Queen’s Speech

Baroness Deech Excerpts

Wednesday 19th May 2021 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Deech (CB) [V]]

My Lords, the integrated review states:

“We will also build upon our close security partnerships, including with Israel and Saudi Arabia, to better protect our interests in the region.”


I urge the Government not to forget their long-standing true allies in the Middle East, despite the untruths and hatred that have spewed forth in the past week in connection with the Israel-Hamas dispute. I call for a fair and open-minded assessment of the situation, with a perspective from British history and in relation to the rest of the Middle East. The UK should join any eventual international effort to rehabilitate Gaza within some negotiated peace plan or political framework designed to resolve the area’s fundamental problems. That effort has to be led by the US, Qatar and Egypt, for it is Egypt that borders Gaza and has the power to open that border without ill result.

Sadly, the Biden Administration seem to have no plan save to revert to the deadly Iran nuclear deal, following in the footsteps of Obama and ignoring the benefit of hindsight. I urge the Government not to follow Biden and not to join in an effort to remove sanctions against Iran, thereby enabling it to continue to smuggle weapons, to continue its terrorist activities and, of course, to support Hamas in its drive to dominate the Middle East. Resurrecting the JCPOA will free Iran sooner or later to continue to enrich uranium and hide its military sites from inspection by the International Atomic Energy Agency. Resurrecting the ineffective 2015 nuclear deal would allow billions of dollars to flow into the regime which will not be used for its suffering people. Iran has been arming Hamas for years. It wants to destroy the Abraham accords and any new concept of a co-operative Middle East. It is Biden’s apparent appeasement of Iran which lies behind the present chaos, along with Abbas’s cancellation of elections.

Hamas’s aim is not a state of Palestine, for that has been rejected several times over the years; it is the replacement of Israel by an Islamist state and the removal of every last Jew from Israel, just as all Jews have been dispossessed, persecuted, expelled, forbidden to live in or killed in that area. Egypt, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Algeria, Libya, Yemen and Lebanon are all Judenrein. The truth is that the dominant powers there cannot accept any Jewish presence in the area, and that is why ordinary negotiations between Israel and the others cannot succeed. Israel is the only state on earth whose enemies want to wipe it off the face of the earth.

Meanwhile we have taken our eyes of the real issues in that area. Syria appears to have been discussed in this House only once in the past year. Some 400,000 people have been killed there, including many Palestinians; 6 million people have been internally displaced and more than 6 million have fled. Its horrors and those of Lebanon, Yemen and Afghanistan make no mark. The Turks launched an attack on the Kurds, and there was no reaction. Islamists killed 94 Afghan schoolchildren and a Kabul mosque was bombed, and there was no reaction. Will the Minister proscribe Hamas in full to curb its actions?

The other action this country can take in order to calm the atmosphere is to withdraw from the forthcoming follow-up conference of the Durban racism conference of 2001. That conference degenerated into a hate-filled anti-Semitic meeting uniquely critical of Israel, giving cover to the real human rights abusers of the world. Attendees at the conference compared its anti-Jewish hysteria to 1930s Germany. The track record of Durban has been to harm race relations, poison progress and encourage anti-Jewish conspiracy theories and attacks. The USA, Australia and Canada have withdrawn from the Durban conference, and it is expected that other democratic countries will also do so, judging by their non-participation in previous follow-up conferences. I join the noble Lord, Lord Polak, in asking the Government to act to curb vicious anti-Semitism disguised as anti-Israel activity. Will the Government withdraw from Durban right now?