Paris university pulls plug on "Israeli apartheid" talk

A Paris university has withdrawn permission for a Palestine solidarity conference at the behest of the Zionist lobby.

In a statement issued today, the authorities at the University of Paris 8 said that the title of the conference – “Israel: an apartheid state?” – was “of a strongly polemical character.” Because there had been strong reactions to its theme, the university predicted there could be a “serious risk posed to public order” if the event scheduled for 27 and 28 February went ahead.

The complaint against the conference was made by the representative council for Jewish organizations in France, or CRIF as it’s better known. It had objected to the participation of Omar Barghouti, coordinator of the Palestinian campaign for boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) against Israel.

Boycott Israel “shock”

Barghouti’s presence in Paris would be “shocking”, according to CRIF, because the ideas that he espouses have “been found on several occasions to constitute an offence of incitement to discrimination.”

CRIF’s claim is misleading. While a number of BDS activists have been accused (ridiculously) of flouting French laws on racism, there have also been important rulings that uphold the right to urge a boycott of Israel. In December last, a court in the eastern city of Mulhouse acquitted 12 campaigners who had urged customers of the supermarket Carrefour not to buy Israeli goods.

I was also one of the invited speakers for the conference, which was part of Israeli Apartheid Week, a series of debates and actions on university campuses throughout the world. The group behind the event, Collectif Palestine Paris 8, wasn’t consulted ahead of the university’s decision to ban it.

This isn’t the first time that CRIF has attempted to muzzle criticism of Israel on French campuses. Last year it strong-armed the authorities at the École normale supérieure (ENS), another Paris college, into forbidding a Palestine solidarity discussion. The big cheese at the ENS succumbed to the pressure.

The “miracle” of Israel

Earlier this month, CRIF underscored its political clout, when Nicolas Sarkozy addressed its annual dinner. The president used the platform to call Israel a “miracle,” marvelling at how “from the debris [of the Holocaust], a democracy has been born.”

On his best behavior now that he is seeking re-election, Sarkozy saluted the “courage” of Benjamin Netanyahu, a man who he has called a “liar” in private conversations with Barack Obama (that were overhead by journalists).

Anyone who has been following events in that “miracle” called Israel will know that Netanyahu and his foreign minister Avigdor Lieberman are waging a war of attrition against civil liberties. Aspects of that war have been exported to France, where calling out Israel as an apartheid state is considered a threat to public order or, worse, a crime.

●First published by The Electronic Intifada, 17 February 2012.

Forget Iran; Israel is a bigger threat to world peace

Is a war with Iran inevitable? I don’t have the answer to that question. But I do feel a sense of déjà-vu when I scan the headlines. Iran is capable of assembling a bomb within a year, Leon Panetta, the US defence secretary, told CBS News recently. Though not as outlandish, his “warning” carried a chilling reminder of Tony Blair’s claim that Iraq could deploy weapons of mass destruction within 45 minutes.

One especially unsavoury aspect of the debate around Iran is how it is being driven by “public relations” professionals, who try to dress up their bloodlust in respectable clothing. Without exception, these “opinion-formers” are supporters of Israel, a state founded on ethnic cleansing, wedded to apartheid and addicted to war. Followers of Zionism, a racist ideology, are unable to offer objective analysis; yet few in the media bother to question the motives of such people or highlight the egregious double standard of demanding robust action against Iran’s nuclear “ambitions”, while keeping mum about the nuclear warheads that Israel has already amassed.

Moshe Kantor, president of the European Jewish Congress (EJC), issued a comical statement in December last. It referred to “reports” – the source of which went unmentioned – that Iran may be preparing to strike Germany in response to an American attack on Iranian nuclear installations. “Whether or not these reports are valid is beside the point, we know certain facts and they are that Iran sees much of Europe as its enemy,” he added.

Can someone who makes a big hullabaloo about new “reports” and then argues it’s irrelevant if they are accurate be regarded as credible? Of course, he can’t. Yet Kantor enjoys the kind of access to political leaders that most lobbyists can only dream of. His organisation’s website tells of how he has spent years bending the ears of senior figures in all of the European Union’s institutions about the “threat” from Iran.

