When Andreas Papandreou died in 1996, The New York Times noted that he often left Western governments “befuddled or exasperated” as he took positions “diametrically opposed to theirs.” Citing examples of his “maverick” behavior, the paper’s obituary referred to how the Greek prime minister granted diplomatic status to the Palestine Liberation Organization in 1981, the year he first took office.
Like most political leaders, Papandreou was a man of contradictions. He professed to despise American imperialism, while allowing the United States retain military bases on Greek soil. Yet he deserves some posthumous acclaim for saluting the PLO when it was still a genuine resistance movement and for criticizing Israel more trenchantly than any of his counterparts in the then European Community.
In recent times, the current Greek premier George Papandreou has acted as if he wishes to totally negate his father’s legacy. No doubt, Greece’s refusal to allow the Freedom Flotilla II set sail for Gaza was partly the result of pressure -- and possibly even financial blackmail -- from the US and Israel. Nonetheless, it was not an isolated occurrence but the logical consequence of a process that was already underway.
In July 2010, Papandreou Junior visited Israel barely one month after the assault on the Mavi Marmara, in which nine Turkish peace activists were murdered by Israeli forces. As an immediate response to that massacre, Greece called a halt to a joint military training exercise then being undertaken with Israel off the island of Crete. But Papandreou had no qualms about going ahead with his trip to Israel as planned.
Israel was swift to reciprocate. In August last year, Benjamin Netanyahu became the first Israeli prime minister to visit Greece. Netanyahu reportedly used the occasion to recommend that the two countries be connected by a gas pipeline. It is not known whether the two men discussed how the Leviathan gas field – the source of the energy on Netanyahu’s radar screen at the time – is located off the Lebanese coast and how Israel’s exploitation of its reserves could spark a new conflict with Lebanon.
It is known, however, that both Israel and Greece continue to strengthen their military cooperation. Codenamed Minoas 2010, the operation that was stopped at the time of the Mavi Marmara bloodbath was, in fact, resumed in October last year. Apache and Black Hawk helicopters were used in the exercise, which tested out landing and take-off procedures in mountainous areas and under several different weather conditions. In December, Flight International stated that there had been at least four such exercises between Greece and Israel over the preceding few months.
Friction between Greece’s historic foe Turkey and Israel have almost certainly helped the Netanyahu-Papandreou relationship to blossom. Papandreou is surely an astute enough politician to have scented an opportunity for Greece to replace Turkey as Israel’s most valued ally in the Mediterranean. The similarities in the men’s backgrounds could well be another factor. Both were educated at highly regarded universities in the US (Papandreou in Harvard, Netanyahu in the Massachusetts Institute of Technology) and despite heading parties that are nominally different in ethos, both are heavily influenced by US politics and culture.
Perhaps more significantly, the recent intensification of relations has followed several years where the two countries have worked alongside each other under the umbrella of NATO. That US-dominated alliance has formed a ring around the entire Mediterranean. Almost every country bordering that sea is either a full member of NATO or has signed up to its Orwellian-titled Partnership for Peace.
Even though there appears to be no imminent prospect of Israel joining NATO, its ties to the alliance have grown exponentially over the past decade. An Israeli-NATO agreement on sharing intelligence was signed in April 2001. Five years later, Israel reached agreement on implementing an “individual cooperation program” with NATO. Updated in December 2008, the agreement paved the way for a high number of joint operations between it and the alliance. Greece has been involved too in most, if not all, of these operations. In 2007, for example, Greek warships took part in drills in Eilat, an Israeli port on the Red Sea.
Both Greece and Israel are also participating in Operation Active Endeavor, a NATO-coordinated exercise under which ships patrol the Mediterranean. That operation was, according to the official narrative, launched in response to the 11 September 2001 atrocities in the US. But in practice its remit has expanded beyond keeping a watch out for potential “terrorist” activity on the waves. In particular, it has been used as part of a repressive agenda of helping prevent foreigners who seek to flee poverty from reaching Europe.
In March, Active Endeavor’s scope was further broadened during preparations for the war against Libya. A 24-hour airborne surveillance system was put in place as part of the ongoing operation. Despite its severe economic problems, Greece has provided a number of warplanes and ships to that war effort, in which NATO has availed of at least seven Greek airfields.
Meanwhile, the solidity of Israel’s links to NATO were underscored shortly before Gabi Ashkenazi stepped down as head of the Israeli military in February. Ashkenazi, who oversaw Operation Cast Lead, which killed 1400 Palestinians in Gaza during December 2008 and January 2009, advised NATO strategists on what tactics should be used against Afghanistan and was treated to a farewell dinner in his honor at the Brussels residence of Giampaolo Di Paolo, chairman of NATO’s military committee.
On a proportionate basis, Greece is one of Europe’s largest spenders on the military, although this expenditure is being cut as part of a wider austerity drive that mainly affects vital public services. In 2009, Greece allocated 2.54% of its gross domestic product to military spending, the highest level in the European Union. Britain was next at 2.53%.
Greece is known to have concluded deals with several Israeli weapons makers, although it has not published comprehensive details on such deals. In February, Evangelos Venizelos, the Greek defense minister, confirmed that “precision-guided” weapon kits known as SPICES (Smart Precise Impact and Cost Effective). Elisra, a subsidiary of the leading Israeli arms manufacturer Elbit, has also supplied electronic warfare systems to the Greek air force over the past decade.
It is true that Greece has combined its ever-tightening embrace of Israel with calls for the blockade of Gaza to be lifted. But it is impossible to take those calls seriously now that the Athens government has assisted Israel in thwarting protest against the very same blockade. Andreas Papandreou’s championing of Palestinian rights might have had some moral weight in the early 1980s. Three decades on, his son George has become a craven accomplice in maintaining the Israeli occupation.
·First published by The Electronic Intifada (www.electronicintifada.net), 13 July 2011.
Showing posts with label Binyamin Netanyahu. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Binyamin Netanyahu. Show all posts
Wednesday, July 13, 2011
Tuesday, April 12, 2011
EU turns blind eye to Palestinian citizens in Israel
Answering questions from YouTube viewers over the past few weeks, Binyamin Netanyahu depicted Israel as an oasis of interracial harmony in a region of strife. "There's only one country in the heart of the Middle East that has no tremors, no protests,” the Israeli prime minister said. “That's Israel. Because we're the only one where we respect human rights. The only one that respects the rights of Arab citizens. Twenty percent of our population are Arabs. And they enjoy full civil rights in Israel. It's the only place in this entire vast expanse where Arabs and Muslims enjoy complete freedom and complete equality before the law."
