I had a surreal experience on Sunday.
For the second consecutive week, a group of us entered a Brussels food exhibition to protest at a stand promoting SodaStream, the manufacturer of soft drink machines based in Mishor Adumim, an Israeli-controlled industrial zone in the occupied West Bank. As soon as we began distributing flyers alerting the public to the company’s crimes, the police arrived. They surrounded us for a while, before escorting us outdoors (throughout this time, we chanted “Boycott Israel” slogans).
A police officer then explained that we needed a permit from the local mayor’s office to wear T-shirts saying “Free Palestine”. (I swear that I’m not making this up). One young woman pointed to a slightly different T-shirt she was wearing that read “I ♥ Palestine.” According to the officer, that garment was permissible as it was considered apolitical. Yet if several people want to wear “Free Palestine” T-shirts at the one time, they need special authorization, the officer maintained.
After this bemusing encounter, the protest organizer Nadia led us to a nearby tram stop, where we handed out our remaining flyers. It was there that I had a conversation with an activist named Farida, who told me about the grotesque human rights abuses inflicted on her brother Ali.
Extradited to Morroco
Ali Aarrass, a Belgian-Moroccan national, was extradited from Spain to Morocco in December last year, after having been held in custody since 2008. He was arrested in Melilla, a Spanish-controlled enclave on Morocco’s north coast in April 2008.
The Spanish authorities refused to heed a call from the UN Human Rights Committee in November 2010 that the extradition not take place until that committee had completed its examination of the case. Amnesty International has complained that the extradition breached the European Convention on Human Rights, which forbids the return of anyone from a country to which he or she is at risk of torture.
I called Farida this morning and she told me that Ali was repeatedly tortured when he was sent to Morocco. The methods used against him included hanging him up by his hands and feet. “My brother was very deeply shocked,” Farida said, adding that when one lawyer went to see him he reflexively covered his face with his hands, fearing that his visitor would beat him. “It was really horrible.”
Aarrass is scheduled to appear in court this Thursday. He is accused of belonging to a network, directed by Abdelkader Belliraj, another Belgian-Moroccan national who was sentenced to life imprisonment in 2009 after being convicted of planning terrorist acts. The case against Aaarass was considered by the Spanish national criminal court. But in March 2009, Baltazar Garzon, provisionally closed investigations because of a lack of evidence.
No help from Belgium
Even though Aarrass has spent most of his life in Belgium and served in its army, this country’s authorities have refused to help him. Farida contacted the Belgian foreign ministry when Ali was held in Spain. “Their excuses were ridiculous,” she said. “They said ‘we cannot interfere in Spanish justice’. I said, ‘I’m not asking you to interfere but to visit him and see if he is in good health.’” (Aarrass has undertaken a number of hunger strikes).
Aarrass has a six year old child, who he has not seen in four years. His mother, who also lives in Belgium, can only visit him rarely. Efforts by his family to have him receive medical attention from independent doctors have been thwarted by the Moroccan authorities.
I was impressed by Farida’s commitment to human rights. As well as raising awareness about her brother’s plight, she also takes part in actions supporting the Palestinians and other victims of human rights violations.
She is encouraging people of conscience to send Ali a note of solidarity. His address: Ali Aarrass, Prison de Salé II, Salé, Morocco.
●First published by The Electronic Intifada, 25 October 2011
Showing posts with label Spain. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Spain. Show all posts
Tuesday, October 25, 2011
Monday, August 22, 2011
Indicted war criminal on payroll of UK Israel lobby
On Friday, I wrote about how Michael Herzog, a retired Israeli brigadier general, is working for one of the most influential Zionist lobby outfits in London. After doing some more research, I realized that as well as being a “senior visiting fellow” with the Britain Israel Communications and Research Center (BICOM), Herzog is the subject of war crime proceedings in Spain.
In January 2009, Spain’s national court decided to open an investigation into Herzog and six other Israeli political and military figures over their involvement in the 2002 bombing of a residential area in Gaza.
