate UK citizens or those who hold dual UK-Israeli nationality from going to the aid of an embattled society of Jews under constant threat of destruction by racist, supremacist enemies.

Pursuing such prosecutions would be an abuse of devolved justice powers to pursue reserved foreign policy goals.

This is why foreign affairs are not devolved to Holyrood, an entity as ignorant as it is ideological on international politics. MSPs no longer appear to care.

If they feel strongly about it, they aren’t going to let something as trifling as the devolution settlement get in their way.

Listen to how MSPs have responded over the past fortnight to criticism of their straying into reserved affairs.

Finance Secretary Shona Robison told Murdo Fraser he was ‘out of touch with the Scottish people’, who ‘care deeply about the plight of people in Gaza and they expect their nation’s parliament to care, too’. For suggesting a devolved parliament restrict itself to devolved issues, the Conservatives were accused of a ‘lack of compassion’.

Her SNP colleague George Adam urged critics of Holyrood’s intervention to ‘take a long, hard look at yourself and think about what kind of person you are’, adding: ‘Scotland has a voice and a role in the world, and using that is what we in the SNP are all about.’

Greer, the new co-leader of the Scottish Greens, has been more explicit still. He cited ‘opposing Israel’s genocidal assault on Palestine’ as one area where he hoped the Scottish Government would ‘stretch the limits of devolution’, which SNP ministers promptly did by unveiling measures to boycott Israel.

Leading MSPs are openly speaking about pushing the parliament into reserved matters, and there’s not a peep about it from those steadfast guardians of Our Precious Union down in Westminster.

A shallow thinker, of which there are many down there when it comes to Scotland and devolution, would dismiss this as nothing more than talk.

It’s not as if they’re legislating in reserved areas. But talk is, in political terms, far more important than legislation. The way a nation is spoken to shapes how it comes to think of itself in ways deeper than any act of parliament can ever hope to achieve.

On Thursday the First Minister criticised Israel’s ‘unjustifiable attack on Qatar’

On Gaza, the Scottish Government and Holyrood have spoken to Scotland as a separate country with its own distinct positions and policies.

For example, the parliament has now declared its support for ‘boycotts, divestment and sanctions targeted at Israel and at companies complicit in its occupation of Palestine’. That is not – yet – the UK Government position, but what does the UK Government matter?

Westminster governments, Tory and Labour alike, are habitually derelict in their responsibility to UK sovereignty.

They insist this is a highly clever strategy to avoid giving the SNP a grievance but it is nothing more than complacency, which aids the Nationalists more in the long run than any grievance, something they can fashion out of whole cloth anyway.

Westminster must grasp the thistle and update the Scotland Act. Amend Holyrood’s standing orders to bar discussion of reserved areas, prohibit Scottish ministers from spending on international aid, and strengthen Section 35 to require the Scottish Government to refrain from any statements or actions which could adversely affect UK foreign relations or be interpreted as advancing a separate foreign policy.

Continued constitutional indolence will only spur Holyrood into bolder incursions on reserved territory, and the more MSPs come to speak about issues properly meant for MPs, the more the public will look to them and not MPs for leadership. It’s Gaza today. What will it be tomorrow?