It was a statement of characteristic chutzpah. Despite his claim that Israel “respects the rights of Arab citizens”, its national parliament – the Knesset – had just approved two pieces of legislation that discriminated against the 1.4 million Palestinians living within Israel’s internationally accepted borders.
First, on 22 March, a bill was passed to withdraw state funding from any institution that commemorates the Nakbah, the massacres and forced displacement of Palestinians that led to the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948. Then, six days later, the Knesset approved a new law, which allows for Israeli citizenship to be removed when someone is convicted of terrorism or treason. Opponents of the law noted that it was directed at Palestinians and that it was virtually unthinkable that Jewish Israelis would have their citizenship revoked as a result.
Netanyahu’s comments were made ahead of a short European tour, confined to Germany and the Czech Republic. Predictably, they did not elicit any protest from the political leaders he met in Berlin and Prague. Angela Merkel, the German chancellor, went out of her way to exude warmth towards her guest. Insisting she is “never irritated” by Netanyahu (notwithstanding reports they had exchanged cross words in February over the expansion of Israeli settlements in the occupied Palestinian territories), Merkel described her contacts with him as “fun”.
Merkel’s silence over the treatment of the Palestinian minority in Israel is mirrored by the stance of the entire 27-country European Union.
Since Catherine Ashton was appointed the EU’s foreign policy chief in 2009, she has not issued even one statement focusing exclusively on the plight of Palestinians within Israel. Her reticence stands in marked contrast to her hasty reaction to incidents that affect Israeli Jews. For example, she swiftly condemned the rockets fired by Hamas from Gaza into southern Israel on 7 April.
Ashton frequently meets Avigdor Lieberman, the Israeli foreign minister, whose party Yisrael Beitenu (Israel Our Home) has been part of the country’s ruling coalition for the past two years. During that time, Lieberman and his colleagues have been the main sponsors of about 20 laws and bills designed to worsen the discrimination faced by Israel’s Palestinian minority.
In 1973, the United Nations recognised that the crime of apartheid did not only apply to South Africa but also to other situations where one racial group dominated over another. Israel has long enshrined its racism against Palestinians in quasi-constitutional legislation. The 1950 Law of Return enables Jews throughout the world to move to Israel and gain citizenship. Yet Palestinians forced to leave their homes during the Nakbah are denied that right.
When I asked Ashton’s spokeswoman Maja Kocijancic why EU representatives never utter the words “Israel” and “apartheid” in the same sentence, she replied: “Israel is a democratic country and a partner of the European Union. Human right issues and possible shortcomings in this respect are discussed in the regular dialogue we have with the Israeli authorities.”
Kocijancic would be well-advised to read an interview with the Israeli historian and political dissident Ilan Pappé published earlier this month by New Internationalist magazine. “Israel is what we in political science call a herrenvolk democracy, democracy only for the masters,” Pappé said. “The fact that you allow people to participate in the formal side of democracy, namely to vote or to be elected, is meaningless if you don’t give them any share in the common good or in the common resources of the state, or if you discriminate against them despite the fact that you allow them to participate in the elections. On almost every level – from official legislation through governmental practices to social and cultural attitudes – Israel is only a democracy for one ethnic group.”
The EU’s unwillingness to address the treatment of Palestinians within Israel was exposed in a report published in February by Adalah, a minority rights organisation based in Haifa, and the Euro-Mediterranean Human Rights Network. It noted that the rights of the Palestinian minority in Israel are not even mentioned in the “association agreement” between the EU and Israel that came into effect in 2000 and sets out the main contractual basis of relations between the two sides.
That omission was partly compensated for by an “action plan” on Israel approved by top-level EU representatives in 2005. The plan listed minority rights as one of the topics which the European Commission (the EU’s executive) and Israel were prepared to hold discussions. While Brussels officials appear to be monitoring the situation facing the Palestinian minority in Israel, “the Commission’s language has neither consistently hardened nor softened over the years,” the February report says.
“The EU is not willing to compromise its relationship with Israel,” Nathalie Tocci, the report’s author, told me. “This means it's unwilling to recognize Israel as not being a democracy. It is ready to criticise Israel's democratic deficiencies - regarding human and minority rights - but would view these problems as analogous to those within some European countries too.”
The socio-economic conditions in which Palestinians inside Israel live also put them at a disadvantage. Throughout Israel, more than 20% of households live below the poverty line. But the proportion rises to 50% for the Palestinian minority in general and to 80% for Bedouins.
When Lieberman visited Brussels in February, the EU issued a 45-paragraph statement on its relations with Israel. It called on the Israeli government to implement the recommendations of a panel chaired by Eliezer Goldberg, a retired Israeli judge, on Bedouin communities in the Negev. Issued in 2008, the Goldberg Commission report found that 62,000 Bedouins in 46 villages unrecognised by Israel were living in an “unbearable state”. It urged Israel to confer a legal status on those villages.
Lending its support to a commission mainly dominated by Israeli establishment figures was an easy step for the EU to take. Unsurprisingly, it did not go further by denouncing the role of the Jewish National Fund (JNF) in destroying Bedouin villages such as Al Araqib, which has suffered more than 20 demolitions since July last year.
Even though the JNF’s bulldozers have been used in those demolitions and other acts of dispossession against Bedouins, the fund is regarded as a charity by some 50 countries worldwide. The JNF held a central position in the Zionist movement well before the state of Israel was established and used that position to advocate vigorously in favour of ethnic cleansing. Back in the 1930s and 1940s, one of its leading figures Yosef Weitz argued repeatedly that Palestinians should be forced out of Palestine.
The JNF has been given direct ownership of 13% of the land of Israel and a role in managing most of the remainder. It is particularly influential in Britain, where David Cameron, the prime minister, is one of its patrons. On its website, the JNF presents itself as a humanitarian and environmental organisation dedicated to planting trees in Israel.
“The JNF is involved in the illegal expropriation of Palestinian land and the concealing of Palestinian villages beneath parks and forests,” said Michael Kalmanovitz from the Stop the JNF Campaign in Britain. “The fact that David Cameron is one of its patrons is a disgrace.”
Hassan Jabareen, director of Adalah, said that both the EU and the US have tended to concentrate only on Palestinians living in the West Bank and Gaza and not on the Palestinian minority within Israel. By turning a blind eye to the Palestinian minority in Israel, the EU has failed to learn important lessons from the experience of its own member states. “You couldn’t have got peace between the UK and the Republic of Ireland without addressing the situation in Northern Ireland,” Jabareen said. “Europe should understand that.”