The attack was supposedly a “targeted assassination” of Salah Shehadeh, commander of Hamas’ military wing the Izzedeen al-Qassam Brigades. Along with Shehadeh, 14 other Palestinians died. They included a two month old infant, seven other children and two elderly men. Numerous others were injured in the blast from the 2,000 pound bomb used by Israeli forces; 11 houses in the al-Daraj district of Gaza City were irreparably damaged.
Herzog was an adviser to Benjamin Ben-Eliezer, then Israeli defense minister, at the time of the attack. On 29 January 2009, both men (and their co-accused) were ordered to present themselves in Spain within 30 days.
The case has been taken by four Spanish lawyers and the Gaza-based Palestinian Center for Human Rights. The lawyers have invoked a law on universal jurisdiction, which allows the Spanish judicial authorities to investigate crimes against humanity throughout the world.
Fugitive from justice
This morning I called BICOM to ask if it was aware of the proceedings against Herzog when it decided to put him on its payroll. “I have no idea”, BICOM’s spokesman Dermot Kehoe told me, explaining that he was not yet working for BICOM when Herzog was appointed.
Kehoe promised to examine my query further and get back to me. If he does (and has anything of substance to say), I’ll happily update this blog post.
In the meantime, it is fair to surmise that BICOM was perfectly aware of the proceedings against Herzog, just as it was aware that he counselled Ehud Barak, the current Israeli defense minister, on the conduct of Operation Cast Lead, Israel’s murderous assault on Gaza in 2008 and 2009.
It is true that Herzog probably will not be held accountable for his crimes by a Spanish court. Miguel Moratinos, then Spain’s foreign minister, gave an undertaking to his Israeli counterpart Tzipi Livni in early 2009 that the Spanish universal jurisdiction law would be watered down. Directly as a result of Israeli pressure, the law (which has been in force since 1985) was amended last year.
Spain’s capitulation to Israel does not provide BICOM with any excuse for recruiting an indicted war criminal. It should be noted, in particular, that the Spanish national court reprimanded the state of Israel for refusing to cooperate with its handling of the case against Herzog and his co-accused.
It can, therefore, be concluded that BICOM has hired a fugitive from justice.
·First published by The Electronic Intifada, (www.electronicintifada.net), 22 August 2011.
In January 2009, Spain’s national court decided to open an investigation into Herzog and six other Israeli political and military figures over their involvement in the 2002 bombing of a residential area in Gaza.
The attack was supposedly a “targeted assassination” of Salah Shehadeh, commander of Hamas’ military wing the Izzedeen al-Qassam Brigades. Along with Shehadeh, 14 other Palestinians died. They included a two month old infant, seven other children and two elderly men. Numerous others were injured in the blast from the 2,000 pound bomb used by Israeli forces; 11 houses in the al-Daraj district of Gaza City were irreparably damaged.
Herzog was an adviser to Benjamin Ben-Eliezer, then Israeli defense minister, at the time of the attack. On 29 January 2009, both men (and their co-accused) were ordered to present themselves in Spain within 30 days.
The case has been taken by four Spanish lawyers and the Gaza-based Palestinian Center for Human Rights. The lawyers have invoked a law on universal jurisdiction, which allows the Spanish judicial authorities to investigate crimes against humanity throughout the world.
Fugitive from justice
This morning I called BICOM to ask if it was aware of the proceedings against Herzog when it decided to put him on its payroll. “I have no idea”, BICOM’s spokesman Dermot Kehoe told me, explaining that he was not yet working for BICOM when Herzog was appointed.
Kehoe promised to examine my query further and get back to me. If he does (and has anything of substance to say), I’ll happily update this blog post.
In the meantime, it is fair to surmise that BICOM was perfectly aware of the proceedings against Herzog, just as it was aware that he counselled Ehud Barak, the current Israeli defense minister, on the conduct of Operation Cast Lead, Israel’s murderous assault on Gaza in 2008 and 2009.
