Palestine: United Nations General Assembly Resolution

Lord King of Bridgwater Excerpts

Monday 3rd December 2012 Lords Chamber

[Lord King of Bridgwater]

My Lords, I have not previously been involved in the debates on Israel and Palestine and the issues arising from them. I am extremely grateful to the noble Baroness for introducing this debate, because I wanted to express simply, as somebody who is much more of an observer than many of the experts who have spoken already, the great concern that I have about the situation.

I am progressively more alarmed about this region, which has already been referred to being in turmoil at the present time. This situation does not threaten merely continuing bitterness and violence between Israel and the Palestinians but threatens the region, and may threaten ourselves, in terms of world peace and stability, the possible involvement of the United States, and the consequences of events in Iran. A number of developments here pose the greatest danger to us. I have always supported the State of Israel and its existence. However, the current actions of the Israeli Government imperil the State of Israel itself. Voices of concern and friendship have a duty to speak out at this time.

The New Statesman had a headline this week, that Mr Netanyahu risked condemning Israel to perpetual war. The awful thought, in such a dangerous world, of the risk of continuing and escalating conflict of this kind, must concern us all. This is a time when Israel needs support. The noble Baroness referred to the vote in the United Nations, which was 138 to nine. Of the nine, as the noble Lord, Lord Alderdice, quoted, I had to look up who two of them were. One of them was Palau, which has a population of 20,000; another was Nauru, which has a population of 10,000; and the Marshall Islands came swinging in with a majority vote of 68,000. That is three votes in the United Nations with a smaller vote than the Isle of Wight in a constituency election. France, Italy and Spain came out against Israel, supporting the adoption of observer status for the Palestinians, while Germany, Holland, Australia and the United Kingdom abstained. I must say to my noble friend that I was disappointed that we abstained. I understand why the Foreign Secretary made that decision, but the Israeli reaction since has been a real slap in the face for him and others who had hoped for a more moderate response.

I say to the many noble Lords who express strong support for the State of Israel: does anyone in Israel still care about what the rest of the world actually thinks? It is deeply depressing at the present time. We have seen Mr Netanyahu going to America, snubbing the American President and marching straight off into a meeting of AIPAC, where he got a heroic reception, as he would. Against that background, it is deeply worrying. The Israelis are losing the support of countries that would have supported them strongly in the past. I had these thoughts even before the announcement of the disastrous reaction to the vote in the United Nations. Although the noble Lord, Lord Palmer, rather glossed over the decision to go ahead with preparations for E1 and the impact these have had on East Jerusalem, along with tax withholding and going ahead with more settlements, I certainly understood why Ban Ki-Moon said that it would be an “almost fatal blow” to hopes of peace. I am not sure that the present Israeli leadership under Mr Netanyahu actually has any intention of ever going forward with a two-state solution. I am afraid that that is the impression he gives outside the country. Everyone goes along with it, saying “That’s our policy”, but I am not sure whether he is ever going to move on it.

I much appreciated the speech of my noble friend Lord Alderdice. He and I know very well the old cry, “Not an inch and no surrender”, which I had shouted at me often enough in Northern Ireland, along with people trying to hit me over the head, but we knew that it was not the way out of the problem. Progress had to be made on both sides and, as the noble Lord, Lord Judd, said, it had to involve the people on both sides. They have to understand their best interests. No sensible Israeli wants to be in a state of perpetual war. The Israelis cannot want to be in that continuing situation, and no Palestinians want to find themselves in the present miserable situation.

Against that background, the scale of change that is taking place in the world and in that region cannot be overstated. I have seen, and no doubt so has Israel, the visits that are now being paid to Gaza. The Prime Minister of Egypt has been to Gaza, as has a senior representative or perhaps the Emir of Qatar. Senior representatives from Bahrain have been there, and now I see that Mr Erdogan of Turkey is talking about going as well. These developments are profoundly significant. Whether these decisions and the reactions to them are to help the election campaign of Mr Netanyahu in January—we are promised the election of an even more hawkish coalition—is not known, but one does weep very seriously, not least because we still have the elephant in the room in the shape of Iran and its nuclear weapons. One wonders what kind of approach a more hawkish coalition might take to that.

I will just add this. I used to visit America on behalf of Northern Ireland, and I found that many of the expat Irish—the Irish lobby—were much more inclined to scream “No surrender” or “A united Ireland at all costs”, and then I would talk to the Irish-American politicians like Ted Kennedy, Daniel Moynihan or Tip O’Neill, and they were the sensible ones. Charlie Haughey used to be picketed when he went over because the Irish lobby there thought he had sold out on Irish independence. The British ambassador to the United States would say to me, “The green lobby, the united Ireland lobby, is jolly strong over here, but it is not a patch on the Jewish lobby”. The truth is that the Jewish lobby in the United States has done no service to Israel and it has done no service to the standing of the United States in the region. Let us think back to when President Clinton could stand between Mr Rabin and Mr Arafat. He was seen as an impartial assister towards peace. America is now seen to be one-sided, voting against the Palestinian resolution and no longer commanding confidence. A nation of the power and scale of the United States could easily be a tremendous force for good in the region.

I believe that we are in a serious and rapidly developing situation, one that makes the world more dangerous. For all who care about the future of Israel and its continuing existence, and not least providing a civilised life for all those in the region, it is desperately important that they realise that a change of course must be undertaken. They must get rid of all the conditions, sit down and try to find a genuine approach towards a two-state solution, or I fear for where the future may go.