In his new book Boycott Divestment Sanctions: The Global Struggle for Palestinian Rights, Omar Barghouti argues that Westerners promoting conflict resolution in the Middle East have not grappled with the underlying injustices. “The main culprit is the insistence of Israel and successive US governments on exploiting the current massive power imbalance to impose a peace devoid of justice and human rights on the Palestinians, an unjust ‘solution’ that fails to address our basic rights under international law and undermines our inalienable right to self-determination,” he writes.
Barghouti is correct to pin much of the blame on Washington. Yet Europe’s contribution to this dismal state of affairs should not be overlooked, either. As the biggest destination for Israeli exports, the EU could have made the strengthening of its political and economic links with Israel conditional on improving the situation of all three groups that comprise the Palestinian people. These are the Palestinians in the West Bank (including East Jerusalem) and Gaza; those within Israel’s internationally accepted borders; and refugees in the diaspora. The EU’s refusal to attach such conditions exposes its never-ending declarations of support for human rights as hollow.
·First published by The Electronic Intifada (www.electronicintifada.net), 12 April 2011
It was a statement of characteristic chutzpah. Despite his claim that Israel “respects the rights of Arab citizens”, its national parliament – the Knesset – had just approved two pieces of legislation that discriminated against the 1.4 million Palestinians living within Israel’s internationally accepted borders.
First, on 22 March, a bill was passed to withdraw state funding from any institution that commemorates the Nakbah, the massacres and forced displacement of Palestinians that led to the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948. Then, six days later, the Knesset approved a new law, which allows for Israeli citizenship to be removed when someone is convicted of terrorism or treason. Opponents of the law noted that it was directed at Palestinians and that it was virtually unthinkable that Jewish Israelis would have their citizenship revoked as a result.
Netanyahu’s comments were made ahead of a short European tour, confined to Germany and the Czech Republic. Predictably, they did not elicit any protest from the political leaders he met in Berlin and Prague. Angela Merkel, the German chancellor, went out of her way to exude warmth towards her guest. Insisting she is “never irritated” by Netanyahu (notwithstanding reports they had exchanged cross words in February over the expansion of Israeli settlements in the occupied Palestinian territories), Merkel described her contacts with him as “fun”.
Merkel’s silence over the treatment of the Palestinian minority in Israel is mirrored by the stance of the entire 27-country European Union.
Since Catherine Ashton was appointed the EU’s foreign policy chief in 2009, she has not issued even one statement focusing exclusively on the plight of Palestinians within Israel. Her reticence stands in marked contrast to her hasty reaction to incidents that affect Israeli Jews. For example, she swiftly condemned the rockets fired by Hamas from Gaza into southern Israel on 7 April.
Ashton frequently meets Avigdor Lieberman, the Israeli foreign minister, whose party Yisrael Beitenu (Israel Our Home) has been part of the country’s ruling coalition for the past two years. During that time, Lieberman and his colleagues have been the main sponsors of about 20 laws and bills designed to worsen the discrimination faced by Israel’s Palestinian minority.
In 1973, the United Nations recognised that the crime of apartheid did not only apply to South Africa but also to other situations where one racial group dominated over another. Israel has long enshrined its racism against Palestinians in quasi-constitutional legislation. The 1950 Law of Return enables Jews throughout the world to move to Israel and gain citizenship. Yet Palestinians forced to leave their homes during the Nakbah are denied that right.
When I asked Ashton’s spokeswoman Maja Kocijancic why EU representatives never utter the words “Israel” and “apartheid” in the same sentence, she replied: “Israel is a democratic country and a partner of the European Union. Human right issues and possible shortcomings in this respect are discussed in the regular dialogue we have with the Israeli authorities.”
Kocijancic would be well-advised to read an interview with the Israeli historian and political dissident Ilan Pappé published earlier this month by New Internationalist magazine. “Israel is what we in political science call a herrenvolk democracy, democracy only for the masters,” Pappé said. “The fact that you allow people to participate in the formal side of democracy, namely to vote or to be elected, is meaningless if you don’t give them any share in the common good or in the common resources of the state, or if you discriminate against them despite the fact that you allow them to participate in the elections. On almost every level – from official legislation through governmental practices to social and cultural attitudes – Israel is only a democracy for one ethnic group.”
The EU’s unwillingness to address the treatment of Palestinians within Israel was exposed in a report published in February by Adalah, a minority rights organisation based in Haifa, and the Euro-Mediterranean Human Rights Network. It noted that the rights of the Palestinian minority in Israel are not even mentioned in the “association agreement” between the EU and Israel that came into effect in 2000 and sets out the main contractual basis of relations between the two sides.
That omission was partly compensated for by an “action plan” on Israel approved by top-level EU representatives in 2005. The plan listed minority rights as one of the topics which the European Commission (the EU’s executive) and Israel were prepared to hold discussions. While Brussels officials appear to be monitoring the situation facing the Palestinian minority in Israel, “the Commission’s language has neither consistently hardened nor softened over the years,” the February report says.
“The EU is not willing to compromise its relationship with Israel,” Nathalie Tocci, the report’s author, told me. “This means it's unwilling to recognize Israel as not being a democracy. It is ready to criticise Israel's democratic deficiencies - regarding human and minority rights - but would view these problems as analogous to those within some European countries too.”
The socio-economic conditions in which Palestinians inside Israel live also put them at a disadvantage. Throughout Israel, more than 20% of households live below the poverty line. But the proportion rises to 50% for the Palestinian minority in general and to 80% for Bedouins.
When Lieberman visited Brussels in February, the EU issued a 45-paragraph statement on its relations with Israel. It called on the Israeli government to implement the recommendations of a panel chaired by Eliezer Goldberg, a retired Israeli judge, on Bedouin communities in the Negev. Issued in 2008, the Goldberg Commission report found that 62,000 Bedouins in 46 villages unrecognised by Israel were living in an “unbearable state”. It urged Israel to confer a legal status on those villages.
Lending its support to a commission mainly dominated by Israeli establishment figures was an easy step for the EU to take. Unsurprisingly, it did not go further by denouncing the role of the Jewish National Fund (JNF) in destroying Bedouin villages such as Al Araqib, which has suffered more than 20 demolitions since July last year.
