Israel's crimes, Britain's culpability

Jody McIntyre hit the headlines late last year, when police pushed him from his wheelchair at a demonstration here in London against cutbacks to education. Although I have never met Jody, I am an admirer of his campaigning work on a number of issues, including the Israel-Palestine conflict. I was particularly impressed with a point he made in a recent speech, where he observed that the name Arthur James Balfour is far more readily recognised in Palestine than in Balfour’s native Britain.

As foreign secretary in 1917, Balfour wrote a terse letter to the Zionist Federation of Great Britain and Ireland, stating that his government supported the objective of setting up a “Jewish national home” in Palestine. It is true that the Balfour declaration also said that nothing would be done to prejudice the rights of people from other religions living in Palestine. Two years later, however, Balfour negated that caveat when he said: “Zionism, be it right or wrong, good or bad, is rooted in age-old traditions, in present needs, in future hopes, of far greater import than the desires and prejudices of the 700,000 Arabs who now inhabit that ancient land.”

The words of Balfour illustrate how the establishment of the state of Israel can only be viewed as a colonial project based on a toxic notion of racial supremacy. Because Britain gave its blessing to this project three decades before its goals were realised, the ruling elite in this country must share in the blame for everything that has happened subsequently. This includes the ever-tightening embrace between the European Union and Israel.

Some London newspapers regularly convey the impression that Britain has been dragged into the European Union against its will. Yet while the United Kingdom may have a semi-detached relationship with Europe on some economic matters, it plays a central role in shaping the EU’s foreign policies. Five UK representatives have been especially influential over recent years in ensuring that the EU mollycoddles Israel like no other state outside the Union’s borders.

The best-known of the five is Tony Blair. In an abuse of the English language, Blair is routinely described as an international “peace envoy” for the Middle East. Not only did the former prime minister team up with George Bush to launch an illegal war in Iraq, he has consistently accommodated Israel’s war crimes. When Israel subjected the people of Lebanon to a merciless assault in 2006, most EU countries wished to formally call for a ceasefire. The exception was Tony Blair, who blocked the Union from doing so.

In his memoirs, published in the autumn last year, Blair intimates that he did not simply support Israel on that occasion because his puppetmaster in the White House told him to. Instead, he wrote that condemning Israel “would have been more than dishonest; it would have undermined the worldview I had come to hold passionately.” Blair also wrote that he regarded the attack on Lebanon as part of “a wider struggle between the strain of religious extremism in Islam and the rest of us”.

Reading these comments has helped me understand that Tony Blair is in some respects the Arthur Balfour of the twenty-first century. He acts as an apologist for Israel even when it slaughters over 1,000 civilians – as it did in Lebanon in 2006 and Gaza more recently – because he has swallowed the main principles of Zionism. This explains why despite his veneer of impartiality, he has been recruited as a peddler of propaganda for the Israeli state. Following Israel’s murder of nine peace activists on the Gaza Freedom Flotilla in May last year, Blair held extensive talks with Binyamin Netanyahu about how to manage the political fall-out. It was Blair, who travelled around praising Israel’s decision to loosen ever so slightly the noose it had placed around Gaza, well before the details of this piecemeal easing of the blockade were announced.

When the invasion of Iraq was being prepared, Tony Blair’s top adviser on foreign policy was a diplomat called Robert Cooper. As Cooper is now a top-level foreign policy strategist in Brussels, he is the second UK representative I wish to speak about.

Fancying himself as an intellectual, Cooper clearly enjoys putting his thoughts about global affairs down in writing. His 2003 book The Breaking of Nations offers a highly readable and highly frightening insight into the thinking that pervades the British Foreign Office. Cooper contends that a new form of imperialism is necessary for the twenty-first century. His book, for example, lauds the “limited form of voluntary empire” that the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund embody, without expressing any concern about how these two American and European-dominated institutions have subjected whole countries to misery.

Cooper enjoys close relations with several pro-Israel lobbyists in Brussels. He has penned joint pamphlets with Ronald Asmus, a leading figure in the German Marshall Fund of the United States, who has been campaigning for Israel to be admitted to NATO. Cooper has proven amenable to the core arguments of the Israel lobby. He has been advocating behind the scenes that the European Union should take a strident approach towards Iran over that country’s nuclear programme. This chimes with the sabre-rattling towards Iran from both Israel and the United States. And it is brazenly hypocritical. It was not Iran that introduced nuclear weapons to the Middle East. It was Israel. It is not Iran that refused to sign the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. It is Israel. And yet it is Iran that has been subject to sanctions from the European Union over its nuclear programme. Not Israel.

At the beginning of December 2010, Cooper was appointed as a top adviser to the new diplomatic corps – external action service in Brussels parlance. That service is run by Catherine Ashton, the EU’s current foreign policy chief, and the third UK representative on my list.

