Trevor Hogan, best-known as an international rugby player, was one of 14 Irish people detained by Israel over the past week after they tried to break the illegal siege of Gaza.
In a telephone interview this morning, Hogan recalled how the MV Saoirse (called after the Gaelic word for freedom) and the Canadian-flagged Tahrir were approaching the waters off Gaza last Friday (4 November) afternoon when they were intercepted by the Israeli navy.
“They were circling us for ages, with their rifles trained on us,” he told me. “It was surreal looking out our window at these guns.”
Still in international waters, the two boats were surrounded by numerous Israeli vessels. Hogan estimates there were 15 or 16 vessels in total, including several full-sized warships. Eventually, the MV Saoirse was attacked by water cannons.
“The water cannons destroyed the electricity,” said Hogan. “They flooded the engine room. We had to use emergency power. The boat could have sunk if it went on much longer.”
Balaclava-clad Israeli commandos then boarded the Saoirse. “We just stayed sitting down peacefully,” he added. “They wanted to search us on deck but we refused. We all acquitted ourselves well. One sudden move and they were sure to fire. My heart was pumping looking at this.”
Hogan expected to be beaten when the Israelis brought their captives to the port of Ashdod. But the arrival of an Irish diplomat at the port “calmed things down.”
Women “stressed and traumatized”
Hogan said that the Israelis kept him and the others awake on their first night in Givon Prison. But the treatment was even worse for the two women, Zoe Lawlor and Mags O’Brien, on the boat, who were detained separately from the 12 men.
“There was solidarity among us [the men],” he said. “We were all together. We managed to meet them [the two women] for 20 minutes each time the consular was there. You could see that the girls were stressed and traumatized. They were under serious pressure.”
Yesterday morning, seven of the 14 were scheduled to be flown from Ben Gurion airport in Tel Aviv to London. Yet they were prevented from boarding a British Airways flight by the Israeli authorities and placed into cells in the airport.
“Givon was tough enough,” Hogan said. “Ben Gurion was a lot worse. We thought we were going home and then we were banged up in cells. It was more decrepit. There was no information and no free association. We were held apart.”
Israel has blamed British Airways for the episode at Ben Gurion, alleging that the carrier would not take the seven campaigners. “Maybe there was an element of the airline being at fault,” Hogan explained. “But there was more to it than that. It was part of a pattern. They wanted lessons to be learnt and that’s why they made life as difficult as they could for us. We didn’t sign anything saying we were criminals, [even though] there were threats made that we would be kept [in prison] indefinitely.”
Five of the Irish, including Hogan, were put on a later flight and arrived in Dublin late last night. Two others, Fintan Lane and Zoe Lawlor, were stopped from taking that later flight and were instead made to travel via Istanbul. They and the seven remaining prisoners are expected to land in Dublin today.
Effective tactic
Hogan retired from professional rugby earlier this year because of persistent knee injuries. His efforts to reach Gaza as part of the Freedom Flotilla II during the summer and now with the smaller Freedom Waves initiative have been supported by a number of Irish sports personalities.
He is adamant that the attempts to penetrate the Gaza blockade have been worthwhile. “We don’t want to make out that we are the victims or martyrs,” he said. “We were in Givon Prison. But Gaza is the world’s largest prison. Whatever we have gone through, the Palestinians have to go through 10 times worse.
“It was very interesting to notice the attitude of the Israelis towards us. They couldn’t comprehend why were doing this. What we were doing challenges their mindset and that is why it is such an effective tactic. They treat the Palestinians as if they are subhuman. They don’t think Palestinians deserve to live in a normal society, to be able to import and export and fish and farm. It’s great to be able to meet that mindset head on.”
●First published by The Electronic Intifada
Showing posts with label Gaza Freedom Flotilla. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Gaza Freedom Flotilla. Show all posts
Friday, November 11, 2011
Thursday, November 10, 2011
EU Parliament chief refuses to protest at illegal arrests by Israel
The president of the European Parliament Jerzy Buzek has declined to protest at how Israel arrested one of his own colleagues in international waters.
Last weekend, Paul Murphy was one of 14 Irish people kidnapped by Israeli forces who boarded the MV Saoirse, as it sailed towards Gaza. Murphy, a member of the European Parliament (MEP), has still not been released but is expected to be flown from Tel Aviv to Dublin tomorrow.
Buzek took his time reacting to Murphy’s arrest, which took place last Friday. It wasn’t until Wednesday this week that Buzek issued a statement urging Israel to “quickly” release his fellow MEP and the other detainees.
I called Buzek’s spokesman Robert Golanski this morning to ask if Buzek had gone beyond calling for the release and complained at the unlawful manner of Murphy’s arrest. “The main concern of the president is to make sure that EU citizens, including a colleague of his, be released as soon as possible,” Golanski replied.
When I repeated the question about whether or not Buzek protested at Israel’s illegal conduct in international waters, Golanski remained evasive. “It looks as if Mr Murphy is going to go home very soon,” he said. “The issue is closed.”
Buzek, a former prime minister in Poland, is sympathetic towards Zionism. During a meeting last month with Reuven Rivlin, the speaker of Israel’s parliament, the Knesset, Buzek described Israel as an “indispensable partner for the EU.” Buzek has been more vocal in demanding the release of Gilad Shalit, the only Israeli soldier detained by Hamas until recently, than any of the thousands of political prisoners held by Israel.
Furthermore, Buzek’s refusal to protest at Israel’s illegal behavior in recent days is at variance with the official position of his institution.
In June 2010, the Parliament approved a resolution condemning Israel’s killing of nine activists taking part in the Gaza Freedom Flotilla. The resolution argued that the manner in which Israel attacked the Mavi Marmara, a Turkish ship, breached international law.
