Middle East and North Africa

Lord Weidenfeld Excerpts

Thursday 30th October 2014 Lords Chamber

[Lord Weidenfeld (CB)]

My Lords, there are serious fissures in the worldwide alliance against ISIS and new hurdles in the sluggish race for peace in Palestine. History repeats itself with terrifying precision. Seventy years ago, the Warsaw rising of Poland’s military elite was brutally suppressed by the SS and the Wehrmacht. It lasted for 63 days and claimed nearly 250,000 victims. Yet in all that time, the Red Army stood idly by just across the Vistula. Anglo-American requests for aerial landing places were gruffly rejected.

Now, 70 years later, the Prime Minister of Turkey, Erdogan, an authoritarian Islamist who all but dismantled the western and secular republic of Kemal Ataturk, at first denied his NATO allies air landing rights and land access, and refused to help the gallant Kurds defend Kobane against the ISIS hordes. Temporary and partial relief at America’s persistent urging was ultimately conceded, and it must be hoped that it is not too late. The Turkish leader apparently disapproves of the Kurdish defenders more than he does the barbarous ISIS, whose ambitious plans for an Islamic caliphate extending over most of the Middle East is of course a thorn in his flesh. But he distrusts the Kurds as he fears that they are on their way to achieving sovereignty. All this bodes rather ill for NATO, where Turkey fields the second largest army, and indeed it bodes ill for Europe.

Nor is the attitude of other Muslim allies towards ISIS quite clear. It can be assumed that the reigning families of oil, gas and cash-rich countries such as Qatar support the American-led alliance, yet hugely rich individuals and groups in those countries are known to finance ISIS quite substantially. We have the absurd and surreal situation in which money flows from Qatar at the same time to pay for cultural programmes on American television networks and vivisection on the Mesopotamian battlefields. Reliable sources such as refugee priests relate that some of the female slaves of ISIS from their Christian communities end up in harems or worse in member countries—I repeat: member countries—of the anti-ISIS alliance.

It may be worth mentioning that there is now a Jewish initiative to provide help on a significant scale for persecuted Christian children in the embattled territories of the Middle East. They are to be given shelter in Christian homes in the free world, in the spirit of Pope John Paul Wojtyla’s famous verdict: the Jew is the older brother of the church. I feel that there are indeed links between the war against ISIS and the peace of Palestine. The campaign to recognise a Palestinian state prior to conventional negotiations between the parties, with a definite view to establishing peace and reaching a viable two-state solution, is an extremely dangerous and negative development because, in spite of what the noble Baroness, Lady Tonge, said earlier, it puts Hamas, a terrorist organisation, into the limelight, rendering it a decisive factor, when it is indisputably and recently on record as saying that it wishes to destroy the Jewish state of Israel. Its joining of the Cabinet of the more moderate Fatah leader, Mahmoud Abbas, has already caused a stiffening of attitude and coarsening of language on his part. Far from bringing the parties closer together, this widens the gulf and encourages intransigence on both sides.

The Gaza campaign was not a routine punitive expedition. To Israelis, it was an existential necessity to prevent the ever-increasing and increasingly effective rocket campaign from burgeoning into a decisive war, endangering major cities and the country’s one main airport. Those of us who lived through the Second World War know what aerial warfare can mean and what it meant to people living in Coventry, Berlin and Dresden; they will understand what has happened in Gaza. That Hamas did not hesitate to practise a policy of human shields cannot be denied. I have been shown the layout of a typical residential house in Gaza where the roof had special facilities for snipers, the ground floor ample space for arms and the cellar extended into tunnels, ready for a breakout of jihadists. In between those were two, or sometimes even three, residential floors housing families with several children. To exculpate Hamas from risking human lives is an absurdity when you consider its constant reliance on suicide bombing, where so often parents send their own children up into the air. There must be other ways of bringing the parties to the conference table than presenting one side with a fait accompli.

Many unsung examples of serious economic and social initiatives between Israelis and Palestinians exist, and could be greatly expanded. There is still much good will, and a majority for a negotiated peace and a two-state solution, among the people of Israel. While today war is raging in large parts of the Middle East, Israel’s military situation is safe. There are also, as we have heard before, signs of serious rethinking in Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Jordan and Morocco about the future of the Middle East. We in Europe, and particularly here in Britain, should support and guide all forms and forces of conciliation.