Israel and the Peace Process

Debate between Richard Burden and Michael McCann

Tuesday 27th March 2012 Westminster Hall

[Richard Burden (Birmingham, Northfield) (Lab)]

I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Barrow and Furness (John Woodcock) on securing this debate. Given the number of hon. Members who want to speak, there will inevitably be a shortage of time, so although we might disagree on some things today, perhaps we can all agree that it might be appropriate to approach the Backbench Business Committee to request a full debate in the main Chamber on Israel and Palestine.

I had a sneak preview of what my hon. Friend was going to say, because it appeared on epolitix.com earlier today. He called for people to avoid black and white analyses and to recognise the hidden complexities of this part of the world. I agree with him about that. He said:

“But most importantly, the international pressure that is needed for both the Israelis and Palestinians to return to the negotiating table needs to be applied to both sides alike.”

I struggled to understand, or to hear from him, exactly what pressure he felt should be applied to Israel, but perhaps he can clarify that in due course.

My hon. Friend went on to say that this is not year zero and that

“at key points in the past, it has been Israel that has been prepared to offer up a great amount for peace and has found the Palestinian leadership unwilling or unable to reciprocate.”

That is not my understanding, and an awful lot of people around the world would dispute it. He mentioned Camp David, but not Taba, which came afterwards, when the Palestinians did not walk away. What ended those negotiations was the change of Government in Israel. Surprisingly, he did not mention the Arab peace initiative either. It is the 10th anniversary of that initiative, which offered full recognition of Israel and full peace in return for full withdrawal and a just and agreed solution to the refugee problem on the basis of UN resolution 194. This week, Ha’aretz, an Israeli newspaper, described that as Israel’s worst missed opportunity, and that is the view of many around the world.

[Mr Michael McCann (East Kilbride, Strathaven and Lesmahagow) (Lab)]

Does my hon. Friend support the Palestine Solidarity Campaign? If so, can he tell us why there is no mention of a two-state solution in the campaign’s objectives and why its logo shows a land without the state of Israel?

[Richard Burden]

I like my hon. Friend a great deal, but that is nonsense. It would be a bit like my standing up and asking whether he would condemn the Israeli tourist board, which was done over by the Advertising Standards Authority only last week because it published a map of what it described as northern Israel, but which included part of the west bank. We should have a better level of debate than that.

More recently, Israel has called for talks without preconditions. Let us remember what provoked the current round of stalled talks: the Palestinians applied for membership of the United Nations, which Israel claims for itself not as something negotiable but as a matter of right. If anybody questions Israel’s right to membership of the United Nations, they are regarded as delegitimising Israel, which is one stage short of anti-Semitism. I fully accept that Israel should be a member of the United Nations and should be recognised within its internationally recognised borders, which are not difficult; they are the pre-1967 borders laid down in numerous UN resolutions. However, if Palestine applies to the United Nations, that is seen as provocative. It is sometimes called a unilateral act. I cannot think of much that is more multilateral than going to the United Nations.

My hon. Friend the Member for Barrow and Furness says that there are complexities, but

“viewing from a distance often gives the impression that the principal blockage to lasting justice for both Palestinians and Israelis has been the intransigence of a dominant state, secure in its borders and willing to let every opportunity for peace limp by.”

He is right that it is important that we do not view the issue from a distance, but that we all go to see what is happening on the ground. I do not mean just visiting offices in Tel Aviv, Jerusalem or even Ramallah; I mean going to Sderot and talking to people there about how they live in fear of rockets. It is important to do so, and we do. It is also important to go to Gaza, where 38% of people live in poverty, 85% of schools must run on double shifts and 80 million litres of sewage are dumped into the sea every single day.

It is important to go to the west bank, and not simply to say that settlements are bad without working out the results or to talk to people like me about it. We should talk to Israelis themselves: people in Peace Now who talk about how continuing to build settlements is torpedoing the two-state solution, as its website says. It is important to look at Jerusalem. People talk about the settlement freeze offered and maintained by Netanyahu a few years ago. It is important to understand that it was not a settlement freeze; it was a freeze of some settlements, and it did not apply to Jerusalem.

If hon. Members do not believe me, they should talk to Israeli organisations such as Ir Amim, which says:

“Since the Six-Day War and the change in the boundaries of Jerusalem, Israel’s Governments have tried to maintain the Jewish demographic advantage in Jerusalem. They have done this by controlling the physical space of the east part of the city and increasing attempts to ‘Judaize’ East Jerusalem.”

Ir Amim says that the continuation of settlement building and the restriction of residency rights in East Jerusalem is destroying the two-state solution.

Hon. Members should go to see what is happening in the Jordan valley and Area C. They should not take my word for it; they should talk to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency, or go there with the Israeli organisation B’Tselem and see what it says about the dispossession of Palestinians, including the Bedouin, in Area C.

Perhaps we should ask a reputable body to investigate, such as the United Nations. It is doing so. It has declared an investigation of settlement building in the west bank, to see what should be made of it. As a result, Israel has cut off contact with the United Nations Human Rights Council and threatened sanctions against the Palestinian Authority. About the initiative to investigate settlements, this was said not by some strange marginal figure but by Israeli Foreign Minister Lieberman:

“We are dealing with al-Qaeda terror on the one hand and diplomatic terror by Abu Mazen on the other”.

So now referring something to the UN Human Rights Council is regarded as diplomatic terror.

Freezing settlements is not about imposing unreasonable preconditions. Without it, I do not see how the peace process can go forward. A Palestinian by the name of Husam Zomlot, who is known to many of us—he used to work over here—gave a good analogy: “It’s a bit like saying you should negotiate who gets which bit of the pizza, but while that’s going on, one of the parties is eating the pizza anyway.” That is what is going on at the moment.

In conclusion, I have deliberately used sources that are not Palestinian. Some of them are United Nations sources; in the main, they are Israeli sources, including the newspaper Ha’aretz and groups such as Peace Now, Ir Amim and B’Tselem. Those organisations are not looking at things from afar; they are there, and they are Israeli. Most of their members would say that they are Zionist. They, too, would like friends of Israel abroad, but what they know and say to us is that true friends are not simply cheerleaders. True friends tell home truths every now and again, and they might like friends of Israel groups in the outside world to do a little more of that.