Queen’s Speech

Baroness Blackstone Excerpts

Thursday 17th May 2012 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Blackstone]

My Lords, it is perhaps appropriate that I should follow the noble Lord, Lord King of Bridgwater, in this debate, given his concerns about what is happening in Israel, since I want to speak about the occupation of the West Bank by Israel and the continuing harassment and humiliation of the Palestinian people that this entails. In doing so, I ask the Government, through their membership of the EU and other international bodies, to use their best efforts to put pressure on the Israeli Government to stop the expansion of settlements and to adhere to human rights in their treatment of Palestine.

Having recently returned from the West Bank and Jerusalem, I was shocked by what I saw. There are now 500,000 settlers on the West Bank, and their numbers are growing every day. The size and number of these illegal settlements make a two-state solution, to which the Minister referred in his opening speech, more and more difficult because they deny the prospect of territorial integrity for a prospective Palestinian state. There has been no progress in the peace process. The Israeli Government give the impression that they wish to continue the status quo, modified only by even more settlers taking over land which at the time of the Oslo agreement was deemed to be set aside for the Palestinians.

GDP per head in Palestine is now only at 1994 levels. It has been calculated that the Palestinian economy would be six times greater in size were it not for the effects of the occupation. These effects include the inability of Palestinian businesses to export their products without very high costs imposed by barriers placed by the Israeli Government on the transport of goods from the West Bank into Israel. As a consequence, there is little interest from foreign investors, and Palestinians living abroad, who have attempted in the past to invest, have been unable to make a profit and in some cases have lost large sums of money.

Palestinian agriculture has been seriously damaged by loss of land to settlements and by the failure of the Israeli Government to ensure that water supplies are maintained. Water consumption by the settlers is hugely greater than that of Palestinians. The building of the wall has cut off Palestinian farmers from their olive groves and from their land for horticulture. In turn, this has led to a high proportion of the Palestinian population becoming dependent on food aid. This is mainly provided now by the EU and consequently means that British and other European taxpayers are having to fork out to pay for the consequences of the Israeli Government’s irresponsible policies. More than 80 per cent of national income in Palestine is now development aid, half of which is humanitarian aid, from which, of course, there are no long-term benefits.

The Palestinian people have for many years been committed to education, which they see as an important contribution to economic growth. However, stagnation in the Palestinian economy means that many educated young Palestinians have to seek opportunities overseas. The universities suffer from unacceptable harassment. For example, when trying to update equipment for their science and engineering laboratories, they order items from a standard catalogue used by scientific and technology faculties from many countries. Israeli customs dismantles the equipment and removes key components, which it justifies on the grounds that such equipment could be put to “dual use”. However, it gives no adequate evidence for this and leaves these important science and technology departments with expensive equipment that is unusable. All universities of any quality around the world now recruit their academic staff internationally and thus have many academic staff from overseas countries. The Israeli Government refuse to allow Palestinian universities to recruit from overseas, thereby damaging the quality of their teaching and the fulfilment of their research potential.

The military courts’ treatment of children who have been arrested for throwing stones at Israeli soldiers is little short of disgraceful. An international NGO has recently documented what happens to these children in a searing report entitled Bound, Blindfolded and Convicted. I recommend it to those of your Lordships who are interested in the humane treatment of children and in what happens when they suffer verbal abuse and humiliation as well as physical violence from those who have arrested them and are holding them in custody. The long-term effects of treating boys in this way cannot be underestimated. The bitterness and resentment they feel is no surprise and, of course, damages any prospect of good relationships between Israelis and Palestinians in the future—a prospect that we all must want.

The lack of time means that I cannot go into the issues around the use of administrative detention on more than 300 adult prisoners in Israel, the completely unacceptable prison regimes and the keeping of numbers of these prisoners in solitary confinement. However I welcome the fact that, following the recent hunger strikes, the Israeli Government have responded to these protests and promise reforms. Nevertheless, it is important that international bodies continue to monitor what happens to these prisoners, following decisions made this week.

Many other aspects of the occupation cause great distress and damage and disrupt the economy and people’s everyday lives. This includes the daily humiliation of going through Israeli-manned checkpoints to get to work, to go to school or simply to visit friends and families. The main checkpoint in Jerusalem is a particular cause for concern, with Palestinian workers herded like cattle through pens surrounded with metal fencing. The delays can be up to three hours. They affect the population at many different levels, from senior officials in the Palestinian Authority to schoolteachers who cannot get to school in time to instruct their pupils, to those undertaking semi-skilled and unskilled jobs in Israel. In parts of east Jerusalem settlers are taking over land and housing from Palestinians against their will. Elsewhere, Arab houses have been destroyed to provide yet more land for settlers.

The situation that I have described cannot be in the long-term interests of Israel. The more it goes on, the more other nations will refuse to support Israel in international, economic and political fora. Plenty of Israeli citizens wish for and deserve something better from their Government with respect to the treatment of Palestinians under the occupation. We owe it to those citizens, as well as to the Palestinians, to put pressure on the Government of Israel, first through economic sanctions—particularly on exports coming from illegal settlements—and, secondly, by upping political pressure for a change in Israel’s policies in occupying for more than 40 years territory to which it has no right.