Israel and Palestine

Lord Dykes Excerpts

Thursday 13th October 2016 Lords Chamber

Asked by

[Lord Dykes]

To ask Her Majesty’s Government what action they plan to take to ensure the revival of the Middle East Peace Process with fresh negotiations between Israel and Palestine.

[Lord Dykes (CB)]

My Lords, I thank all those who have come at the end of a Thursday afternoon to the final debate of the day on perhaps one of the most important subject that Parliaments throughout the world can consider. I start by thanking the noble Baroness, Lady Anelay, the Foreign Office Minister, for coming today to reply to the debate. I embarrass her deliberately by saying that she has an incredibly hard work schedule and, inevitably in that job, travels a lot, so we are very grateful that she has come. I commend the excellent briefing pack from the House of Lords Library on this subject.

I have for many years, ever since my first visit, been a strong friend of Israel, which is a great and impressive country in every way. Like many other fans of this country, which is unique and special indeed, and will continue to be so for good reasons, I have sadly to confess that in recent years I have less enthusiasm. I live in France as well, where there are many more press articles on the Palestine-Israel dispute. Sadly, the UK press gives very little coverage to such an important subject.

The Americans have for a long time rightly been the defenders of Israel, but at the UN recently Barack Obama stated that it cannot continue to occupy permanently territories in Palestine. In his moving address for the Shimon Peres ceremony, he said that Peres from the very first day thought that Israel was against the masters and slaves mentality that occupation as a colony implies. Shimon Peres, a very impressive president of the state, always believed that the Zionist idea would be best protected when the Palestinians too had their own state. As the well-known journalist David Grossman stated in the press on 30 September, Peres,

“never gave up, but he knew a disastrous future was being built for both Israelis and Palestinians”.

The international community has been equally critical, but no deeds have followed the many words uttered for almost 50 years since the Six Day War. Indeed, it could not do much anyway, since every time it was discussed at the UN the USA insisted on misusing the system of endless vetoes to allow its close ally to continue the illegal colonisation policy, even if it did not approve. After the Six Day War, wise voices in Israel urged the Government to withdraw as soon as possible, having made the point effectively that they had enough French and US weaponry and planes to be unbeatable militarily. I remember supporting this very strongly, since Israel needed then and will always need outside support and protection.

In France, at the end of last month, the Franco-German channel ARTE showed the startling documentary made by Shimon Dotan called “The Settlers”, which was originally presented at the International Documentary Film Festival on 20 May last year in Tel Aviv. Of course, the audience may naturally have been made up of moderate citizens, but it was not attacked at all by the critics who were watching as well, including those who routinely defend their country automatically and proudly. This was not merely the left-wing papers: others such as Yedioth Ahronoth, which is right-wing, and the centrist Maariv urged their readers to make sure they went to see the film to face up to what was happening in the Occupied Territories.

Subsequently, Shimon Dotan did many interviews on TV and radio, both in Israel and elsewhere, and was listened to with great respect. Indeed, speaking at a cinema showing in the city centre of Tel Aviv later, he was widely applauded. But the atmosphere there was also tense. Had the public allowed the politicians to create a situation which had become, literally, inextricable? As Mearsheimer and Walt showed vividly in their historic world tour eight years ago—they came to Britain as well—this had been allowed to happen, seemingly unchecked. A bewildered young lady in the audience at the cinema that evening was even more upset when Mr Dotan added that the situation on the ground was ever more difficult, and the bitterness among Palestinians about what was happening to their own country was stronger than ever.

After the recent very sad passing of Shimon Peres, whom I met many times, especially with the courageous Yitzhak Rabin, who was murdered for his bravery, we have to face this sad reality that the mistakes were made even back then. Mr Peres later acknowledged this fact publicly. I remember him addressing us here as President in the Robing Room and saying, “There are now so many settlers; how are we going to get them to leave?”.

The 21st century does not allow any sensible Government to occupy another country illegally on the basis of a biblical fable of divine promise, even if one is a great sympathiser with religion. We must all surely admire, too, the young military men and women in Israel who have campaigned in the Breaking the Silence movement, whose protest goes on.

