Middle East

Lord Bew Excerpts

Tuesday 23rd February 2016 Lords Chamber

[Lord Bew (CB)]

My Lords, I declare an interest as chairman of the Anglo Israel Association, in which position I am proud to say I follow on from the noble Lord, Lord Anderson of Swansea, who spoke earlier.

I will address the aftermath of Cabinet Office Minister Matthew Hancock’s remarks in Israel on the subject of boycott. Obviously I welcome his remarks, but we are at the beginning of a difficult phase. The Government must accept that there will be a reaction. It is necessary not simply to assert, as the Cabinet Minister did quite rightly in Israel, that trade between Israel and the United Kingdom is at record high levels, but to realise that there will be a strong challenge. It can be dealt with only by insisting that the Government cannot be complicit in the acceptance of a version of the history and conflict of the Middle East that stigmatises one side only.

That is the fundamental problem with the boycott movement. In many respects you can say that it has been singularly ineffectual, but none the less it is based on the idea that it is possible to proceed on the basis that the root of the problem lies with one side of the debate only. For example, I say on behalf of the Anglo Israel Association that I would be very unhappy—I think the noble Lord, Lord Anderson, would be equally unhappy—if any of the groups we encourage to go to Israel were set on a programme where they met only Israelis and not Palestinian speakers, who would put different points of view. That is fundamental to the approach that we adopt. It is very important that we argue, in the struggle for a two-state solution, that any approach based on the stigmatisation of one group is unacceptable. Make no mistake: in the aftermath of the recent statements made in Israel by Matthew Hancock, we are in for an ideological struggle.