It should be emphasised that the EJC does not represent all Europe’s Jews, despite how it purports to do so. I have a number of Jewish friends and acquaintances who disagree sharply with its agenda.

Emanuele Ottolenghi is another Zionist hawk who has carved out a niche for himself as an “Iran expert”. Formerly the Brussels director of the American Jewish Committee, he now works for the Foundation for the Defence of Democracies, a neoconservative outfit that includes Richard Perle, a cheerleader for the invasion of Iraq, on its board of advisers.

“Israel might act alone”

In a recent article for Standpoint magazine, Ottolenghi asked: “Is Israel’s air force – the one that bombed the Iraqi nuclear reactor in 1981 and the Syrian one in 2007 – gearing up for the most daring airstrike in aviation history?” He concluded his piece by arguing that the “international community” (translation: the US and its cronies) has until the Spring of 2012 to “stop Iran”. After that, Israel might act alone.

I am tired of reading about how David Cameron risks leaving Britain isolated in Brussels. The truth is that the UK has an unhealthy level of clout in European and international affairs and shows no sign of repenting in any meaningful way for its blood-stained history.

The “experts” who are so adamant that democracy be brought to Iran usually neglect to remind their readers and listeners that it was Britain and the US which destroyed democracy in Iran. In 1953, Mohammed Mossadegh, Iran’s elected prime minister, was overthrown in a coup staged by the West. The reason why he was toppled was simple: Britain felt it owned Iran’s oil and could not tolerate Mossadegh’s decision to nationalise this resource.

Fast forward to December 2011, when George Osborne, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, was guest of honour at the Conservative Friends of Israel annual lunch at a plush London hotel. Osborne was interviewed onstage by the right-wing pundit Danny Finkelstein, who asked his views on the “threat” from Iran. “Well, first of all I think Israel is right to identify this as one of the greatest threats to peace and human life in the world at the moment,” Osborne replied, before speaking of “this government’s determination to use all the tools at our disposal to stop Iran getting a nuclear weapon.”

Stop macho posturing

Pause for a moment and consider those lines. Osborne thinks Israel is right to identify Iran as one of the greatest threats to world peace. If he believes his own baloney, he should brush up on world affairs. Iran is not occupying the land of another people. By contrast, Israel occupies the West Bank and Gaza, as well as parts of Lebanon and Syria. Iran’s most recent war was with Iraq in the 1980s. Israel attacked Gaza as recently as the past few weeks.

Iran may be less than candid about its nuclear ambitions but it has signed the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. Israel has not.

True, Iran’s human rights record is deplorable. It was the world’s second highest user of the death penalty in 2010. But invoking that as a casus belli would be grossly hypocritical, when one considers that the US was at number five on the global executions table.

My (sadly unrealistic) wish for 2012 is that Europe’s leaders stop their macho posturing towards Tehran and that they address a bigger threat to world peace. The name of that threat is Israel.

●First published by New Europe, 9 January 2012.

Is UK "friends of Israel" group breaking law on political funding?

Public anger over how members of parliament (MPs) were abusing their expenses system has helped usher in a little transparency to British politics over the past few years. Yet the Labor Friends of Israel (LFI), a powerful group within the country’s main opposition party, is still behaving like a secret society.

Unlike a similar “friends of Israel” group belonging to the Liberal Democrats – the junior party in the ruling coalition - the LFI does not appear to have supplied any information about the sources of its finances to the UK’s Electoral Commission. This lack of disclosure could be illegal. Legislation applying to “members’ associations” of political parties stipulates that all donations above £7,500 ($11,600) must be notified to the Commission within 30 days.

Today, I asked Ben Garrett, the LFI’s head of policy and research, why his organization seems to be breaking the law. “I am not willing to comment,” he replied.

Garrett repeated that answer when I asked for basic details of the LFI’s annual budget and who its largest contributors are. When I argued that it is undemocratic for the LFI to be seeking to influence British policies on the Middle East, without providing basic details about how it is financed, he said, “I am not willing to engage with The Electronic Intifada in a discussion on these issues.”