Even though the JNF’s bulldozers have been used in those demolitions and other acts of dispossession against Bedouins, the fund is regarded as a charity by some 50 countries worldwide. The JNF held a central position in the Zionist movement well before the state of Israel was established and used that position to advocate vigorously in favour of ethnic cleansing. Back in the 1930s and 1940s, one of its leading figures Yosef Weitz argued repeatedly that Palestinians should be forced out of Palestine.
The JNF has been given direct ownership of 13% of the land of Israel and a role in managing most of the remainder. It is particularly influential in Britain, where David Cameron, the prime minister, is one of its patrons. On its website, the JNF presents itself as a humanitarian and environmental organisation dedicated to planting trees in Israel.
“The JNF is involved in the illegal expropriation of Palestinian land and the concealing of Palestinian villages beneath parks and forests,” said Michael Kalmanovitz from the Stop the JNF Campaign in Britain. “The fact that David Cameron is one of its patrons is a disgrace.”
Hassan Jabareen, director of Adalah, said that both the EU and the US have tended to concentrate only on Palestinians living in the West Bank and Gaza and not on the Palestinian minority within Israel. By turning a blind eye to the Palestinian minority in Israel, the EU has failed to learn important lessons from the experience of its own member states. “You couldn’t have got peace between the UK and the Republic of Ireland without addressing the situation in Northern Ireland,” Jabareen said. “Europe should understand that.”
In his new book Boycott Divestment Sanctions: The Global Struggle for Palestinian Rights, Omar Barghouti argues that Westerners promoting conflict resolution in the Middle East have not grappled with the underlying injustices. “The main culprit is the insistence of Israel and successive US governments on exploiting the current massive power imbalance to impose a peace devoid of justice and human rights on the Palestinians, an unjust ‘solution’ that fails to address our basic rights under international law and undermines our inalienable right to self-determination,” he writes.
Barghouti is correct to pin much of the blame on Washington. Yet Europe’s contribution to this dismal state of affairs should not be overlooked, either. As the biggest destination for Israeli exports, the EU could have made the strengthening of its political and economic links with Israel conditional on improving the situation of all three groups that comprise the Palestinian people. These are the Palestinians in the West Bank (including East Jerusalem) and Gaza; those within Israel’s internationally accepted borders; and refugees in the diaspora. The EU’s refusal to attach such conditions exposes its never-ending declarations of support for human rights as hollow.
·First published by The Electronic Intifada (www.electronicintifada.net), 12 April 2011
Saturday, April 9, 2011
Rumours that Israel has fallen out of favour in Europe exaggerated
Is Binyamin Netanyahu really as tough as he would like us to believe? The prime minister’s European tour this week was restricted to Germany and the Czech Republic, two countries where he is guaranteed softball treatment from the political elite and the media.
Yet it would be wrong to think that everyone in those two countries has made a “Welcome Bibi” placard. On Tuesday evening, I shared a platform in Prague with Eva Nováková from the International Solidarity Movement. Nováková hit the headlines in January 2010, after she was taken from an apartment where she lived in Ramallah by Israeli soldiers. The following day she was deported, allegedly because she had overstayed her visa. (Her lawyers have mounted a challenge against the deportation in the Israeli Supreme Court. Israeli forces, the lawyers argue, had no legal power to apprehend a woman in a West Bank city nominally under full Palestinian control).
Since arriving back in Prague, Nováková has turned her attention to business links with the occupation of Palestine. She can regularly be seen protesting outside a shop that sells products made by Ahava, the cosmetics firm based in Mitzpe Shalem, an Israeli settlement in the West Bank.
Even though the Czech government likes to champion political dissidents abroad, it prefers to ignore courageous home-grown troublemakers like Nováková. Karel Schwarzenberg, the Czech foreign minister, has been kicked out of Cuba for embracing opponents to Fidel Castro, yet is uncharacteristically reticent when it comes to Israel’s systematic denial of basic rights to the Palestinians.
According to Schwarzenberg, the Czech Republic and The Netherlands are Israel’s most steadfast allies in the European Union. In January this year, he told The Jerusalem Post: “Whereas 10 or 20 years ago, there was a vast majority of EU countries who were definitely for Israel, now we can really rely on two countries.”
As it happens, he was misrepresenting the EU’s position. All of the Union’s 27 governments have embraced Israel in recent years. Britain, for example, is in the process of rewriting its universal jurisdiction law, which theoretically allowed for foreign war criminals to be tried in the UK’s courts. The weakening of this law is a direct response to pressure from Israel. In late 2009, Tzipi Livni chickened out of visiting London, when she discovered a warrant had been issued for her arrest at the request of Palestine solidarity campaigners.
Netanyahu is reportedly using his stopovers in Berlin and Prague to voice concern about Freedom Flotilla II, which will sail towards Gaza next month.
To their disgrace, some EU governments are helping Israel thwart this new initiative to break the medieval siege on Gaza. Demetris Christofias, the Cypriot president, stated during March that a 2010 order banning ships from travelling to Gaza via Cyprus remained in place.
So while Netanyahu mightn’t deign to set foot in most of the EU’s countries, he can still twist their leaders’ arms. Rumours that he has fallen out of their favour seem to be exaggerated.
·First published by Mondoweiss (www.mondoweiss.net), 8 April 2011
Yet it would be wrong to think that everyone in those two countries has made a “Welcome Bibi” placard. On Tuesday evening, I shared a platform in Prague with Eva Nováková from the International Solidarity Movement. Nováková hit the headlines in January 2010, after she was taken from an apartment where she lived in Ramallah by Israeli soldiers. The following day she was deported, allegedly because she had overstayed her visa. (Her lawyers have mounted a challenge against the deportation in the Israeli Supreme Court. Israeli forces, the lawyers argue, had no legal power to apprehend a woman in a West Bank city nominally under full Palestinian control).
Since arriving back in Prague, Nováková has turned her attention to business links with the occupation of Palestine. She can regularly be seen protesting outside a shop that sells products made by Ahava, the cosmetics firm based in Mitzpe Shalem, an Israeli settlement in the West Bank.
Even though the Czech government likes to champion political dissidents abroad, it prefers to ignore courageous home-grown troublemakers like Nováková. Karel Schwarzenberg, the Czech foreign minister, has been kicked out of Cuba for embracing opponents to Fidel Castro, yet is uncharacteristically reticent when it comes to Israel’s systematic denial of basic rights to the Palestinians.
