Contribution
My hon. Friend makes a powerful point. Twinning offers an important opportunity to hear that dialogue and to make sure that we are not shutting out the people who are directly impacted. I certainly support that. At next year’s Yom Kippur, I dearly hope that we have an opportunity to look back on a year of progress. I hope that the threat of E1 settlements has ended, and with it, the violent expansion of settlements across the west bank that terrorise Palestinians. I hope that extremism no longer has any influence on the Government of Israel. I hope that the everyday leadership of Israelis and Palestinians, and of Jewish and Muslim communities, inspires people towards peace and towards love.
I hope that the Palestinian Authority, often considered the best hope of leading the Palestinian people, end once and for all the abhorrent practice of paying terrorists each and every month based on the level of destruction and death they wreak upon the Jewish people. I hope that the Palestinian people and Palestinian children are not taught using textbooks that say I am to be hated because I am Jewish. I hope that those children are not brought up to believe that hating Jews is as necessary a life skill as learning maths or science. I hope that Hamas, an evil who have inflicted untold damage on the people of Israel and the people of Gaza, are no more. I hope that in their place is a leadership who see aid as an opportunity to feed their people and to build out infrastructure that might make the everyday life of Gazans better.
I hope, as I have called for in this Chamber many times in the past, that Israel has increased the flow of aid into Gaza so that people have no worry about from where they might find their next meal or dose of medicine. I hope that those in Gaza who have stolen more than £1 billion of public money to build an underground terrorist tunnel network and ply it with weapons become marginalised voices, recognised for the malign influence that they are. I hope that the current Iranian regime, which exports terrorism right across the globe, including here in Britain, and without whom this conflict could never be sustained, is over. I hope that in its place are a Government who treat all the people of Iran—man or woman, gay or straight, Jew or Muslim—as equal people deserving of love and respect.
I am an optimist. I cannot give up on the idea of a two-state solution, but—it is difficult to say this—I understand why some people have. I have spoken to lifelong peace activists in Israel who decided that the depravity of 7 October, and the celebrations that followed it, showed them that they would be fools to believe they could share peace with people who want them dead. I also understand that someone growing up in Gaza knowing war, hunger, destruction and death similarly might not see an alternative path. They may not see their neighbours as partners towards peace. However, my optimism does not dismiss these views, or simply wish that they would go away; my optimism is a belief that we can change course. It has been done before.
In this House, we are rightly proud of what we achieved in Northern Ireland through the Good Friday agreement. That was anything but easy. Prejudices ran deep. Terrible injustices were inflicted upon people, and hurt reached into every corner and every community of Northern Ireland. More of the same was not an option, but that required change and courage. It placed a demand on those who wanted peace—an uncomfortable demand to see and pursue an alternative that hardly seemed possible. We can learn from them.
It starts with us here, with understanding, with compassion, with humanity and dignity in everything we do. It requires us to listen, sometimes to views that we do not always like, and sometimes to people who are not “on our side”. It starts with ending a culture, here in the UK and around the world, in which we take sides on this issue as if it were a football match. That is not a path to peace. If we fail to start from the idea that even in the most intractable and bloody conflicts, children and non-combatants should be kept safe, we will never find that path. If we want to play our role, in this place, in building a two-state solution, we must not see this as a debate needing more heat, but as one needing more light. Where there is anger—understandable, justifiable anger—we must work to ensure that the words we speak do not entrench that anger and, in so doing, block any future chance of progress. The UK and our allies owe that to the people of Israel and Palestine, those who are doing the hard work of trying to find peace in the most difficult of circumstances. We owe them our solidarity. The alternative is that we risk looking back, in a year, at another missed opportunity.