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International Affairs

I shall make five points in three minutes, if I can manage that. First, I think that the Foreign Secretary was very wise to resist pressure to say whether she considered Israel’s response to be proportionate or disproportionate. I am sorry that others were not quite so statesmanlike. It is extraordinarily difficult to say what is a proportionate and what is a disproportionate response in such circumstances. Is it proportionate not to take out stores of missiles because Hezbollah chooses to locate them in populated areas? That is scandalous in itself, and is of course the responsibility of the Government of Lebanon, although no one has wanted to say that in the House today. The Government of Lebanon have simply acquiesced in the state of affairs for a very long time. They have made no attempt to enforce Security Council resolution 1559, and I am afraid that a great deal of responsibility now lies on their shoulders. Secondly, there is no doubt in the House and in the world about who is responsible for this. The middle east has been pretty calm for the past couple of years, and certainly during the past few months. There can be no doubt that it was an entirely gratuitous and deliberate decision by Hamas and Hezbollah—perhaps acting in concert, perhaps not—to attack Israeli soldiers, and to capture some Israeli soldiers and hold them hostage, that started the crisis. We do not do a service to the facts, and we certainly do not do a service to peace, if we do not recognise that, and if we try to put the attacker and the attacked and the innocent and the guilty on the same footing. Thirdly, many people are now saying that because there is great conflict and loss of life on all sides, the answer is for the international community to put pressure on the parties. That is understandable, but it has not been thought through properly. It is not possible to put pressure on Hezbollah or Hamas. It is not even possible to put pressure on their supporters, Syria and Iran. If we could put pressure on Iran we could solve the nuclear weapons problem, but we all know that we cannot do that. Putting pressure on the parties basically means putting pressure on Israel. What a perverse and absurd situation that would be. What a terrible, dangerous message to send around the world, and the middle east in particular: that if a country launches rocket attacks on Israel or attack Israeli soldiers, the international community will put pressure not on that country but on Israel. That really would be extremely perverse and extremely dangerous, and we should not do it. Fourthly, Israel must learn the lessons of its mistakes. In no circumstances should it carry out a prisoner exchange. It is, to some extent, paying a terrible price for having done that in the past. My final point is that the only solution is an international force. That is the only alternative to an indefinite buffer zone in southern Lebanon—