Ensconced in Brussels, the only controversy Máire Geoghegan-Quinn has been embroiled in over the past few years related to her bloated income. While she has displayed remarkable chutzpah in seeking to draw down both a European commissioner’s salary and Oireachtas and ministerial pensions, her personal greed is of little consequence compared to how she is abetting Israel’s crimes against humanity.
Israel is the most active non-European participant in the EU’s multi-annual scientific research programme, which Geoghegan-Quinn administers. According to the European Commission’s own data, Israel is currently involved in 800 EU-financed research activities with a total value of €4.3 billion. What the Commission is less eager to spell out is that the beneficiaries of this largesse include weapons manufacturers and technology firms that supply Israel with the tools of repression and occupation.
The Irish Times regularly publishes columns on the EU’s research activities by Conor O’Carroll from the Irish Universities Association. Because the seven universities O’Carroll represents receive funding from the EU’s science programme, he has a direct interest in presenting that programme in a positive light. Although The Irish Times is nominally committed to informed debate, its editors have told me on several occasions that they would not have space on their pages for an article explaining how Irish academics cooperate with Israel’s war industry.
Trinity College Dublin, for example, is taking part in a €14.5 million EU-financed project called Total Airport Security System (TASS), under which new surveillance equipment will be installed in Heathrow Airport ahead of next year’s Olympic Games in London. Among the other participants in the TASS consortium are Elbit, a company that has helped install surveillance equipment in the apartheid wall that Israel is building in the West Bank. Elbit was also one of two makers of the pilotless drones(or unmanned aerial vehicles, UAVs) with which Israel attacked Gaza in 2008 and 2009.
Duty not to assist apartheid
When ruling that the West Bank wall was illegal, the International Court of Justice stated in 2004 that public authorities throughout the world had an obligation not to render any aid or assistance to its construction. Norway – a country outside the EU - has taken that verdict sufficiently seriously to order that its state-owned pension scheme divest from Elbit. Yet Geoghegan-Quinn and her officials continue to subsidise that same company.
The University of Limerick is involved in a €70 million project called Maaximus for developing “more affordable” aircraft than those currently in use. Other participants in this project include Israel Aerospace Industries, another firm that has worked on the West Bank wall and provided warplanes used to kill civilians in Gaza.
University College Cork, meanwhile, is trying to give credence to the Israeli myth that it is saving the world from terrorist attacks. UCC is the official coordinator of an EU-funded project called CommonSense, which is focused on developing sensors for detecting bombs containing radioactive materials. This project also involves the Police Service of Northern Ireland and the Israeli Institute for Technology in Haifa. Better known as the Technion, that institute has been responsible for such innovations as a remote-controlled bulldozer, explicitly intended for use in demolishing Palestinian homes.
Geoghegan-Quinn was pressurised by the Dublin government last year into returning her pension payments to the state. She has not come under pressure from any European government to cease assisting Israel’s military industry. This dearth of scrutiny has allowed her to remain in denial about reality.
Poorly informed
She recently dismissed concerns about an EU-financed surveillance technology project that includes Motorola Israel. The aims of that project – to design sensors for detecting “intruders” who venture near buildings or resources deemed to be of critical economic importance – appear similar to those of the “virtual fences” that Motorola has placed around Israeli settlements on occupied Palestinian land. (Using thermal cameras, those “fences” are also designed to identify “intruders”). But when a British MEP alerted her to that similarity, Geoghegan-Quinn claimed her officials do not have “any information about any radar systems Motorola Israel might or might not have installed in the West Bank.” Her advisers should take greater care reading their email messages in future; a paper containing detailed information about Motorola’s work in the West Bank was sent to them by the Palestinian organisation Stop the Wall in May.
Geoghegan-Quinn will be kept busy in the coming months finalising plans for the next EU science programme, which is likely to have a budget of around €80 billion between 2014 and 2020. While the negotiations on the programme’s priorities remain ongoing, Israel’s participation in it has been guaranteed. This means that Geoghegan-Quinn will continue approving the allocation of grants to companies profiting from war and human rights abuses.
Why doesn’t her support for Israel attract more attention than the contents of her bank account?
●First published by Politico, 7 November 2011.
Showing posts with label Maire Geoghegan-Quinn. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Maire Geoghegan-Quinn. Show all posts
Monday, November 7, 2011
Thursday, October 27, 2011
EU in denial about aid for Motorola Israel
“I know nothing” is a catchphrase associated with the TV sitcom Fawlty Towers. Less amusingly, it also sums up the line of defence from European Union officials when quizzed about how they are facilitating Israel’s crimes against humanity.
Máire Geoghegan-Quinn, the EU’s scientific commissioner, this week attempted to give an assurance that the technology firm Motorola Israel’s participation in research activities financed by the Union did not pose any legal or ethical problems. She stated that her aides do not have “any information about any radar systems Motorola Israel might or might not have installed in the West Bank.”
Her statement -- made in response to a query from a British member of the European Parliament (MEP) -- smacks of either dishonesty or incompetence. If the officials who drafted her reply had done a little searching beforehand, they would have learned that the European Commission has been recently appraised of Motorola’s work in Israeli settlements in the West Bank.
In May, the Palestinian organization Stop the Wall sent a detailed paper to Geoghegan-Quinn outlining how a number of Israeli beneficiaries of EU science grants are abetting human rights abuses. Point (d) on that paper was devoted entirely to Motorola Israel. It said: “Motorola has created at least four surveillance systems used in at least 20 illegal Jewish-only settlements and military camps throughout the occupied West Bank.”
Treating Palestinians as “intruders”
Motorola Israel is taking part in two EU-funded research projects, with a combined value of over €9 million, at the moment. One of them, named iDetect 4All, relates to the development of equipment designed to raise the alarm when an “intruder” approaches a building or resource considered economically important.
