Hansard

I thank my friend and colleague Sandra White for bringing the issue, once again, to Parliament. She has been a great champion of the cause, and she has certainly educated many members of our party about some of the issues.

What is peace? Peace is a period of harmony between different social groups that is characterized by a lack of violence and conflict behaviours, and by freedom from fear of violence. It is commonly understood to be an absence of hostility and retribution. Peace also suggests sincere attempts at reconciliation, the existence of healthy or newly healed interpersonal or international relationships, prosperity in matters of social or economic welfare, and the establishment of equality and a working political order that serves the true interests of all.

My consideration of that idea of peace led me to an initiative that I had heard about: the Nobel Women’s Initiative. Everything that it does embodies the interpretation of peace that I have just given. The initiative has three objectives—“Women Forging Peace”, “Women Achieving Justice” and “Women Advancing Equality and Human Rights”. A few years ago, the initiative produced a fascinating report on the work that it was doing with Palestinian and Israeli women. The report was called, “Partners for Peace: Women in Israel and Palestine Working for an End to the Conflict and Lasting Reconciliation”, and I am sure that what we all want for Palestine and Israel is women—mothers, wives, sisters and daughters—in Palestinian and Israeli communities working together for peace and reconciliation. The report states:

“Any meeting between the Palestinian and Israeli members of the group has an element of a miracle ... If we, who have lost the most precious of all, can sit and talk, then surely others could use this as an example.”

I am sure that we can all agree with that.

That have been many moments when I have been proud of my party, but I have never been prouder than I was at the manifesto launch yesterday, when I saw, written in bold in our manifesto, a commitment to recognise a Palestinian state. I back Sandra White’s call on whoever forms the next UK government to take that into account.

A good few years ago, I hosted the middle east peace festival in this building. Part of that festival was a photographic exhibition in the garden lobby. The display was a narrative of some of the reconciliation work that was going on in Gaza. The photographer was Angela Catlin and the reporter was Billy Briggs. Many, many photographs depicted scenes that were symbolic of peace and reconciliation, but one in particular kept drawing me back over and over again. That photograph now hangs in my office—it has been there for about seven years. It reminds me of why we need to do what we are doing, and it brings us back to the idea of “Women Forging Peace”—I know that the guys are pretty good at that as well, but I thought that it would be different to focus on women. The photograph shows a three-year-old girl in a bright red jumper, holding a white dove. The symbology of that tells us everything that we need to know: youth, the future, the bright reality of the red jumper, and the white of the dove, meaning peace.

For all of our sakes—for the sake of that wee girl and for the sake of Israel and Palestine—we need a two-state solution that is enshrined in the philosophy of peace.