Fortunately, nobody was killed when Israel used heavy-handed tactics against the Saoirse and the Canadian boat the Tahrir last weekend. But considering it behaved in a manner that had been previously condemned by his assembly, Buzek had strong grounds to protest. His decision not to do so indicates that he either has a short memory or that he is not willing to upset Israel.
Last weekend, Paul Murphy was one of 14 Irish people kidnapped by Israeli forces who boarded the MV Saoirse, as it sailed towards Gaza. Murphy, a member of the European Parliament (MEP), has still not been released but is expected to be flown from Tel Aviv to Dublin tomorrow.
Buzek took his time reacting to Murphy’s arrest, which took place last Friday. It wasn’t until Wednesday this week that Buzek issued a statement urging Israel to “quickly” release his fellow MEP and the other detainees.
I called Buzek’s spokesman Robert Golanski this morning to ask if Buzek had gone beyond calling for the release and complained at the unlawful manner of Murphy’s arrest. “The main concern of the president is to make sure that EU citizens, including a colleague of his, be released as soon as possible,” Golanski replied.
When I repeated the question about whether or not Buzek protested at Israel’s illegal conduct in international waters, Golanski remained evasive. “It looks as if Mr Murphy is going to go home very soon,” he said. “The issue is closed.”
Buzek, a former prime minister in Poland, is sympathetic towards Zionism. During a meeting last month with Reuven Rivlin, the speaker of Israel’s parliament, the Knesset, Buzek described Israel as an “indispensable partner for the EU.” Buzek has been more vocal in demanding the release of Gilad Shalit, the only Israeli soldier detained by Hamas until recently, than any of the thousands of political prisoners held by Israel.
Furthermore, Buzek’s refusal to protest at Israel’s illegal behavior in recent days is at variance with the official position of his institution.
In June 2010, the Parliament approved a resolution condemning Israel’s killing of nine activists taking part in the Gaza Freedom Flotilla. The resolution argued that the manner in which Israel attacked the Mavi Marmara, a Turkish ship, breached international law.
Fortunately, nobody was killed when Israel used heavy-handed tactics against the Saoirse and the Canadian boat the Tahrir last weekend. But considering it behaved in a manner that had been previously condemned by his assembly, Buzek had strong grounds to protest. His decision not to do so indicates that he either has a short memory or that he is not willing to upset Israel.
Wednesday, July 13, 2011
How Greece abandoned Palestine
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.
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.
Thursday, June 23, 2011
Israel's future weapons unveiled in Paris
For the past few years, Ehud Barak has generally visited arms fairs in Paris during June to help drum up business for Israel’s weapons-makers. The exception was 2010, when the international outcry over the attack on the Gaza Freedom Flotilla prompted the defence minister to cancel his trip.
Barak’s annual routine has now been restored. He was in France once again this week to cut the opening ribbon for the Israeli pavilion at this year’s Paris Air Show. His trip follows the announcement that Israel’s weapons exports were worth $7.2 billion in 2010, a growth of $300 million over the previous year.
Predictably, hacks working for the business and “defence” press were happy to regurgitate the promotional material pumped out by Israeli exhibitors in Paris.
Rafael, a Haifa-based firm, must be especially pleased with the attention devoted to it. In a fawning feature published by Aviation International News, Rafael signalled it is adapting well to these times of austerity. Ilan Biran, the Rafael chairman, said he is running a “boutique” firm, which is hoping to benefit from the increased willingness of countries to share military technology, rather than to rely on domestic suppliers, in order to lower their defence spending.
Like the state of Israel itself, Biran has been able to depict his firm as both tiny and terrifying. The “boutique” Rafael has teamed up with the American behemoth Raytheon to develop David’s Sling. This “air defence missile system” – likely to replace Hawk missiles already in Israel’s arsenal – is making its debut in Paris. Rafael is also being lauded as the innovator of the Iron Dome system. Reportedly capable of intercepting rockets such as those fired by Hamas into southern Israel, Iron Dome has become a useful tool in Israel’s never-ending propaganda war.
Another big draw in Paris is the new medium-weight laser-guided bomb (MLGB) from Israel Aerospace Industries (IAI). Though only 253 pounds in weight, these sound obese compared to the 22 pound nano-satellites that IAI is working on.
It is surely obscene that the display of weapons that may well be used to kill Palestinians and attack other countries in the future elicits no criticism in the press. How can journalists specialising in “defence” really know so little about the realities of war that they faithfully regurgitate the canard that Israel’s weapons are designed to minimise “collateral damage”? When was avoiding harm to civilians ever on Israel’s agenda?
·First published by Mondoweiss (www.mondoweiss.net), 23 June 2011
Barak’s annual routine has now been restored. He was in France once again this week to cut the opening ribbon for the Israeli pavilion at this year’s Paris Air Show. His trip follows the announcement that Israel’s weapons exports were worth $7.2 billion in 2010, a growth of $300 million over the previous year.
Predictably, hacks working for the business and “defence” press were happy to regurgitate the promotional material pumped out by Israeli exhibitors in Paris.
Rafael, a Haifa-based firm, must be especially pleased with the attention devoted to it. In a fawning feature published by Aviation International News, Rafael signalled it is adapting well to these times of austerity. Ilan Biran, the Rafael chairman, said he is running a “boutique” firm, which is hoping to benefit from the increased willingness of countries to share military technology, rather than to rely on domestic suppliers, in order to lower their defence spending.
Like the state of Israel itself, Biran has been able to depict his firm as both tiny and terrifying. The “boutique” Rafael has teamed up with the American behemoth Raytheon to develop David’s Sling. This “air defence missile system” – likely to replace Hawk missiles already in Israel’s arsenal – is making its debut in Paris. Rafael is also being lauded as the innovator of the Iron Dome system. Reportedly capable of intercepting rockets such as those fired by Hamas into southern Israel, Iron Dome has become a useful tool in Israel’s never-ending propaganda war.
