Meeting of the Parliament 03 September 2019
I, too, am grateful to Claudia Beamish for bringing such a well-crafted motion to Parliament this afternoon. It threads the needle to allow all sides of the chamber to support it, and the Liberal Democrats certainly do.
One of the darkest legacies of the British empire is the reality that, on maps around the world, lines that were drawn by British cartographers spark conflicts to this day. That carries with it a burden of atonement and redress that is handed down through the generations, and we as parliamentarians have a role to play in at least trying to unpick some of that mess. Nowhere is that cat’s cradle greater than in the current state of affairs in Israel/Palestine. Three treaties, each born of motives of profit, conquest and military alliance in war time, have created that mess. Each of them has, in some way, created the state of affairs, and the state of conflict, that has existed in that region for the better part of a century.
The McMahon–Hussein agreement during world war one was brokered in part by T E Lawrence to bring Arabia into the war against the Ottoman empire, with the hint that it might have its own unified state of Arabia. The Sykes–Picot agreement took place at the end of the war, and saw the victors of that war carving up, for monetary gain, aspects of the middle east, drawing maps around oil wells and crashing peoples together to create states such as Iraq and Syria. Finally, as we have heard, the Balfour declaration of Lord Rothschild was designed first and foremost to help bring America into world war two with the promise of a Jewish homeland state.
Each of those treaties, seemingly vital to British interests at the time, effectively carved up the same piece of land and its peoples with no thought of the impact that it would have on those peoples or those lands for generation upon generation. That legacy is measured out in human lives—in the disproportionate violence and displacement that takes place to this very day. Between March and November last year, Israelis launched intermittent air and artillery attacks on the Gaza strip, killing 37 Palestinians, while Palestinian groups fired more than 1,000 rockets into Israel during the same period.
I welcome today’s motion and the questions that it asks about what we in Scotland can and must do. As Lib Dems, we strongly believe that those two peoples, Israelis and Palestinians, are obliged to share the region forever. However, it is part and parcel of our historic responsibility to help them do that. We favour neither group over the other in that reality, and we look forward to recognising a wholly autonomous and sovereign Palestinian state, when that will lead to a workable and sustainable two-state solution. We condemn the disproportionate use of force on both sides, whether that is rocket attacks by Palestinians or the Israelis’ continuing illegal policy of settlement expansion. The morass of Israel/Palestine, and all the suffering that goes with it, is the dark inheritance of our history, and we need to play a part in its future.
17:33