The technology involved in this project appears to bear many similarities to the “virtual fence” that Motorola has installed around a network of Israeli settlements in the West Bank. A 2006 report in The Jerusalem Post noted that this radar system uses thermal cameras to identify “intruders” to the settlements. Reading between the lines, that means Motorola is helping to keep Palestinians away from illegal settlements on occupied Palestinian land.
According to Geoghegan-Quinn, “checks” have taken place to ascertain that Motorola Israel is based within the state of Israel. These found that it was eligible to benefit from EU science grants.
Yet the checks cannot have been too profound. The “association agreement” covering EU-Israel relations explicitly says that both sides must respect human rights. If Motorola Israel is – as can be proven – enabling human rights abuses, then it should be kicked out of the research programme immediately.
Call for action
Motorola Israel is one of numerous Israeli firms taking part in the EU’s research programme, which has a total budget of €53 billion for the 2007 to 2013 period. Last week, several groups representing Palestinian academics and students protested at how many of the activities under this programme connect European universities with Israeli arms manufacturers and others who profit from the occupation of Palestine. A call for action signed by the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI) urged third-level students and teachers in Europe to devise a strategy for ending cooperation between their colleges and Israel.
Palestine solidarity activists based in King’s College London have already begun a campaign against an EU nanotechnology project linking their university with Ahava, a firm producing cosmetics in the illegal settlement of Mitzpe Shalem. The campaign has drawn support from the renowned intellectual Noam Chomsky and the poet Remi Kanazi.
Details of EU-funded science projects can be found on a database called Cordis. If you work or study in a university, enter the name of your college into its search engine, along with the word “Israel.” There is every likelihood that the resulting information can be used to challenge your university’s authorities about their links with Israel. Don’t be shy in kicking up a fuss on campus. Institutions that cooperate with Israeli apartheid must be confronted.
●First published by The Electronic Intifada, 27 October 2011.
Máire Geoghegan-Quinn, the EU’s scientific commissioner, this week attempted to give an assurance that the technology firm Motorola Israel’s participation in research activities financed by the Union did not pose any legal or ethical problems. She stated that her aides do not have “any information about any radar systems Motorola Israel might or might not have installed in the West Bank.”
Her statement -- made in response to a query from a British member of the European Parliament (MEP) -- smacks of either dishonesty or incompetence. If the officials who drafted her reply had done a little searching beforehand, they would have learned that the European Commission has been recently appraised of Motorola’s work in Israeli settlements in the West Bank.
In May, the Palestinian organization Stop the Wall sent a detailed paper to Geoghegan-Quinn outlining how a number of Israeli beneficiaries of EU science grants are abetting human rights abuses. Point (d) on that paper was devoted entirely to Motorola Israel. It said: “Motorola has created at least four surveillance systems used in at least 20 illegal Jewish-only settlements and military camps throughout the occupied West Bank.”
Treating Palestinians as “intruders”
Motorola Israel is taking part in two EU-funded research projects, with a combined value of over €9 million, at the moment. One of them, named iDetect 4All, relates to the development of equipment designed to raise the alarm when an “intruder” approaches a building or resource considered economically important.
The technology involved in this project appears to bear many similarities to the “virtual fence” that Motorola has installed around a network of Israeli settlements in the West Bank. A 2006 report in The Jerusalem Post noted that this radar system uses thermal cameras to identify “intruders” to the settlements. Reading between the lines, that means Motorola is helping to keep Palestinians away from illegal settlements on occupied Palestinian land.
According to Geoghegan-Quinn, “checks” have taken place to ascertain that Motorola Israel is based within the state of Israel. These found that it was eligible to benefit from EU science grants.
Yet the checks cannot have been too profound. The “association agreement” covering EU-Israel relations explicitly says that both sides must respect human rights. If Motorola Israel is – as can be proven – enabling human rights abuses, then it should be kicked out of the research programme immediately.
Call for action
Motorola Israel is one of numerous Israeli firms taking part in the EU’s research programme, which has a total budget of €53 billion for the 2007 to 2013 period. Last week, several groups representing Palestinian academics and students protested at how many of the activities under this programme connect European universities with Israeli arms manufacturers and others who profit from the occupation of Palestine. A call for action signed by the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI) urged third-level students and teachers in Europe to devise a strategy for ending cooperation between their colleges and Israel.
Palestine solidarity activists based in King’s College London have already begun a campaign against an EU nanotechnology project linking their university with Ahava, a firm producing cosmetics in the illegal settlement of Mitzpe Shalem. The campaign has drawn support from the renowned intellectual Noam Chomsky and the poet Remi Kanazi.
Details of EU-funded science projects can be found on a database called Cordis. If you work or study in a university, enter the name of your college into its search engine, along with the word “Israel.” There is every likelihood that the resulting information can be used to challenge your university’s authorities about their links with Israel. Don’t be shy in kicking up a fuss on campus. Institutions that cooperate with Israeli apartheid must be confronted.
●First published by The Electronic Intifada, 27 October 2011.
Monday, September 26, 2011
Dublin treated with double standards by Brussels elite
Sometimes it is the softly-spoken who can be the most dangerous. Olli Rehn is a case in point.
A few months ago, Ireland’s EU commissioner Máire Geoghegan-Quinn made this observation about Rehn’s initial handling of the financial crisis in her country (and mine): “This was ‘Mr Nasty’ coming in to tell the Irish people and the Irish government what to do. And then suddenly, he gave an interview on television and people said, ‘This guy. Mr Nasty?’ It doesn’t fit with the man at all. He explained everything in a very reasonable way.”
Rehn may be an affable bloke. But as the Union’s economic policy chief, he is implementing measures that have nasty consequences.
I have obtained copies of the briefing notes that Brussels officials prepared for Rehn when he was pondering what should be done about Ireland in 2010 and the beginning of 2011. The stench of arrogance and callousness from these papers is overpowering.
