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UK Policy on the Middle East

If my hon. Friend will allow me, I will give way if I have time before I finish. Israel ignores international opinion on the illegal wall that has turned towns such as Kalkilya and Bethlehem into prisons, and on the illegal checkpoints. It knows that, whatever it does, no action will follow. It has the most extremist Government it has ever had, under the most extremist Prime Minister it has ever had, and a Foreign Minister who is an avowed racist. Israel is allowed literally to get away with murder. Only punitive international action will make even the tiniest difference. That means an arms ban, and the kind of sanctions that were imposed by the senior President Bush on Yitzhak Shamir to force him to participate in international talks in Madrid. This is a situation in which one country is holding 1.5 million people in an internal prison and 4 million other Palestinians in a form of detention, but let us be clear about this: no action will be taken against Israel. President Obama will take no action, partly because he has mid-term elections in five months' time, and partly because the odious pressure group, AIPAC—the American Israel Public Affairs Committee—can destroy any United States politician who makes the slightest criticism of Israel. When a Republican Congressman suggested that a tiny sliver of the billions of dollars that the United States gives to Israel should be transferred to alleviate a certain amount of poverty in Africa, AIPAC labelled him an anti-Semite. That is what American politicians, including Obama, have to put up with. We could take action, however. The European Union could take action over trade agreements, for example. Let us be clear that we cannot appeal to the conscience and good will of a country that has not demonstrated that it has either quality. The situation is now unsustainable. The more the Israelis repress, suppress and oppress the Palestinians, the more precarious the future of their state will be. I saw, as did other hon. Members when we went to Iraq this year, that the Israelis are breeding children who hate them because of their hunger and their lack of schooling, and because of the way in which they are being treated. The Israelis seem to believe that treating the people of Gaza like that is a way of weaning them away from Hamas, but it only makes them support Hamas even more. Nobody is excusing Hamas; it has done dreadful things, as I pointed out to its representatives when I was in Gaza earlier this year. The fact is, however, that the Israelis are creating a generation of children who will grow up hungry and hating them. This Israel does not want a two-state solution, but the only alternative is a one-state solution, and the existential fact is that, before long, there will be more Palestinians than Israeli Jews. It took the Jews 2,000 years to get their homeland in what is now Israel. After 60 years in that homeland, they now risk throwing it all away.