Another big draw in Paris is the new medium-weight laser-guided bomb (MLGB) from Israel Aerospace Industries (IAI). Though only 253 pounds in weight, these sound obese compared to the 22 pound nano-satellites that IAI is working on.
It is surely obscene that the display of weapons that may well be used to kill Palestinians and attack other countries in the future elicits no criticism in the press. How can journalists specialising in “defence” really know so little about the realities of war that they faithfully regurgitate the canard that Israel’s weapons are designed to minimise “collateral damage”? When was avoiding harm to civilians ever on Israel’s agenda?
·First published by Mondoweiss (www.mondoweiss.net), 23 June 2011
Wednesday, May 25, 2011
Smear campaign against Gaza flotilla
A campaign of vilification against the flotilla that will soon try to break Israel’s siege of Gaza appears to be gathering momentum in Europe.
Over the past few weeks newspapers in the Netherlands have published articles alleging that some Dutch organizers of the flotilla are “terror supporters”. The main focus of these smears was Rob Groenhuijzen, chairman of the Netherlands Gaza Foundation, who was imprisoned for radical activities more than thirty years ago.
In the annals of political violence, Groenhuijzen -- convicted of being a threat to the Dutch state -- probably merits no more than a footnote. Red Youth, the left-wing group to which he was linked in the 1970s, carried out several bombings but never killed anyone. The renewed interest in his past, Groenhuijzen argues, is a sign of desperation on the part of Israeli diplomats and the network of lobbyists who wish to prevent the flotilla from setting sail.
“They don’t have the political or legal means [to stop the flotilla] and that’s why they try to criminalize the flotilla’s participants,” he told me.
Unfortunately, the government in The Hague has proven receptive to the anti-flotilla campaign. A Dutch office of the Turkish Humanitarian Relief Foundation (known by the acronym IHH) was recently placed on a national list of [[banned]] organizations. Uri Rosenthal, the Netherlands’ foreign minister, gave a circuitous explanation for the ban in an interview with The Jerusalem Post. He hinted that the assets of IHH Netherlands were being frozen because it had transferred money to IHH representatives in Germany, who were suspected of funding Hamas.
The Center for Information and Documentation on Israel (CIDI) is the most influential Zionist lobby group in the Netherlands. A member of the CIDI’s staff said: “We are not campaigning [against the flotilla] as such. It’s just that we don’t agree with the idea of a flotilla. We don’t think it is in any way conducive to solving the problem. We have pretty much the same stance as the one the [Dutch] government has taken.”
The IHH has announced that it will be sending a ship filled with medicines, construction materials and other essential goods to Gaza on 31 May. That date will be exactly one year after Israeli troops boarded the Mavi Marmara, a Turkish-flagged ship, in international waters, killing nine peace activists.
Although the 2010 attack was condemned by top-level representatives of the European Union, supporters of Israel wasted no time trying to convince the EU that the IHH should be outlawed. On 4 June last year, the European Jewish Congress (EJC) issued a statement calling for the IHH to be placed on the Union’s list of terrorist organizations.
The case made by the EJC rested entirely on the conclusions of a 2006 paper by the Danish Institute for International Studies, which accused the IHH of having contacts with al-Qaeda.
The arguments made to justify labeling the IHH as “terrorist” in that paper included the group’s involvement in “large and raucous protest rallies” ahead of the war against Iraq in 2003. “Even after the initial US invasion of Iraq, the IHH has continued to bitterly oppose the presence of Western troops in Mesopotamia,” that report noted, implying there was something unreasonable about abhorring wars of aggression.
Although the EU has not (yet) bowed to the Israel lobby’s pressure by banning the IHH, it has effectively called for the flotilla not to go ahead. Catherine Ashton, the EU’s foreign policy chief, said in May this year “I do not consider a flotilla to be the right response to the humanitarian situation in Gaza.”
Dror Feiler, a spokesman for the Swedish Ship to Gaza, explained: “When Baroness Ashton says the flotilla is not a proper act, I would ask her what is a proper act? The blockade of Gaza is considered collective punishment.”
“Collective punishment is forbidden according to international law,” Feiler added. “When you see such acts go on for four years, you cannot as an international citizen be silent. It is our duty to act. Ashton is trying to continue with passivity, probably because of Israeli pressure. The EU’s politicians seem to be letting themselves be intimidated. They seem to be letting Israel dictate how to act.”
Ashton’s comments followed those of Ran Curiel, Israel’s ambassador in Brussels, who described the flotilla as “clearly a political provocation since there’s no need for a flotilla to aid Gaza”. Curiel added that “You can pass whatever you want to Gaza through normal channels.”
His assurance was dishonest. The UN agency for Palestine refugees (UNRWA) has documented how a piecemeal easing of the blockade over the past twelve months has not halted the deterioration of health services in Gaza. “The persistent restrictions on the importation of medical supplies and equipment, and on the movement of health staff between the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, hinder the provision of quality health services,” UNRWA says in its newly published annual report.
“Supplies of electricity, fuel and other consumables for the maintenance of the basic health infrastructure have not significantly improved since the adjustment of the blockade. Hospital treatment is increasingly curtailed because of the inability of hospitals to run procedures when they have limited access to electricity supplies, spare parts and equipment,” UNRWA adds in the report.
The European Friends of Israel (EFI), another lobby outfit, has similarly been trying to tarnish the reputation of flotilla organizers.
Charles Tannock, a British Conservative member of the European Parliament (MEP) who sits on the EFI’s steering committee, has called the planned flotilla an “incredibly irresponsible and hostile action.” Tannock, who doubles up as his party’s foreign policy spokesman in the Brussels-based assembly, believes Israel is “well within its rights” to enforce a naval blockade against Gaza, regardless of the humanitarian consequences for the 1.5 million Palestinians living there.