Right now, I am reading a “scene setter” that Rehn perused before a November meeting with Irish opposition leaders and “social partners” (as representatives of bosses and workers are called – misleadingly – in Brussels parlance). It dismisses a call by trade unions to extend the 2014 deadline by which Ireland has been enjoined to bring down its budget deficit to within 3% of gross domestic product (GDP). “Even if this was politically feasible, it would be an arithmetical impossibility,” the document says. “Financial markets will simply not allow Ireland to kick the can further down the road.”
“We know best”
I’m not a huge admirer of Ireland’s trade union leadership, mainly because it has been too eager to curry favour with the powerful. But the EU officials’ attitude of “we know best” is disgusting. The deficit limits they regard as sacrosanct are the result of arbitrary criteria that make sense only to the German government and its slavish followers in the Commission and the European Central Bank.
It is also significant that another internal Commission document contradicts the line from Rehn’s team. This second document is a briefing note prepared for a meeting between José Manuel Barroso, the institution’s president, and Klaus Regling, head of the European Financial Stability Facility (the “bail-out” backstop for eurozone countries), in December. It says that the 3% deadline should be postponed to 2015 as this would be a “more credible target”. Something that was an “arithmetical impossibility” less than a month earlier became feasible with a click of the fingers.
A third paper indicates that a general election held in Ireland during February this year was essentially fought on lies. The centre-right Fine Gael, which emerged as the largest party after that poll, promised voters that it would “burn the bondholders” and that Irish banks would not receive another cent from the state until they imposed losses on creditors. Yet the Commission’s document, dating from January, suggests Brussels had already told senior figures in Fine Gael to rule out that option. “A possible involvement of banks’ senior bondholders (‘haircut’) has been excluded and renegotiating this would run counter to the progamme’s main objective – restoring confidence in the Irish banking sector,” it says.
Callous indifference to suffering
The most disturbing thing about the 11 internal documents I’ve seen is how they call savage cuts to social expenditure “appropriate”, without registering a smidgen of concern for the people affected. The cuts are proving especially cruel to children with learning difficulties. A report shown by the national broadcaster RTE recently illustrated how one school in Wexford – a county in the south-east – has lost five special needs assistants. That story is being replicated across Ireland, hampering children from learning the most basic skills such as the ability to write their own name.
It is a tenet of elementary justice that nobody should be punished for a crime he or she did not commit. Why is Olli Rehn punishing Irish children for a crime of which they are entirely innocent? And why should education be hit at all? Even during its “Celtic Tiger” boom, Ireland was spending proportionately less on schooling than the average for industrialised countries, according to data from the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development.
If Rehn’s team had been a little more thorough in its research, it would have realised that despite Ireland’s problems, the country still has a fair amount of wealth. Merrill Lynch (now Bank of America’s wealth management division) has calculated that the country had 19,000 “high net worth individuals” (HNWIs) last year, a rise of 5% from 2009. HNWIs are people with over $1 million in “investable assets”.
It is striking that the Irish Business and Employers Confederation (IBEC) has been demanding all kinds of measures that hurt ordinary people. It has demanded the scrapping of the minimum wage, downsizing of the public sector and reform of social welfare to “incentivise” work. Yet IBEC and its chums in the Irish government and the Brussels institutions won’t contemplate going after the rich. Why can’t a limit be set on the amount of money people can have, so that they are required to hand over anything above that limit to the exchequer?
Paul Krugman, the economist, last week compared Europe’s austerity agenda to bloodletting. Doctors no longer believe that patients can be healed by draining their blood; they will just get weaker. The same goes for economic management, yet Rehn and the blinkered bureaucrats around him are continuing to prescribe medicine that simply doesn’t work.
●First published by New Europe, 26 September 2011.
A few months ago, Ireland’s EU commissioner Máire Geoghegan-Quinn made this observation about Rehn’s initial handling of the financial crisis in her country (and mine): “This was ‘Mr Nasty’ coming in to tell the Irish people and the Irish government what to do. And then suddenly, he gave an interview on television and people said, ‘This guy. Mr Nasty?’ It doesn’t fit with the man at all. He explained everything in a very reasonable way.”
Rehn may be an affable bloke. But as the Union’s economic policy chief, he is implementing measures that have nasty consequences.
I have obtained copies of the briefing notes that Brussels officials prepared for Rehn when he was pondering what should be done about Ireland in 2010 and the beginning of 2011. The stench of arrogance and callousness from these papers is overpowering.
Right now, I am reading a “scene setter” that Rehn perused before a November meeting with Irish opposition leaders and “social partners” (as representatives of bosses and workers are called – misleadingly – in Brussels parlance). It dismisses a call by trade unions to extend the 2014 deadline by which Ireland has been enjoined to bring down its budget deficit to within 3% of gross domestic product (GDP). “Even if this was politically feasible, it would be an arithmetical impossibility,” the document says. “Financial markets will simply not allow Ireland to kick the can further down the road.”
“We know best”
I’m not a huge admirer of Ireland’s trade union leadership, mainly because it has been too eager to curry favour with the powerful. But the EU officials’ attitude of “we know best” is disgusting. The deficit limits they regard as sacrosanct are the result of arbitrary criteria that make sense only to the German government and its slavish followers in the Commission and the European Central Bank.
It is also significant that another internal Commission document contradicts the line from Rehn’s team. This second document is a briefing note prepared for a meeting between José Manuel Barroso, the institution’s president, and Klaus Regling, head of the European Financial Stability Facility (the “bail-out” backstop for eurozone countries), in December. It says that the 3% deadline should be postponed to 2015 as this would be a “more credible target”. Something that was an “arithmetical impossibility” less than a month earlier became feasible with a click of the fingers.