Ashton kicked off the New Year by choosing Israel and the occupied Palestinian territories for her first working trip abroad for 2011. Ashton used this trip to boast of how the EU is invariably generous to the Palestinian people. She announced an initial aid package of €100 million (£83 million) to the Palestinian Authority, signalling that more will be released to the PA during the course of this year.

It is true that the EU is the largest provider of aid to the Palestinian Authority and is helping to finance the provision of vital services, including healthcare and education. But it is entirely wrong of Ashton to portray such aid as evidence of generosity. International law – in particular the Hague Regulations of 1907 – makes it clear that it is the responsibility of the occupying power to meet the basic needs of the people under occupation.

What Ashton has failed to spell out is that the European Union is relieving Israel of its responsibilities under international law. The EU has a legal and moral duty to send the bills for its aid to Israel, especially when Israel causes damage to EU-financed infrastructure. The Union has had many opportunities to sue Israel when such destruction occurs, such as after the attack on Gaza in 2008 and 2009, when at least €11 million worth of damage was inflicted on EU-funded projects. Yet the EU’s institutions have repeatedly backed away from holding Israel to account.

Ashton deserves a modicum of credit for speaking out last weekend against the demolition of the Shepherd hotel in East Jerusalem. Yet while she has issued several robust statements about the expansion of Israeli settlements in East Jerusalem, it should not be forgotten that she is eager to bring Israel even closer to the EU than it already is. During the autumn of last year, she recommended that Israel should be designated a “strategic partner” for the Union. This would put Israel on a similar ranking to larger economies like the US and China in terms of how it is prioritised by EU officialdom. Last week she described the EU’s relationship with Israel as “strong and solid” and expressed hope that it will become even stronger in the coming months.


I will forgive you if you have not heard of the fourth and fifth UK representatives on my list. They are two police officers: Colin Smith and Paul Kernaghan. As younger men both Smith and Kernaghan were members of the Royal Ulster Constabulary, a police force which many Irish people, myself included, regard as synonymous with harassment of the Catholic community in the North of Ireland. This background alone should be sufficient to render them unsuitable for any policing role in the Middle East.

Yet both men have headed an EU body called the Coordinating Office for Palestinian Police Support (COPPS). Propaganda would have us believe that this police training mission is designed to pave the way towards a Palestinian state. Documents drawn up by the Israeli authorities, however, have revealed the mission is subservient to Israel. One such document – from April last year – boasted of how there had been a rise of 72% in “coordinated actions” between Israeli and Palestinian police between 2008 and 2009.

Just as significantly, the police mission is being used to drive a wedge between the political representatives of the Palestinian people. Human rights monitors have reported that the clashes between Fatah and Hamas have helped turn the occupied Palestinian territories into a “police state”. The EU mission has refused to deal with Hamas in Gaza and has instead confined its operations to the West Bank for the past few years. Police in the West Bank are known to have resorted to torture of Hamas supporters. Despite how the EU is nominally opposed to torture wherever it occurs, its representatives have been mainly silent about torture perpetrated by the very police officers in the West Bank who they are in charge of training.

Political and economic relations between the EU and Israel are covered by an “association agreement” which came into effect in 2000. Article 2 of that agreement stipulates that both sides must respect human rights. Even though that condition is legally-binding, the EU has turned a blind eye to many of the crimes that Israel has committed against the Palestinians over the ensuing decade. After the attacks on Gaza in 2008 and 2009, for example, the EU extended the scope of trade preferences that it offers to agricultural goods from Israel. As a result most Israeli food exports, both fresh and processed, can enter the EU without having to pay customs duties. The EU is already Israel’s largest trading partner and both sides have expressed an interest in increasing the volume of that trade. The European Commission has gone so far as to set up a body known as the EU-Israel business dialogue, where chief executives can brainstorm on how to overcome any obstacles they encounter when trying to make profits.

Britain is the third largest destination for Israeli exports. Peter Mandelson, the former business secretary, voiced hopes during his time in office that the volume of British-Israeli trade will be worth more than £3 billion per annum by 2012. If realised, that would be an increase of £700 million in the volume of trade over a five-year period.

Many of the companies trading between Britain and Israel are directly involved in the occupation of Palestine. Travellers on the London Underground are under surveillance from video equipment manufactured by Verint, a subsidiary of the Israeli firm Comverse Technology. Verint has also won a contract to install a closed circuit TV system in Earl’s Court as part of preparations for next year’s Olympic Games.

BT, meanwhile, has a special partnership with Bezeq, an Israeli company that provides telecommunications to illegal settlements and military checkpoints in the West Bank. Around this time last year, Bezeq was admitted into the BT Alliance programme, under which it enjoys access to BT services on preferential terms.