According to Schwarzenberg, the Czech Republic and The Netherlands are Israel’s most steadfast allies in the European Union. In January this year, he told The Jerusalem Post: “Whereas 10 or 20 years ago, there was a vast majority of EU countries who were definitely for Israel, now we can really rely on two countries.”
As it happens, he was misrepresenting the EU’s position. All of the Union’s 27 governments have embraced Israel in recent years. Britain, for example, is in the process of rewriting its universal jurisdiction law, which theoretically allowed for foreign war criminals to be tried in the UK’s courts. The weakening of this law is a direct response to pressure from Israel. In late 2009, Tzipi Livni chickened out of visiting London, when she discovered a warrant had been issued for her arrest at the request of Palestine solidarity campaigners.
Netanyahu is reportedly using his stopovers in Berlin and Prague to voice concern about Freedom Flotilla II, which will sail towards Gaza next month.
To their disgrace, some EU governments are helping Israel thwart this new initiative to break the medieval siege on Gaza. Demetris Christofias, the Cypriot president, stated during March that a 2010 order banning ships from travelling to Gaza via Cyprus remained in place.
So while Netanyahu mightn’t deign to set foot in most of the EU’s countries, he can still twist their leaders’ arms. Rumours that he has fallen out of their favour seem to be exaggerated.
·First published by Mondoweiss (www.mondoweiss.net), 8 April 2011
Tuesday, January 25, 2011
Israel lobby junket for Euro-MPs
The pro-Israel lobby is seeking to increase its influence among members of Europe’s parliaments by offering them an expenses-paid trip to the Middle East.
Brochures circulated in several elected assemblies invite their representatives to take part in a visit to Israel and the occupied Palestinian territories, organised by the group European Friends of Israel (EFI). Established in 2006, the EFI has emerged as Europe’s closest equivalent to the America Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), the most powerful pro-Israel lobby group in Washington.
The brochures give no details about how the visit from 5 to 8 February is being financed, other than requesting a €300 contribution from each member of parliament who accepts the invitation. The contribution, which will only cover a fraction of the visit’s costs, is described as “non-mandatory”.
Marek Siwiec, a Polish member of the European Parliament (MEP) who sits on the EFI board, said the organisation has a “fundraising system, where the money is coming from the private sector”. When asked to name its main donors, Siwiec referred me to the organisation’s Brussels office.
But a spokesman for that office said he could only release such details if granted permission by the MEPs sitting on the organisation’s board.
Although the EFI’s website gives viewers links to AIPAC and similar organisations in Washington, the spokesman insisted that it does not receive funding from the pro-Israel lobby in the U.S. “I promise you 100% that no [we do not receive such funding],” he said. So far, however, EFI has declined to say how it is financed. It has also not signed up to a register of “interest representatives” set up by the European Commission as part of an initiative reportedly designed to shed light on how pressure groups operate.
The forthcoming visit is being promoted as the EFI’s second “policy conference”. It will commence with a “gala dinner” in Jerusalem, hosted by Shimon Peres, the Israeli president, feature day-trips to the headquarters of arms-makers and technology firms, and conclude with another gala dinner, which Binyamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, is scheduled to attend. The visit coincides, too, with the annual Herzliya security conference, which usually attracts the top military and political figures in Israel, as well as eminent guests from abroad.
Other tours on the itinerary include visits to the Israeli settlements of Ofra, Kfar Adumim and Gush Etzion in the occupied West Bank. Those settlements are officially regarded as illegal by the European Union as they were constructed in violation of international law. The Fourth Geneva Convention of 1949 forbids an occupying power from transferring its own civilian population into the land that it occupies.
Spouses of elected representatives have been invited to join the visit, provided they pay €300 each. A return flight from Brussels to Tel Aviv on El Al, Israel’s national carrier, for the dates in question costs €570.
Piet de Bruyn, a Belgian Senator, said he has decided to take part in the visit, despite how he is critical of Israel’s occupation of Palestinian land. “I am curious to find out how it will be,” he said. “Will they be brainwashing us or will they be more subtle?”
De Bruyn stressed that he is taking part in an individual capacity, rather than as a representative of his country’s Senate. He would be particularly interested, he said, to see how the tour of Israeli settlements is presented. “I don’t know what message will be given to us,” he said.
In a lecture given in the Lebanese capital Beirut during November last year, Daud Abdullah from the London-based Middle East Monitor (MEMO) argued that there has been a marked increase in the impact of the pro-Israel lobby in Europe over the past decade. “If the influence of the Israel lobby was manifested in the policies of the individual European countries, it was even more apparent in the collective policies of the EU,” he said.
Abdullah noted that several pro-Israel groups have set up European affairs offices in Brussels and are in regular contact with some of the highest-ranking officials in the EU institutions. These groups include the American Jewish Committee, the European Jewish Congress and B’nai B’rith. One of their greatest achievements to date was a decision taken by EU foreign ministers in 2008 to “upgrade” their relations with Israel by integrating Israel into the Union’s single market for goods and services. The pro-Israel lobby had mounted a vigorous campaign for the “upgrade” ahead of that move and is continuing to advocate that the decision be given practical effect, even though work on doing so has stalled because of Israel’s three-week attack on Gaza in December 2008 and January 2009.
The EFI’s visit to Israel and the occupied Palestinian territories follows its inaugural “policy conference” in Paris in 2008. Israeli politicians taking part in that event were granted meetings with Nicolas Sarkozy and Bernard Kouchner, France’s president and foreign minister.
A spokesman for Israel’s embassy in Brussels said that the EFI has not been given any finance from the Israeli state to organise its forthcoming visit. “We have lots of friends in Europe,” the spokesman said. “We have contacts with like-minded people and we have good dialogue with people who are opposed to our policies.”
Michel Legrand, chairman of the Luxembourg Committee for a Just Peace in the Middle East, complained that the EFI’s activities are “not at all transparent”. Its efforts to win support for the Israeli occupation of Palestine are “really crass”, he added.
·First published by Inter Press Service (www.ipsnews.net), 25 January 2011
Brochures circulated in several elected assemblies invite their representatives to take part in a visit to Israel and the occupied Palestinian territories, organised by the group European Friends of Israel (EFI). Established in 2006, the EFI has emerged as Europe’s closest equivalent to the America Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), the most powerful pro-Israel lobby group in Washington.
The brochures give no details about how the visit from 5 to 8 February is being financed, other than requesting a €300 contribution from each member of parliament who accepts the invitation. The contribution, which will only cover a fraction of the visit’s costs, is described as “non-mandatory”.
