Prevention and Suppression of Terrorism — House of Commons, 2021-11-24
Topic: International Affairs
Crispin Jeremy Rupert Blunt (Conservative, Centre-right): I draw the attention of the House to my entry in the Register of Members’ Financial Interests, which I will return to at the end of my remarks if I do not run out of time First, we need to put the measure in context. The nearest parallel is the proscription of both wings of Hezbollah. In terms of practicality, our engagement with Lebanon is very much less than it is with Palestine and Israel. We are unable to talk to the four Ministries that have Hezbollah Ministers and the French are then seen as the lead western European nation in that space. Our relative position in the very troubled country of Lebanon—we have made difficulties for ourselves because of the extent of the popular support for Hezbollah in Lebanon—is significantly reduced from that Of course, Hezbollah is only part of the Government of Lebanon. The difficulty we are giving ourselves here is that the jurisdiction of Gaza is run by Hamas. Nearly 2 million people are administered by the local Administration, who, strangely enough, have their own security forces. If you were responsible for administering Gaza, you might rather need them in one form or another, otherwise you would find organisations such as Islamic Jihad or Islamic State providing security instead. This, therefore, is a complex and difficult question that we have to address. We have already taken a position on what is plainly the stupid, illegitimate and immoral mortaring of people where you cannot tell where the targets are, simply flying weapons over the wall, because you do not have the capacity to engage in that targeting of what would be legitimate targets under international law as resistance. Of course those acts are illegitimate. That is why they have been proscribed However, we need to be careful because people do have a right to resist, and we must understand that we are talking about an occupied people. The history is very long, going back to the Balfour declaration in 1917. We delivered half of the Balfour declaration, perhaps one of the great moral projects of the 20th century, where we gave the Jewish people, who had suffered the most appalling, the greatest crime in human history in the holocaust, as well as the pogroms and all the other oppression in European history and elsewhere, a safe place in the state of Israel. Obviously half of that declaration is undelivered—the bit that said it would not be done at the cost of the rights of the people already there. Of course it has been. That is undone. That is why we have the Balfour project, led by our former consul-general in Jerusalem, Sir Vincent Feen, who is working away to draw attention to the fact that the work is half done and the United Kingdom still has to deliver the Balfour declaration. There is a duty on all of us to try to ensure that we assist—perhaps for the 21st century—a great process of reconciliation between the Palestinian and Jewish Israeli people to enable it to be an example of a great moral project where people come together to forge a future together. That is my hope My personal position is that the two-state solution is long gone. In the end, this will be resolved only by the peoples coming together, with us enabling and helping that to happen. I fear that the order does precisely the opposite.