Abraham Accords

Baroness Ludford Excerpts

Thursday 14th September 2023 Grand Committee

[Baroness Ludford (LD)]

My Lords, I am so shocked—I am recalling life in the European Parliament, where we were lucky if we got two minutes.

I am pleased that we are having this debate and congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Polak, on securing it, almost on the third anniversary of the signature of the original accords. In fact, the anniversary is tomorrow, which is also the festival of Rosh Hashanah, so I wish Jewish colleagues and the community in general a happy new year and shanah tovah.

I strongly welcome the Abraham accords as a factor of peace and development in the Middle East region. In the 1970s, I visited Israel on a scholarship from the Anglo-Israel Association. This led me on a journey to being today a vice-president of the Liberal Democrat Friends of Israel, so I am deeply committed to the security and flourishing of Israel at peace in its region.

I wrote a pamphlet as a result of that trip which urged regional economic integration. Yes, I was inspired by the then EEC and I was thinking of Israel’s neighbours, not Gulf or North African countries beyond Egypt, but the destination is more important than the route. People-to-people contacts as much as official ones will help to normalise relations. Beside trade and tourism, support in bad times can help. We are, of course, particularly thinking, as the noble Lord pointed out, of Moroccan, Libyan and, previously, Turkish victims of terrible disasters. I understand that several Israeli teams are assisting with the rescue effort on the ground in Morocco.

The largely positive picture from the Abraham accords is marred by a deplorable rise in extremism in some quarters. This includes the absolutely shocking recent remarks by Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas that Hitler murdered European Jews in the Holocaust not because of anti-Semitism but because of Jews’ “social role” in society. Those remarks have been greeted with widespread horror, including by leading Palestinian public figures in an open letter in which they

‘unequivocally condemn the morally and politically reprehensible comments’.

Sadly, we also have shocking extremists sharing in government on the Israeli side. While I will always be a friend of Israel, this has not made me a friend of all Israeli Governments, but the current Government are the worst I have ever witnessed. The make-up and domestic policies of this Netanyahu Government in encouraging illegal settlements and failing to stop settler violence against Palestinians are surely deterrents to reinforcing the Abraham accords—although they in any case bring their own headaches, such as how to treat Saudi Arabia’s leader Mohammed Bin Salman—and to any peace with Palestinians. Of course terrorist attacks by Palestinians on Israeli civilians as much as Israeli settler violence are deplorable, and I condemn both. The prospects for peace and a two-state solution with the Palestinians have rarely looked worse, and the Abraham accords are not an alternative to that.

On a trip last November with Caabu, I found it sobering to hear the alienation of young Palestinians from not only Israel but their own Palestinian Authority, which was last elected 15 years ago. It is interesting and possibly hopeful that a recent poll found that while only just over one-quarter of Palestinians in the West Bank had a positive view of the regional impact of the Abraham accords, this rose to almost half in Gaza and nearly two-thirds in east Jerusalem, and a majority of the respondents in all three places agreed with the statement

“Arab governments are neglecting the Palestinians and starting to make friends with Israel, because they think the Palestinians should be more willing to compromise”.


That is food for thought.

I conclude with the obvious questions for the Minister, who can perhaps report on the Foreign Secretary’s recent visit to Israel. They are: where do the Government think the Abraham accords are going? What is the UK Government’s role in them, as the noble Lord, Lord Polak, asked? Do they offer any hope for Israeli-Palestinian peace? What shoots of peace can he discern for us to deliver a happy new year?