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Terrorism (Foreign Policy Aspects)

I am pleased to follow my two Foreign Affairs Committee colleagues. Like them, I want to focus on the middle east, because the failure to find a lasting and just solution in that region affects the security of us all. The perpetrators of every atrocity since 9/11 have cited the failure to find a just solution to the problems of the middle east as a justification for their outrages. One does not have to accept the warped logic of the terrorist to see that that failure has created a culture in which terrorism and those who support it flourish—and failure there has, indeed, been. I was in the west bank two years ago with the Foreign Affairs Committee, and we could see the tangible signs of failure. I went to a Palestinian town called Qalqilia in the northern west bank, very close to the Israeli border. The Israeli security wall entirely encircles that town, completely cutting it off from neighbouring towns and villages. It is a sizeable town of 20,000 or 30,000 people, but there is only one way in and one way out—through the checkpoint—and it takes hours to gain access to the town and hours to leave it. I met a farmer whose land was outside the town wall and whose home was inside it. He was sleeping in the fields, because he could not get through the checkpoint—it would have taken too long. We saw children whose homes were on one side of the wall and whose school was on the other. It was clear to members of all political parties who were on the visit that the town was slowly but surely being strangled by the combination of the wall and the fence that completely encircled it. When we went back to the west bank last week, I hoped that things might have improved. However, the situation is much worse than it was two years ago. For one thing, there is much more of the security wall and the fence. We went to Abu Dis on the outskirts of Jerusalem and saw the 25-foot-high reinforced concrete wall snaking its way down the middle of the street, dividing communities, families and friends; people were unable to cross the barrier with any ease. When it is finished, they will be completely unable to cross it. We saw new Israeli settlements outside Jerusalem. The right hon. Member for Tonbridge and Malling (Sir John Stanley) referred to Ma'ale Adumim. That is a sizeable settlement and next to it there is an area referred to as the E1 zone. That is set aside for Israeli settlement—deep into the west bank. The Israelis clearly have every intention of fencing that off and putting the wall around it. We went to see Israeli settlements way beyond the security barrier, deep in Palestinian territory, and we met settlers at Shiloh. We were shocked when we realised that there were so few cars on the main road out of Jerusalem to settlements many miles to the east. The only cars allowed on the road were Israeli cars—settlers' cars. As one drove past Palestinian villages on either side of the main road, one could see the small roads coming down from them. At the point at which they met the main road, they were sealed off by concrete barriers or earth mounds put up by Israeli defence force bulldozers. Even if a Palestinian could get on to the main road, there are IDF checkpoints every so often. If a Palestinian wants to go from one village to another to visit a relative, friend or place of work, their journey, which would have taken 10 minutes by car a while ago, will routinely take an hour or more on the back roads, although even those are subject to closure at no notice and at the whim of IDF conscripts. Underpinning all that is the tangible site of the wall encroaching into the west bank, which I thought was appalling. If the west bank is worse than it was two years ago, nothing had prepared me for going to Gaza. Gaza has been described as the largest prison in the world because people cannot get in or out. Like many hon. Members, however, I have been inside prisons to see constituents, and it is a darn sight easier to get inside a prison. We were a visiting delegation of British Members of Parliament, with security clearance, diplomatic clearance and diplomatic-plated cars, and the Israelis had our passport numbers in advance, but we spent three hours kicking our heels at the Erez border crossing before we got into the Gaza strip. I can see why the Israelis do not want British Members of Parliament to go into Gaza strip—they do not want the eyes of the world to see what is going on there. Frankly, it is shocking. There are thousands upon thousands of families living on less than $2 a day and trade is almost impossible. We went to look at the goods crossing at Karni, where every consignment of goods has to be dismantled, stripped down to its smallest component part and shipped from Palestinian trucks on to Israeli trucks. It is chaotic and inhuman and takes for ever. I cannot see how anybody manages to trade across the border. As one drives through Gaza, especially the southern part, one sees the ruins of properties destroyed by the IDF, the bullet holes and the poverty. There is a palpable sense of a people who have been humiliated, subjugated and oppressed. I have an enduring memory of a small child—perhaps only three-years-old—playing in the dirt of a Gaza street under a billboard. There are billboards at the end of every road and they have on them paintings of what they describe as martyrs—the suicide bombers just from that street. Such people are lionised. What chance does that child have of growing up in the expectation of seeing any kind of peace or prosperity? It is a deeply depressing scenario. It almost goes without saying that none of that oppression justifies the suicide bombings for one second. Such bombings must be unequivocally condemned wherever they take place. Whether innocent people die in Tel Aviv or, like a constituent of mine, in the 7/7 bombings, suicide bombings deserve unreserved condemnation. However, that does not mean that we should ignore the injustice in the Gaza strip. If