---

Gaza

My Lords, I was enormously grateful to the Minister for beginning by talking about the humanitarian situation in Gaza. It underlines for me, as a former chair of Christian Aid, the universal importance in our country of the DEC appeal and the need for it to be properly publicised. This is urgent. May I also say that I am president of the English Friends of Sabeel, which is a Christian organisation in the Holy Land that is working on the issues of Palestinian liberation? I shall pick up where the noble Lord, Lord Wallace, left off towards the end of his speech. Those of us who have been to the Holy Land will know the experience of passing through checkpoints on the West Bank that are staffed by young Israeli men and women who are barely out of school and controlling people old enough to be their grandparents. It makes you wonder what we are doing to the next generation of people and what people are thinking who have been involved in firing from tanks into Gaza, which has left young children and women dead or injured for life. There is a brutalising effect in all this. Then I think of the 1.5 million people on the Gaza Strip, half of whom are under the age of 21, I guess. What has happened to them now that thousands of their children have been traumatised by violence and brutality? Is the Minister aware of anything that is being done to help that generation with the anger and the trauma that they have experienced? Every situation is different—I agree with the noble Lord, Lord Howell—but I am reminded of what we experienced in the north of Ireland during the days of the Troubles. We are bound to say, are we not, that no one can win? Both sides may have claimed to have won this conflict, but in fact both have lost. In the midst are millions of people across the community who long for peace but who are locked in conflict. Do not many of us around this House have Jewish friends in Israel and friends among Palestinians? We know that both sides take a totally different view, and that millions of people long for peace on both sides. That means, as noble Lords have said, that we have to return to a political process that must include all parties. Diplomacy is clearly the starting point, and is surely geared to turning diversity and difference to the task of peace with justice. Ways must be found to bring to the table all, including those to whom some say they will never speak. Diplomacy behind the scenes, whatever the rhetoric up front, clears the ground to make that possible, and I wonder how the international community is thinking of strategies for enabling that diplomatic task to succeed. Clearly we must use all the strength of our present international community to insist that the parties negotiate a solution. Whatever is said about the wider international community, we all know that the behaviour of the new American Administration will be critical in all this. The friend of Israel must now become an honest broker in this dispute. There are some promising signals, not least the difficult agenda that Barack Obama has opened up in carrying forward his desire to open up negotiations with Tehran. By crossing these divides, the international community can begin to pull the parties to the table. We know that that will sometimes involve them coming kicking and screaming to the table, but the international community must use its influence and power to achieve that task. I hope that noble Lords will forgive me for saying this from these Benches, but alongside and within this process it is vital that the powerful voice of the faith traditions in the Middle East are brought to bear on this task. Again, when I was last in the region, everyone said that one of the problems with the Oslo accords in the 1990s was that they excluded the faith traditions, which was a mistake. We must mount ourselves over the fantasies that many have that all religious Jews in Israel are fanatical right wingers, that all leaders of Islam are potential terrorists and that the leaders of the Christian Church spend their time arguing about who controls the holy sites. It is time we got out of this mode and got to the substance of the contribution that they and other people behind the political leaders can contribute as community leaders in creating a climate which encourages the process to peace. Fourthly, everyone must insist that progress towards a just solution can happen only when the missiles remain on the ground and the tanks remain silent. Of course, we have to be patient and not allow those who want to use violence to knock us off course from doing so in the task of bringing peace. The appalling scenes that we have witnessed in Gaza bring an urgency to the task. It is made the more vital by the growing disenchantment among Palestinian people with the two-state solution. That adds an urgency to recovering some sense of hopefulness. A vacuum could open up in the political process, which, to use the biblical New Testament metaphor, if it is not filled, seven worse devils could enter it quite quickly and we could find ourselves worse off. Only the international community can bring hope into all of this. Not only do the people of Gaza need their lives and homes rebuilt, confidence needs patiently to be rebuilt. With it, there needs to be a focus on peace and justice, from which all of us should refuse to be diverted.