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Gaza

My Lords, I was thinking about what I should say today as my wife and I attended the Leeds Holocaust Day last Sunday. It was quite an emotional experience. Young Muslims were talking about going to Auschwitz and thinking about the need to ensure that we all live together in peace in this country. The slogan under which the Leeds Holocaust Day met was, ““Stand up to hatred””. That is what I suggest we all have to do. It is easy in the circumstances for people on both sides to be partisan and to give way to anger, to go from anger to hatred and to put all the blame on the other side. We may hear some of that in this debate. We know, because we have been told, how appalling it has been to live in southern Israel, to have to live underground or inside with the threat of rocket attacks coming day by day. We shall hear that. Some may say that that justified what Israel did in Gaza. We will also no doubt hear from others who will say that the destruction of Gaza, with well over 1,000 people killed and many others wounded, the destruction of the university and schools, the killing of people close to and distantly, and the use of white phosphorus justifies revenge against Israel. It is our responsibility in this country, as we come to terms with those two contradictory narratives of competitive victimhood, outsiders as we are, to talk to the partisans on both sides, to those to whom we feel emotionally most close to say: ““Don’t give way to anger, hatred and revenge””. After all, this washes over into our country. In recent months, there have been some very worrying outbreaks of anti-Semitism, threats of renewed radicalisation in the Muslim community, and I have heard worrying rumours of what some imams are saying in some mosques. That is a threat to us and to the peace of our diverse democracy. We have also seen some defensive drawing in within our Jewish community, feeling itself, as well as Israel, to be under attack. We need to say to the leaders of both communities in this country that they have to reach out, not draw in. The danger for us and for them is that we continue with the cycle of conflict: more embittered martyrdom on the Muslim side; and more—one has to say it—self-brutalising attitudes to conflict on the Israeli side. If the preservation of Israel can be assured only by massive and disproportionate attacks on its neighbours every few years, it will eventually be impossible to preserve Israel. Israelis cannot guarantee that they will win every time, and the cost of winning to Israeli society and Israel's reputation in the world and in the United States, on which it vitally depends for continuing support, will be too high. I am very sorry that my noble friend Lady Falkner cannot be here today. Her mother died yesterday, and she had to fly immediately to the United States. We had agreed that I would be critical mainly of Israel and that she would be critical of the Muslim world, on which she has much greater expertise. I will now try to be critical of both. We all feel much anger and sorrow about the immediate crisis, the destruction of Gaza. It is a tactical victory for Israel but, it seems to me, undeniably a strategic disaster. To hear Israelis glorying in how disproportionate their response has been is deeply worrying—there are those who would whisper about possible war crimes. As I listen to this, I recall what was said of Napoleon’s murder of the Duke of Enghien: "““This was worse than a crime, it was a mistake””." It was a mistake that endangers the future of Israel. Two weeks ago, some of us had lunch with the deputy leader of Likud, Silvan Shalom. We asked him repeatedly, ““What is Israeli’s strategy? Where do you go from here? What do you do after you have destroyed Hamas?”” and he kept not answering those questions. As I was finishing reading The Audacity of Hope some days afterwards, I thought that what Barack Obama writes about the United States applies to Israel: "““Without a well-articulated strategy that the … world understands, America””—" and Israel— "““will lack the legitimacy—and ultimately the power—it needs to make itself safer than it is today””." How easy is it to defend Israel? Last week Ha’aretz published a survey of settlement on the West Bank, which stated that 75 per cent of settlements are built illegally on Palestinian-owned land. Yet the Israeli Government demolish Palestinian houses for which there is no permission. Is that acceptable within the best of the Jewish tradition, which many of us cherish so much? There are rumours about troop behaviour towards the Palestinians both in Gaza and on the West Bank, some of which are sadly likely to be true, and very hard evidence of fundamentalist settlers behaving in a totally unacceptable fashion towards their Palestinian neighbours. We have the rise of Netanyahu and Lieberman. It was Netanyahu who made that dreadful Faustian pact with the nastiest version of Christian fundamentalism in the United States in order that they could avoid facing up to the need for withdrawal from what right-wing Israelis call Judea and Samaria and what we like to call the West Bank and Palestine. Ellen Dahrehdorf, of Independent Jewish Voices, said to me last week that she fears that this conflict is leading to a coarsening of Israeli society and a brutalisation of its younger generation to a point where, she says, some of us will not think that the Israel to which we were committed is any longer our Israel. Any true friend of Israel in Britain now, therefore, has to be a critical friend. It does not help to give in to the demand that we should support the dreadful mistakes that the Israeli army and Government have made, thrashing out in their frustration and confusion. On the other side, we also have to ask how easy it is to defend Hamas or Hezbollah and the romanticism of violence which they and their supporters proclaim. How easy is it to defend those Arab regimes which put off reform because they find it easy to blame the West for the ills of the Muslim world rather than tackle the problems of modernising societies, economies and Islam itself? The Saudi pact with Wahhabism is itself part of the problem. So what is to be done? Looking at the Anglo-Israel Association’s magazine the other week, I was struck by an excellent article by Amnon Aran, written just before the current conflict, in which he says that the Arab peace initiative, "““constitutes the most conciliatory pan-Arab position towards Israel since the beginning of the Arab-Israeli conflict””." He said that it is an opportunity that Israel could, and should, seize before the window of opportunity that appeared in the early 1990s closes for good. We need to widen the framework for resolving this conflict, to get beyond Gaza and beyond Israel and Palestine, and to talk about the Middle East as a whole. We need to talk to Syria and to bring in Hamas—that is not so shocking; Israeli has already been talking, indirectly, to Hamas. That is what happens with the Egyptians acting as mediators in the room. We need to bring in external pressure from all sides, not just from what we conventionally call the international community, by which we mean the West; as far as possible, we must involve Russia and, if we can, India and China. There is a need for tough talking to both sides, particularly Israel, since it has been the occupying power for 40 years and is currently the dominant power, and to move with, we hope, at last a constructive American Administration towards the settlement that we desperately need, which will give us a viable Palestinian state and a secure Israel in a more peaceful Middle East.