Marek Siwiec, a Polish member of the European Parliament (MEP) who sits on the EFI board, said the organisation has a “fundraising system, where the money is coming from the private sector”. When asked to name its main donors, Siwiec referred me to the organisation’s Brussels office.
But a spokesman for that office said he could only release such details if granted permission by the MEPs sitting on the organisation’s board.
Although the EFI’s website gives viewers links to AIPAC and similar organisations in Washington, the spokesman insisted that it does not receive funding from the pro-Israel lobby in the U.S. “I promise you 100% that no [we do not receive such funding],” he said. So far, however, EFI has declined to say how it is financed. It has also not signed up to a register of “interest representatives” set up by the European Commission as part of an initiative reportedly designed to shed light on how pressure groups operate.
The forthcoming visit is being promoted as the EFI’s second “policy conference”. It will commence with a “gala dinner” in Jerusalem, hosted by Shimon Peres, the Israeli president, feature day-trips to the headquarters of arms-makers and technology firms, and conclude with another gala dinner, which Binyamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, is scheduled to attend. The visit coincides, too, with the annual Herzliya security conference, which usually attracts the top military and political figures in Israel, as well as eminent guests from abroad.
Other tours on the itinerary include visits to the Israeli settlements of Ofra, Kfar Adumim and Gush Etzion in the occupied West Bank. Those settlements are officially regarded as illegal by the European Union as they were constructed in violation of international law. The Fourth Geneva Convention of 1949 forbids an occupying power from transferring its own civilian population into the land that it occupies.
Spouses of elected representatives have been invited to join the visit, provided they pay €300 each. A return flight from Brussels to Tel Aviv on El Al, Israel’s national carrier, for the dates in question costs €570.
Piet de Bruyn, a Belgian Senator, said he has decided to take part in the visit, despite how he is critical of Israel’s occupation of Palestinian land. “I am curious to find out how it will be,” he said. “Will they be brainwashing us or will they be more subtle?”
De Bruyn stressed that he is taking part in an individual capacity, rather than as a representative of his country’s Senate. He would be particularly interested, he said, to see how the tour of Israeli settlements is presented. “I don’t know what message will be given to us,” he said.
In a lecture given in the Lebanese capital Beirut during November last year, Daud Abdullah from the London-based Middle East Monitor (MEMO) argued that there has been a marked increase in the impact of the pro-Israel lobby in Europe over the past decade. “If the influence of the Israel lobby was manifested in the policies of the individual European countries, it was even more apparent in the collective policies of the EU,” he said.
Abdullah noted that several pro-Israel groups have set up European affairs offices in Brussels and are in regular contact with some of the highest-ranking officials in the EU institutions. These groups include the American Jewish Committee, the European Jewish Congress and B’nai B’rith. One of their greatest achievements to date was a decision taken by EU foreign ministers in 2008 to “upgrade” their relations with Israel by integrating Israel into the Union’s single market for goods and services. The pro-Israel lobby had mounted a vigorous campaign for the “upgrade” ahead of that move and is continuing to advocate that the decision be given practical effect, even though work on doing so has stalled because of Israel’s three-week attack on Gaza in December 2008 and January 2009.
The EFI’s visit to Israel and the occupied Palestinian territories follows its inaugural “policy conference” in Paris in 2008. Israeli politicians taking part in that event were granted meetings with Nicolas Sarkozy and Bernard Kouchner, France’s president and foreign minister.
A spokesman for Israel’s embassy in Brussels said that the EFI has not been given any finance from the Israeli state to organise its forthcoming visit. “We have lots of friends in Europe,” the spokesman said. “We have contacts with like-minded people and we have good dialogue with people who are opposed to our policies.”
Michel Legrand, chairman of the Luxembourg Committee for a Just Peace in the Middle East, complained that the EFI’s activities are “not at all transparent”. Its efforts to win support for the Israeli occupation of Palestine are “really crass”, he added.
·First published by Inter Press Service (www.ipsnews.net), 25 January 2011
Tuesday, November 2, 2010
Israeli insults rewarded by EU embrace
Israel has directed a stream of insults towards its Western allies and protectors in the past 12 months, and has been rewarded with short-lived rebukes followed by an even closer embrace.
A group of foreign ministers representing the EU’s five largest states – including William Hague - was told to stay away by Israel in September because they were going to urge Binyamin Netanyahu’s government to extend the 10 month moratorium on building settlements in the West Bank.
Within a few days of this snub, the EU’s foreign policy chief, Catherine Ashton, recommended that Israel should be designated a new “strategic” partner for the Union. The fact that Israel had once again bombed Gaza that same week, killing three civilians, did not appear to trouble her.
Ashton’s proposal is designed to put Israel on a similar ranking with far bigger economies like the US, Japan and China in terms of how it is prioritised by EU officialdom. Her move follows last year’s acknowledgement by Javier Solana, her predecessor as head of EU diplomacy, that no country outside the European continent had closer relations with the Union than Israel. According to Solana, Israel’s participation in various EU-run programmes has made it a de facto member state of the Union.
The insult to the foreign ministers follows the murder of the leading Hamas figure, Mahmoud al-Mabhouh, who was shot dead in a Dubai hotel in January by assassins presenting themselves as British, Irish, German and French citizens. After a British investigation concluded that there were “compelling reasons” to believe that Mossad, the Israeli secret service, had used fraudulent versions of ID cards belonging to Britons living in Israel, an Israeli diplomat was expelled from the UK.
The expulsion has turned out to be tokenistic. The European countries whose passport systems were abused had an opportunity to censure Israel in a more meaningful fashion when a vote on its bid to join the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development took place in May. None of them were prepared to exercise their veto so Israel was admitted into this elite club for industrialised countries, receiving a “very significant seal of approval,” as Israel’s finance minister, Yuval Steinitz, observed.
Then there was the attack on the Gaza Freedom Flotilla when Israeli commandos shot dead nine peace activists on board a ship belonging to Turkey, a country engaged in formal, if protracted, talks aimed at its accession to the EU. Although some EU states condemned the attack, none of them took any concrete measures against Israel.
This pattern echoes the response of US Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, who accused the Israeli government of delivering an “insult to the United States” when it announced the planned construction of new settlements in East Jerusalem while vice president Joe Biden was visiting the Middle East in March.
While her comments might have upset some of the wealthy Zionists who had previously bankrolled her election campaigns, Clinton soon resumed her usual practice of fawning to neocons. Later the same month she told the annual conference of AIPAC, the most powerful pro-Israel lobby group in Washington, that her devotion to Israel was “rock solid, unwavering, enduring and forever.”
