UK has historic duty to find Middle East peace - Alex Cole-Hamilton

A large part of my undergraduate degree had been focussed on the various promises, treaties and lines on maps created by the British in the Middle East in return for wartime alliances. Much of the tension that exists in that part of the world can be traced back to those.

The McMahon-Hussein agreement was a British assurance of Arab independence in return for a revolt against the Ottoman Empire in the First World War. However, while the Arab revolt succeeded, British Ministers had simultaneously offered the same territory up as a permanent home for the Jewish people in the Balfour declaration.

Arrogant British administrators didn’t stop to think what that meant and the incompatibility of those two agreements can be measured out in thousands of human lives and a conflict which rages to this day. Indeed, the utterly appalling and tragic events of this weekend, and those that are unfolding as I type, mark the worst escalation in tensions in my lifetime. Peace and security in that region seem further away than ever before.

More Jews were murdered on Saturday than at any moment since the Holocaust. To put that into context, as a proportion of the population if the same massacre were to happen in the UK, we’d be talking about the slaughter of over 8,000 people.

Civilians tortured, kidnapped and humiliated. Nearly 300 young people gunned down at a music festival. These are not the actions of freedom fighters. Hamas has shown the world that like ISIS it is nothing more than a death cult. It cares more about the slaughter of Jews than it does the liberation of Palestine. In fact, its murderous actions this weekend have signed the death warrants of hundreds if not thousands of Palestinians.

There have been periods of relative peace in the 75 years of Israel’s existence. At times we have appeared to inch closer to the much longed for prize of a two-state solution. But this can only come about through a peace process, engaged in by those committed to it, by the likes of Rabin, Peres and Arafat. That progress lies in ruins after the murderous acts of Hamas. There is no peace process right now, but there can be again. There has to be.

I never did that PhD. Politics took over and I can barely order from a menu in Arabic these days. But I took those evening classes out of a sense of a kind of national guilt. From an understanding that we caused this mess and should play some part in sorting it out. I wanted to learn that language because it is only through talking, through understanding one another that we can ever hope to move closer to peace.

Alex Cole-Hamilton is MSP for Edinburgh Western Constituency and Leader of the Scottish Liberal Democrats