Admittedly, the information provided by the “friends of Israel” groups for the two other large parties is quite scanty. The Conservative Friends of Israel refused to tell me a few months ago if that group is being funded by the arms industry. The answer to this question cannot be found in the information it has given to the commission, which mainly relates to visits to the Middle East by Conservative MPs. For their part, the Liberal Democrat Friends of Israel appear to be more open, naming David Alliance, a textiles entrepreneur known to grace The Sunday Times list of Britain’s richest people, as one of its key donors.

Admiring Israel’s weapons

The LFI’s secrecy is all the more disturbing, given how some of its senior figures have recently been preparing a review of Britain’s defense policy and there is strong reason to suspect that their admiration for Israel is coloring their views.

A 96-page paper called “Ideas for Future UK Defense Equipment” was published by the Labor Party in September. Its preface was jointly signed by Michael Dugher, the LFI’s vice-chairman, and Jim Murphy, the shadow defense secretary.

As part of their deliberations, both men visited Israel in June. The bill for that trip was shared by the Britain Israel Research Center (BICOM) and the UK embassy in Tel Aviv. During it, the men held consultations with two of Israel’s leading arms makers, Elbit and Rafael. Their paper lauds the pilotless drones that Elbit has provided to the British Army for the war in Afghanistan, without acknowledging that they have been tested by spying on and murdering civilians in Gaza.

A few months ago, Dugher and Murphy both tried to make political capital out of a controversy in which Liam Fox, then the UK’s defense secretary, was embroiled. Fox had to resign because his close friend Adam Werritty was posing as his adviser, despite how Werritty had never been given any such job by the British government. While Dugher and Murphy were happy to censure Fox and Werritty for their shenanigans, they did not draw attention to how some of Werritty’s trips abroad were financed by BICOM.

Strong bonds to Zionist PR firm

Their reticence on that point is easy to understand. For BICOM is known to have solid bonds with the LFI, even though the center’s chief donor, Las Vegas casino magnate Poju Zabludowicz has helped fund the Conservatives. BICOM is registered as a private company, yet performs many of the functions that an embassy normally would by, for example, arranging for journalists to interview Israeli politicians.

At least three of BICOM’s team either remain involved with the LFI or have been in the recent past. Lorna Fitzsimons, the chief executive, was active in the LFI when she was a Labor member of parliament. Dermot Kehoe, BICOM’s press officer, was the partner of David Cairns, the LFI chairman who died in May. And Luke Akehurst, BICOM’s director of campaigns, is a Labor councillor in London who uses his blog to solicit recruits for the LFI.

Akehurst is also the quasi-official stenographer for the LFI. Last month, he wrote a glowing account of a speech given to the LFI by Ed Miliband, leader of the entire Labor Party.

Proving that he is little different to his predecessors Gordon Brown and Tony Blair, Miliband is more eager to placate the LFI’s hawks than follow the good example shown by his mother Marion Kozak , who has declared her support for the principled organization Jews for Justice for Palestinians. If Akehurst’s transcript is accurate, Miliband used his LFI address to malign the Palestinian-led campaign for boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) against Israel by implying that it had an anti-Semitic motive.

Sara Apps from the Palestine Solidarity Campaign in London noted that the only information that the LFI seems to have provided to the Electoral Commission concerned trips that the LFI has financed, without revealing where the money for those trips originated. “According to the Electoral Commission website, LFI has spent at least £76,822 on overseas visits for Labor MPs since 2003,” she told me. “Add this to their office and employment costs, it is difficult to conceive they could survive without significant donations from funders.”

By refusing to reveal where they get their money, the Labor Friends of Israel prove that they are enemies of democracy.

●First published by The Electronic Intifada, 19 December 2011.

UK shadow foreign minister in pocket of Israel lobby

Britain’s Labor Party has been trying to rebrand itself lately after a 13-year spell in government. During an annual conference last month, the most memorable remark by its leader Ed Miliband was “I am not Tony Blair.”

This commitment to change does not appear to have affected Labor’s stance on the Middle East. John Spellar, a shadow Foreign Office minister, has an especially close relationship with London’s pro-Israel lobby.