There is, of course, an enormous hypocrisy involved here. This week the Union’s foreign ministers decided to broaden the scope of sanctions imposed on Syria by imposing a travel ban and an asset freeze on President Bashar Assad. The reason for those measure was that Assad’s forces were denying the right to peaceful protest. Yet the same EU elite which – rightly – punishes Syria for cracking down on demonstrations is in effect telling Palestine solidarity activists that they cannot protest against Israel.
It is not the first time that the EU has decided that different rules apply to Israelis than to Arabs. And it is unlikely to be the last.
·First published by The Electronic Intifada (www.electronicintifada.net), 25 May 2011.
Over the past few weeks newspapers in the Netherlands have published articles alleging that some Dutch organizers of the flotilla are “terror supporters”. The main focus of these smears was Rob Groenhuijzen, chairman of the Netherlands Gaza Foundation, who was imprisoned for radical activities more than thirty years ago.
In the annals of political violence, Groenhuijzen -- convicted of being a threat to the Dutch state -- probably merits no more than a footnote. Red Youth, the left-wing group to which he was linked in the 1970s, carried out several bombings but never killed anyone. The renewed interest in his past, Groenhuijzen argues, is a sign of desperation on the part of Israeli diplomats and the network of lobbyists who wish to prevent the flotilla from setting sail.
“They don’t have the political or legal means [to stop the flotilla] and that’s why they try to criminalize the flotilla’s participants,” he told me.
Unfortunately, the government in The Hague has proven receptive to the anti-flotilla campaign. A Dutch office of the Turkish Humanitarian Relief Foundation (known by the acronym IHH) was recently placed on a national list of [[banned]] organizations. Uri Rosenthal, the Netherlands’ foreign minister, gave a circuitous explanation for the ban in an interview with The Jerusalem Post. He hinted that the assets of IHH Netherlands were being frozen because it had transferred money to IHH representatives in Germany, who were suspected of funding Hamas.
The Center for Information and Documentation on Israel (CIDI) is the most influential Zionist lobby group in the Netherlands. A member of the CIDI’s staff said: “We are not campaigning [against the flotilla] as such. It’s just that we don’t agree with the idea of a flotilla. We don’t think it is in any way conducive to solving the problem. We have pretty much the same stance as the one the [Dutch] government has taken.”
The IHH has announced that it will be sending a ship filled with medicines, construction materials and other essential goods to Gaza on 31 May. That date will be exactly one year after Israeli troops boarded the Mavi Marmara, a Turkish-flagged ship, in international waters, killing nine peace activists.
Although the 2010 attack was condemned by top-level representatives of the European Union, supporters of Israel wasted no time trying to convince the EU that the IHH should be outlawed. On 4 June last year, the European Jewish Congress (EJC) issued a statement calling for the IHH to be placed on the Union’s list of terrorist organizations.
The case made by the EJC rested entirely on the conclusions of a 2006 paper by the Danish Institute for International Studies, which accused the IHH of having contacts with al-Qaeda.
The arguments made to justify labeling the IHH as “terrorist” in that paper included the group’s involvement in “large and raucous protest rallies” ahead of the war against Iraq in 2003. “Even after the initial US invasion of Iraq, the IHH has continued to bitterly oppose the presence of Western troops in Mesopotamia,” that report noted, implying there was something unreasonable about abhorring wars of aggression.
Although the EU has not (yet) bowed to the Israel lobby’s pressure by banning the IHH, it has effectively called for the flotilla not to go ahead. Catherine Ashton, the EU’s foreign policy chief, said in May this year “I do not consider a flotilla to be the right response to the humanitarian situation in Gaza.”
Dror Feiler, a spokesman for the Swedish Ship to Gaza, explained: “When Baroness Ashton says the flotilla is not a proper act, I would ask her what is a proper act? The blockade of Gaza is considered collective punishment.”
“Collective punishment is forbidden according to international law,” Feiler added. “When you see such acts go on for four years, you cannot as an international citizen be silent. It is our duty to act. Ashton is trying to continue with passivity, probably because of Israeli pressure. The EU’s politicians seem to be letting themselves be intimidated. They seem to be letting Israel dictate how to act.”
Ashton’s comments followed those of Ran Curiel, Israel’s ambassador in Brussels, who described the flotilla as “clearly a political provocation since there’s no need for a flotilla to aid Gaza”. Curiel added that “You can pass whatever you want to Gaza through normal channels.”
His assurance was dishonest. The UN agency for Palestine refugees (UNRWA) has documented how a piecemeal easing of the blockade over the past twelve months has not halted the deterioration of health services in Gaza. “The persistent restrictions on the importation of medical supplies and equipment, and on the movement of health staff between the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, hinder the provision of quality health services,” UNRWA says in its newly published annual report.
“Supplies of electricity, fuel and other consumables for the maintenance of the basic health infrastructure have not significantly improved since the adjustment of the blockade. Hospital treatment is increasingly curtailed because of the inability of hospitals to run procedures when they have limited access to electricity supplies, spare parts and equipment,” UNRWA adds in the report.
The European Friends of Israel (EFI), another lobby outfit, has similarly been trying to tarnish the reputation of flotilla organizers.
Charles Tannock, a British Conservative member of the European Parliament (MEP) who sits on the EFI’s steering committee, has called the planned flotilla an “incredibly irresponsible and hostile action.” Tannock, who doubles up as his party’s foreign policy spokesman in the Brussels-based assembly, believes Israel is “well within its rights” to enforce a naval blockade against Gaza, regardless of the humanitarian consequences for the 1.5 million Palestinians living there.
