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Middle East and Afghanistan

My Lords, in the third day of debate on the gracious Speech, just over a fortnight ago, many Members of your Lordships’ House spoke clearly and strongly about the priority of finding a resolution to the disastrously destructive situation in Israel-Palestine—destructive, as has already been said today, not only to both Israelis and Palestinians but to the rest of the Middle East and much wider. On that day, the noble Lord, Lord Hylton, was not, in my view, exaggerating—he spoke for many that day and for many who have spoken today—when he said that, "““the conflict of Israel and Palestine, with its overspill into Lebanon, holds the key to world peace””.—[Official Report, 20/11/06; col. 209.]" He offered the House and the Government advice that was both sound and innovative. It seemed to me that, in winding up the debate that day, the Minister, the noble Lord, Lord Triesman, was agreeing with much of what the noble Lord, Lord Hylton, and the noble Lord, Lord Alderdice, had said, as he has done again this afternoon. I especially remember from a fortnight ago the characteristically distinguished and passionate speech of the noble Baroness, Lady Williams of Crosby. It was, she said, "““wickedly wrong for Gaza to use rockets against the citizens and civilians of Israel. But it is also wickedly wrong for Gaza to have two people out of three with no running water or to have persistent collective punishment directed against them, with children and elderly people among the many victims””.—[Official Report, 20/11/06; col. 134.]" It is also wickedly wrong for any of us, and for any state, to speak or behave as if the whole situation, not only in Gaza but right across the West Bank and the Occupied Territories, can be allowed to drag on much as it is. This is also true for the Israelis who suffer, too, although not remotely to the extent of the Palestinians. The Minister quoted the freshly energetic words of the Prime Minister this afternoon, and it has never been more vital that they should be translated into concerted, persevering diplomatic activity. The reality is that the Palestinian economy is in ruins, wrecked by the wanton destruction of olive groves, orchards and factories, by the separation of farmers from their land and of producers from their markets because of the separation wall and fence, by the destruction of homes, and by the constant abusive delays at checkpoints. The quartet’s and the Israelis’ freeze on funds to the Palestinian Authority has had a truly terrible and inhumane effect, especially on medical services, on education and on the physical and mental welfare of a generation of children. Tens of thousands of people are now seriously undernourished. I often wonder whether the Prime Minister, members of his Government and still more the Government of President Bush have taken the time to see the wall and fence from the Palestinian side and through the eyes, accompanied by the commentary, of Palestinians who know and suffer its dire and disproportionate effects. Have they talked to people whose relatives have been held up for hours gratuitously, oppressively and throughout the heat of the day at checkpoints when they were clearly sick or in labour and on the way to hospital, tragically often with the result that their condition has worsened or, indeed, that they have died? Have the Government questioned the Israeli authorities about the conditions in Bethlehem, the little town about which carols are already being sung and—I hope that noble Lords will be as glad about this as I am—to which the four presidents of Churches Together in England will be going after they have been to Jerusalem in the week before Christmas? Bethlehem today is in effect a prison, entirely surrounded by the separation wall or fence and with a huge and forbidding fortification straddling the road to Jerusalem. The city is imprisoned, too, by the settlements built on its land on the hills around it. The pilgrimage industry is therefore in ruins, and large numbers of Christians have no option but to emigrate. Ever fewer are left in the city of Jesus’s birth. In particular, have the Government an opinion about the state of affairs around Rachel’s Tomb, sacred to all three faiths and a few hundred yards inside Bethlehem from the point where the wall and that monstrous gate close off the ancient road? In April 1998, a party of pilgrims and I had a good dinner and a valuable opportunity to meet and talk to Palestinian Christians in a Lutheran-owned hotel that overlooks it. A few years later, in the second intifada, the Israeli Defence Forces requisitioned the hotel, concerned for the safety of their then small base behind the sacred site. Two years ago, my wife and I were taken around that same hotel by its Lutheran owners, to whom it had been returned systematically trashed and abused from top to bottom, with highly unpleasant anti-Palestinian slogans on the walls, many of them anti-Muslim, in a Christian-owned building. Now, Rachel’s Tomb is off limits, prohibited to Muslims and to Christians. The great wall of Israel snakes down to enclose both the little shrine and the small Israeli settlement that is being built around it. The Open Bethlehem project fears that, once settlers move in, it will become, like the extremist settlement in Hebron, a provocation to violence in a peaceful place. We need to be as clear here and across Europe and the United States, and in many Arab states as well, as most Palestinians and many Israelis are clear that the situation is intolerable and that a resolution must be found quickly. Historically, as we have been reminded this afternoon, the UK has such a large share of responsibility for the whole situation that we of all people should be exerting every diplomatic vigour—that good word of the noble Lord, Lord Howell—to bring into existence a widely drawn coalition towards a resolution of all the issues through what will be years of careful, persevering work, which we are frankly late in restarting and about which especially the noble Lord, Lord Alderdice, and the noble Lord, Lord Hylton, spoke a fortnight ago. There has to be a two-state solution—one that assures both Israel and the Palestinians security, safety and prosperity. However, I question the realism of the Minister in speaking of returning to the road map, because so many facts on the ground have been brought into being even in the past two years—the continuing development of the illegal occupation, of settlements and of settlers-only roads, tunnels and viaducts, not to speak of the wall or fence. The weakness of the current Israeli Government cannot be a reason for putting off this fresh diplomatic initiative until what will only be a less promising future still. It will be imperative that all the parties take all the relevant UN resolutions seriously. For my part, I doubt whether peace can be guaranteed for the time that it will take to work through all that must be worked through, including the status of Jerusalem, without a UN force deployed along the internationally recognised borders of Israel. Unless this country and many others work together with those immediately concerned at all those matters as a priority, I am afraid—I use the word advisedly—that there is little point in searching for peace anywhere else in the region to which today’s debate is attending or indeed in searching for peace in the cities and transport systems of the northern hemisphere.