I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Rutland and Melton (Mr. Latham) on his success in the ballot and on his speech, which, as ever, was balanced. He speaks with much knowledge, sensitivity and sincerity on these issues. When he leaves the House at the next election, his contributions on the middle east will be missed by many of us.

I should like to pay tribute to the work of my right hon. Friend the Foreign Secretary and my right hon. and learned Friend the Minister of State in improving, on a personal level, relations between Britain and Israel. The Foreign Secretary has developed a warm personal rapport with the Foreign Secretary of Israel, and the visit that my right hon. and learned Friend the Minister of State recently paid to Israel was a great success. When Ministers visit the middle east, it is rather like their having to dance on eggs. My right hon. and learned Friend managed his visit with much skill.

I welcomed the answer that my right hon. and learned Friend the Minister of State gave yesterday that The PLO certainly discredited itself by its conduct during the Gulf war and that—this is a slight change in Government thinking— We are not pressurising the Israelis to sit down at the same table with the PLO."—[Official Report, 22 May 1991; Vol. 191, c. 926.] That is implicit recognition that attitudes in the middle east were changed by Yasser Arafat's decision last August to embrace Saddam Hussein's invasion of Kuwait. In so doing, he knocked the ground from under those who were seeking to get discussions going between the Palestinians and the Israelis.

There is no doubt that there is a great reservoir of good will in Israel for the United Kingdom. I had the privilege to be in Israel in 1986 when the then Prime Minister made the first official visit to Israel by a British Prime Minister. The spontaneous outburst of enthusiasm and welcome that she received showed how warm relations were between the two countries. I hope that my right hon. Friend the Prime Minister will soon visit Israel. I hope also that, at some stage, a member of the royal family will do so, because unfortunately, ever since the creation of the state of Israel, members of the royal family have visited her neighbours but never Israel.

Like my hon. Friend the Member for Rutland and Melton, I pay tribute to the self-restraint and statesmanship shown by the people of Israel during the Gulf war. I do not believe that any other democracy, seeing its people being killed and attacked by missiles from the sky, would have been as willing to show the same self-restraint.

We all welcome the tremendous influx of emigrants from the Soviet Union to Israel. Sometimes we in the west do not understand that many people are emigrating to Israel£200,000 a year, and about 400,000 in 1990–91. That is the equivalent of 5 million people migrating to the United Kingdom. I recall the unholy row about passports being offered to enable 55,000 heads of households in Hong Kong to come to the United Kingdom in four, five or six years' time. In Israel, 400,000 people are being assimilated within a short period.

That is placing tremendous strains on the Israeli economy, which must provide jobs and housing and teach the immigrants new languages. That involves a huge cost. I hope that we in the west, who have fought so hard to secure basic human rights for the people of the Soviet Union, will be willing to help with the cost of resettlement.