There is, of course, an enormous hypocrisy involved here. This week the Union’s foreign ministers decided to broaden the scope of sanctions imposed on Syria by imposing a travel ban and an asset freeze on President Bashar Assad. The reason for those measure was that Assad’s forces were denying the right to peaceful protest. Yet the same EU elite which – rightly – punishes Syria for cracking down on demonstrations is in effect telling Palestine solidarity activists that they cannot protest against Israel.
It is not the first time that the EU has decided that different rules apply to Israelis than to Arabs. And it is unlikely to be the last.
·First published by The Electronic Intifada (www.electronicintifada.net), 25 May 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
Monday, April 11, 2011
Prague politics: acting as America's stooge
, After a day in Prague, I feel like my eyes cannot cope with any more beauty. From the old Town Hall with the overlapping circles on its astronomical clock to the funky futurism of its national theatre’s “new stage”, this is a city packed with architectural gems. It has all the elegance of a place that insists on being called central European. So why does its political establishment identify so much with the United States?
I blame Václav Havel. In a perceptive 1978 essay called “The Power of the Powerless”, Havel neatly summarised the function of propaganda in a repressive society. “Because the regime is captive to its own lies, it must falsify everything,” he wrote. “It falsifies the past. It falsifies the present, it falsifies the future. It falsifies statistics. It pretends not to possess an omnipotent and unprincipled police apparatus. It pretends to respect human rights. It pretends to persecute no one.”
Browbeaten by totalitarianism, Havel made the mistake of thinking that market fundamentalism was the only viable alternative. When he came to power following the ‘Velvet Revolution’, he claimed that the Cold War had been a battle between two superpowers: one (the Soviet Union) a nightmare, the other (the US), a champion of liberty.
Havel is no longer the Czech president and has recently made his debut as a film director. But he remains the world’s best-known living Czech and uses the prominence he enjoys to demonstrate egregious double standards.
He continues to lend his support to dissidents such as the Chinese Nobel Peace laureate Liu Xiaobo, who suffer intimidation and imprisonment for their political beliefs. Yet he is happy to mainly turn a blind eye to human rights abuses carried out by the US and its client states, with their “omnipotent and unprincipled police apparatus”.
In September 2010, he added his name to the Friends of Israel initiative. The brains behind this sordid public relations exercise include two men who helped start the war in Iraq: American diplomat John Bolton and former Spanish president José María Aznar. They also include David Trimble, a one-time leader of the Ulster Unionist Party, who was selected by Israel to help “investigate” its attack on the Gaza Freedom Flotilla last year. Predictably, Trimble served his Israeli master well by concluding there was no legal difficulty with the killing of nine peace activists in international waters. In Havel’s words, Trimble falsified the recent past.
Havel has defended his support for the state of Israel by saying that both it and the Palestinian Authority “deserve encouragement rather than boycott at this critical moment”. Such a declaration might have merits if Israel was seriously engaged in something that justified being described as peace negotiations. Yet the Palestine Papers, those documents leaked to Al Jazeera over the past few months, show that rather than desiring peace, Israel is committed to a process of colonial expansion. Even though representatives of the Palestinian Authority have been shown to have betrayed their own people by offering Israel control of most of East Jerusalem, Israel still wanted more.
Havel’s hypocrisy is replicated by Karel Schwarzenberg, the aristocratic and bowtie-sporting Czech foreign minister.
Schwarzenberg also fancies himself as a defender of dissidents. As a senator in 2005, he was kicked out of Cuba, where he was scheduled to address a conference of Fidel Casto’s critics.
His demands that countries reflect the democratic will of their people have not been reflected by the policies he has espoused at home. In 2008, he signed an agreement with Condoleezza Rice to station a US missile interceptor system on Czech soil. That decision was taken without the electorate being consulted, even though there was immense opposition to the plan among the Czech public.
Once more proving he is America’s stooge, Schwarzenberg announced last year that 180 new troops would be added to the 550-strong Czech contingent helping to fight that never-ending war in Afghanistan.
Just like Havel, Schwarzenberg is unwavering in his support for Israel. He likes to brag of how the Czech Republic vies with only the Netherlands for the position of the most pro-Israel government in the EU.
When Israel attacked Gaza in December 2008, Schwarzenberg asked: “Why am I one of the few that have expressed understanding for Israel? I have the luxury of telling the truth.”
By blaming all the violence on Hamas, he was parroting the version of events concocted by Israel. The actual facts of the situation were that Hamas observed an Egyptian-brokered truce with Israel between June and November 2008. It was Israel which then reopened hostilities by attacking Gaza on 4 November that year, a day when the world was preoccupied with the election of a new American president.
Prague used to host one of Europe’s largest Jewish communities but over 250,000 Czechoslovak Jews were murdered in the Holocaust. Before writing this piece, I admired the oldest preserved synagogue in Central Europe, which was built in Prague in the thirteenth century. More than 60 other Czech synagogues were destroyed by the Nazis.
If Schwarzenberg thinks that backing Israel at all times provides some atonement for the attempted extermination of Czech Jews during the Second World War, then it is vital he be challenged. In what way were the 320 Gazan children killed by the state of Israel in 2008 and 2009 culpable for the Holocaust? When did two wrongs start making a right?
·First published by New Europe (www.neurope.eu), 10-16 April 2011
I blame Václav Havel. In a perceptive 1978 essay called “The Power of the Powerless”, Havel neatly summarised the function of propaganda in a repressive society. “Because the regime is captive to its own lies, it must falsify everything,” he wrote. “It falsifies the past. It falsifies the present, it falsifies the future. It falsifies statistics. It pretends not to possess an omnipotent and unprincipled police apparatus. It pretends to respect human rights. It pretends to persecute no one.”
Browbeaten by totalitarianism, Havel made the mistake of thinking that market fundamentalism was the only viable alternative. When he came to power following the ‘Velvet Revolution’, he claimed that the Cold War had been a battle between two superpowers: one (the Soviet Union) a nightmare, the other (the US), a champion of liberty.
