Occupied Palestinian Territories: Israeli Settlements

Debate between Wes Streeting and Richard Burden

Thursday 9th February 2017 Commons Chamber

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

I thank the Backbench Business Committee for scheduling this debate and congratulate the right hon. Member for New Forest West (Sir Desmond Swayne) on the way he introduced it.

Debates such as this always bring out sharply differing opinions on both sides of the Chamber—that is inevitable—but in my experience there is one thing on which there has always been consensus in the House, whatever people’s views on other issues: the best way to peace between Israel and Palestine is a two-state solution in which both peoples have equal rights to sovereignty in viable and contiguous states. Of course full and lasting peace involves more than dealing with settlements, but settlements are rightly the focus of this debate because their continued expansion, the infrastructure around them, and the demolitions that precede them, are creating, as the right hon. Gentleman said, a new physical reality in the west bank that is destroying the possibility of a viable Palestinian state ever being established. They are making physical changes to the map of the west bank, carving it up into different segments, severed from each other, so that it ends up resembling a Swiss cheese. It does not resemble anything that could, at the end of the day, be a viable and contiguous Palestinian state.

[Wes Streeting (Ilford North) (Lab)]

Does my hon. Friend agree that the policy of ongoing settlement expansion is not only an intolerable infringement on the rights of the Palestinians, but a long-term threat to the stability and security of Israel? People who care about Israel’s longer-term security, and its future as a democratic and Jewish state, ought to oppose that policy and support the progressive voices in Israel that are also opposed to settlement expansion.

[Richard Burden]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right. I am particularly pleased that he mentions the progressive voices in Israel, because they do exist. Among the most insidious things currently happening are the actions taken by some of the Israeli right, sadly supported by people in the Israeli Government, to silence the voices of organisations such as B’Tselem, Breaking the Silence and many others that have the guts and integrity to stand up and say, “This is wrong.”

Some 6,000 new units have been announced in just the past few weeks and the settlement footprints now make up more than 42% of the west bank’s land mass. Whatever the numbers, the reality is, as the hon. Member for Hazel Grove (William Wragg) said, that every single settlement built on occupied land is unlawful under the fourth Geneva convention.

If settlement building does not stop, the destruction of the two-state solution that will inevitably follow will mean the de facto annexation of the west bank by Israel. In the past week, we have seen another move towards that, with the passing of the so-called regularisation law, which retrospectively declares legal the illegal Israel settlements on expropriated private Palestinian land. I commend Israel’s Attorney General for declaring that unconstitutional and pay tribute to the judicial independence that demonstrated, but the direction of travel is clear: both that law and the massive expansion of settlements that is taking place mean that, whatever Israel calls it in theory, annexation is happening in practice.