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International Affairs

I shall do my best to keep to three minutes. I entirely agree with what the hon. Member for Hartlepool (Mr. Wright) said and I do not wish to repeat it. I thought it was a fine speech. I declare my interest. I am the chairman of the Conservative Friends of Israel. This will not be a balanced speech because I do not think I should take the time to balance it as I would otherwise like. When hostages are taken and still held, I find it difficult to be balanced. The Foreign Secretary was absolutely right in saying that the crisis could be brought speedily to an end by the hostages being released and by the firing of the rockets being stopped. I shall make four points. First, some people say that the occupation by the Israelis is the problem. Well, if that were the case, when Israel withdrew from Gaza they could have expected some benefit from it, but instead what they got was a rain of rockets coming out of Gaza. That withdrawal from Gaza was heavily objected to by many people in Israel, and now the reaction in Israel by the opponents of withdrawal from Gaza is, ““Look, we were right. We should never have withdrawn from Gaza in the first place.”” We do not want to send the wrong message to Israel by allowing rockets to continue to rain down on Israel from the areas that it releases. Secondly, people are calling on Israel to be proportionate and restrained. Yes, of course it must be proportionate and restrained, but what do we expect the Israelis to do? Do we expect them to leave open the route to restock Hezbollah’s rockets? Do we expect them to negotiate with kidnappers and thus to create more kidnappers? Do we expect them to let out of jail the people who have been murdering their neighbours? We call on Israel to show restraint, of course, but Israel over many years has been showing restraint in the face of those rockets. A couple of weeks ago I was in Kandahar and had to spend two hours in a concrete air raid shelter because of the fear of rockets coming in from the Taliban. To be honest, it turned out to be almost a bit of a game. But in Israel it is happening night after night, and the Israelis could see that going on time after time and never stopping. Thirdly, the Iranians are talking about their nuclear weapons. We cannot just ignore what the Iranian President says about wanting to wipe Israel off the face of the map. We cannot pretend from our western perspective that he never said it or that he was joking. I believe that he meant it. The way that he is working, through Syria and the Lebanese Hezbollah, is something of which we need to be very scared. My final point echoes a comment by the hon. Member for Berwickshire, Roxburgh and Selkirk (Mr. Moore). It is worrying that 80 per cent. of Palestinians are living below the poverty line. In the long term, the only solution to the problem is dramatically to regenerate the economies of Palestine and Lebanon. One can of course argue that that will not be achieved by destroying all the infrastructure. Equally, however, it will not be achieved if the security situation there is such that they are free to launch rockets and to intimidate Israel, their democratic, rule-of-law neighbour. I will not have changed many minds, but at least I have been brief.