Havel is no longer the Czech president and has recently made his debut as a film director. But he remains the world’s best-known living Czech and uses the prominence he enjoys to demonstrate egregious double standards.
He continues to lend his support to dissidents such as the Chinese Nobel Peace laureate Liu Xiaobo, who suffer intimidation and imprisonment for their political beliefs. Yet he is happy to mainly turn a blind eye to human rights abuses carried out by the US and its client states, with their “omnipotent and unprincipled police apparatus”.
In September 2010, he added his name to the Friends of Israel initiative. The brains behind this sordid public relations exercise include two men who helped start the war in Iraq: American diplomat John Bolton and former Spanish president José María Aznar. They also include David Trimble, a one-time leader of the Ulster Unionist Party, who was selected by Israel to help “investigate” its attack on the Gaza Freedom Flotilla last year. Predictably, Trimble served his Israeli master well by concluding there was no legal difficulty with the killing of nine peace activists in international waters. In Havel’s words, Trimble falsified the recent past.
Havel has defended his support for the state of Israel by saying that both it and the Palestinian Authority “deserve encouragement rather than boycott at this critical moment”. Such a declaration might have merits if Israel was seriously engaged in something that justified being described as peace negotiations. Yet the Palestine Papers, those documents leaked to Al Jazeera over the past few months, show that rather than desiring peace, Israel is committed to a process of colonial expansion. Even though representatives of the Palestinian Authority have been shown to have betrayed their own people by offering Israel control of most of East Jerusalem, Israel still wanted more.
Havel’s hypocrisy is replicated by Karel Schwarzenberg, the aristocratic and bowtie-sporting Czech foreign minister.
Schwarzenberg also fancies himself as a defender of dissidents. As a senator in 2005, he was kicked out of Cuba, where he was scheduled to address a conference of Fidel Casto’s critics.
His demands that countries reflect the democratic will of their people have not been reflected by the policies he has espoused at home. In 2008, he signed an agreement with Condoleezza Rice to station a US missile interceptor system on Czech soil. That decision was taken without the electorate being consulted, even though there was immense opposition to the plan among the Czech public.
Once more proving he is America’s stooge, Schwarzenberg announced last year that 180 new troops would be added to the 550-strong Czech contingent helping to fight that never-ending war in Afghanistan.
Just like Havel, Schwarzenberg is unwavering in his support for Israel. He likes to brag of how the Czech Republic vies with only the Netherlands for the position of the most pro-Israel government in the EU.
When Israel attacked Gaza in December 2008, Schwarzenberg asked: “Why am I one of the few that have expressed understanding for Israel? I have the luxury of telling the truth.”
By blaming all the violence on Hamas, he was parroting the version of events concocted by Israel. The actual facts of the situation were that Hamas observed an Egyptian-brokered truce with Israel between June and November 2008. It was Israel which then reopened hostilities by attacking Gaza on 4 November that year, a day when the world was preoccupied with the election of a new American president.
Prague used to host one of Europe’s largest Jewish communities but over 250,000 Czechoslovak Jews were murdered in the Holocaust. Before writing this piece, I admired the oldest preserved synagogue in Central Europe, which was built in Prague in the thirteenth century. More than 60 other Czech synagogues were destroyed by the Nazis.
If Schwarzenberg thinks that backing Israel at all times provides some atonement for the attempted extermination of Czech Jews during the Second World War, then it is vital he be challenged. In what way were the 320 Gazan children killed by the state of Israel in 2008 and 2009 culpable for the Holocaust? When did two wrongs start making a right?
·First published by New Europe (www.neurope.eu), 10-16 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
Thursday, December 23, 2010
Cuddling up to apartheid Israel
Every time I hear the phrase “honest broker” I am reminded of a joke about my native Ireland in the 1980s. It was said at the time that no country could be more honest. And no country could be broker.
For many years senior representatives of the European Union have been presenting themselves as an honest broker in the Israel-Palestine conflict. But in fact they have been extremely dishonest.
They have been dishonest because they have tried to give an impression of impartiality, while displaying favouritism towards the principal aggressor in the Middle East: the state of Israel.
It is no exaggeration to say that Israel has been mollycoddled by the European Union like no other state outside the EU’s borders. This is not just my observation. Javier Solana, the EU’s foreign policy chief for most of the past decade, stated last year that Israel is a member of the European Union, without being a member of its institutions.
Nor is it an exaggeration to say that the EU has been aiding the occupation of Palestine.
Evidence of this aid can be seen every time you step into a supermarket.
Under a recent agreement on agricultural trade, almost all of Israel’s food exports – both fresh and processed – can enter the EU without paying customs duties. In theory, these trade preferences only apply to food grown inside Israel’s internationally recognised borders and not on Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank. In practice, we know that Israel’s main food exporter Agrexco mixes up goods from the settlements with goods grown in Israel “proper” and labels the whole lot as “made in Israel”.
Business publications in Israel have helpfully given advice to agri-business firms based in the settlements about how they can masquerade as bona fide Israeli firms. The EU’s officials are perfectly aware that these abuses occur and that a significant proportion of the groceries on our supermarket shelves was grown on Israeli settlements. And yet these officials have willingly extended the scope of the trade preferences to Israel.
It should never be forgotten that Israeli settlements are illegal under international law. The Fourth Geneva Convention from 1949 expressly forbids an occupying power from transferring its own civilian population into the territory that it occupies. By opening the door to higher quantities of exports from these settlements, the European Union is – regardless of its official rhetoric – conniving in the expansion of Israeli settlements and the suffocation of Palestine.
Most of my book was completed nearly a year ago. And anyone who writes a book on current affairs knows that you run the risk of being overtaken by events.
It gives me no pleasure to see that my basic thesis has been reinforced throughout 2010.
