Author Archives: Kerry Hutchinson

On a recent visit to Jerusalem I was given a history lesson by a Palestinian shopkeeper that was the more blistering for his quiet humility in delivering it. He did not blame the US or even the Israelis, he said, for the situation his people had been enduring for nearly 40 years.

No, it was all firmly down to you British (pointing at me). To its policy failures and double-dealing in selling out on the Arabs post World war 1 and again in 1948 in abandoning the mandate of Palestine to the UN and doing a runner. What could I say?

Are we doing it again? Last September saw the launch at Conference of a foreign policy document that was informative, not so much by what it said, but by what it didn’t say. Iraq featured highly, as did global corporate responsibility. But were there missing components?

How clear and instantly recitable by us, is, for example, the Party’s position on Lebanon, Iran, and that ‘burning coal’ as Paddy Ashdown recently put it, of the Israel/Palestine problem? Personally, I’d be struggling, if challenged, to come up with the key messages on the Middle East outside of Iraq. So what?

Well, the issues of freedom of speech, freedom of movement and freedom to dissent – bedrock principles of any liberal democracy – matter. Because these core pillars are not just issues relevant to Iraq. They count throughout the whole of the Middle East. And supporting these liberal democratic principles must surely be the guiding direction across the board – an ‘a la carte’ approach might be criticised as failing the peoples of Palestine, the Lebanon and the other Middle East nations, nearly all of whom are sovereign States, if we major solely on Iraq alone.

This is one of the reasons why the Liberal Democrat Friends of Palestine is being launched at the 2007 Brighton Conference – to highlight the lack of the three basic core liberal democratic principles that many in the Middle East, especially the Palestinian electorate, do not yet have. To add to our Party’s foreign policy debate to help it address that ‘burning coal’ and help it back onto an agenda that oft overlooks the issue in the pursuit of easier political point-scoring ‘wins’.

At the same time and for similar reasons, revitalising the hitherto quiescent Lib Dem Middle East Council (MEC) may go a long way in stimulating policy debate within the Party, by beefing up the foreign policy debate and present a more inclusive and robust approach to all the regional components – not just Iraq.