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.

Above all of this though, the debate could help us call the Government to account for its blindingly glaring double-standards as well as the hypocritical and incoherent approach of its own foreign policy towards the Middle East’s ‘burning coal’.

For example, Israel’s disregard for humanitarian law and international norms in its dogged approach to security and land-grab is a matter of record as witnessed by countless Israeli and external NGOs, EU and UK official monitoring. Yet does our current Liberal Democrat foreign policy address this issue effectively?

What is also a matter of equally uncomfortable record is the blind eye and deaf ear of the Government’s approach to the ‘burning coal’. For example, Mrs Beckett persistently refuses to consider sanctions against Israel (for instance through a possible suspension of the EU Association Trade Agreement with Israel) because her Department maintains, we must keep dialogue open with Israel – sanctions would only antagonise and worsen relations.  Couldn’t agree more.

So why on earth, then, does the Government, apparently so insistent in its belief of

keeping dialogue open with the one country (Israel), refusing point blank to suggest sanctions against it, then immediately suspend dialogue – instead applying hugely crippling sanctions at the drop of a transatlantic hat, against a neighbour of Israel’s?  A nation already on its economic knees, with parts of its population close to malnutrition?

This is a glaring and shameful Government policy inconsistency, the hypocrisy of which beggars belief.

An inconsistency we Liberal Democrats should expose and highlight with vigour. And a good opportunity to do so is, sadly for the Palestinians, looming.

Because this June the 10th marks 40 years of military, municipal and fiscal Israeli occupation of the Palestinian Territories that breaches international humanitarian law, not to mention the countless UN, UK, EU and even Quartet calls to end this illegal Occupation and to stop building any more colonies. All of which the Israeli Government sadly routinely ignores.

The Party now has an opportunity, in this approaching anniversary, to call the Government to account for its biased double-standard policy approach to the Middle East.  Doing so through written, oral and starred oral Parliamentary Questions, thereby potentially riding a Liberal Democrat coach and horses through this Government’s deeply flawed foreign policy.

But we can only do so if our own foreign policy itself is robust, evidence-based, and above all, totally inclusive of all the issues in the Middle East, not just Iraq.  To offer anything less would mean failing in our policy obligations to the suppressed and dispossessed in the Middle East.  Let us not fail them, as the Government has so frequently done since 1918.  Or will that Palestinian shopkeeper’s son be making the same accusation in 2018?

Kerry Hutchinson is a former FCO policy official and nominated contact for the Liberal Democrat Friends of Palestine