In January, Mossad, the Israeli secret service used counterfeit passports so that its agents could pose as European citizens when assassinating a leading Hamas figure in Dubai. In response, we saw some tokenistic protests from Britain and Ireland, yet no EU country was prepared to actually sanction Israel. Instead, all of them gave their blessing to Israel’s membership of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development in May, a step that was seen as a diplomatic and political victory by the Israeli government.
Later that month, Israel attacked a ship run by a humanitarian organisation from Turkey, a country hoping to join the EU. Nine peace activists were brutally murdered in international waters. Millions of decent people were outraged by this act of piracy. Yet the best Catherine Ashton, the EU’s relatively new foreign policy chief, could do was to say she regretted the incident.
Ashton has made some strong statements about Israel’s ongoing theft of East Jerusalem and over the imprisonment of Abdullah Abu Rahmeh, one of the courageous leaders of the weekly protests against Israel’s apartheid wall in the West Bank. Though welcome in themselves, these statements do not negate the fact that Ashton is beavering away to bring Israel even closer to the Union than it already is. During the autumn, she recommended that Israel should be designated a “strategic partner” for the Union. That would place Israel on a similar ranking to major global economies like the US and China in terms of how it is prioritised by EU officialdom.
During November, the European Commission announced it was giving 7 million euros to a new Holocaust research project, with which Israel will be intimately involved. Now in principle, I have no problem with the concept of Holocaust research. My book makes it clear that I consider the Holocaust to have left an indelible stain on Europe’s history. Educating present and future generations about the evils of the Holocaust is essential to ensure that nothing comparable ever happens again.
I do have a problem, though, with how Israel and its most zealous supporters deliberately misuse the Holocaust in their propaganda war. During the attacks on Gaza in 2008 and 2009, some pro-Israel lobbyists argued that Israel’s military prowess showed how it had learned lessons from the Holocaust.
I ask those lobbyists tonight: when did two wrongs start making a right? When did the millions of Jews murdered by the Nazis give Israel permission to drop bombs on schools and ambulances in Gaza?
What I also object to is that precisely the same funds that are being used to finance Holocaust research are being drawn down by Israeli arms companies that have manufactured the pilotless drones and other cutting-edge killing machines that inflicted terror on the people of Gaza in 2008 and 2009. The EU is now the second largest provider of scientific research grants to Israel and we know that Israeli weapons manufacturers are among the beneficiaries of this funding. As a taxpayer, I object to how my hard-earned euros are subsidising the Israeli war industry.
The very first political demonstration I attended as an idealistic adolescent was against apartheid in South Africa. Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians may not be identical to the treatment of the black majority in South Africa during the apartheid era but it bears many similarities. Indeed, some ANC activists have argued that what Palestinians have to endure is worse than what blacks had to endure in South Africa. Nelson Mandela himself has described Palestine as the moral issue of our age.
Israel’s apartheid system is becoming more draconian all the time. In recent months, a whole series of laws have been placed before the Knesset, the Israeli parliament, aimed at depriving Palestinians living within Israel of their rights. Racist discourse is commonplace among Israeli politicians.
The European Union is nominally a strong supporter of the Rome Statute, under which the International Criminal Court was established. That statute lists apartheid as one of several crimes against humanity. Signatories of the Rome Statute, therefore, have an obligation to take action against this crime. Yet the European Union will not take any decisive action against Israeli apartheid.
For many years a bizarre debate has been taking place about whether or not Israel has the right to exist. Israel clearly does exist and nobody can deny that.
But Israel does not have the right to exist as an apartheid state. And Israel does not have the right to exist as a state which is occupying the land of another people. If Israel wants to assert its right to exist, then it is about time it started taking some responsibilities. It is about time that it ceased treating the Palestinians as subhuman.
If our politicians and civil servants will not take action against Israel, then it falls to ordinary people to do so. We must treat Israel as a pariah state until it starts respecting the elementary rights of the Palestinian people. This should be done by using the tactics that proved effective during the long struggle against apartheid in South Africa, namely boycott, divestment and sanctions.
The occupation of Palestine is brutal and inhuman. But there is no reason why it has to continue like that indefinitely. If enough people of conscience speak out, a fair solution will eventually be found.
I want this evening to be relaxed and informal. But I also hope that you will leave this room angry. Angry because no people on earth should have to go through what the Palestinians have been experiencing for more than 60 years.
My appeal is that you channel this anger constructively, that you get involved in the Palestine solidarity movement and that you keep taking action until justice triumphs over apartheid.
·This is the text of a presentation given during a tour of Belgium, Britain and Ireland in November and December 2010. The tour, to promote my book Europe’s Alliance With Israel: Aiding the Occupation, was hosted by the Quaker Council for European Affairs (Brussels), War on Want (London) and the Ireland Palestine Solidarity Campaign (Limerick, Cork and Dublin).
For many years senior representatives of the European Union have been presenting themselves as an honest broker in the Israel-Palestine conflict. But in fact they have been extremely dishonest.
They have been dishonest because they have tried to give an impression of impartiality, while displaying favouritism towards the principal aggressor in the Middle East: the state of Israel.
It is no exaggeration to say that Israel has been mollycoddled by the European Union like no other state outside the EU’s borders. This is not just my observation. Javier Solana, the EU’s foreign policy chief for most of the past decade, stated last year that Israel is a member of the European Union, without being a member of its institutions.
Nor is it an exaggeration to say that the EU has been aiding the occupation of Palestine.
Evidence of this aid can be seen every time you step into a supermarket.
Under a recent agreement on agricultural trade, almost all of Israel’s food exports – both fresh and processed – can enter the EU without paying customs duties. In theory, these trade preferences only apply to food grown inside Israel’s internationally recognised borders and not on Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank. In practice, we know that Israel’s main food exporter Agrexco mixes up goods from the settlements with goods grown in Israel “proper” and labels the whole lot as “made in Israel”.