A third paper indicates that a general election held in Ireland during February this year was essentially fought on lies. The centre-right Fine Gael, which emerged as the largest party after that poll, promised voters that it would “burn the bondholders” and that Irish banks would not receive another cent from the state until they imposed losses on creditors. Yet the Commission’s document, dating from January, suggests Brussels had already told senior figures in Fine Gael to rule out that option. “A possible involvement of banks’ senior bondholders (‘haircut’) has been excluded and renegotiating this would run counter to the progamme’s main objective – restoring confidence in the Irish banking sector,” it says.
Callous indifference to suffering
The most disturbing thing about the 11 internal documents I’ve seen is how they call savage cuts to social expenditure “appropriate”, without registering a smidgen of concern for the people affected. The cuts are proving especially cruel to children with learning difficulties. A report shown by the national broadcaster RTE recently illustrated how one school in Wexford – a county in the south-east – has lost five special needs assistants. That story is being replicated across Ireland, hampering children from learning the most basic skills such as the ability to write their own name.
It is a tenet of elementary justice that nobody should be punished for a crime he or she did not commit. Why is Olli Rehn punishing Irish children for a crime of which they are entirely innocent? And why should education be hit at all? Even during its “Celtic Tiger” boom, Ireland was spending proportionately less on schooling than the average for industrialised countries, according to data from the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development.
If Rehn’s team had been a little more thorough in its research, it would have realised that despite Ireland’s problems, the country still has a fair amount of wealth. Merrill Lynch (now Bank of America’s wealth management division) has calculated that the country had 19,000 “high net worth individuals” (HNWIs) last year, a rise of 5% from 2009. HNWIs are people with over $1 million in “investable assets”.
It is striking that the Irish Business and Employers Confederation (IBEC) has been demanding all kinds of measures that hurt ordinary people. It has demanded the scrapping of the minimum wage, downsizing of the public sector and reform of social welfare to “incentivise” work. Yet IBEC and its chums in the Irish government and the Brussels institutions won’t contemplate going after the rich. Why can’t a limit be set on the amount of money people can have, so that they are required to hand over anything above that limit to the exchequer?
Paul Krugman, the economist, last week compared Europe’s austerity agenda to bloodletting. Doctors no longer believe that patients can be healed by draining their blood; they will just get weaker. The same goes for economic management, yet Rehn and the blinkered bureaucrats around him are continuing to prescribe medicine that simply doesn’t work.
●First published by New Europe, 26 September 2011.
Wednesday, September 14, 2011
EU helps Israeli colonel pose as Florence Nightingale
A propaganda event aimed at showing the Israeli military in a positive light is being supported by the European Union this week.
The Society for Medical Innovation and Technology (SMIT) conference in Tel Aviv features Gil Hirschhorn, surgeon-general with the Israeli air force, as a keynote speaker. Running from yesterday until Friday, it is sponsored by the EU’s multi-billion euro scientific research programme.
Why is the EU helping Hirschhorn to masquerade as a Florence Nightingale-type figure when he is a colonel in an army that abuses human rights as a matter of routine? His resumé notes that he was medical officer with the military’s Galilee division from 2004 until the end of Israel’s war against Lebanon in 2006. After that, he was put in charge of trauma issues for the military.
Not surprisingly, there is no mention of how the army in which he serves has caused widespread trauma for the Palestinian and Lebanese people. There is a strong likelihood he and other speakers are bragging about the state-of-the-art equipment that can be found in Israel’s hospitals. Yet Israel has caused major damage to health facilities on which the civilian populations it has bombed in recent years depend. While Hirschhorn was attending to the military’s medical needs in August 2006, his comrades attacked the Dar al-Hikma hospital in Baalbek, Lebanon, partly destroying it.
Horrific injuries, immoral thinking
As a surgeon, Hirschhorn should be particularly horrified by the injuries received by victims of cluster bombs used by Israel in that war. An article published by the Inter Press Service news agency on Monday reminds us of something that has faded from our memory: how Israel dropped more cluster bombs in Lebanon than any other country had since the first Gulf War in the early 1990s. Cluster bombs can literally slice the limbs off those who happen upon them. Because these bombs remain lethal for years, they are continuing to kill and maim. There have been more than 400 cluster bomb casualties in Lebanon -- 115 of them children or teenagers -- since the war stopped in 2006.
When I was researching my book Europe’s Alliance With Israel: Aiding the Occupation, several Brussels officials told me they believed the EU was right to allocate research grants to Israel because that country was developing innovative treatments for cancer and other diseases. The inference was that the Union should have no qualms about including in its scientific research activities a state that has prevented seriously ill patients in Gaza from travelling to Egypt to receive specialist care.
The SMIT conference is another example of this immoral thinking, which holds that Israel, a high-tech human rights abuser, should be mollycoddled on the basis that it might come up with a cure for cancer.
“Aware” of Ahava’s illegal acts
Last month, I wrote about how Ahava, the firm manufacturing cosmetics in the illegal Israeli settlement of Mitzpe Shalem, is one of the beneficiaries of the EU’s multi-annual research programme.
Keith Taylor, a British member of the European Parliament (MEP), has just received a response to a formal query he made on this subject. Máire Geoghegan-Quinn, the EU’s research commissioner, told him that she was “aware” there was an issue here. The Union’s civil servants are “scrutinizing options” in order to be “evaluate and potentially address” this situation when future grant applications are being assessed, she said.
The acknowledgement of the problem can be considered a small victory for those Boycott Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) campaigners who have complained to the EU bureaucracy about Ahava. But the choice of words used in the reply shows that Geoghegan-Quinn and her aides don’t regard this dossier as an urgent one. Keeping them under pressure is vital.
·First published by The Electronic Intifada (www.electronicintifada.net), 14 September 2011.