It is true that Herzog probably will not be held accountable for his crimes by a Spanish court. Miguel Moratinos, then Spain’s foreign minister, gave an undertaking to his Israeli counterpart Tzipi Livni in early 2009 that the Spanish universal jurisdiction law would be watered down. Directly as a result of Israeli pressure, the law (which has been in force since 1985) was amended last year.
Spain’s capitulation to Israel does not provide BICOM with any excuse for recruiting an indicted war criminal. It should be noted, in particular, that the Spanish national court reprimanded the state of Israel for refusing to cooperate with its handling of the case against Herzog and his co-accused.
It can, therefore, be concluded that BICOM has hired a fugitive from justice.
·First published by The Electronic Intifada, (www.electronicintifada.net), 22 August 2011.
Tuesday, May 3, 2011
Spain a bastion of support for Palestine?
While preparing to give a lecture in Bilbao recently, I was surprised to see headlines declaring Spain to be one of Europe’s most anti-Semitic countries.
The headlines were based on the findings of a report, published in late March, by the Observatory on Anti-Semitism in Madrid, an office run by the Spanish Federation of Jewish Communities. Reading the report, it became apparent that the observatory had deliberately conflated criticism of the state of Israel with a general hostility to Jews.
The observatory stated that it was notified of 28 incidents of anti-Semitic behaviour during 2010. Nine of these incidents were taken out of consideration as they either did not occur on Spanish soil or because they were found not to be anti-Semitic in nature. Some of the remaining 19 incidents were certainly deplorable. They involved verbal or written threats to Jews, the smearing of graffiti – including a swastika – near synagogues and Jewish cultural centres, and the posting of neo-Nazi blogs on the internet.
But the observatory also gave some spurious examples. These included a decision by organisers of the Gay Pride parade in Madrid that a float from Tel Aviv shouldn’t be allowed to participate following Israel’s attack on the Gaza Freedom Flotilla in May last year. Other examples given were a column for El Mundo newspaper by the writer António Gala and a cartoon by the artist El Roto. Both the column and the cartoon sought to compare how Israel treats the Palestinians and how the Nazis treated Jews during the Second World War.
The observatory uses a “3 D” test when assessing if incidents qualify as anti-Semitic. The brainchild of Natan Sharansky, a former Israeli government minister, this test identifies people as anti-Semitic if they resort to (1) demonization; (2) double standards or (3) deligitimization. According to Sharansky, demonization can involve likening the state of Israel to Nazi Germany, double standards can involve criticising Israel in a way that one does not criticise other countries and deligitimization can involve questioning the rights of Jews to have their own state.
Sharansky’s definition has little to do with defending ordinary Jews from racist attack and everything to do with shielding the state of Israel from scrutiny. The “double standards” criterion exposes his test to be particularly weak as Israel is treated far more lightly by governments in North America and Europe, as well as the mainstream media, than other serial abusers of human rights. At the behest of Western powers, the United Nations Security Council recently imposed a no-fly zone over Libya. Yet no Western government has advocated a no-fly zone over Gaza.
This was not the first time that threadbare evidence was used to accuse the Spanish public of hating Jews. In September 2009, the Anti-Defamation League, a Zionist lobby group in New York, published a “study” on Spain. It had a section titled “anti-Semitism at anti-Israel rallies”. Ludicrously, this alleged that protesters holding banners saying “Gaza = Auschwitz” and “Stop the Genocide” were guilty of anti-Semitism.
It is telling that the ADL paper did not quote the definition of genocide endorsed by the UN in 1948. Largely the work of the lawyer Raphael Lemkin, a Polish Jew who fled to the United States during the Holocaust, the definition refers to crimes designed to destroy a national or ethnic group in whole or in part by inflicting serious physical or psychological harm on that group. Given the suffering inflicted on Palestinians by Israel, the conclusion that Palestinians are victims of genocide appears inescapable. Research by the Gaza Community Mental Health Programme, for example, indicates that more than two-thirds of Gazans have displayed symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder over the past few years.