Worse again, some of the components used by Israel’s most lethal warplanes are manufactured on British soil. Elbit, the maker of the pilotless drones that have killed numerous civilians in Gaza, has invested considerably in this country. Engines for one of Elbit’s drones, the Hermes 450, are made at its factory in Lichfield, north of Birmingham.

Earlier today, I was scheduled to give a separate talk to the International Centre for the Study of Radicalisation in King's College London. I decided, however, to withdraw from this event when I learned that this centre is a partnership between four different academic institutions, including the Herzliya Inter-Disciplinary Centre in Israel.

After consulting with the Boycott Divestment and Sanctions National Committee, which represents a wide cross-society of Palestinian society, I learned that the Herzliya centre reserves 10% of its places for veterans of elite combat units in the Israeli army and that it has expressed pride in how its students work for Israeli arms companies. I support the campaign to boycott institutions that enable the occupation of Palestine and for that reason I felt that I had no choice than to boycott the partnership between the Herzliya centre and King's College London.


I was similarly shocked to learn that Shimon Peres, the Israeli president, was given an honorary doctorate by King’s College in November 2008. The authorities who decided to give this award to an inveterate war-monger like Peres should be ashamed of themselves. I salute those students in King's College who have called for this honour to be revoked.

By coincidence, I also stumbled across a remark from Shimon Peres over the past week in a feature about Israeli cinema published in The Sunday Times last summer. “Israel grew like a miracle and fought like a tiger,” Peres said. “She is the only utopia of the twentieth century that became a reality. She was born in drama and she never stops being dramatic.”

Israel is certainly dramatic but it is no utopia. Rather, it is state established as a result of a vicious colonial project. Six decades after its establishment, Israel is continuing to oppress an entire people. Ending that oppression is one of the greatest moral challenges of our age.

·Text of a presentation given to the Islamic Human Rights Commission’s book shop in Wembley, London, 12 January 2011.

CSI Palestine: Europe complicit in West Bank rights abuses

A bizarre public relations exercise is now underway in the West Bank. Doubtlessly inspired by the enduring popularity of TV drama CSI: Crime Scene Investigation, the European Union has been trying to glamorise a forensic science course it has been running for Palestinian police since mid-September. As well as being tutored on fingerprinting techniques and the use of chemicals following a murder or armed robbery, officers completing the six-week programme will be given CSI vans of their own, “updates” promoting the course tell us.

It is not difficult to see why EU officials are eager to obtain favorable publicity for their police support “mission”, headquartered in Ramallah. For all of its five-year life, the mission has been something of a poor relation to the other major international policing initiative in the occupied Palestinian territories: that run by US security coordinator Keith Dayton (replaced by Michael Moeller earlier this month). At a time when the EU’s 27 governments are nominally striving to make a greater collective impact on the world stage, it is logical that they should be highlighting foreign policy work that at first glance appears laudable.

The reality is far from glamorous. Rather than helping to nurture institutions that could prove essential in a future Palestinian state, both the EU and US are acting as proxies for the Israeli occupation. Moreover, they are acquiescent in human rights abuses perpetrated by the Palestinian security forces against their own people.

Contrary to the impression frequently created by news stories, the Palestinian Authority does not have a police force that can justifiably be viewed as independent of Israel. Under the Oslo accords from the 1990s, the PA was given full responsibility for security in a region dubbed “Area A”. This comprises six West Bank cities - Jenin, Nablus, Qalqilya, Ramallah, Tulkarem and Bethlehem – and part of Hebron. In Area B – other towns and villages, where 68 percent of Palestinian inhabitants in the West Bank lived – the authority was tasked with maintaining public order but Israel was allowed “overriding” responsibility for security. Then in Area C – 62 percent of the West Bank, including Jewish-only settlements and other areas deemed of “strategic importance” to Israel – total control over security remained in Israeli hands.

For the Palestinians, it has proven impossible to operate a police service that could comply with international norms. Regular incursions by Israeli troops throughout the West Bank has meant that patrols by Palestinian officers cannot be undertaken in any city, apart from Ramallah, between midnight and six o’clock in the morning.

The response from the EU mission (its proper name is the Coordinating Office for Palestinian Police Support or COPPS) to Israel’s everyday acts of aggression and intimidation has been timid, to say the least. The strongest words that Hendrik Malmquist, the Swedish officer heading the mission, has used on the record to criticise the Israeli incursions is to call them a “public embarrassment” for the Palestinians.

