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Middle East

My Lords, I endorse much of what the noble Lord, Lord Howell, has said. It is clear that we now face a potential for expansion of the Israel/Palestine conflict into a broader regional conflict. We on these Benches recognise that the Prime Minister has been expressing that view in Washington for some time. Indeed, the Prime Minister was right to argue, as he did to President Bush on many occasions, that any action in Iraq had to be taken in parallel with pursuing active negotiations on the road map for Israel and Palestine. It is a tragedy that the United States resisted that advice. We have now lost five and a half years in the Israel/Palestine peace process. There is an underlying ambiguity about how far the Government of Israel or the Administration of the United States were committed to a two-state solution and how far they were prepared to accept that we were edging towards a greater Israel with settlement building continuing in the West Bank and with continued impoverishment of the Palestinians. Does the Minister accept that Israel can be secure in the long run only if it finds a way to live in peace with its neighbours and that the only way to secure peace with its neighbours is to have a two-state solution with a viable Palestine? We are now moving further away from that rather than towards it. We on these Benches are particularly worried about the perceptions in Washington under the current Administration. Condoleezza Rice's remarks about the right of Israel to defend itself as a sovereign state do not seem to be helpful in the current situation. We are much concerned about those who see this as part of a general war on terror in which different terrorist groups—Hezbollah, Hamas, al-Qaeda, groups in Kashmir and Indonesia and heaven knows where else—are lumped together into a broad war on Islam, which one sometimes gets from some neoconservatives in the United States. Those who said three or four years ago that the road to Jerusalem lies through Baghdad now assume that it has to lie through regime change in Damascus and Tehran as well, although we make no excuses for the current regimes in Syria and Iran. We recognise that the attempt to redraw the entire structure of the Middle East by the Project for the New American Century was flawed from the outset and unachievable. The disproportionate response from Israel is counterproductive. Every survey of strategic bombing and major bombing campaigns, from the US’s strategic survey of bombing in the Second World War through to post-Vietnam surveys, shows that bombing hardens resistance and increases bitterness. Hezbollah, after all, grew in influence and local prestige out of the Israeli occupation of Lebanon. Bombing it again is not the way to weaken Hezbollah’s position. We must be concerned that the humanitarian situation in Gaza does not worsen. We must also be concerned to ensure that Israeli efforts to cripple the Palestinian state, administration and infrastructure are stopped. If we are to have some hope of a viable Palestinian partner, we must acknowledge that it was a crucial mistake to refuse at least to talk to Hamas when it was democratically elected as the Government of Palestine. How closely are we liaising with other states on the evacuation of British citizens? Do we have enough helicopters? As my noble friend Lord Dholakia has just reminded me, what is the situation for British citizens of dual nationality? That is a common situation for people in the Lebanon. Are we actively engaged with it? Will the Minister give some assurance that Britain is taking active steps towards securing what must be, given the difficulties that we have in persuading Washington to see the complex problems of the Middle East from our perspective, an EU initiative? The Prime Minister has on a number of occasions suggested that what we most need is a regional conference to deal with the problems of the Middle East as a whole. Does he intend to revive that?