There is a perception among some Israelis that Spain even has an anti-Semitic government. When Trinidad Jiménez, the Spanish foreign minister, visited Hebron in the West Bank during February, a group of Israeli settlers followed her through the streets shouting “go home anti-Semite”. Speculation that Spain will soon recognise a Palestinian state, coupled with occasional gestures of solidarity towards Palestinians from official Madrid – Prime Minister José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero has been photographed sporting a keffiyeh – have created an impression that its ruling elite has a deep-rooted loathing of Israel. Historic anti-Semitism – Jews were expelled from Spain 500 years ago – is undoubtedly another factor behind that impression.
Yet the notion that Spain’s government is more favourably disposed to the Palestinians, than to the state of Israel, falls apart under scrutiny.
Spain was under Francisco Franco’s dictatorship when Israel was founded in 1948 and it wasn’t until 1986 – more than a decade after Franco’s death – that the two countries established diplomatic relations. To commemorate the twenty-fifth anniversary of that relationship, the Israeli President Shimon Peres recently hosted a visit from Crown Prince Felipe and his wife Princess Letizia. The Jerusalem Post marked the occasion by noting that the volume of trade between Israel and Spain was worth about €1.7 billion last year. Much emphasis was placed on the potential for growth in scientific and technological cooperation between Spain and Israel during the visit.
The Spanish authorities have attempted to put a positive spin on such cooperation, hinting that most of it is of a civilian nature. Around the time of Operation Cast Lead – Israel’s all-out attack on Gaza in 2008 and 2009 – Zapatero insisted that Spanish arms sales to Israel were “absolutely insignificant”.
A November 2009 study by Nova, a Barcelona group promoting non-violence, exposed Zapatero’s assurance as duplicitous. Official data stating that Spain sold more than €32 million worth of weapons to Israel between 1995 and 2008 did not tell the whole story, according to the study. Those figures do not taken into account how Indra, a leading Spanish arms manufacturer, supplies components to the F-16 fighter jets produced by Lockheed Martin. Once completed, those warplanes – used extensively in Operation Cast Lead and Israel’s 2006 war against Lebanon – are exported from the US to Israel.
Indra brags on its website of how it has been acclaimed as one of the world’s most ethical companies by a “think tank” called the Ethisphere Institute. Among the other firms viewed as highly ethical by Ethisphere were Caterpillar and CRH, which have supplied bulldozers for the destruction of Palestinian homes (and the murder of American Palestine solidarity activist Rachel Corrie) and cement used to build Israel’s annexation wall in the West Bank respectively.
When a pregnant Carme Chacón became Spain’s first-ever female defence minister in 2008, Time magazine mused that by appointing her Zapatero may be “making a kinder, gentler statement about the armed forces”. Time was wide of the mark. Chacón has enjoyed a cordial relationship with her Israeli counterpart Ehud Barak, untroubled by his long track record of oppressing Palestinians (as both a military and political leader). Within less than two years of Chacón’s appointment, Spain had signed an agreement paving the way for far-reaching military cooperation with Israel, with a particular focus on the development of weapons for future wars. The accord followed several years, in which the Spanish army has been an important customer for Israel’s burgeoning arms industry. Israel Aerospace Industries, for example, is scheduled to deliver a consignment of pilotless drones – or unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) – to Spain in 2012. Known as Herons, these remote-controlled killing machines were “battle-tested” by Israel during Operation Cast Lead. At least 87 civilians died from Israeli drone attacks in that three-week offensive, investigations by human rights monitors found. The Spanish forces taking part in NATO’s war in Afghanistan have Israeli drones in their arsenal, too.
Although there was widespread public opposition in Spain to Cast Lead, the elite has not had any qualms about bolstering its ties with Israel. Alejandro Pozo, author of the Nova report, said “it is a scandal” that in 2009, Spain authorised arms sales €2.8 million to Spain, most of them in the categories of bombs, torpedoes, missiles and rockets. This was in addition to the almost €1.2 million worth of “dual-use” exports (which have both civilian and military applications) approved by Spain to Israel that year. Moreover, it was separate from the €3.7 million in weapons actually delivered from Spanish firms to Israel in 2009 (the relevant licenses for those sales had been approved before Cast Lead).