The Society for Medical Innovation and Technology (SMIT) conference in Tel Aviv features Gil Hirschhorn, surgeon-general with the Israeli air force, as a keynote speaker. Running from yesterday until Friday, it is sponsored by the EU’s multi-billion euro scientific research programme.
Why is the EU helping Hirschhorn to masquerade as a Florence Nightingale-type figure when he is a colonel in an army that abuses human rights as a matter of routine? His resumé notes that he was medical officer with the military’s Galilee division from 2004 until the end of Israel’s war against Lebanon in 2006. After that, he was put in charge of trauma issues for the military.
Not surprisingly, there is no mention of how the army in which he serves has caused widespread trauma for the Palestinian and Lebanese people. There is a strong likelihood he and other speakers are bragging about the state-of-the-art equipment that can be found in Israel’s hospitals. Yet Israel has caused major damage to health facilities on which the civilian populations it has bombed in recent years depend. While Hirschhorn was attending to the military’s medical needs in August 2006, his comrades attacked the Dar al-Hikma hospital in Baalbek, Lebanon, partly destroying it.
Horrific injuries, immoral thinking
As a surgeon, Hirschhorn should be particularly horrified by the injuries received by victims of cluster bombs used by Israel in that war. An article published by the Inter Press Service news agency on Monday reminds us of something that has faded from our memory: how Israel dropped more cluster bombs in Lebanon than any other country had since the first Gulf War in the early 1990s. Cluster bombs can literally slice the limbs off those who happen upon them. Because these bombs remain lethal for years, they are continuing to kill and maim. There have been more than 400 cluster bomb casualties in Lebanon -- 115 of them children or teenagers -- since the war stopped in 2006.
When I was researching my book Europe’s Alliance With Israel: Aiding the Occupation, several Brussels officials told me they believed the EU was right to allocate research grants to Israel because that country was developing innovative treatments for cancer and other diseases. The inference was that the Union should have no qualms about including in its scientific research activities a state that has prevented seriously ill patients in Gaza from travelling to Egypt to receive specialist care.
The SMIT conference is another example of this immoral thinking, which holds that Israel, a high-tech human rights abuser, should be mollycoddled on the basis that it might come up with a cure for cancer.
“Aware” of Ahava’s illegal acts
Last month, I wrote about how Ahava, the firm manufacturing cosmetics in the illegal Israeli settlement of Mitzpe Shalem, is one of the beneficiaries of the EU’s multi-annual research programme.
Keith Taylor, a British member of the European Parliament (MEP), has just received a response to a formal query he made on this subject. Máire Geoghegan-Quinn, the EU’s research commissioner, told him that she was “aware” there was an issue here. The Union’s civil servants are “scrutinizing options” in order to be “evaluate and potentially address” this situation when future grant applications are being assessed, she said.
The acknowledgement of the problem can be considered a small victory for those Boycott Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) campaigners who have complained to the EU bureaucracy about Ahava. But the choice of words used in the reply shows that Geoghegan-Quinn and her aides don’t regard this dossier as an urgent one. Keeping them under pressure is vital.
·First published by The Electronic Intifada (www.electronicintifada.net), 14 September 2011.
Friday, August 5, 2011
Occupation profiteer Ahava soaks up EU science grants
Not for the first time, the European Union is in denial about how it is subsidizing Israel’s crimes.
Máire Geoghegan-Quinn, the EU’s commissioner for scientific research, recently acknowledged that the cosmetics-maker Ahava was allocated more than €1 million worth of innovation grants from the Union over a period stretching from 1998 to 2013. Giving even one cent to Ahava involves facilitating breaches of international law because of the firm’s unlawful activities in the West Bank.
As Geoghegan-Quinn doesn’t appear to recognize this problem, she would be well-advised to read a report, issued in May, by the human rights organization B’Tselem. It highlights how Ahava is partly owned by two Israeli settlements on occupied Palestinian land: Mitzpe Shalem and Qalya. Both of those settlements are illegal under the Fourth Geneva Convention of 1949, which forbids an occupying power from transferring its civilian population to the territory it occupies.
Responding to a parliamentary question, Geoghegan-Quinn effectively conceded that some of Ahava’s EU-funded research may have been undertaken in the West Bank. While Ahava is “formally established within the borders of the internationally recognized state of Israel”, she said, beneficiaries of EU grants are not required to carry out the related research in the place of establishment.
I would alert Geoghegan-Quinn to two salient facts:
1. The rules covering EU science grants stipulate that projects which violate “fundamental ethical principles” are ineligible for funding. Carrying out research in one or more illegal settlements must surely violate such principles.
2. Ahava may be able to give its offices in Holon or Airport City, industrial zones near Tel Aviv, as an address for its headquarters when applying for Euro-lolly. Yet its core manufacturing activities are conducted in Mitzpe Shalem. If Geoghegan-Quinn doesn’t believe me on this, I urge her to take a trip to the settlement, where she will no doubt be given a warm welcome to Ahava’s official visitors’ centre.
There are other questions about why any of my tax euros should be going to a private cosmetics firm. A glance at Cordis, the EU’s database on its science grants, shows that in one of the projects concerned, Ahava has teamed up with the US Department of the Interior. The objective of this scheme is to assess what impact tiny toxins (nanoparticles, as boffins call them) can have on the environment.
Correct me if I’m wrong but I never had the impression that the Department of the Interior spent too much time worrying about trees and dolphins. So what is the real agenda here?
·First published by The Electronic Intifada (www.electronicintifada.net), 5 August 2011.
Máire Geoghegan-Quinn, the EU’s commissioner for scientific research, recently acknowledged that the cosmetics-maker Ahava was allocated more than €1 million worth of innovation grants from the Union over a period stretching from 1998 to 2013. Giving even one cent to Ahava involves facilitating breaches of international law because of the firm’s unlawful activities in the West Bank.
