Occupied Palestinian Territories: Israeli Settlements

John Nicolson Excerpts

Thursday 9th February 2017 Commons Chamber

[John Nicolson (East Dunbartonshire) (SNP)]

I have absolutely nothing to declare, except my recent Council for the Advancement of Arab-British Understanding trip to Israel and the Palestine territories. I have been visiting those countries since the first Gulf war. Back then, Palestinian democrats warned of the rise of the fundamentalist Hamas. They argued that if Israel failed to support an independent Palestinian state, extremism would rise, the centre ground would be lost, and peace would be harder to attain.

In my previous role as a journalist, I interviewed Hanan Ashrawi and the late, great Edward Said. They had a series of reasonable demands. Said spoke of reconciliation and denounced the use of violent rhetoric. Both wanted to see a homeland for the Palestinian people, an acknowledgement of the grave injustices committed towards them—as we know, many of them were driven from their homes and into refugee camps when Israel was created—and, crucially, an assurance that Israeli territorial expansion would end. When I first visited Israel and Palestine, the settler population in the west bank and East Jerusalem was around 200,000. Today, 20 years later, there are more than 600,000 settlers.

People come from across the world to live in Israel, and for lots of reasons, but those seeking a better life in the illegal settlements gain it, alas, by the appropriation of Palestinian land and homes. Palestinian farmland is barren and dry, yet many settlements have swimming pools with illegally funnelled water. Illegal settlers consume six to 10 times more water per head than the Palestinians. Israel’s policy of creating “facts on the ground” is brutal and determined to establish so many settlements on the west bank that a contiguous Palestinian state becomes impossible. We must consider the consequences of this for Israel itself. If a viable two-state solution dies and Palestine is subsumed into a greater Israel stretching from the Mediterranean to the Dead sea, what will happen to the 5 million to 6 million Palestinians in the Jewish state with no government of their own?

An abiding memory of my first trip to Israel and Palestine is of taking tea in a refugee camp. Some of the elders got out their British Mandate of Palestine house deeds and, poignantly, the keys to their long-appropriated houses. They told me that they trusted British honour and British law, and asked why we remained so silent in the face of injustice. It was Edward Said who put it best for me. “Can you explain to me,” he asked, “why because of the evil committed against innocents in Europe 60 years ago, you in the west salve your consciences by turning a blind eye to the injustice of my family’s expulsion from our home to provide compensation for people in whose oppression we played no part?” This goes to heart of the issue. We cannot turn a blind eye to this theft any longer. We cannot allow the bitterness to pass to another generation.