Spain has proven so accommodating to Israel lately that it has even allowed Israel shape its human rights legislation. Since 1985, Spain had an important law on its statute books relating to universal jurisdiction, the principle under which crimes against humanity could be tried in Spanish courts irrespective of where they were committed. The law had been invoked to issue an arrest warrant against the Chilean tyrant Augusto Pinochet and to prosecute an ex-navy officer involved in Argentina’s “dirty war” of the 1970s and 1980s.
Yet when it was used by Palestinian human rights campaigners in an effort to hold Israel to account for a 2002 operation in which 14 civilians were killed, Spain’s then foreign minister Miguel Angel Moratinos promised his Israeli equivalent Tzipi Livni in early 2009 that the law would be watered down. Moratinos kept his word: later in 2009, a bill restricting universal jurisdiction to cases with a clear Spanish link was approved by both houses in the Spanish parliament.
With the ruling Socialists faring badly in opinion polls, there is a high probability they will cede power to the centre-right Popular Party after parliamentary elections slated for next year. The Popular Party is likely to be even more hawkish in its support for Israel, judging by the antics of its former leader José María Aznar, who was prime minister from 1996 to 2004. On the day Israel attacked the Gaza Freedom Flotilla in May last year, Aznar presided over the inaugural meeting of the Friends of Israel, a grouping of other retired politicians and diplomats, including the one-time Czech president Václav Havel and the American neoconservative John Bolton.
In a speech he gave in New England earlier this month, Aznar argued that even though Israel is located in the Middle East, it is a Western country. It is strategically and morally imperative that the West, therefore, stands up for Israel, he added. “When people are deligitimizing Israel, our roots and the values of pluralism, tolerance, innovation, liberty and human dignity are deligitimized as well,” he said.
It is no coincidence that Aznar is also a director of Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation. For the kind of baseless propaganda he has been peddling about Israel is worthy of Fox News and other outlets in Murdoch’s media empire. The tragedy is that Aznar’s curriculum vitae allows him to be taken seriously. And even though he is no longer in office, the views he espouses still resonate in Madrid’s corridors of power.
Regardless of what the Zionist lobby may claim, Israel can count Spain as a loyal customer of its arms industry. The Madrid government’s occasional gestures of sympathy towards the Palestinians amount to little more than posturing and are worthy only of contempt.
·First published by The Electronic Intifada (www.electronicintifada.net), 28 April 2011
The headlines were based on the findings of a report, published in late March, by the Observatory on Anti-Semitism in Madrid, an office run by the Spanish Federation of Jewish Communities. Reading the report, it became apparent that the observatory had deliberately conflated criticism of the state of Israel with a general hostility to Jews.
The observatory stated that it was notified of 28 incidents of anti-Semitic behaviour during 2010. Nine of these incidents were taken out of consideration as they either did not occur on Spanish soil or because they were found not to be anti-Semitic in nature. Some of the remaining 19 incidents were certainly deplorable. They involved verbal or written threats to Jews, the smearing of graffiti – including a swastika – near synagogues and Jewish cultural centres, and the posting of neo-Nazi blogs on the internet.
But the observatory also gave some spurious examples. These included a decision by organisers of the Gay Pride parade in Madrid that a float from Tel Aviv shouldn’t be allowed to participate following Israel’s attack on the Gaza Freedom Flotilla in May last year. Other examples given were a column for El Mundo newspaper by the writer António Gala and a cartoon by the artist El Roto. Both the column and the cartoon sought to compare how Israel treats the Palestinians and how the Nazis treated Jews during the Second World War.
The observatory uses a “3 D” test when assessing if incidents qualify as anti-Semitic. The brainchild of Natan Sharansky, a former Israeli government minister, this test identifies people as anti-Semitic if they resort to (1) demonization; (2) double standards or (3) deligitimization. According to Sharansky, demonization can involve likening the state of Israel to Nazi Germany, double standards can involve criticising Israel in a way that one does not criticise other countries and deligitimization can involve questioning the rights of Jews to have their own state.