An inspection of Spellar’s declaration of interests shows that he travelled to the Herzliya security conference, one of the key events on the Israeli political calendar, in February. His airfare and accommodation (estimated total: £1,970 or $3,170) was paid for by David Menton, a director of the Britain Israel Research Center (BICOM). In its own words, that lobby outfit is “dedicated to creating a more supportive environment for Israel in Britain.”

Thanks to a source who shall remain nameless, I also learned that Spellar’s researcher Linda Smith is a partner of BICOM staff member Luke Akehurst (a former spindoctor for the arms industry). Smith and Akehurst both serve as Labor members of Hackney Council, a local authority in London.

I emailed Smith earlier today, asking if her views on the Middle East differ from those of Akehurst but did not receive a reply. Spellar has also not responded to a request for comment.

Lobby at center of resignation scandal

This information about Spellar’s connection to BICOM appears all the more significant given the organization’s role in a controversy leading to the recent resignation of Liam Fox as Britain’s defense secretary. Fox, who belongs to the Conservative Party, was severely embarrassed over revelations that his close friend Adam Werritty was posing as his official adviser during foreign travels, when Werritty had been given no such job by the British government. The Guardian newspaper revealed that Werritty’s jet-set lifestyle was being bankrolled by three prosperous Zionists. They included Poju Zabludowicz, BICOM’s chairman. When Werritty attended the 2009 Herzilya conference, his expenses were covered by BICOM.

David Menton, the man who picked up the tab for Spellar’s trip to Israel earlier this year, is a business associate of Zabludowicz, a billionaire who owns a sizeable chunk of Las Vegas. Menton is a founder of Synova Capital, a private equity fund. According to Synova’s website, the fund’s “cornerstone investor” is the Tamares Group, which is led by Zabludowicz.

I was intrigued to read an article by Spellar, in which he bragged of Labor’s affinity with the poor. It is difficult to square that posture with his willingness to go on junkets funded by a wealthy supporter of Israel, a state that denies an entire people their most elementary rights.

●First published by The Electronic Intifada, 28 October 2011.

Influence of French pro-Israel lobby examined in new book

How powerful is the pro-Israel lobby in Europe?

I’ve just finished reading a book on CRIF, the dominant Zionist organization in France, that provides some light on that little-discussed topic in a measured and scholarly way.

Written by Samuel Ghiles-Meilhac, Le CRIF: De la Résistance juive à la tentation du lobby (CRIF: From the Jewish Resistance to the lobby temptation) traces how a supposedly broad church has come to define itself narrowly as a defender of Israel’s worst excesses.

The representative council for Jewish institutions in France, or CRIF as it’s better know, bands together more than 60 groups ranging from scouts to lawyers. Its origins were in secret meetings during the Second World War, aimed at ensuring that Jews would never again have to endure the suffering inflicted on them by the Vichy regime, which helped deport over 75,000 Jewish refugees and French citizens to Nazi death camps.

Documents studied by Ghiles-Meilhac show that when its inaugural charter was being drawn up in 1943 and 1944, there was a lively debate about whether or not it should have a Zionist orientation. Communists taking part in the drafting discussions argued forcefully and with some degree of success that it shouldn’t declare support for the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine.

That changed in 1977, when a section titled “links with Israel” was inserted into the council’s revised charter. It described the state of Israel as “the privileged expression of being Jewish”.

Snubbed by Bibi

Nonetheless, the CRIF has not always blindly followed a line dictated to it by the Israeli government. In 1999, Benjamin Netanyahu (nearing the end of his first stint as prime minister) snubbed a delegation from the council in Israel because its president Henri Hajdenberg had recently exchanged pleasantries with Yasser Arafat during a meeting in Egypt.

There is no such friction with Netanyahu this time around. In June 2009, the council threw a party in his honor when he visited Paris, giving the prime minister a “triumphal reception” (Ghiles-Meilhac’s words).

Climate of censorship

Lurching more and more to the right, CRIF has tried to create a climate of censorship. In September 2000, the TV channel France 2 broadcast images of Israeli troops killing the Palestinian child Mohammed Al-Dura. Alarmed by how the footage increased awareness among the French public about the routine violence of the Israeli state, French politician Philippe Karsenty used a CRIF event to claim that “the child is not dead” and to accuse France 2 of anti-Semitism. Four candidates for the post of CRIF’s president were in attendance when Karsenty made those remarks; none of them took issue with him.

