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Israel and Palestinian Territories

Thank you, Mr. Bercow. It is a pleasure to have you in the Chair today. I start by congratulating the hon. Member for Orkney and Shetland (Mr. Carmichael) on securing this debate. I, too, was on the visit of the all-party parliamentary group on Palestine last September, and I would like to thank Welfare Association UK, which enabled that visit to happen. I would also like to commend the United Nations agencies in the region, particularly UNOCHA— the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs—and the United Nations Relief and Works Agency, especially John Ging from UNRWA, who briefed us while we were there and looked after us. I would also like to thank Julia Wickham and Allan Hogarth of Amnesty International, who accompanied us on the visit. I should also say that, although we were a group of Liberal Democrat and Labour MPs, that was not intentional. There was a Conservative group of MPs that visited the same places the following week, staying in rather better hotels, I think, but they were briefed by exactly the same people. I hope that we will hear from Conservative MPs about their experience during the debate. Of course, the week after their visit there was also a visit by Tony Blair, on behalf of the Quartet, and he was briefed by the same people. I should say at the outset that I deplore the habit that people have got into of calling other people either pro-Israeli or pro-Palestinian, as though the two were mutually exclusive. I regard myself as a friend of Israel every bit as much as my hon. Friend the Member for Liverpool, Riverside (Mrs. Ellman) does, and I also regard myself as a friend of Palestine. It is really as a friend of Israel that I think that we should be urging the Israeli Government, in their own interests as much as in the interests of justice, to stop expanding the settlements, because they cannot expect the Palestinians to engage in meaningful negotiations at the same time as they are encroaching every day on yet more Palestinian land. It is like asking people to play football while moving the goalposts. It is the continuing expansion of settlements that cuts the ground from under the feet of moderate Palestinian politicians, metaphorically as well as literally, and strengthens the extremists. The Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs, my right hon. Friend the Member for South Shields (David Miliband), saw the bulldozers and cranes still at work building new settlement houses when he travelled from Jerusalem to Jericho last year, through the settlement of Ma'ale Adumim, which is now a town of some 30,000 inhabitants about six miles to the east of Jerusalem. When I asked him about his trip in the Commons, he said that he took comfort from a speech made by the Israeli Prime Minister, Ehud Olmert, the preceding week, in which Mr. Olmert promised, as a confidence-building measure, to fulfil his responsibilities under the first phase of the road map, which my right hon. Friend understood to mean that he would stop building in the settlements. However, when one looks more closely at what the Israeli Prime Minister said, one finds that he did not actually promise to stop building; what he promised to do was to stop expanding the outer boundaries of settlements, but to continue building within them. Therefore, I fear that that is an empty promise, since all the Israeli settlements have large areas set aside for future building. Next to Ma'ale Adumim, there is an area known on the maps only as E1, which is a military area closed to Palestinians but is also, in fact, reserved for future expansion of Ma'ale Adumim, and it could take more than another 30,000 settlement houses. All the other settlements also have areas reserved for future expansion. In fact, a study by the World Bank found that, although the built-up areas of settlements cover only 3 per cent. of west bank territory, the municipal areas around them cover 9 per cent., and then there are areas called reserved settlement jurisdiction, which cover a further 9 per cent. When we add the closed military areas and the various other categories, we find that nearly 50 per cent. of the west bank is closed to nearly all Palestinians. The state of Israel already occupies 77 per cent. of the land of the Palestine mandate, so if and when the Palestinians get their own state with the 1967 boundaries, they will be renouncing their claim to 77 per cent. of the mandate area and agreeing to occupy and live in only 23 per cent. of it. I sometimes wonder how the English would react if we were confined to 23 per cent. of our original country. Let us imagine that the original inhabitants of England were cooped up in an area the size of Wales, which is proportionately the same size as the area that we are talking about.