Israel and Palestine Debate
Full Debate: Read Full DebateDepartment: Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office
Alistair Carmichael
Main Page: Alistair Carmichael (Liberal Democrat - Orkney and Shetland)Department Debates - View all Alistair Carmichael's debates with the Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office
(3 years, 6 months ago)
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Mr Alistair Carmichael (Orkney and Shetland) (LD)
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Dowd. I remind the House of my interim entry in the Register of Members’ Financial Interests and that I serve as a director of the advisory board of the Council for the Advancement of Arab-British Understanding.
The two petitions address probably two of the most substantial issues that we could have hoped to have before us. I thank the Petitions Committee for allowing this debate, but I am afraid that the belief that any meaningful analysis of the issues at hand can be achieved in a three-minute speech represents optimism beyond even that which I possess.
Picking up on the point made by the hon. Member for Edinburgh East (Tommy Sheppard), I have visited Palestine twice and have seen what he refers to as the “one-state reality”. I know exactly what he means. However, the point about the one-state reality, as he describes it, is that it is no solution. The only solution is a two-state solution, and if it is a solution that does not involve two states in a meaningful way, it is no solution.
The yardstick by which the Minister and British foreign policy should be guided is always to ask one simple question: will this make the achievement of a two-state solution more or less likely? Looking around Palestine, we see that the settlement-building programme on the west bank makes the achievement of a two-state solution manifestly less likely, and it should be condemned by our Government accordingly. It is also beyond peradventure that Britain should recognise Palestine as a state. To those who have suggested that that is not possible because it is not quite the right time, I gently say that the reason that Palestine does not control her own territory goes back to the circumstances that pertained in 1967 and subsequently. There is now no good reason for that not to be the case.
In the context of the recent conflict in Palestine, I hope that the Minister and our Government will look very closely at the deployment of arms that would have come from this country. Like others, I bow to no one in my acceptance of Israel’s right to defend herself, but we all know that self-defence in law, wherever we find it, must always be commensurate, appropriate and proportionate, and what we saw was none of those things. The idea that these events were contributed to by arms sold from this country is something that many people, wherever they stand on the debate, find disturbing.