Sharansky’s definition has little to do with defending ordinary Jews from racist attack and everything to do with shielding the state of Israel from scrutiny. The “double standards” criterion exposes his test to be particularly weak as Israel is treated far more lightly by governments in North America and Europe, as well as the mainstream media, than other serial abusers of human rights. At the behest of Western powers, the United Nations Security Council recently imposed a no-fly zone over Libya. Yet no Western government has advocated a no-fly zone over Gaza.
This was not the first time that threadbare evidence was used to accuse the Spanish public of hating Jews. In September 2009, the Anti-Defamation League, a Zionist lobby group in New York, published a “study” on Spain. It had a section titled “anti-Semitism at anti-Israel rallies”. Ludicrously, this alleged that protesters holding banners saying “Gaza = Auschwitz” and “Stop the Genocide” were guilty of anti-Semitism.
It is telling that the ADL paper did not quote the definition of genocide endorsed by the UN in 1948. Largely the work of the lawyer Raphael Lemkin, a Polish Jew who fled to the United States during the Holocaust, the definition refers to crimes designed to destroy a national or ethnic group in whole or in part by inflicting serious physical or psychological harm on that group. Given the suffering inflicted on Palestinians by Israel, the conclusion that Palestinians are victims of genocide appears inescapable. Research by the Gaza Community Mental Health Programme, for example, indicates that more than two-thirds of Gazans have displayed symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder over the past few years.
There is a perception among some Israelis that Spain even has an anti-Semitic government. When Trinidad Jiménez, the Spanish foreign minister, visited Hebron in the West Bank during February, a group of Israeli settlers followed her through the streets shouting “go home anti-Semite”. Speculation that Spain will soon recognise a Palestinian state, coupled with occasional gestures of solidarity towards Palestinians from official Madrid – Prime Minister José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero has been photographed sporting a keffiyeh – have created an impression that its ruling elite has a deep-rooted loathing of Israel. Historic anti-Semitism – Jews were expelled from Spain 500 years ago – is undoubtedly another factor behind that impression.
Yet the notion that Spain’s government is more favourably disposed to the Palestinians, than to the state of Israel, falls apart under scrutiny.
Spain was under Francisco Franco’s dictatorship when Israel was founded in 1948 and it wasn’t until 1986 – more than a decade after Franco’s death – that the two countries established diplomatic relations. To commemorate the twenty-fifth anniversary of that relationship, the Israeli President Shimon Peres recently hosted a visit from Crown Prince Felipe and his wife Princess Letizia. The Jerusalem Post marked the occasion by noting that the volume of trade between Israel and Spain was worth about €1.7 billion last year. Much emphasis was placed on the potential for growth in scientific and technological cooperation between Spain and Israel during the visit.
The Spanish authorities have attempted to put a positive spin on such cooperation, hinting that most of it is of a civilian nature. Around the time of Operation Cast Lead – Israel’s all-out attack on Gaza in 2008 and 2009 – Zapatero insisted that Spanish arms sales to Israel were “absolutely insignificant”.
A November 2009 study by Nova, a Barcelona group promoting non-violence, exposed Zapatero’s assurance as duplicitous. Official data stating that Spain sold more than €32 million worth of weapons to Israel between 1995 and 2008 did not tell the whole story, according to the study. Those figures do not taken into account how Indra, a leading Spanish arms manufacturer, supplies components to the F-16 fighter jets produced by Lockheed Martin. Once completed, those warplanes – used extensively in Operation Cast Lead and Israel’s 2006 war against Lebanon – are exported from the US to Israel.
Indra brags on its website of how it has been acclaimed as one of the world’s most ethical companies by a “think tank” called the Ethisphere Institute. Among the other firms viewed as highly ethical by Ethisphere were Caterpillar and CRH, which have supplied bulldozers for the destruction of Palestinian homes (and the murder of American Palestine solidarity activist Rachel Corrie) and cement used to build Israel’s annexation wall in the West Bank respectively.