terrorism is to succeed, it requires more just the terrorists themselves; it requires somebody to recruit the bomber, somebody to arm them, somebody to provide a safe house and somebody to transport them. As in Northern Ireland, there must also be a wider group of people in the community who acquiesce to the acts of terror taking place in their name and an even larger group who simply look the other way and do not bother about them. It is those other people whom we need to peel away from the terrorist cause. The scenario is very depressing. The moderate Palestinian leadership is in danger of almost complete collapse in the Gaza strip. Last week, Fatah abandoned its primaries in scenes of absolute disarray. The al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade is becoming more popular, as is Hamas, partly because it is not Fatah, which is becoming tainted and seen as corrupt and out of touch. Fatah does not have much authority at all in the Gaza strip. If the Palestinian elections take place on 25 January—it is not absolutely certain that they will—it is entirely likely that Hamas will win a third of the vote across the Palestinian territories, and it is quite possible that it will be the outright winner in the Gaza strip. There is a chink of light in the gloom—the border crossing at Rafah between the Gaza strip and Egypt. There is huge excitement among Palestinian people that at last they have some, if not total, control over a border crossing. It is a small building block on the road to nationhood, and they are incredibly pleased about it and incredibly proud of it. In passing, I should say what a fantastic job the European Union monitors are doing. They are mainly Italian Carabinieri, although I believe that British monitors are due out there, and they are doing a really good job. I have come to some rather depressing conclusions about the middle east peace process and the knock-on effects that it will have on terror. Sharon seems likely to win the elections in Israel in March. He has a huge poll lead, and if he wins, I am sure that there will be a policy of unilateralism on the west bank just as there is in Gaza. I can see no will on the part of the Israeli Government to negotiate with the Palestinians. They will seek simply to impose their own solution. We know what that solution is on the west bank. A wall is being built deep into Palestinian territories. It is looping around new Israeli settlements, and there is no doubt that it will become the de facto border of Israel. I suspect that most Members in the Chamber support, as I do, the road map and a two-state solution. I want a secure Israel that is at peace with a prosperous Palestinian state next door, but that is a long way from happening. As my hon. Friend the Member for Ilford, South (Mike Gapes) said, in a two-state solution, one state cannot impose its will on the other state, but we are in grave danger of one state, Israel, leaving the other putative state, Palestine, with only disconnected fragments of unviable territory. That will not work. The Palestinians will not accept such a state, and to be honest, why should they? There is a view in parts of Israeli society, which was articulated by the professor whom the Select Committee met last week, that the wall will provide peace, that it is enough, and that it will stop the suicide bombings. That is a chimera. It is simply nonsense. The wall may be able to reduce the number of suicide bombings, but it will not bring peace. It cannot. Peace can come about only if there are political and economic measures side by side with security measures. As we learned in Northern Ireland, security measures alone cannot provide lasting peace; they can provide only protection until lasting peace is found. The security wall is a blemish on Israel's reputation as a state, and its continued existence is an affront to human dignity in the whole of the middle east. The report also mentions Guantanamo Bay. I realise that this may be a rare point of disagreement between my hon. Friend the Minister and me, but the war on terror is, at least in part, a war for human rights. Our opponents in this war have no respect for human rights. The people who carried out the 9/11 bombings and murdered 3,000 people have no respect whatever for the human rights of their victims. Nor do the people who carried out the bombings in Bali, London, Madrid, Turkey and Sharm al-Sheikh. Saddam had no respect for the human rights of his opponents, and neither did the Taliban for the human rights of their opponents in Afghanistan. I put it gently to my hon. Friend the Minister that we cannot prosecute a war for human rights while denying the human rights of our opponents, and that is essentially what is happening at Guantanamo Bay. As long as 500 people are kept there without recourse to the courts, any habeas corpus, full cognisance of the Geneva conventions and any prospect of being charged let alone released, that completely undermines our position. In the war on terrorism, the United Kingdom and its allies in the United States are in the right. We should have the moral high ground, but it is difficult for us to occupy the moral high ground when it is being taken away from us by human rights abuses in places such as Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay. We have a special relationship with the United States. We have stood—rightly, I believe—shoulder to shoulder with the United States ever since 9/11, and through Afghanistan and through Iraq. I voted for British troops to participate in the war in Iraq—I have been to Iraq since, and I will go back—and I believe that we were right to do so. Things have been difficult and we have made mistakes, but we were right to participate in the war in Iraq. We should now take the opportunity afforded to us by the special relationship to say, as America's best friend—best friends are sometimes the only people who can say this—that what is happening at Guantanamo Bay is wrong. It is undermining our position and the Americans should end it now.