Mr. Alan Shatter:

I will come back to one issue Deputy Ó Murchú raised. There could be multiple meetings talking about the history of this region and this conflict. I would share a view the Deputy expressed, which is that we are where we are. There is a Palestinian people who self-identify as Palestinians. They are as entitled to self-determination as the Jewish people. There is only one viable solution to this conflict and it is the solution the United Nations, as I referenced, attempted in 1947. It has been attempted on multiple occasions since. President Clinton, who was of huge assistance to this country and everyone in Northern Ireland in bringing to an end the conflict there, had a meeting at Camp David in 2000 involving Yasser Arafat and the then Israeli Prime Minister. A deal was about to be signed that would have resulted in Israel vacating 95% of the totality of the territory that then fell within the Palestinian authority area - in other words, the West Bank and Gaza. In Clinton's autobiography, he says the only reason that did not happen was because Arafat said "No". As to how we bring this conflict to an end, we have to get people to engage. We have to get people to stop killing each other. We have to get all the resources that go into the West Bank and Gaza to be used for housing construction, economic development and hospital construction.

The settlement issue is enormously straightforward. Settlements occupy about 5% of the total area of the West Bank. A lot of them are contiguous to Jerusalem. The odd thing about the settlements is, although occupied largely by Jewish people, a lot of the Jewish people who live in the settlements work with local Palestinians and a lot of the Palestinians work with the local Jewish people. I know that because I have been there to see it. There are joint Palestinian-Israeli industrial parks on the West Bank. The apartheid appellation is ludicrous because in some of those parks, some of the Jewish workers are under the management of Palestinian managers and owners. I have been to date farms where Palestinians and Israelis engage in agriculture together and pick dates. The Palestinians attend the bar mitzvahs of the Israelis' 13-year-old children and the Israelis attend the weddings of the Palestinian daughters. This is not apartheid. It is nuts to talk about it that way. The settlements are not the obstacle to a resolution of all of this. The obstacle is the incapacity of people on the Palestinian side to constructively engage in conversation, and the right-wing politicians in Israel who do not want to engage because they saw what happened as a result of the Gaza engagement and Israel moving out of Gaza. They lack confidence and trust in any Palestinians they can engage with. Finally, Hamas does not want to engage at all.

I was in Israel some years ago having breakfast in the kitchen of one of the then Palestinian negotiators with the Israeli side. He was very well known but I want to keep confidence as to who it was. At that moment, he was optimistically of the view that there would be some resolution, at least between Fatah, the Palestinian authority and the Israelis, even though Hamas would not engage. He said to me that he was optimistic but if the deal that he thought possible was done - and tragically, ultimately, it did not prove possible - he would be dead in ten weeks. He said they would assassinate him. The people he was talking about were Hamas, Islamic Jihad, and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine.

This was a man who remained in a position in the Palestinian leadership for a number of years after we had met and talked. He and I had met on a number of occasions. This is the problem; we have to change the narrative. Sadly, and unfortunately in this country, we have occasionally copperfastened that narrative.

My apologies. I said I would mention settlements and I will say one thing about them. These series of meetings commenced with a discussion about Israeli apartheid. As Mr. Haddad so well illustrated, Israel has a population of just over 9 million people, 2 million of whom are Arabs, with a variety of other people, approximately 300,000, of other backgrounds, who live in what is a multi-ethnic melded state where everybody does everything with each other and engages. I do not understand why there should be objection to Jewish people living on the West Bank. If the suggestion is that Jewish people living on the West Bank is completely inappropriate, that is advocating apartheid on the West Bank. What we need to do is encourage Christians, Muslims, Jews, Israelis and Palestinians to engage, build confidence, work together, socialise together and share schooling together, as happens with a school in the centre of Jerusalem which has both Israeli-Arab children and Israeli-Jewish children attending. Do not drive them apart. Encourage them and do not make the settlements the barrier to reconciliation because I can tell the committee that they are not if one visits them.

Ariel University, which was created on the West Bank, has a large number of Palestinian students getting third level education together with Israeli students who live on the West Bank. Not only is that not apartheid but it is advancing these students into third level education and giving them great opportunities they would not otherwise have in an atmosphere - I will finish on this, Chairman - of communal engagement between young Israelis and young Palestinians who get on with each other. That is what we need to be encouraging, not separation, division or pillory.

Of course, we do not want extremism on any side, whether that is Palestinian or Israeli extremism. There is a problem of a small group of extreme Israelis in the West Bank who make life very difficult for the Palestinian side. That is an issue but it is not the major issue as to why we do not have conflict resolution.