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Israel (War against Terror)

I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Lichfield (Michael Fabricant) on securing this debate. I wish to focus on the subject of the debate. It is all too easy to be partisan in looking at the details of the situation in Israel at present, but we should seek consensus on Israel as the focal point in the fight against terror. This country and others that have been victims of terror can join in that, but at the same time we should recognise that Israel is the focus of terrorist organisations. That must concern us all and we should all take action to deal with it. I visited Israel in January, courtesy of the Conservative Friends of Israel, and have three abiding images that are relevant to this debate. The first memory is of going to northern Israel, to the southern Lebanese border, and seeing an armed Hezbollah terrorist standing 50 yards away on the border. That reminded me all too clearly of the presence of terrorist organisations. That needs to be tackled. As my hon. Friend said, it needs to be tackled by this Government as well through the way in which we deal with Hezbollah. As hon. Members will know, Hezbollah was established by Iran and Syria as a proxy for attacking Israel—as the spearhead for Iran’s export of terrorism. It seeks the destruction of the state of Israel and the establishment of an Islamic republic in Lebanon. We need to recognise that Hezbollah is a threat to Israel, the United States and, indeed, the entire western world and we need to tackle it seriously. As the Foreign Secretary said in reply to a written question from the hon. Member for Hartlepool (Mr. Wright), we need to do that by calling on Hezbollah"““to contribute to peace and security in the middle east by renouncing violence, disarming in compliance with UN Security Council resolution 1559, and entering into the democratic process on an exclusively non-violent basis.””—[Official Report, 29 November 2005; Vol. 440, cc. 126-127.]" We can all unite on the response to that question, but we need to go further. As other countries, such as the US, Australia, Canada, Israel and, recently, Holland, have done, we need to recognise that Hezbollah is a terror organisation and to treat it accordingly. We cannot go along with the European Union in seeking artificially to differentiate between the political and military wings of Hezbollah. I saw the situation for myself when I saw the terrorist standing there armed, guarding the border. I ask the Minister to respond on this particular point: Hezbollah is a terror organisation and we cannot separate the political side and what is called the external security organisation. We need to join the countries that I mentioned and recognise Hezbollah as an organ of terror. As my hon. Friend the Member for Lichfield said, we need to recognise properly that Hezbollah is engaged in activities that are causing great damage to the region and instability beyond. It is threatening Lebanon’s own fragile democracy and independence from the Syrian occupation and it is causing instability and conflict to cross the UN-drawn Israeli-Lebanese border. It is a cause of instability in Israel and further afield. We also need to recognise the activities of al-Qaeda in the region. I am referring not only to activities that we can see, but to the words of the al-Qaeda leaders bin Laden and Zawahiri. They have mentioned not so much Afghanistan or Iraq but Palestine as a higher priority. In recent times, they have carried through phases of operations in Afghanistan and beyond. Now we are seeing, particularly in Israel, the results of their activities. In August 2005, the Syrian citizen Louai Sakra was arrested while planning to blow up cruise ships containing Israeli tourists. On 27 December 2005, nine rockets were fired from Lebanon into Israel. Al-Qaeda claimed responsibility for that attack. On 2 March 2006, Palestinian security forces caught al-Qaeda operatives in Gaza and the west bank, and the Chairman of the Palestinian Authority, Mahmoud Abbas, admitted that there was proof of the infiltration of al-Qaeda into the west bank and Gaza. We need to consider more broadly the war against terror, but inevitably the focus is Israel and the Jewish people. My second abiding memory is of Yad Vashem, the holocaust memorial. When I visited it, I was reminded that even when the war was over and Jewish people were going out of the camps, the killing of the Jewish people continued relentlessly. That reminds me and should remind us all that anti-Semitism and attacks on Jewish people continue to this day. We can see that in the words coming from Iran. As has been said, the Iranian President said that he wished to wipe Israel off the map. We should remember the words that have often gone in tandem with an attack on Israel and the Jewish people—words that constitute a denial of the holocaust, in which more than 6 million Jews were murdered.