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Gaza

My Lords, "““Tell it not in Gath, publish it not in the streets of Askelon; lest the daughters of the Philistines rejoice, lest the daughters of the uncircumcised triumph””." That quotation from David’s lament for the deaths of Saul and Jonathan cannot be more appropriately said than now. We have to go back—have we not?—to the root causes of the problem, which were 2,000 years of Christian guilt at their treatment of the Jews, culminating in the Russian persecutions of the late 19th century and the ghastliness of the Holocaust. What do Christianity and the western world do but impose on the Arabs and the Palestinians to make the redress and pay their fine? They have put on the Arabs by terrorist means, through Likud and Haganah, the bombing of Deir Yassin, the murder of people in Lydda and outside Mount Carmel and the forced evacuation of over 1 million people from Palestine in 1948. We cannot go back over that, but somehow we have to redress that dreadful series of injustices. If we do not, as everyone else has said, this will go on and on and on, and one day a Hamas or Hezbollah chap will get hold of a dirty load of nuclear weapons and lob it into Israel and Israel will use nuclear weapons. The situation can get worse. We have to make both sides realise that a terrible injustice was done to the Arabs, who have to be compensated in some way for that injustice done by Christianity to the Muslim world.