Maybe his nonchalance is best explained by how COPPS is part of what the tireless Israeli human rights campaigner Jeff Halper calls the “matrix of control” imposed by Israel on the occupied territories. Visiting Brussels in May, Malmquist said that Israel is “happy we are there in order to contribute to better security in the [occupied] territories.” Probably the main reason for Israeli satisfaction with his work is that his 80-strong staff, has been assisting the forces of occupation to strengthen their grip over most aspects of Palestinian life.

When I contacted EU officials in Ramallah recently, they sought to downplay the significance of their role in fostering cooperation between Israeli and Palestinian security forces. The officials pointed, for example, to how they have organised joint Israeli-Palestinian training seminars on apparently uncontroversial issues such as traffic management. “We are not in the political game,” one official insisted.

A document published by the Israeli foreign ministry in April indicates that the cooperation goes deeper. Titled “Measures Taken by Israel in Support of Developing the Palestinian Economy”, it says that COPPS has played a “central role” in encouraging and implementing “capacity-building” in the West Bank. The purpose of this “capacity-building”, the paper makes clear to anyone who reads between its lines, is to stress that the Palestinian forces are subservient to Israel. Last year, the ministry gloats, was a record one for “coordinated actions” between Israeli and Palestinian security forces, with almost 1,300 taking place, a 72 percent rise over 2008.

In its monthly newsletters, COPPS promotes the training offered by its human rights specialist Diane Halley to Palestinian police. This propaganda cannot be allowed to mask how the EU has enabled a situation develop where gross abuses occur within a culture of impunity. Whereas COPPS’s original mandate allowed it to support police in both the West Bank and Gaza, the Union’s refusal to engage with the de facto Hamas administration in Gaza has meant that it has been encouraging disunity among Palestinians.

Worse again, the EU has connived in the creation of what an alliance of Palestinian human rights groups recently called “a police state” within the occupied territories. While these groups – including the Palestinian Center for Human Rights, Al Haq and the Women’s Center for Legal Aid and Counselling – stress that most violations committed by the Palestinian authorities are a “direct result” of tensions between Fatah and Hamas, the EU has been largely silent about the abuses.

During a press briefing in May, Malmquist stated that COPPS wishes to “export core European Union values” such as respect for fundamental rights. A few minutes later, a Palestinian police spokesman Yossef Ozreil insisted that there is “no more torture” by his colleagues against political rivals.

Malmquist did not contradict this assurance, yet evidence amassed by the Arab Organisation for Human Rights suggests that Ozreil was dishonest. Mohammed Jamil, a spokesman for the organisation, said that there is an average of seven arrests in the West Bank each day, with between 700 and 800 rounded up in the Hebron area last month after Hamas gunmen killed four Israeli settlers. Torture of detainees is widespread, he added. Methods found to have been used include tying people to the ceiling and suspending them, aping crucifixions by tying people to doors with their arms and legs outstretched and beatings by sticks. One of the victims had a boiled egg placed on his backside, Jamil told me. “They [the security forces] made jokes about him – that he was like a chicken giving birth to eggs.”

On paper, the main distinction between COPPS and the US security coordinator in the West Bank is that the former interacts with the Palestinian civil police and the latter with the more militarised National Security Force. In practice, there is extensive overlap between the two international operations; Dayton has said that one of his objectives was to eliminate any duplication of efforts between aid donors to the Palestinian Authority. As well as employing several British members of staff in his team, Dayton enjoyed close contacts with the two Britons who headed COPPS before Malmquist took up his post in January this year: Colin Smith and Paul Kernaghan.

The extent to which Dayton may have advised forces loyal to Fatah to resort to brutal means in attacking Hamas supporters has not yet been revealed. One thing that is clear, however, is Dayton’s understanding that his job was to underscore the Palestinian Authority’s subordination to Israel. “We don’t provide anything to the Palestinians unless it has been thoroughly coordinated with the state of Israel and they agree to it,” he has said.

Daud Abdullah, director of Middle East Monitor, a research institute in London, says it is inconceivable that Dayton was unaware of the abuses conducted by Palestinian security forces. “There has been no let-up in abuses as far as we know,” Abdullah added. “The fact that money is still flowing and [international] officials are still on the ground makes them culpable for what is happening.”

COPPS has a budget of nearly 7 million euros (9.7 million dollars) for this year. This sum appears small on its own. Yet it cannot be separated from the wider support that the EU gives to the Palestinian Authority, which amounts to 947 million euros since 2008.

Europe’s representatives rarely miss an opportunity to trumpet their generosity to the Palestinians. Although donors are undoubtedly financing the provision of many essential services in the occupied territories, tough questions need to be asked about much of this aid and how it is being tailored to serve Israel’s interests. Few taxpayers would be pleased to know that their hard-earned euros are subsidising an illegal occupation.

·First published by The Electronic Intifada (www.electronicintifada.net), 12 October 2010