Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs and Defence

It is a privilege, as always, to follow the right hon. and learned Member for North-East Fife (Sir Menzies Campbell), and a privilege to be given the opportunity to spend 12 minutes reflecting, if I may, on the greatest British failure of foreign policy for 40 years. There are, unhappily, many worthy candidates for that particular plinth in our political pantheon: Iraq, certainly; Afghanistan, perhaps. But the greatest failure by a long political street is our policy in the past 40 years towards Palestine and the state of Israel. That policy has not received, of course, the attention that has been given to Afghanistan and to Iraq, and British soldiers do not daily die on the sand in Palestine. That is to be understood, but that being said, there is no greater cause in the world than exists in Palestine for terrorism—for asymmetric conflict; and, there is no greater alibi or apology for terrorism than exists in Palestine. It does not exist in Afghanistan. The motivation for terrorism is nowhere better exemplified than in Palestine and in the state of Israel, and the so-called legitimacy that those who are part of the asymmetric conflict claim is within Palestine. There is no hope for us in confronting the fundamentalism that lies at the root of terror until we apply ourselves to the defeat of the grotesque injustice that takes place in the middle east. I say straight away that I, myself, have been slow to anger on this issue. There are two reasons why. First, most of my political preoccupation over the past 13 years has been with trying to do something about the erosion of civil liberties in my own country, let alone within the middle east. That erosion has been steady and, as you know, Mr. Deputy Speaker, a preoccupation with which I have wearied the House on a number of occasions. Secondly, my generation has always had a natural sympathy and empathy with the state of Israel—always. Whatever its geographical legitimacy, it is a state that was born within my lifetime and born out of indescribable suffering. There has always been a belief in my generation that the state of Israel should be supported, if nothing else, for that reason, but it needs to be said now that, for me and for many of my generation, that empathy is now at an end. That partiality which was natural within international corridors is now finished. Israel must now be judged without partiality as any other nation state within the community of nations, and, if the acts that it commits make it an international pariah, that is precisely how it must be judged. The anger that has come to me and many other people is not irrational; it is founded in report after report from the most reliable and illustrious of sources, some of them within Israel itself. As my hon. Friend the Member for Islington, North (Jeremy Corbyn) said, brave people in Israel are responsible for that research and those reports. It has come from the United Nations Office for Co-ordination of Humanitarian Affairs, and it has come, finally, in 575 pages of indictment from Goldstone—indictment of criminal carnage and devastation that I shall come to in a moment.