UK: Peer who advised Blair says peace impossible with Netanyahu in power
A British peer whose cousin was taken captive in the Hamas-led 7 October attack on southern Israel has said there is no hope for peace with Netanyahu as the state's prime minister.
Lord Michael Levy, a Labour peer who was Prime Minister Tony Blair's Middle East advisor and envoy from 1997 to 2007, said in an interview with the Independent that the Middle East is in a "potential blow-up situation".
If Netanyahu had been offered a pardon and retired from Israeli politics, he said, "we could have a very different scene in Israel, there may be some hope forward for a peaceful solution".
Levy's 27-year-old cousin Emily was captured by Hamas fighters last year and has been held in the besieged territory since.
"I don’t think there’s any hope for peace with Netanyahu in power," the peer said during the interview.
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Levy also called for Palestinians to "recognise that they cannot want any more the destruction of Israel". But he insisted he wants "a state of Israel that can live in peace with its neighbours.
"You cannot keep a people down any longer, and the terror within the Palestinian people must stop. They must have a future."
Blair's Middle East envoy
Levy, who had a home in Tel Aviv, raised millions of pounds for the Labour Party before Blair became prime minister, and was then appointed Blair's personal envoy to the Middle East in 2000.
He has often drawn controversy, famously walking out of a meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon in 2003, which many believed led to the envoy being sidelined.
Levy also brokered talks between Palestinian Liberation Organisation chairman Yasser Arafat and the Israeli government and was credited with having convinced Arafat, whom he descibed as "very personable" but "difficult to read", to appoint a Palestinian prime minister.
In July, Levy wrote in a column for Haaretz saying that Prime Minister Keir Starmer's "Labour has shown a willingness to stand up for Israel's security, even when that has alienated significant cohorts of its own supporters".
But he insisted: "Labour will not stand up for Israeli actions which undermine peace and international law and harm not only Palestinians, but Israel itself.
"The shocking conditions in which Palestinians in Gaza are living cannot continue.
"This war must end and a massive humanitarian relief program must be implemented alongside political initiatives that can fast track peace efforts or put them onto a new path forward."
The peer's latest remarks on the 7 October anniversary came as Starmer declared that "7 October 2023 was the darkest day in Jewish history since the Holocaust".
The prime minister said that Britain "must unequivocally stand with the Jewish community and united as a country".
"We must also not look the other way as civilians bear the ongoing dire consequences of this conflict in the Middle East," he added, further calling for ceasefires in Gaza and Lebanon.
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