As Geoghegan-Quinn doesn’t appear to recognize this problem, she would be well-advised to read a report, issued in May, by the human rights organization B’Tselem. It highlights how Ahava is partly owned by two Israeli settlements on occupied Palestinian land: Mitzpe Shalem and Qalya. Both of those settlements are illegal under the Fourth Geneva Convention of 1949, which forbids an occupying power from transferring its civilian population to the territory it occupies.
Responding to a parliamentary question, Geoghegan-Quinn effectively conceded that some of Ahava’s EU-funded research may have been undertaken in the West Bank. While Ahava is “formally established within the borders of the internationally recognized state of Israel”, she said, beneficiaries of EU grants are not required to carry out the related research in the place of establishment.
I would alert Geoghegan-Quinn to two salient facts:
1. The rules covering EU science grants stipulate that projects which violate “fundamental ethical principles” are ineligible for funding. Carrying out research in one or more illegal settlements must surely violate such principles.
2. Ahava may be able to give its offices in Holon or Airport City, industrial zones near Tel Aviv, as an address for its headquarters when applying for Euro-lolly. Yet its core manufacturing activities are conducted in Mitzpe Shalem. If Geoghegan-Quinn doesn’t believe me on this, I urge her to take a trip to the settlement, where she will no doubt be given a warm welcome to Ahava’s official visitors’ centre.
There are other questions about why any of my tax euros should be going to a private cosmetics firm. A glance at Cordis, the EU’s database on its science grants, shows that in one of the projects concerned, Ahava has teamed up with the US Department of the Interior. The objective of this scheme is to assess what impact tiny toxins (nanoparticles, as boffins call them) can have on the environment.
Correct me if I’m wrong but I never had the impression that the Department of the Interior spent too much time worrying about trees and dolphins. So what is the real agenda here?
·First published by The Electronic Intifada (www.electronicintifada.net), 5 August 2011.
Thursday, June 9, 2011
Silence over EU science grants to Israel's war machine
Top European Union officials seem to be in denial about how they are subsidising Israel’s war industry in the name of innovation.
Although it probably won’t send pulses racing in many newsrooms, a vitally important debate is taking place at the moment about the future of Europe’s policy on scientific research. The debate directly concerns Israel because it is the most active non-European participant in the Union’s multi-annual programme for research. Manufacturers of the weapons used to blitz Gaza during Operation Cast Lead have proven especially adept at accessing funds from the programme, which has been allocated 53 billion euros ($37 billion) between 2007 and 2013.
The ethical and legal questions behind handing over taxpayers’ money to Israeli arms companies are being avoided by the Brussels elite. On Friday (10 June), Europe’s science commissioner Máire Geoghegan Quinn will host a conference to discuss what the priorities of the successor programme – beginning in 2014 – should be. If the agenda for the event is anything to go by, the discussion will be dominated by big picture themes like “strengthening competitiveness” and “tackling societal challenges”. Israel is barely mentioned in preparatory documents – or at least in those that have been made public.
The EU’s cowardice towards Israel is in stark contrast to the stance taken by Norway. In 2009, the Oslo government decided that a state-owned pension scheme should withdraw its investment in Elbit because that Israeli company had supplied an electronic surveillance system to the annexation wall in the West Bank. Yet despite how the wall was declared unlawful by the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in 2004, Elbit has been deemed eligible to take part in at least four EU-funded science projects for the 2007-13 period.
Both Elbit and Israel Aerospace Industries (IAI) made the pilotless drones or unmanned air vehicles (UAVs) used to bomb Gaza’s civilians in 2008 and 2009. IAI has similarly contributed components to surveillance equipment fitted into the West Bank wall. And IAI is doing nicely, too, out of the EU, taking part in no fewer than 15 of its research projects.
I have quizzed Geoghegan Quinn and her aides about Israel on several occasions. The pat response I have always got is that all of the schemes being financed are of a civilian nature, so there’s nothing to worry about. That is hogwash. There are no safeguards in place to stop the Israeli companies from applying the fruits of this research to developing more sophisticated warplanes than they have in their present arsenal. And you don’t need to be a bearded boffin to see how the results of these projects could be adapted for military purposes. A 70 million euro project named Maaximus – involving IAI and bankrolled by Europe - aims to create lighter and more affordable aircraft. Could it be helping develop the slimmed-down warplanes of the future?
It is a measure of how reliant academics have become on corporate and even military funding that they can defend this grotesque situation. Konstantin Novoselov, 2010 winner of Nobel Prize for Physics, was in Brussels during May to give his input to the debate on Europe’s science policy. The Russian-British scientist told me he was “sick” of people complaining about Israel and argued that the EU gains more from Israel’s participation in its research activities than Israel does itself. It is unlikely to be a coincidence that his views echo those of many Brussels officials, who claim that because Israel invests heavily in technology, the EU needs to court Israel if the Union’s domestic technology sector is to ever flourish.
Fortunately, there are other academics more willing to speak out. The British Committee for the Universities of Palestine (BRICUP) has filed a complaint with the European Commission recently. “The EU continues to fund Israeli research in full knowledge of its exploitation by the state of Israel in the oppression of the Palestinian people,” BRICUP wrote. In total, the Israelis expect they will have pocketed more than 500 million euros from the current research programme once it concludes at the end of 2013.
The aforementioned ICJ verdict stipulated that every country is under an obligation not to “render aid or assistance” that would help sustain the illegal situation created by the West Bank wall. Surely, the granting of EU subsidies to companies that helped build that wall constitutes such “aid or assistance”. Why are Europe’s representatives so nonchalant about their support for crimes against humanity?