Another channel, ARTE, was told by CRIF in 2004 that it should interest itself in themes other than the Israel-Palestine conflict.

Careful not to exaggerate CRIF’s influence, Ghiles-Meilhac identifies instances where French policy has differed from that proposed by the council. Yet he demonstrates how CRIF has become the “second voice of Israel” in France, in effect serving as an adjunct to the official Israeli embassy. Its annual dinners have offered a platform, where leading political figures make what they consider as important policy announcements. François Fillon, the prime minister, stated his intention to seek new sanctions against Iran over its nuclear programme at the 2010 event.

Ghiles-Meilhac agrees that CRIF enjoys close links with Nicolas Sarkozy. These were cultivated when he was minister of the interior and flaunted publicly after Sarkozy’s election as president. In 2008, Sarkozy became the first French president to attend CRIF’s annual dinner.

But it was Bernard Kouchner, foreign minister from 2007 until last year, who proved to be especially malleable. When PNGO, the Palestinian network of non-governmental organizations, was named as a recipient of a French human rights award in 2009, CRIF went ballistic. After trying to smear the reputation of the network by insinuating it was a front for Hamas, the council succeeded in having the presentation ceremony for the award moved from the Quai d’Orsay, the foreign ministry’s headquarters, to another venue.

Kouchner still turned up at the ceremony but used his speech to castigate PNGO for exhorting a boycott of Israeli goods and institutions. According to Ghiles-Meilhac, it was probably “unprecedented” for the Zionist lobby to have such a direct say in the running of an official government event and the content of the message delivered at it.

If you understand French, I’d strongly recommend that you check out this fascinating book.

·First published by The Electronic Intifada (www.electronicintifada.net), 30 August 2011.

NATO mulls marriage with Israel

Israel wishes to participate in NATO’s future wars, judging by the content of a diplomatic cable released this week by WikiLeaks.

Dating from November 2009, the document from the American embassy in Tel Aviv summarizes a briefing given by Claudio Bisorgniero, NATO’s deputy-secretary general, during a visit to Israel.

Fresh from talks with Avigdor Lieberman, the Israeli foreign minister, Bisorgniero noted that Israel wishes to sign a status of forces agreement (SOFA) with the alliance. Such an accord lays down the rules covering a country’s troops when they are operating abroad.

The notion of a SOFA (a silly acronym) between Israel and the alliance has been advocated by the Zionist lobby for a few years now. Less than a fortnight before the cable was drawn up, the policy journal Europe’s World published an article by Matthew Mark Horn from the American Jewish Congress on Israel’s relations with NATO. He indicated that a status of forces accord would allow Israel join NATO operations more swiftly than it has to date.

Horn, a former official in the US defense department, hinted at his frustration over how it took two years of negotiations before an Israeli officer could be posted to the headquarters of Operation Active Endeavor in Naples. Originally, that Mediterranean-patrol mission was part of NATO’s response to the atrocities on 11 September 2001; its remit has subsequently been expanded to serve a reactionary agenda of stopping impoverished foreigners from sailing to Europe.

“Sensitive”

Bisorgniero described Israel’s idea of a SOFA as “sensitive”, according to the cable. It could be problematic, he suggested, for NATO to conclude such an agreement with Israel, unless similar arrangements could be found with some Arab countries. Since 1994 NATO has been involved in a process called the Mediterranean dialogue with states neighboring members of the alliance. Along with Israel, those states are Egypt, Algeria, Tunisia, Morocco, Jordan and Mauritania. Israel has used this forum for dialogue to forge greater ties with the alliance than all of the others, however.

It is telling that the cable does not allude even once to Operation Cast Lead, Israel’s assault on Gaza in 2008 and 2009. NATO gave its tacit approval for that act of aggression earlier this year. When Gabi Ashkenazi, the Israeli military chief who oversaw Cast Lead, visited Brussels in January, he was treated to a farewell dinner to mark his imminent retirement as head of the world’s “most moral army.”