Why is Israel being treated with kid gloves by our governments? Privately, Brussels officials say that the EU needs to be on good terms with Israel because it is the kind of hi-tech economy that they wish Europe to emulate. The same officials are less willing to recognise that many of the Israeli innovations they profess to admire were developed through cruel experiments, in which the Palestinian people were treated as lab rats.
Israel is the leading foreign participant in the EU’s multi-annual “framework programme” for scientific research, which has been allocated €53 billion (£44.2 billion) between 2007 and 2013. Among the Israeli firms pocketing EU grants are Elbit and Israel Aerospace Industries, the manufacturers of pilotless drones – also known as unmanned air vehicles (UAVs) – that were used to inflict terror on civilians during Israel’s three-week bombardment of Gaza in late 2008 and early 2009
Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians meets the definition of genocide enshrined in a 1948 UN convention: a crime designed to destroy a national, ethnic or religious group by causing serious physical or psychological harm on members of that group or by imposing intolerable conditions of life on them.
Under the terms of an “association agreement” with Israel that came into effect in 2000, the EU is legally obliged to sanction Israel for systematic abuses of human rights. Not only has the Union refused to honour that commitment, it is actively supporting the arms companies that profit from the murder of innocents. It is no exaggeration to conclude that the EU has become an accomplice to genocide.
·First published by Palestine News, magazine of the Palestine Solidarity Campaign, Autumn 2010
A group of foreign ministers representing the EU’s five largest states – including William Hague - was told to stay away by Israel in September because they were going to urge Binyamin Netanyahu’s government to extend the 10 month moratorium on building settlements in the West Bank.
Within a few days of this snub, the EU’s foreign policy chief, Catherine Ashton, recommended that Israel should be designated a new “strategic” partner for the Union. The fact that Israel had once again bombed Gaza that same week, killing three civilians, did not appear to trouble her.
Ashton’s proposal is designed to put Israel on a similar ranking with far bigger economies like the US, Japan and China in terms of how it is prioritised by EU officialdom. Her move follows last year’s acknowledgement by Javier Solana, her predecessor as head of EU diplomacy, that no country outside the European continent had closer relations with the Union than Israel. According to Solana, Israel’s participation in various EU-run programmes has made it a de facto member state of the Union.
The insult to the foreign ministers follows the murder of the leading Hamas figure, Mahmoud al-Mabhouh, who was shot dead in a Dubai hotel in January by assassins presenting themselves as British, Irish, German and French citizens. After a British investigation concluded that there were “compelling reasons” to believe that Mossad, the Israeli secret service, had used fraudulent versions of ID cards belonging to Britons living in Israel, an Israeli diplomat was expelled from the UK.
The expulsion has turned out to be tokenistic. The European countries whose passport systems were abused had an opportunity to censure Israel in a more meaningful fashion when a vote on its bid to join the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development took place in May. None of them were prepared to exercise their veto so Israel was admitted into this elite club for industrialised countries, receiving a “very significant seal of approval,” as Israel’s finance minister, Yuval Steinitz, observed.
Then there was the attack on the Gaza Freedom Flotilla when Israeli commandos shot dead nine peace activists on board a ship belonging to Turkey, a country engaged in formal, if protracted, talks aimed at its accession to the EU. Although some EU states condemned the attack, none of them took any concrete measures against Israel.
This pattern echoes the response of US Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, who accused the Israeli government of delivering an “insult to the United States” when it announced the planned construction of new settlements in East Jerusalem while vice president Joe Biden was visiting the Middle East in March.
While her comments might have upset some of the wealthy Zionists who had previously bankrolled her election campaigns, Clinton soon resumed her usual practice of fawning to neocons. Later the same month she told the annual conference of AIPAC, the most powerful pro-Israel lobby group in Washington, that her devotion to Israel was “rock solid, unwavering, enduring and forever.”
Why is Israel being treated with kid gloves by our governments? Privately, Brussels officials say that the EU needs to be on good terms with Israel because it is the kind of hi-tech economy that they wish Europe to emulate. The same officials are less willing to recognise that many of the Israeli innovations they profess to admire were developed through cruel experiments, in which the Palestinian people were treated as lab rats.
Israel is the leading foreign participant in the EU’s multi-annual “framework programme” for scientific research, which has been allocated €53 billion (£44.2 billion) between 2007 and 2013. Among the Israeli firms pocketing EU grants are Elbit and Israel Aerospace Industries, the manufacturers of pilotless drones – also known as unmanned air vehicles (UAVs) – that were used to inflict terror on civilians during Israel’s three-week bombardment of Gaza in late 2008 and early 2009
Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians meets the definition of genocide enshrined in a 1948 UN convention: a crime designed to destroy a national, ethnic or religious group by causing serious physical or psychological harm on members of that group or by imposing intolerable conditions of life on them.
Under the terms of an “association agreement” with Israel that came into effect in 2000, the EU is legally obliged to sanction Israel for systematic abuses of human rights. Not only has the Union refused to honour that commitment, it is actively supporting the arms companies that profit from the murder of innocents. It is no exaggeration to conclude that the EU has become an accomplice to genocide.
·First published by Palestine News, magazine of the Palestine Solidarity Campaign, Autumn 2010
Thursday, June 3, 2010
Gaza convoy attack: the West runs for cover
Two weeks ago NATO published a strategy document underscoring one of the alliance’s core tenets: an attack on any member of the alliance is an attack on all of them. Iran’s nuclear programme was identified as one of the biggest threats that the 28-nation club could face within the coming decade.
Two weeks later, a NATO country has indeed come under attack. A Turkish vessel laden with food and other essential supplies for the undernourished and traumatised people of Gaza was the target of a murderous assault by Israel. As the ship was sailing in international waters at the time, this was tantamount to a declaration of war against Ankara.
If Iran or North Korea had been behind a comparable act of piracy, Europe and America would either be retaliating with force or preparing stringent sanctions. Yet because Israel enjoys a privileged relationship with our governments, we have generally heard asinine statements of “regret” and “concern” (tellingly, the “r” word has been uttered both by Binyamin Netanyahu and Barack Obama).
I’m certainly not advocating that Turkey should respond militarily. Rather, Israel should be ostracised diplomatically and economically until its political and military elite accepts that nobody has ever granted it a waiver from international law.