·First published by Mondoweiss (www.mondoweiss.net), 8 June 2011
Although it probably won’t send pulses racing in many newsrooms, a vitally important debate is taking place at the moment about the future of Europe’s policy on scientific research. The debate directly concerns Israel because it is the most active non-European participant in the Union’s multi-annual programme for research. Manufacturers of the weapons used to blitz Gaza during Operation Cast Lead have proven especially adept at accessing funds from the programme, which has been allocated 53 billion euros ($37 billion) between 2007 and 2013.
The ethical and legal questions behind handing over taxpayers’ money to Israeli arms companies are being avoided by the Brussels elite. On Friday (10 June), Europe’s science commissioner Máire Geoghegan Quinn will host a conference to discuss what the priorities of the successor programme – beginning in 2014 – should be. If the agenda for the event is anything to go by, the discussion will be dominated by big picture themes like “strengthening competitiveness” and “tackling societal challenges”. Israel is barely mentioned in preparatory documents – or at least in those that have been made public.
The EU’s cowardice towards Israel is in stark contrast to the stance taken by Norway. In 2009, the Oslo government decided that a state-owned pension scheme should withdraw its investment in Elbit because that Israeli company had supplied an electronic surveillance system to the annexation wall in the West Bank. Yet despite how the wall was declared unlawful by the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in 2004, Elbit has been deemed eligible to take part in at least four EU-funded science projects for the 2007-13 period.
Both Elbit and Israel Aerospace Industries (IAI) made the pilotless drones or unmanned air vehicles (UAVs) used to bomb Gaza’s civilians in 2008 and 2009. IAI has similarly contributed components to surveillance equipment fitted into the West Bank wall. And IAI is doing nicely, too, out of the EU, taking part in no fewer than 15 of its research projects.
I have quizzed Geoghegan Quinn and her aides about Israel on several occasions. The pat response I have always got is that all of the schemes being financed are of a civilian nature, so there’s nothing to worry about. That is hogwash. There are no safeguards in place to stop the Israeli companies from applying the fruits of this research to developing more sophisticated warplanes than they have in their present arsenal. And you don’t need to be a bearded boffin to see how the results of these projects could be adapted for military purposes. A 70 million euro project named Maaximus – involving IAI and bankrolled by Europe - aims to create lighter and more affordable aircraft. Could it be helping develop the slimmed-down warplanes of the future?
It is a measure of how reliant academics have become on corporate and even military funding that they can defend this grotesque situation. Konstantin Novoselov, 2010 winner of Nobel Prize for Physics, was in Brussels during May to give his input to the debate on Europe’s science policy. The Russian-British scientist told me he was “sick” of people complaining about Israel and argued that the EU gains more from Israel’s participation in its research activities than Israel does itself. It is unlikely to be a coincidence that his views echo those of many Brussels officials, who claim that because Israel invests heavily in technology, the EU needs to court Israel if the Union’s domestic technology sector is to ever flourish.
Fortunately, there are other academics more willing to speak out. The British Committee for the Universities of Palestine (BRICUP) has filed a complaint with the European Commission recently. “The EU continues to fund Israeli research in full knowledge of its exploitation by the state of Israel in the oppression of the Palestinian people,” BRICUP wrote. In total, the Israelis expect they will have pocketed more than 500 million euros from the current research programme once it concludes at the end of 2013.
The aforementioned ICJ verdict stipulated that every country is under an obligation not to “render aid or assistance” that would help sustain the illegal situation created by the West Bank wall. Surely, the granting of EU subsidies to companies that helped build that wall constitutes such “aid or assistance”. Why are Europe’s representatives so nonchalant about their support for crimes against humanity?
·First published by Mondoweiss (www.mondoweiss.net), 8 June 2011
Monday, June 28, 2010
Ireland's EU envoy aids Israeli war machine
Ireland’s EU commissioner Máire Geoghegan-Quinn is set to approve two technology grants for an Israeli company that made some of the most lethal weapons used in last year’s war against Gaza.
Brussels officials are assessing a new series of Israeli applications for funding under the EU’s multi-annual research programme, which Geoghegan-Quinn administers. The probable beneficiaries include Israel Aerospace Industries (IAI), manufacturer of the Heron, a warplane that terrorised Gaza’s 1.5 million inhabitants in late 2008 and 2009.
IAI has been deemed eligible for two new EU grants following evaluations carried out in recent months but is awaiting a final decision from Geoghegan-Quinn and her advisers. The grants – part of a series earmarked for Israel worth a total of €17 million – are supposed to help develop a new internet-type system for the telecommunications and financial services industries.
Geoghegan-Quinn’s spokesman Mark English said that while the projects concerned are civilian, there is no guarantee that the fruits of EU-financed research will not eventually be used by the Israeli military. “We don’t fund military projects,” he added. “However, probably the majority of our projects have direct or indirect military applications.”
Although Israel does not formally belong to the EU, it is an active participant in the Union’s “framework programme” for scientific research, which has been allocated €53 billion between 2007 and 2013. The programme is the largest source of funding that Israel receives from the EU, with Tel Aviv expecting that the total value of the grants it draws over the duration of the programme to exceed €500 million.
Mahmoud Abu Rahma, a campaigner with the Gaza-based human rights group Al Mezan, said it would be “outrageous” for Geoghegan-Quinn to support Israeli arms firms. “The European Union is very well informed about the way these weapons have been used,” he said. “There have been many panels in the EU and its member states looking into cases where weapons have been used in perpetrating war crimes. The least we can expect is that the EU will take a stand on this.”
IAI’s Heron was one of the two pilotless drones – also known as unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) – “battle-tested” by Israel in Gaza last year. An investigation by Human Rights Watch found that while these aircraft are equipped with sophisticated cameras and sensors allowing an army to verify whether a target is a combatant or a civilian, they were frequently used against innocent Gazans. Eighty-seven civilians were killed by drones during the three-week offensive.
