Lord Hamilton of Epsom
Main Page: Lord Hamilton of Epsom (Conservative - Life peer)
Lord Hamilton of Epsom (Con)
My Lords, I am most grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Warner, for introducing the debate because this is a very important subject. I was able to go on a trip to Israel in February which was organised by my noble friend Lord Polak and paid for by the Israeli Government. It was the first time that I had been to Israel since 1967; that is quite a long time ago and it has changed dramatically in the meantime. During our visit we went to the West Bank. I was surprised to find that virtually all Palestinians are Sunni Muslims—there are almost no Christian Palestinians left now. At the same time, I was rather surprised to see that it is possible to buy whisky, wine and beer, so Palestinian Sunnis do not really abide by extreme Sunni Muslimism.
The radicalisation of Sunnis comes via the schools of the West Bank, where the rhetoric is a nasty form of anti-Semitism, the sort of thing that we associate with Nazi Germany. They accuse Jews of being unworthy of playing any role in the world and liken them to vermin, as the Nazis used to do in Germany. The result of this radicalisation is that a number of young Palestinians have found their way into Israel proper and have murdered Israelis on the streets. When we were there, we found out that 18 Israelis had been killed in the preceding few months. The number of atrocities has dropped, but there was an incident in which an Israeli was murdered just the other day. That is pretty awful.
What is even more awful is the discovery that the education authority for the West Bank is financed by the European Union. In answer to a Question I tabled, my noble friend Lady Verma stated that the EU gives €290 million in aid to the West Bank authorities and that 14.5% of it comes from the United Kingdom. My noble friend made the point in her reply that EU funding to the Palestinian Authority is through something called the PEGASE mechanism, which provides salaries for vetted civil servants only. When my noble friend the Minister winds up the debate, can she tell us what that vetting means? Does it mean that people working for the Palestinian Authority have no responsibility for the videos being put out of young people saying that they are determined to kill Jews?
As the noble Baroness, Lady Tonge, said, there are Jewish Peers in this House. I am a Christian but I have a certain amount of Jewish blood. I hope that gives me a certain degree of objectivity in discussing these issues. I have enormous sympathy with the views of the noble Lord, Lord Judd. I think the settlements that have been established on the West Bank and continue to be established to this day are very counterproductive for Israel. When we had a meeting with Prime Minister Netanyahu, I was interested when he put up his finger and said, “I was the first Israeli Prime Minister to stop the settlements on the West Bank”. He then said that he had had no response from the Palestinians so he got them to continue again. I think that was very regrettable.
We will solve the Palestinian issue only when we recognise the legitimate claim of Palestinians to their own self-determination. On the other hand, what has never been mentioned by those who bemoan the terrible fate suffered by many Palestinians is Gaza. Israel actually gave Gaza back to the Palestinians. Was it too much to expect at that stage that the Palestinians in Gaza might decide to live at peace with Israel? They had been given their territory and all they had to do from there was get on and live their own existences. They did not. They lobbed mortars over the borders and killed Israelis in Israel proper.
Not unnaturally, there is an obsession in Israel today with the security of its own citizens. It has put up a wall—a barrier between the West Bank and Israel proper. If you have a two-state solution, what guarantees would there be that an independent Palestine on the eastern side of the border would not lob mortars over the barrier into Israel proper? I have to say that logistically it would be rather easier to do it from the West Bank than it is from Gaza. One has to accept that because of the problem of Hamas deciding to declare war on Israel, despite being given back the territory of Gaza in which to live, there is a certain reluctance in Israel to go ahead with a two-state solution that may create an enormous security problem for its own citizens.
If Israel does not have a two-state solution, what will it do? Will there be a one-state solution? Will it go on building settlements on the West Bank and eventually reach the situation when Israelis and Jews in Israel will be outnumbered by Palestinians? There are no simple answers to this question but I do not believe that the status quo is sustainable. We have to address the issue of self-determination for Palestinians if we are ever to solve the problems that continue to run in that area, and which are of great concern to all of us.