Middle East and North Africa

Mark Durkan Excerpts

Thursday 17th July 2014 Westminster Hall

[Mark Durkan (Foyle) (SDLP)]

Like others, I commend the right hon. Member for North East Bedfordshire (Alistair Burt) for securing this debate and opening it with such a comprehensive look at the situation in the middle east and north Africa. I also want to take the opportunity to welcome the new Minister to his brief; I look forward to his response.

I too want to concentrate on the situation in Gaza and Israel. I come to the subject without interests to declare—I have no particular attachment—but with some experience of living and working somewhere that has known conflict and having been involved in practically all stages of a peace process. I am very conscious that in any situation of long-standing conflict, there needs to be a point at which people realise that they cannot be secure against each other; we can only truly be secure with each other. How that security is found, expressed and contained is different in different situations.

The two-state solution is obviously recommended for Palestine and Israel. We MPs repeat that constantly and we hear it repeated by Governments internationally. As someone with experience of a peace process, I must say that peace processes work well when the process itself starts to establish some of the givens that must be part of the solution. Just as our peace process ended up creating inclusion as a given of the process so that inclusion became a given of the outcome, we have to question why there cannot be more of a semblance of a two-state process in the middle east. That is why, along with other Members, I supported the bid for UN recognition on the behalf of the Palestinian Authority and others. That was not going to create an equal or real two-state situation, but it could have created some semblance of that.

In an intractable conflict situation, when we will all say from the outside that give and take is needed on both sides, the fact is that not all the givens can come from the people involved in the conflict. If external authorities and the international community are involved, they can intervene and use their status to create some of the givens, without surrender or compromise on the part of the parties concerned. That is where I believe the international community has been lax and remiss, not only in the context of the current onslaught that the people of Gaza are suffering, but in relation to the wider situation and our aspirations and support for a wider peace process in Palestine and the middle east.

I suppose it is fashionable for many of us to make the point about how one-sided America’s interest and involvement is, but we have to ask why so much of the other western interest or involvement at a wider level seems to amount to something like a screensaver stance. Images are projected, shapes are thrown and impressions are given, but nothing is really going on in terms of having any significant effect on what Israel is doing in respect of the Palestinian people.

I fully recognise and would defend and argue for the full right of the state of Israel to exist. I want to see that fully expressed by all others, not only in Palestine, but right across the region. That would be part of the prize available in the long-standing Arab peace initiative, which would set all the Arab states on the starting point of recognising the state of Israel and affirming its right to existence. However, despite being offered, that initiative has not been taken forward and used as a basis for anything.

I have listened to other right hon. and hon. Members speaking. I know from our situation in Northern Ireland that when people talk about the atrocities and outrages suffered in one community or territory, it is very easy for people to engage in “whataboutery” over what has been suffered and threatened in another community or territory. I hope we can all agree that we do not want to see civilians threatened, targeted or killed, whether they live in Israel or Gaza, or any other part of Palestine.

The word “terrorism” is bandied about, particularly in relation to Hamas. If “terrorism” means targeting and threatening civilians and civilian space to achieve or enforce a political end or to induce a change in someone else’s political thinking, it is a description that can as easily be attached to what the state of Israel is waging on the people of Gaza. That is precisely what Israel is doing—it is violence aimed at achieving a particular purpose and conditioning a change in political attitude.

I do not accept that there is any moral difference in the anti-civilian violence waged through Hamas rockets and that waged through the firepower of the Israeli defence forces against the people of Gaza. There is no moral difference in my book. Nor am I under any illusion that there is military equivalence between that violence, but that does not make the violence on either side right. There is no military equivalence. I am not trying to say that Hamas rockets are primitive and made out of bins—I am under no illusion about their sophistication—but there is no point pretending that there is military equivalence. People should not use such distracting and misplaced arguments to fail to answer the basic questions.

As other hon. Members have done, we all have to ask how long our moderation would last and survive if we were in the situation facing the people of Gaza. Any situation of repression sows the seeds of violence. When the basic conditions for living are denied, the basic conditions in which people strike out and kill are created. If Israel thinks that it will find security by waging destruction and potentially threatening invasion against the people of Gaza, there is no security there.

I am heartened to hear the number of Members who have referred to it being easy to talk about both sides but that there are people of peace and moderation living in Israel who do not support the current violence being waged by the Israeli defence forces and people of non-violence and moderation in Gaza who do not believe that Hamas’s violence will further their interests or rights, either.