We can recall also Mr Rabin’s sombre reminder, many years ago, that Gush Emunim, then the main religious settlers’ movement, was “gnawing away at the essence of Israeli democracy”. Attach all this to a seriously flawed national list electoral system, with no threshold to deter tiny minority groups, to Mr Netanyahu’s recent appointment of Avigdor Lieberman as Defense Minister, and to the reassurance that now comes from the new US defence support deal, and we see the possible danger of an ominous and catastrophic impasse developing even more, even if it sounds ironical at this stage.

It is precisely because I want Israel to flourish and prosper in the future as a normal society with no feeling of isolation or siege—or besieged—mentality that I ask our own Government from now on, and the international community, to ensure that Mr Rabin’s warnings are responded to and dealt with. Even the Russians now are attempting to establish the first-ever discussions between the two leaders for years—they have not taken a prominent role for some time. Compare the USA, with its sorry record of 11 peace envoys over the years all biting the dust since Oslo. Even the legendary Senator Mitchell pulled out very rapidly from that process. Of course, the huge tragedy unfolding next door in the Syrian civil war has helped us all to indulge in a useful amnesia about the total impasse developing in Ramallah and Jerusalem.

But this crisis is not going to go away. I ask the Minister to say more today than she can with the brief given to her by the Foreign Office and the usual platitudes we have heard many times. I do not criticise her in any way, as that is part of the process, but she works hard on these dossiers and I would like to hear her saying some new things about new initiatives by this Government.

Coming back to the ominous replacement of the moderate Moshe Ya’alon as Defense Minister by Mr Lieberman, we can wonder what will unfold now unless checked by the United Nations. Mr Ya’alon was of course a Likud member, but he condemned the killing of an unarmed Palestinian attacker by Elor Azaria, a Tsahal soldier, and the Prime Minister asked him to step down. This theme was covered in the last edition of the excellent English language newspaper published in Berlin, the Jewish Voice from Germany, which is read by a growing readership everywhere, especially the growing community of Israelis in Berlin and elsewhere. It mentioned that the IDF deputy chief of staff, Yair Golan, warned of the rise of extremist tendencies in Israeli society. The same article concluded:

“The Jewish state must remain democratic and pluralistic. This can only succeed if all cosmopolitan and open-minded forces acknowledge the looming danger and … support a humane Zionism”.

Those who know the country will have various thoughts about whether the Israeli Labor Party should join the present coalition. It appears also that Israel and the UK both have huge problems with our internal constitutional arrangements and no proper written restraints. Israel, however, has all the effective security that any state needs to protect its citizens—and more—unlike the hapless and disorganised Palestinians, who have an ineffective president, Mahmoud Abbas, who has already exceeded his own election mandate period by seven years. As British colonial experience has revealed all too starkly in so many cases in the past, when you seek to extricate yourself from the colonial quagmire you have to talk to the so-called enemy, which will have to include people in Gaza too.

Thanks to brave groups in Israel like JJP, Bet’selem and Peace Now, along with the gradual emergence of better public efforts by the Palestinian intelligentsia, there is much more realisation of what can now be achieved. The US must say goodbye for ever to endless vetoes, and the whole world needs to accept the huge recognition that Palestine has now achieved in being a recognised state, with some non-binding resolutions as well, including in France, UK, Spain and Ireland.

When I had the great privilege of going with the courageous Gerald Kaufman to the West Bank, we both agreed that Palestine surely could not end up as being the only country in the world with no civic or political rights. Whoever is the next US President, therefore, has to rise to the occasion and ask their friends in Israel to do the same. The courageous and wise South African President de Klerk did so in freeing and then working with Nelson Mandela, whom Mrs Thatcher had called a terrorist. Is Israel lucky and fortunate enough to be harbouring a de Gaulle, he who saved France from the Algerian nightmare? Someone has to step up to the plate and do the same in Israel. This is, after all, the established state with all the power, in comparison to Palestine.

I wish personally to resume my visits to this great and important country as quickly as possible, and the two-state solution is there still to be achieved.