Middle East (Hansard, 12 July 1989)

§ 5. Sir Dennis Walters
To ask the Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs, if he will make a statement on progress towards peace in the middle east.

§ 10. Mr. Wood
To ask the Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs if he will make a statement on the middle east peace process.

§ The Minister of State, Foreign and Commonwealth Office (Mr. Waldegrave)
In a major statement in Madrid last month the European Council appealed to the parties to seize the present opportunity to achieve peace. The Twelve made it clear that the election proposals put forward by Mr. Shamir could contribute to the peace process but that the PLO must participate in negotiations. We fear that the Likud decisions last week, if translated into Israeli Government policy, will make progress much more difficult.

§ Sir Dennis Walters
Does my hon. Friend recognise that the Shamir offer to hold free elections on the West Bank has now been exposed for the fraud that it always was? He was saying privately weeks ago that it was merely a device to buy time. Now he has had to come out publicly. What do we intend to do now to get the peace process moving in a serious manner?

§ Mr. Waldegrave
We intend to deal with the Israeli Government, not with internal party factions. We shall urge the Israeli Government that the peace proposal that they made had the germ of an idea in it, that it should be developed and that it should not be limited in the way that the Likud motions seek to limit it. We shall urge the other side—the Palestinians and the PLO—not yet to despair of developing those election proposals.

§ Mr. Wood
Does my hon. Friend think that any international measures could be taken to ensure free and fair elections in the occupied territories? Is my hon. Friend pressing on Israel and the United States the need to have an international peace conference before there is further and much more serious loss of life?

§ Mr. Waldegrave
Yes, and the Twelve reinforced that commitment to a peace conference. Our sense of urgency is increasing day by day with every new tragedy, including the terrible killing of 14 people in a bus on the way to Jerusalem. Every one of those tragedies, on either side, shows how little time there is left.

§ Mr. Steel
The Minister cannot separate the identity of the leader of the Likud from the identity of Prime Minister Shamir, when they are the same person. Does he think that the recent statements from Mr. Shamir go back on the undertakings that he gave to Her Majesty's Government, the Twelve and the United States Government? Will he therefore take a more vigorous stance on the matter?

§ Mr. Waldegrave
I understand the right hon. Gentleman's concern. It would be unwise for me to predict the final outcome of the Israeli Government's position. As we know, there may be changes in the coalition. We stand by our view that that proposal for an election seemed to offer the hope of progress, and the last thing that anyone should be seeking now is to abort it before it is properly born.

§ Mr. Ernie Ross
The Minister must realise that Mr. Shamir's statement last Wednesday, as Prime Minister of Israel and as the leader of the Likud party, had two clauses. The first sought to ensure that there should be no negotiations with the PLO, no Palestinian state in any part of the Eretz Israel and no sovereignty over any part of the 960 Eretz Israel. Clause 2, which is far more important, sought to make all those decisions binding, in the Cabinet and in the Knesset, on all Likud members. How can we expect the Palestinians or anyone else to accept that any Israeli peace plan remains?

§ Mr. Waldegrave
I feel no more optimism than the hon. Gentleman does after the events of that Likud meeting. However, I am well aware, as is the hon. Gentleman, that some members of Likud, such as Mr. Ezer Weizman, take a very different line. Before we despair of the Israeli Government's position, let us finally see what it is.

§ Sir Philip Goodhart
Does my hon. Friend really think that the peace process in the middle east will be helped if we refuse to sell gas masks to Israel at the same time as we contemplate selling military aircraft to Iraq, a country which has used poison gas against its own citizens?

§ Mr. Waldegrave
The latter decision has not yet been taken. I hope that the House will recognise the difficulty of the former very emotive decision. Equipping the armed forces of a state for fighting with chemical weapons is dangerous and difficult. We, as the principal sponsor of efforts to achieve a worldwide ban on chemical weapons, must be very careful about that. The application that was informally submitted was not simply for children. If such an application was clearly only for civilian and defensive use, we would consider it very carefully. The House would be the first to criticise us if we were seen to be equipping armed forces for chemical warfare.

§ Mr. Kaufman
Will the Minister of State join me and my hon. Friends in sending sympathy to the relatives of all who were killed in the bus outrage last week and to the relatives of the Palestinians who are being killed every day in the occupied territories? Does he agree that those sterile, pointless and tragic deaths will continue as long as there is no settlement in the middle east and that instead of putting pressure on the Israeli Labour party to remain members of a Government who are going back on what he agrees was a minimal but perhaps helpful commitment, the United States Secretary of State should be putting pressure on the Likud to go to the conference table? It is unacceptable that one bigoted faction should stand in the way of ending this terrible confrontation.

§ Mr. Waldegrave
I gladly associate myself with what the right hon. Gentleman said, as I am sure do my right hon. and hon. Friends. I have been trying not yet to despair of the Israeli Government's position as I hope that there are people in Likud who will take a wiser view and prevent the Israeli Government from drawing back from an already minimalist position.
Will the House and the right hon. Gentleman forgive me if I ask him to join me in sending one other condolence which is relevant today—to the McCarthy family and other friends of John McCarthy on the death of Mrs. Sheila McCarthy, the mother of the British journalist held in Lebanon? The heartlessness of his captors in the face of his mother's appeals to be reunited with her son before she died can invite only universal condemnation. Obviously, we continue to make every effort to secure his release. We beg those who are in a position of influence to help with that release to do so unconditionally. We recognise that the break in relations with Iran, which was not of our making, has made the task more difficult, but we hope that 961 the new leadership in Iran will be willing to help in that task. These people are high on our agenda and are not forgotten.