No guilt over massacres

Under Ashkenazi’s leadership, that army wiped out 22 members of the al-Dayah family -- including 12 children and a pregnant woman -- when it bombed the family’s Gaza home in early 2009. NATO commanders may be feeling a sense of affinity with Ashkenazi this month as they have tried to excuse an even bloodier massacre in Libya. On the night of 8 August, NATO attacked residential areas in Zliten, a city in the district of Misrata. According to the Libyan authorities, 85 people were killed. Thirty-three of them were children; 32 them of them women, some reports say.

Don’t feel bad if you have not heard of that massacre; it received scant attention in the Western press. The BBC’s Matthew Price visited the scene of the attack and admitted that he saw the corpses of women and children in the morgue. But he also sought to lend credence to the NATO narrative that it had struck a “legitimate target” (the words of its propagandist Roland Lavoie), where Gaddafi loyalists were sheltering. “The front line is not far away,” Price reported. “From the site, plumes of white smoke can be seen rising from where the fighting is taking place. It would make sense that soldiers would need somewhere to rest in the area.”

NATO’s killing of children does not elicit even the faintest pang of conscience among its commanders and their lackeys in the media. It would be logical, then, for NATO to make sure its flirtations with Israel lead to a proper marriage.

·First published by The Electronic Intifada, 25 August 2011.

Arms industry promoter latest recruit for UK Israel lobby

What is the next career move for a promoter of the arms industry? Join the Israel lobby, it seems.

Over the past few days, I have been writing about how the Britain Israel Communications and Research Center (BICOM) has indicted war criminal Michael Herzog on its staff. Herzog’s newest colleague at the center is Luke Akehurst, until recently a “defense” specialist with the public relations giant Weber Shandwick.

Enticing Akehurst to work for her is quite a coup for Lorna Fitzsimons, BICOM’s chief executive. He was named “UK consultant of the year” at the 2008 Public Affairs News Awards. The prize was in recognition for his invaluable services for several companies that arm dictators.

Libya connection

Finmeccanica, one of his clients, cultivated strong links with Muammar Gaddafi lately. While it has predicted that its revenues for 2011 will exceed €18 billion, the civil war in Libya will inevitably have repercussions. The Italian firm has a backlog of orders worth €800 million from the Gaddafi regime.

Akehurst also represented GKN, which supplied water cannons to Indonesia in the 1990s, unperturbed about how its then military ruler Suharto was overseeing an occupation in East Timor, that involved one of the twentieth century’s worst cases of genocide. Serco, another client of his, manages Britain’s Atomic Weapons Establishment (AWE) as part of a consortium that bands it together with the world’s number one weapons maker Lockheed Martin.

It is fitting that Akehurst, a Labor Party elected representative for Hackney council in London, has joined BICOM. For the largest donor to that center Poju Zabludowicz inherited a vast fortune through his father’s involvement in the arms industry. Shlomo Zabludowicz set up a firm called Soltam, which is today owned by the top Israeli weapons manufacturer Elbit.

In 2009, TheObserver reported that Poju Zabludowicz gave BICOM (which he chairs) nearly £1 million in 2007 alone. A subsequent TV documentary about Britain’s pro-Israel lobby showed how he has invested in a shopping centre in the illegal Israeli settlement of Ma’ale Adumim and other Israeli business activities in the occupied West Bank.

Blood money

According to The Sunday Times, Zabludowicz is placed at number 31 on the list of Britain’s richest residents.

Even though Fitzsimons and Akehurst hail from a Labor background, Zabludowicz is a generous contributor to the rival Conservatives, led by Prime Minister David Cameron. It is de rigueur for that party’s members of parliament to join the Conservative Friends of Israel (CFOI) and take part in its trips to the Middle East. One such junket – in February this year – included a visit to Elbit’s headquarters. A briefing note prepared by the CFOI underscored how Elbit “provides the British armed forces with the unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) that play such a crucial role in intelligence-collection.” The MPs weren’t reminded that such warplanes were used to kill and maim women and children in Gaza during Israel’s Operation Cast Lead in late 2008 and early 2009.