Business publications in Israel have helpfully given advice to agri-business firms based in the settlements about how they can masquerade as bona fide Israeli firms. The EU’s officials are perfectly aware that these abuses occur and that a significant proportion of the groceries on our supermarket shelves was grown on Israeli settlements. And yet these officials have willingly extended the scope of the trade preferences to Israel.
It should never be forgotten that Israeli settlements are illegal under international law. The Fourth Geneva Convention from 1949 expressly forbids an occupying power from transferring its own civilian population into the territory that it occupies. By opening the door to higher quantities of exports from these settlements, the European Union is – regardless of its official rhetoric – conniving in the expansion of Israeli settlements and the suffocation of Palestine.
Most of my book was completed nearly a year ago. And anyone who writes a book on current affairs knows that you run the risk of being overtaken by events.
It gives me no pleasure to see that my basic thesis has been reinforced throughout 2010.
In January, Mossad, the Israeli secret service used counterfeit passports so that its agents could pose as European citizens when assassinating a leading Hamas figure in Dubai. In response, we saw some tokenistic protests from Britain and Ireland, yet no EU country was prepared to actually sanction Israel. Instead, all of them gave their blessing to Israel’s membership of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development in May, a step that was seen as a diplomatic and political victory by the Israeli government.
Later that month, Israel attacked a ship run by a humanitarian organisation from Turkey, a country hoping to join the EU. Nine peace activists were brutally murdered in international waters. Millions of decent people were outraged by this act of piracy. Yet the best Catherine Ashton, the EU’s relatively new foreign policy chief, could do was to say she regretted the incident.
Ashton has made some strong statements about Israel’s ongoing theft of East Jerusalem and over the imprisonment of Abdullah Abu Rahmeh, one of the courageous leaders of the weekly protests against Israel’s apartheid wall in the West Bank. Though welcome in themselves, these statements do not negate the fact that Ashton is beavering away to bring Israel even closer to the Union than it already is. During the autumn, she recommended that Israel should be designated a “strategic partner” for the Union. That would place Israel on a similar ranking to major global economies like the US and China in terms of how it is prioritised by EU officialdom.
During November, the European Commission announced it was giving 7 million euros to a new Holocaust research project, with which Israel will be intimately involved. Now in principle, I have no problem with the concept of Holocaust research. My book makes it clear that I consider the Holocaust to have left an indelible stain on Europe’s history. Educating present and future generations about the evils of the Holocaust is essential to ensure that nothing comparable ever happens again.
I do have a problem, though, with how Israel and its most zealous supporters deliberately misuse the Holocaust in their propaganda war. During the attacks on Gaza in 2008 and 2009, some pro-Israel lobbyists argued that Israel’s military prowess showed how it had learned lessons from the Holocaust.
I ask those lobbyists tonight: when did two wrongs start making a right? When did the millions of Jews murdered by the Nazis give Israel permission to drop bombs on schools and ambulances in Gaza?
What I also object to is that precisely the same funds that are being used to finance Holocaust research are being drawn down by Israeli arms companies that have manufactured the pilotless drones and other cutting-edge killing machines that inflicted terror on the people of Gaza in 2008 and 2009. The EU is now the second largest provider of scientific research grants to Israel and we know that Israeli weapons manufacturers are among the beneficiaries of this funding. As a taxpayer, I object to how my hard-earned euros are subsidising the Israeli war industry.
The very first political demonstration I attended as an idealistic adolescent was against apartheid in South Africa. Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians may not be identical to the treatment of the black majority in South Africa during the apartheid era but it bears many similarities. Indeed, some ANC activists have argued that what Palestinians have to endure is worse than what blacks had to endure in South Africa. Nelson Mandela himself has described Palestine as the moral issue of our age.
Israel’s apartheid system is becoming more draconian all the time. In recent months, a whole series of laws have been placed before the Knesset, the Israeli parliament, aimed at depriving Palestinians living within Israel of their rights. Racist discourse is commonplace among Israeli politicians.
The European Union is nominally a strong supporter of the Rome Statute, under which the International Criminal Court was established. That statute lists apartheid as one of several crimes against humanity. Signatories of the Rome Statute, therefore, have an obligation to take action against this crime. Yet the European Union will not take any decisive action against Israeli apartheid.
For many years a bizarre debate has been taking place about whether or not Israel has the right to exist. Israel clearly does exist and nobody can deny that.
But Israel does not have the right to exist as an apartheid state. And Israel does not have the right to exist as a state which is occupying the land of another people. If Israel wants to assert its right to exist, then it is about time it started taking some responsibilities. It is about time that it ceased treating the Palestinians as subhuman.
If our politicians and civil servants will not take action against Israel, then it falls to ordinary people to do so. We must treat Israel as a pariah state until it starts respecting the elementary rights of the Palestinian people. This should be done by using the tactics that proved effective during the long struggle against apartheid in South Africa, namely boycott, divestment and sanctions.
The occupation of Palestine is brutal and inhuman. But there is no reason why it has to continue like that indefinitely. If enough people of conscience speak out, a fair solution will eventually be found.
I want this evening to be relaxed and informal. But I also hope that you will leave this room angry. Angry because no people on earth should have to go through what the Palestinians have been experiencing for more than 60 years.
My appeal is that you channel this anger constructively, that you get involved in the Palestine solidarity movement and that you keep taking action until justice triumphs over apartheid.
·This is the text of a presentation given during a tour of Belgium, Britain and Ireland in November and December 2010. The tour, to promote my book Europe’s Alliance With Israel: Aiding the Occupation, was hosted by the Quaker Council for European Affairs (Brussels), War on Want (London) and the Ireland Palestine Solidarity Campaign (Limerick, Cork and Dublin).
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