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Israel (War against Terror)

Let me proceed a little. The hon. Gentleman rightly condemns Hamas, which is a terrorist organisation that is responsible for the death of innocent people. He implicitly condemned the kidnapping of the teenage Israeli corporal Gilad Shalit but seems to imagine that somehow or other such events are peculiar to Palestinian terrorists. He does not refer to the fact that before Israel gained independence, Jewish terrorists led by two future Prime Ministers of Israel, Begin and Shamir, one of whom was a murderer and an assassin, kidnapped two British sergeants, hanged them and booby-trapped their bodies. Hamas has learned well from Jewish terrorists. If the hon. Gentleman believes that the explosion at the King David hotel can somehow be legitimised, he ought to pay attention to the fact that not only 200 non-Jews but 19 Jews were killed there, and if he goes on about terrorism, let him somehow justify more than 200 innocent Palestinians being murdered by Begin and Shamir in the village of Deir Yassin. There are no clean hands on either side of this conflict. I condemn Hamas. The party includes murderers, killers and terrorists, but it won a democratic election. President Bush, whose first election was not a democratic victory but a fiddled election that resulted in his appointment by the Supreme Court, seems to imagine that not only do we require democratic elections in the middle east but those elections can be accepted as democratic only if the people vote in the way we want. I did not want the Palestinians to vote for Hamas—I was there leading an Inter-Parliamentary Union delegation before that election—but they did so. The more the Israelis go on oppressing and killing Palestinians, the more support for Hamas will grow. The father of Gilad Shalit is quoted in The Daily Telegraph today as regarding the Israeli Government’s action, allegedly to free his son, as ““delusional””. Ehud Olmert, the Prime Minister of Israel, is quoted in the same article as having issued orders to the army to"““make sure that no one sleeps at night in Gaza””." That is collective punishment. It is in direct violation of every canon of international law; yet the hon. Gentleman says that it is all right because Israel is a democracy. However, Hamas was elected by a democratic vote—hon. Friends of mine went to see that election, and saw that it was democratically conducted. Let us be clear: terrorists are murdering Israeli citizens. That is culpable to the nth degree, but at the same time, the Israelis have killed 4,000 Palestinians since the second intifada began, including hundreds of children. The hon. Gentleman says that children are not targeted—but they are dead just the same. As long as we go on tolerating such unacceptable breaches of law by the Israeli Government, the more terrorism and support for it among the Palestinians will be fostered.