Middle East

David Jones Excerpts

Monday 30th November 2015 Commons Chamber

[Mr David Jones (Clwyd West) (Con)]

I, too, congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Bracknell (Dr Lee) on securing this important and timely debate. I must begin by declaring an interest, as a former member of the Council for the Advancement of Arab-British Understanding.

I greatly enjoyed and appreciated the contribution of the hon. Member for Edinburgh East (Tommy Sheppard), which was thoughtful and with a great deal of which I agreed. The middle east has, of course, been a source of enormous tension for many years, as has been mentioned by many Members today, and Britain has an important role to play. Next year will mark the centenary of the Sykes-Picot agreement, which shaped much of the middle east as we know it now, and modern Syria dates back to that accord.

British middle east policy combines a number of approaches and positions. Some are influenced by direct national interest, some by the position of the European Union, and some by the United States and other regional powers. Given all the crises in the region, including Syria, Iraq, Yemen, Libya and Palestine, these policy positions might at times appear contradictory. I therefore believe that it is important for us to have this debate today.

Many hon. Members have focused on Syria today, for what are very clear reasons, and there will no doubt be further contributions on that subject in the next 48 hours. I, however, would like to focus on what is for many the kernel of the middle eastern problem—namely, the issue of Israel and Palestine. As the hon. Member for Edinburgh East pointed out, that issue seems to have been overlooked in recent years, but it is now bursting on to the international consciousness as a result of the increasingly violent tension in that country.

Since the beginning of October, the violence in Israel and the west bank has resulted in the deaths of 85 Palestinians and 11 Israelis, and more than 9,000 Palestinians and 133 Israelis have been injured. There is talk of this being the third intifada. The latest surge in violence began after a Palestinian stabbed two Israelis to death in the old city of Jerusalem, which all hon. Members would of course condemn. We have to wonder, however, whether the Israelis acted proportionately in their response. They have erected more walls to surround the west bank, and added to the 750 km of security fences that are rapidly caging in the west bank. They have fired at protesters on the Gaza border, and early in October, nine Palestinians were killed in what Israel claimed was an attempt to bridge the fence.

The causes of the conflict are many and various. They go back to the 1967 six-day war and beyond. However, it seems that the recent escalation was sparked, at least in part, by the Israelis placing restrictions on access to the al-Aqsa compound in Jerusalem’s old city. The French Government have called for an international observer force to be deployed at the holy sites, and I strongly urge the Government to give consideration to that proposal. The al-Aqsa compound has been a source of tension for many, and if Britain could play a part in defusing that tension, it would be doing a wonderful thing.

Many people in this country—and, indeed, in this House—fully understand that Israel’s history renders it unique and that it is concerned about its borders, but it has to remember that it is a democracy. Many of its actions in the region do it a huge disservice, particularly the increase in the number of settlements on the west bank. In fact, the settlement programme continues unabated. On 8 October, Israel’s Defence Minister said that settlement building

“was not frozen for even a minute”,

and pledged that Israel would continue to “build in the future”. If Israel continues to deny the Palestinians any prospect of constituting themselves as a state and of living with the kind of dignity that they are entitled to, it will continue to experience the sort of violence that it is facing at the moment.

As my hon. Friend the Member for Hornchurch and Upminster (Dame Angela Watkinson) said, Israel has a great deal to commend it. Like her, I have visited the Hadassah hospital in East Jerusalem, which treats patients of Israeli and Palestinian extraction equally. However, continuing to deny the Palestinians a homeland of their own will result only in the continued escalation of the violence. It will, as the hon. Member for Edinburgh East put it, render the prospect of a two-state solution almost impossible.

In the climate talks in Paris today, the Israeli Prime Minister, Binyamin Netanyahu, and the President of the Palestinian Authority, Mahmoud Abbas, shared a handshake. That could possibly be the start of a dialogue between the two sides, and it is dialogue that is needed, rather than what the Secretary-General of the United Nations has referred to as the continued enclosure of the Palestinians behind walls. We have to find our way towards a solution, and I believe that this country, with its long history in the middle east, could play its part in that. With goodwill on both sides, we may yet see a resolution of that most persistent of conflicts.