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Middle East

I am pleased to follow the hon. Member for High Peak (Tom Levitt), and I commend his and his colleagues’ initiative in visiting Gaza. I have also done so in the past year. The situation there is one of despair, with all the consequences that come from 1.5 million people living in terrible circumstances. Let me return to that issue later. This is a topical debate on the middle east, but the middle east is always topical, and it would be interesting to know why it popped up today. I did not envy the Minister or his brilliant advisers at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office having to produce a 10-minute speech to cover the middle east peace process, Iraq, the importance of the Gulf Co-operation Council, Iran, Syria and Lebanon for the edification of the House. It all makes this debate an exchange of headlines as much as anything else. It gives the Minister the opportunity to restate one or two Government positions, but it is almost impossible for us to get into the detail of any middle east issue. However, let me try to get into the detail of one such issue—the United Kingdom’s representation and understanding in the middle east. Historically, we have an immensely strong position in the region. However, in the past 10 years we have lacked the joined-up thinking, ability and propensity to draw on our understanding as a nation. Part of that has been due to the emasculation of the policy making of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office in the first 10 years of the Labour Government. A concentration on policy making within a small cabal inside Downing street characterised the previous Prime Minister’s term in office, and that has wreaked havoc with our reputation in the middle east. We have the benefit of years of experience among our diplomats and soldiers, who have taken time in their long careers to understand the region and the Arab perspective. The Government have preferred to trust their own dogmatic appreciation of events. In the past 10 years, we have chosen a path that has made our foreign policy on the region seem indistinguishable from that of our American allies. Our interests in the region are, however, profoundly different. We should recognise that. Furthermore, the previous Prime Minister showed an interest that seemed sometimes childishly simple, and at other times deeply patronising, to those on the receiving end. He had a flair for fleetingly inserting himself into trouble spots as a sort of additional American Secretary of State—one thinks of his charge down the steps on to the tarmac in Syria for what ended up as a disastrous visit and his intervention in Lebanon—but it took him 10 years to visit the United Arab Emirates, which he did right at the end of his premiership. That is one example of where our priorities were profoundly wrong in those 10 years, quite apart from all the conflicts we got into and the trouble elsewhere. I very much welcome the statement by the Minister that the Gulf Co-operation Council area is the area most visited by Ministers. I would particularly like to applaud the efforts of His Royal Highness the Duke of York in supporting the efforts of Lord Jones of Birmingham. The two of them are doing an immensely important job in fronting our business and trade interests in that region, and I am delighted that their efforts are getting the support from other Ministers that they so richly deserve. As one of the parliamentary chairmen of the Council for Arab-British Understanding and the Conservative Middle East Council, I, like a scratched record, again ask Members to encourage more engagement with and more understanding of the region. We need to engage in more patient study of the issues and their causes so that we can understand them. We need to spend more time listening to the Arab world, and we need to listen to the Iranians and understand their perspective. I advocate visits by parliamentarians and Ministers to the region, but we should not forget the scale of the British-Arab and the British-Iranian interest in the United Kingdom. Those communities should be better engaged in our domestic processes, which will offer benefits to our foreign policy as well as to community relations in the UK. The obvious benefit is that we will then have a better understanding of how to pursue our interest in the region. In three or four years time, Qatar is likely to have the largest sovereign wealth fund in the world. Where the Qataris decide to invest will be critical to many of our businesses and our country. Indeed, to secure our energy needs, we are engaged in creating important links to get liquid petroleum gas from Qatar. Let us just imagine, however, Iran providing that opportunity as well as Qatar. Along with the United States, we have pursued a policy of confrontation with Iran. I say nothing to defend the deeply unattractive Government of Iran or their position, but our policy is based on a profound lack of understanding of the Iranian perspective. A lot of what they do in their pursuit of diplomacy internationally is unforgivable, but we should at least try to understand why they pursue their aims in such a way. If we understand that better, we can begin the process—it will be long, but we have to start somewhere—of moving to a position where 75 million Iranians are again an effective market for British financial services and manufactured goods. Our oil and gas companies should be able to go in to assist in the development of Iran’s vast oil and gas reserves, for their benefit and ours. There is a massive mutual interest. The product of our policy on Iran has, ironically, turned this deeply unattractive Government into the leaders of the most significant regional power. The decisions that they take, particularly with regard to the neighbouring conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan that we are engaged in, are immensely important for the United Kingdom and the thousands of our soldiers deployed in the region, whether we like it our not. We have to find a way of improving the outcome of policy on Iran, and we would be able to do that if we understood Iran better. I briefly return to the Israeli-Arab conflict. We are debating the United Kingdom’s role and involvement in it, and by extension, that of the international community as a whole. I sometimes wonder whether it would not be better for the international community to step back a little. In the end, this conflict has to be resolved by the people of Israel and the Palestinian people. Until the basic insecurity of the state of Israel and the obvious injustice of what has happened to the Palestinians in the past 60 years are addressed—and those two can only be addressed together—the conflict will continue. The message I urge on Arab representatives to whom I speak and on the Palestinians whom I meet in the course of the extra work I do in Parliament is that they should address their policy to the people of Israel. In the end, the people of Israel will have to vote for a Government who will do an historic deal with the Palestinians. In the same way, the people of Palestine will have to support a Government who do a deal with the people of Israel and their Government. That will happen only when there is a sufficient kernel of opinion in both countries that people want peace and are prepared to go through the pain required to get it. That means the Israelis have to appreciate the importance of the Arab peace plan, rather than just trying to push it away. It also means that the Arab League has to reinforce the statement of the Arab peace plan—an historic offer to live in peace in Israel and to offer it the prospect of normalisation with its neighbours. That peace plan must be driven through and reinforced with a soft diplomacy aimed at the people of Israel. It must convince them that Arab states really mean it when they talk about normalisation. Once that message is put to the people of Israel, they can begin to address the insecurity at the heart of many Israeli people’s existence, reflected by the experiences referred to by the hon. Member for High Peak. I hope that such a position would give the Israelis confidence to begin to address the terrible injustice that has been meted out to the Palestinians. The story of the past 60 years is a horrifying one, which has overflowed into all the nations that border Palestine and Israel. One has only to look at the catastrophic effect of the involvement of Palestinian refugees on the politics of Lebanon—the awful Lebanese civil war and the enormous complications that that produced—to understand how important it is that the two peoples are reconciled. I leave the Minister and the House with this thought. The international community is an external actor in this situation, and for the main players, the Israeli and Palestinian people, it tends to be a question of manipulating that community to achieve a particular objective. I sometimes wonder whether the international community should try to remove that opportunity from them, and ensure that the responsibility for resolving this conflict is not something for the Americans to broker, or for other external actors to deliver. This is about Israel getting its security within a region that is Arab, and how the Arabs and the Israelis deal with the situation together. They have to stop looking to the rest of us to sort it out for them. I offer that reflection having spent a long time thinking about how the UK and others can contribute to the situation. I sometimes wonder whether doing a little less might achieve rather more.