The likelihood that this will happen in the short term is not strong. Avigdor Lieberman, Israel’s racist foreign minister, and his bloodthirsty predecessor Tzipi Livni have made several visits to NATO’s headquarters in Brussels in recent years. Even though they represent a terrorist state, they have had considerable success in convincing NATO’s planners that Israel is an indispensable partner in the “war against terror”. The alliance’s efforts to colonise Afghanistan are being assisted in no small way by pilotless drones and other sophisticated weaponry made in Israel. And to feed its delusion that Iran is the number one threat to world peace, NATO is closely studying how missile interceptors based in Israel can be used to ratchet up the tensions with Tehran. NATO has been inviting Israel to participate in joint manoeuvres, too. Even Turkey – as well as Greece (a country that ought to have other priorities at the moment) – had been scheduled to undertake military exercises with Israel but these have now been called off.
The European Union is equally entangled in the occupation of Palestine. A few weeks ago the EU’s foreign ministers agreed to extend the mandate of the “border assistance mission” at Rafah – the crossing between Gaza and Egypt – for which they are nominally responsible. When the mission was first set up in 2005, it was hailed by EU officials as a major breakthrough for freedom of movement. Yet the reality is that Israel has always decided when the crossing can and cannot be opened (it has been closed permanently since 2007), with the result that the EU’s team has become a subcontractor for the siege of Gaza.
Europe’s commercial ties with Israel have continued to flourish – at the same time that Israel has gone out of its way to prevent Gaza and the West Bank from having functioning economies. Only last month, Israel was admitted into that officer’s mess of global capitalism: the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development. Mossad’s abuse of British and Irish passports to carry out an extrajudicial execution in Dubai did not deter our governments from welcoming Israel into the Paris-based body.
This week’s attacks appear to chime in a most chilling fashion with a warning given during the latest Herzliya conference - an annual talkfest for Israel’s “security” experts. A presentation by the Reut Institute – a “think-tank” – identified human rights and Palestinian solidarity activists as Israel’s biggest enemies as they are determined to “delegitimize” the state. In an odd way, the institute was right. When a state attacks a boat carrying nothing more dangerous than vegetables – or when it shows no signs of relaxing its occupation of another people’s land – that state’s legitimacy must be questioned.
Just over a year ago, I travelled around Israel and Palestine. One campaigner I met in Jerusalem told me there was an idea doing the rounds that the next intifada – Palestinian uprising (literally “shaking off”) – should be an international one modelled on the campaign that helped demolish apartheid in South Africa. Boycott, divestment and sanctions would be essential elements of this struggle.
It is possible that when Israel fired its bullets at a humanitarian convoy on Monday, it also fired the starting pistol for a new intifada. My hope is that this struggle will rely on the principles of non-violence, be supported by decent people everywhere and that our governments will be forced to stop rewarding Israel for its barbarism.
•Originally published by The Samosa (www.thesamosa.co.uk)
Two weeks later, a NATO country has indeed come under attack. A Turkish vessel laden with food and other essential supplies for the undernourished and traumatised people of Gaza was the target of a murderous assault by Israel. As the ship was sailing in international waters at the time, this was tantamount to a declaration of war against Ankara.
If Iran or North Korea had been behind a comparable act of piracy, Europe and America would either be retaliating with force or preparing stringent sanctions. Yet because Israel enjoys a privileged relationship with our governments, we have generally heard asinine statements of “regret” and “concern” (tellingly, the “r” word has been uttered both by Binyamin Netanyahu and Barack Obama).
I’m certainly not advocating that Turkey should respond militarily. Rather, Israel should be ostracised diplomatically and economically until its political and military elite accepts that nobody has ever granted it a waiver from international law.
The likelihood that this will happen in the short term is not strong. Avigdor Lieberman, Israel’s racist foreign minister, and his bloodthirsty predecessor Tzipi Livni have made several visits to NATO’s headquarters in Brussels in recent years. Even though they represent a terrorist state, they have had considerable success in convincing NATO’s planners that Israel is an indispensable partner in the “war against terror”. The alliance’s efforts to colonise Afghanistan are being assisted in no small way by pilotless drones and other sophisticated weaponry made in Israel. And to feed its delusion that Iran is the number one threat to world peace, NATO is closely studying how missile interceptors based in Israel can be used to ratchet up the tensions with Tehran. NATO has been inviting Israel to participate in joint manoeuvres, too. Even Turkey – as well as Greece (a country that ought to have other priorities at the moment) – had been scheduled to undertake military exercises with Israel but these have now been called off.
The European Union is equally entangled in the occupation of Palestine. A few weeks ago the EU’s foreign ministers agreed to extend the mandate of the “border assistance mission” at Rafah – the crossing between Gaza and Egypt – for which they are nominally responsible. When the mission was first set up in 2005, it was hailed by EU officials as a major breakthrough for freedom of movement. Yet the reality is that Israel has always decided when the crossing can and cannot be opened (it has been closed permanently since 2007), with the result that the EU’s team has become a subcontractor for the siege of Gaza.
Europe’s commercial ties with Israel have continued to flourish – at the same time that Israel has gone out of its way to prevent Gaza and the West Bank from having functioning economies. Only last month, Israel was admitted into that officer’s mess of global capitalism: the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development. Mossad’s abuse of British and Irish passports to carry out an extrajudicial execution in Dubai did not deter our governments from welcoming Israel into the Paris-based body.
This week’s attacks appear to chime in a most chilling fashion with a warning given during the latest Herzliya conference - an annual talkfest for Israel’s “security” experts. A presentation by the Reut Institute – a “think-tank” – identified human rights and Palestinian solidarity activists as Israel’s biggest enemies as they are determined to “delegitimize” the state. In an odd way, the institute was right. When a state attacks a boat carrying nothing more dangerous than vegetables – or when it shows no signs of relaxing its occupation of another people’s land – that state’s legitimacy must be questioned.
Just over a year ago, I travelled around Israel and Palestine. One campaigner I met in Jerusalem told me there was an idea doing the rounds that the next intifada – Palestinian uprising (literally “shaking off”) – should be an international one modelled on the campaign that helped demolish apartheid in South Africa. Boycott, divestment and sanctions would be essential elements of this struggle.
It is possible that when Israel fired its bullets at a humanitarian convoy on Monday, it also fired the starting pistol for a new intifada. My hope is that this struggle will rely on the principles of non-violence, be supported by decent people everywhere and that our governments will be forced to stop rewarding Israel for its barbarism.
•Originally published by The Samosa (www.thesamosa.co.uk)
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