When a pregnant Carme Chacón became Spain’s first-ever female defence minister in 2008, Time magazine mused that by appointing her Zapatero may be “making a kinder, gentler statement about the armed forces”. Time was wide of the mark. Chacón has enjoyed a cordial relationship with her Israeli counterpart Ehud Barak, untroubled by his long track record of oppressing Palestinians (as both a military and political leader). Within less than two years of Chacón’s appointment, Spain had signed an agreement paving the way for far-reaching military cooperation with Israel, with a particular focus on the development of weapons for future wars. The accord followed several years, in which the Spanish army has been an important customer for Israel’s burgeoning arms industry. Israel Aerospace Industries, for example, is scheduled to deliver a consignment of pilotless drones – or unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) – to Spain in 2012. Known as Herons, these remote-controlled killing machines were “battle-tested” by Israel during Operation Cast Lead. At least 87 civilians died from Israeli drone attacks in that three-week offensive, investigations by human rights monitors found. The Spanish forces taking part in NATO’s war in Afghanistan have Israeli drones in their arsenal, too.
Although there was widespread public opposition in Spain to Cast Lead, the elite has not had any qualms about bolstering its ties with Israel. Alejandro Pozo, author of the Nova report, said “it is a scandal” that in 2009, Spain authorised arms sales €2.8 million to Spain, most of them in the categories of bombs, torpedoes, missiles and rockets. This was in addition to the almost €1.2 million worth of “dual-use” exports (which have both civilian and military applications) approved by Spain to Israel that year. Moreover, it was separate from the €3.7 million in weapons actually delivered from Spanish firms to Israel in 2009 (the relevant licenses for those sales had been approved before Cast Lead).
Spain has proven so accommodating to Israel lately that it has even allowed Israel shape its human rights legislation. Since 1985, Spain had an important law on its statute books relating to universal jurisdiction, the principle under which crimes against humanity could be tried in Spanish courts irrespective of where they were committed. The law had been invoked to issue an arrest warrant against the Chilean tyrant Augusto Pinochet and to prosecute an ex-navy officer involved in Argentina’s “dirty war” of the 1970s and 1980s.
Yet when it was used by Palestinian human rights campaigners in an effort to hold Israel to account for a 2002 operation in which 14 civilians were killed, Spain’s then foreign minister Miguel Angel Moratinos promised his Israeli equivalent Tzipi Livni in early 2009 that the law would be watered down. Moratinos kept his word: later in 2009, a bill restricting universal jurisdiction to cases with a clear Spanish link was approved by both houses in the Spanish parliament.
With the ruling Socialists faring badly in opinion polls, there is a high probability they will cede power to the centre-right Popular Party after parliamentary elections slated for next year. The Popular Party is likely to be even more hawkish in its support for Israel, judging by the antics of its former leader José María Aznar, who was prime minister from 1996 to 2004. On the day Israel attacked the Gaza Freedom Flotilla in May last year, Aznar presided over the inaugural meeting of the Friends of Israel, a grouping of other retired politicians and diplomats, including the one-time Czech president Václav Havel and the American neoconservative John Bolton.
In a speech he gave in New England earlier this month, Aznar argued that even though Israel is located in the Middle East, it is a Western country. It is strategically and morally imperative that the West, therefore, stands up for Israel, he added. “When people are deligitimizing Israel, our roots and the values of pluralism, tolerance, innovation, liberty and human dignity are deligitimized as well,” he said.
It is no coincidence that Aznar is also a director of Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation. For the kind of baseless propaganda he has been peddling about Israel is worthy of Fox News and other outlets in Murdoch’s media empire. The tragedy is that Aznar’s curriculum vitae allows him to be taken seriously. And even though he is no longer in office, the views he espouses still resonate in Madrid’s corridors of power.
Regardless of what the Zionist lobby may claim, Israel can count Spain as a loyal customer of its arms industry. The Madrid government’s occasional gestures of sympathy towards the Palestinians amount to little more than posturing and are worthy only of contempt.
·First published by The Electronic Intifada (www.electronicintifada.net), 28 April 2011
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