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Israel's Parliament Speaker, a Visitor to Britain, Is a Settler and Former Soviet Prisoner
(Telegraph-UK) Raf Sanchez - Yuli Edelstein, the speaker of the Knesset, will visit Parliament this week at the invitation of John Bercow, the speaker of the House of Commons. He will speak to a joint session of peers and MPs in the first-ever official visit by an Israeli Knesset speaker. Edelstein is one of around 350,000 Israelis living in the West Bank. The Palestinian Authority called his visit to London "a slap in the face." Edelstein has been hearing these criticisms since 1987 when he arrived in Israel after being released from a Soviet labor camp where he was imprisoned for secretly teaching Hebrew. After being sent to a gulag near the Mongolian border, he was released nearly two years later after an international campaign by Jewish activists and human rights groups. "I would never spend one day of my life in occupied territories," he said, but argues that the West Bank - which he refers to by the biblical Jewish name Judea and Samaria - is not occupied territory because the land did not belong to a sovereign state before it was captured by Israel in 1967. "It's a disputed territory. We didn't take it from any other country. They claim it's theirs, we claim it's ours," he said. When British or European officials urge Israel to withdraw from the West Bank, Edelstein says he points them to Israel's 2005 withdrawal from Gaza. "All the Gaza settlements have been evacuated. There is not a single Jew or Israeli soldier in the Gaza Strip and what do we have? A million plus Israelis sitting in bomb shelters because of rockets, Hamas in power, and Palestinians suffering." Edelstein's request to his parliamentary counterparts in Britain is not to change their minds about the conflict, but to give up on the idea that they "know how to make peace in five minutes" in one of the world's most complicated regions. "Those who say to us: as long as there are settlements there can never be peace, I say thank you very much, you hate us and Arabs the same way because you're actually saying you guys are cats and dogs who can never live together," he said. "The solution will come from this area because we are the ones who live side-by-side with the Palestinians."