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Global Security (Middle East)

We must welcome that and hope that the aid is allowed across the crossing points. I shall be looking at that initiative with some interest. There is a blockade. What do we do when there is a blockade? My hon. Friend the Member for Birmingham, Northfield (Richard Burden) quoted what deputy Defence Minister Vilnai said. He wants to cut off the Gaza strip completely, with no supplies going in at all from the direction of Israel. Where else can they come from? The sea, the air and by land from Egypt—those are the only alternatives. Right hon. and hon. Members have heard what I said about the Gaza-Egyptian crossing. I do not think the Israelis will want to see too many supplies coming in by land there and they guard the sea, as my hon. Friend said, so there is only one alternative to such a blockade, which is to airlift in materials. However, the Israelis have bombed the airfield—paid for, by the way, partly by the UK. The port, also paid for partly by taxpayers in this country, has been there for many years, and one can imagine the state of it now, so the only way to airlift material in is by helicopter. That means moving goods by shipping them into the Mediterranean and offloading them into the Gaza strip. Has the Minister been involved in any talks about the possibility of an airlift, hopefully in the near future, to relieve the huge suffering that is already going on in Gaza but will get worse as the days proceed? If we are sending a ship to the Mediterranean to help the Gazans, I make a plea for it to have a decent operating facility on board, because there are some very sick people in Gaza, who need to be airlifted out and given proper medical attention as soon as possible. The situation is desperate, and I suggest to the Minister that desperate situations often need radical solutions. I accept that the airlift solution I am proposing this afternoon is radical, but it is a solution to a desperate situation. In response to my hon. Friend the Member for Birmingham, Erdington (Mr. Simon), who asked a question that was not answered earlier, I have seen no evidence at all for what was described and I have been analysing over many years what the Israelis—in fact, it is not all Israelis, but a small number of Israelis called Zionists—have been doing in Israel. People can shoot me down on this if they do not believe me or do not want to accept the argument, but my firm belief is that the Zionists will not stop until they have control of all the biblical lands. We can analyse what happened following the talks in Oslo, Camp David, Madrid and, recently, Annapolis. After all those so-called peace talks, the Israelis have given very little. The situation has just gone on and on and on, for 60 years altogether, and we still have not seen a settlement.