Despite the widespread revulsion at that war among the European public, IAI’s wares were given much prominence at Eurosatory, an arms exhibition held in Paris earlier this month. The company availed of the occasion to promote a new unmanned weapons system called the Electronic Tethered Observation Platform (ETOP). It has been hailed as the first in a line of “hovering air vehicles” that IAI has designed for future wars.
Israel is predicting that 2010 will be a bumper year for its arms companies, with their sales reaching $8 billion, according to a recent statement from the country’s defence ministry. With a population of only around 7 million, Israel is already the fourth largest arms dealer on the planet.
Among the other Israeli firms likely to have their funding bids rubber-stamped by Geoghegan-Quinn are Afcon, a supplier of metal detectors to military checkpoints in the occupied Palestinian territories, including the Erez crossing between southern Israel and Gaza. Afcon was also awarded a contract in 2008 for installing a security system in a light rail project designed to connect illegal Israeli settlements in East Jerusalem with the city centre.
Geoghegan-Quinn’s anticipated support for Israeli firms specialising in surveillance follows a raft of EU grants issued to such companies over the past decade, when Israel positioned itself as indispensable to George Bush’s “war on terror”. Athena GS3, a company run by a former head of the secret service Mossad, has been one of many recipients. It forms part of the Mer Group, a supplier of equipment to settlements and checkpoints in East Jerusalem and the wider West Bank.
Merav Amir from the Coalition of Women for Peace, a Tel Aviv group opposed to the occupation of Palestine, said that it would be “highly problematic” for the EU to draw a distinction between military and non-military research in the case of Israel. “The military here is used as part of this whole mechanism of control that is much wider than anything that is done at gunpoint,” she said. “There are also a wide range of civilian means used for depriving Palestinians of their basic human rights. Any aspect of the occupation that you look at is done through a wide range of technologies, whether they be biometric means, security cameras, fences, sensors and so on. It is not simply things that are aimed to kill.”
•First published by The Sunday Tribune, 27 June 2010 (www.tribune.ie)
Brussels officials are assessing a new series of Israeli applications for funding under the EU’s multi-annual research programme, which Geoghegan-Quinn administers. The probable beneficiaries include Israel Aerospace Industries (IAI), manufacturer of the Heron, a warplane that terrorised Gaza’s 1.5 million inhabitants in late 2008 and 2009.
IAI has been deemed eligible for two new EU grants following evaluations carried out in recent months but is awaiting a final decision from Geoghegan-Quinn and her advisers. The grants – part of a series earmarked for Israel worth a total of €17 million – are supposed to help develop a new internet-type system for the telecommunications and financial services industries.
Geoghegan-Quinn’s spokesman Mark English said that while the projects concerned are civilian, there is no guarantee that the fruits of EU-financed research will not eventually be used by the Israeli military. “We don’t fund military projects,” he added. “However, probably the majority of our projects have direct or indirect military applications.”
Although Israel does not formally belong to the EU, it is an active participant in the Union’s “framework programme” for scientific research, which has been allocated €53 billion between 2007 and 2013. The programme is the largest source of funding that Israel receives from the EU, with Tel Aviv expecting that the total value of the grants it draws over the duration of the programme to exceed €500 million.
Mahmoud Abu Rahma, a campaigner with the Gaza-based human rights group Al Mezan, said it would be “outrageous” for Geoghegan-Quinn to support Israeli arms firms. “The European Union is very well informed about the way these weapons have been used,” he said. “There have been many panels in the EU and its member states looking into cases where weapons have been used in perpetrating war crimes. The least we can expect is that the EU will take a stand on this.”
IAI’s Heron was one of the two pilotless drones – also known as unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) – “battle-tested” by Israel in Gaza last year. An investigation by Human Rights Watch found that while these aircraft are equipped with sophisticated cameras and sensors allowing an army to verify whether a target is a combatant or a civilian, they were frequently used against innocent Gazans. Eighty-seven civilians were killed by drones during the three-week offensive.
Despite the widespread revulsion at that war among the European public, IAI’s wares were given much prominence at Eurosatory, an arms exhibition held in Paris earlier this month. The company availed of the occasion to promote a new unmanned weapons system called the Electronic Tethered Observation Platform (ETOP). It has been hailed as the first in a line of “hovering air vehicles” that IAI has designed for future wars.
Israel is predicting that 2010 will be a bumper year for its arms companies, with their sales reaching $8 billion, according to a recent statement from the country’s defence ministry. With a population of only around 7 million, Israel is already the fourth largest arms dealer on the planet.
Among the other Israeli firms likely to have their funding bids rubber-stamped by Geoghegan-Quinn are Afcon, a supplier of metal detectors to military checkpoints in the occupied Palestinian territories, including the Erez crossing between southern Israel and Gaza. Afcon was also awarded a contract in 2008 for installing a security system in a light rail project designed to connect illegal Israeli settlements in East Jerusalem with the city centre.
Geoghegan-Quinn’s anticipated support for Israeli firms specialising in surveillance follows a raft of EU grants issued to such companies over the past decade, when Israel positioned itself as indispensable to George Bush’s “war on terror”. Athena GS3, a company run by a former head of the secret service Mossad, has been one of many recipients. It forms part of the Mer Group, a supplier of equipment to settlements and checkpoints in East Jerusalem and the wider West Bank.
Merav Amir from the Coalition of Women for Peace, a Tel Aviv group opposed to the occupation of Palestine, said that it would be “highly problematic” for the EU to draw a distinction between military and non-military research in the case of Israel. “The military here is used as part of this whole mechanism of control that is much wider than anything that is done at gunpoint,” she said. “There are also a wide range of civilian means used for depriving Palestinians of their basic human rights. Any aspect of the occupation that you look at is done through a wide range of technologies, whether they be biometric means, security cameras, fences, sensors and so on. It is not simply things that are aimed to kill.”
•First published by The Sunday Tribune, 27 June 2010 (www.tribune.ie)
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