I would like to congratulate Luke Akehurst on his new appointment and suggest that he studies his payslips carefully. If he does, he will see they are stained with the blood of innocent Palestinians.

·First published by The Electronic Intifada (www.electronicintifada.net), 23 August 2011.

Fake flexibility from London's Israel lobby

Predictably, the European Union responded quickly to yesterday’s violence in Southern Israel. "I condemn unreservedly all such acts of terror," the bloc’s foreign policy chief Catherine Asthon said.

Will Ashton be issuing another statement today to denounce the Israeli military in similarly strong terms for murdering an infant in Gaza a few hours later? Or for ending a teenager’s life in the early hours of this morning? I’m sure that she won’t. The most we can expect is that she will call for "restraint" (that weasel word which diplomats have rendered meaningless through overuse).

And did she post something on her website expressing revulsion at how Israeli troops shot dead Sa'd al-Majdalwai, a 17 year old with a mental disability, also in Gaza earlier this week? Of course, she didn’t. Why? Because he was too low down in the hierarchy of victims to get noticed. And because the European Union applies different standards to the Israeli forces of occupation and the Palestinians who resist them. Violence by Israel is "regrettable" (or, in most cases, elicits no comment); violence by Palestinians is always categorized as "terrorism".

A phony plea for understanding

Ashton may try to appear balanced -- she has repeatedly criticized the expansion of Israeli settlements in the West Bank -- but, in reality, there is little to distinguish her from former colleagues in the British parliament such as Lorna Fitzsimons. Who, you might ask? Fitzsimons was an elected representative of the Tony Blair-led Labor Party in Westminster between 1997 and 2005. After losing her seat, she took up a job running a propaganda outfit called the Britain Israel Communications and Research Centre (BICOM).

Fitzsimons had an opinion piece published by The Guardian in London this week, in which she sought to come across all reasonable. Purporting to be a big fan of mutual understanding, she patted her own back for organizing a "roundtable discussion" recently, where representatives of Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud and the Palestinian party Fatah chatted amiably. She proceeded to illustrate how she has no interest in understanding the concerns of Palestinians by insisting "there cannot be a mass return of Palestinian refugees to [present-day] Israel."

War criminal in London

BICOM’s team includes a "senior visiting fellow" named Michael Herzog. He is a retired brigadier-general from the Israeli army. During Operation Cast Lead, that relentless three-week assault on Gaza’s civilians in late 2008 and early 2009, Herzog was chief of staff to Ehud Barak, Israel’s defense minister. As he was involved in planning that operation and advising on strategy, Herzog must be held accountable for the war crimes committed in its execution. Next time he pops into BICOM’s London offices for a cup of tea and some blue-sky thinking, the police should be alerted and be ready to arrest him.

Herzog has at least done one good thing: he has proven that BICOM’s declared belief that Israel should display "considerable flexibility" (as Fitzsimons wrote in her Guardian article) amounts to waffle. In a new briefing paper for the center, Herzog contends that any future Palestinian state would have to be non-militarized but that Israel would maintain a long-term military presence along the Jordan River.

So while the Palestinians could have nothing more destructive in their arsenal than pea-shooters, the West Bank would remain surrounded by one of the world’s most powerful armies. That, it appears, is what the Israel lobby means by flexibility.

·First published by The Electronic Intifada (www.electronicintifada.net), 19 August 2011.

AIPAC's European cousin evades scrutiny

I don’t envy the 81 members of the US Congress who are on an expenses-paid trip to Israel this week. Having to listen to Zionist claptrap throughout the junket’s packed schedule is not my idea of a fun vacation.

But I was struck by how the jaunt, organized by the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), has received some attention from the mainstream press on both sides of the Atlantic. London’s right-wing Daily Mail noted that AIPAC’s critics believe it operates on behalf of the Israeli government and has “secured too much influence on Congress”.

While it’s positive that AIPAC’s activities are coming under greater scrutiny, it is noteworthy that little attention has been paid to how a similar lobbying outfit is being developed in Europe. In February, around 400 members of parliaments from across this continent were brought to Israel in a trip hosted by the European Friends of Israel (EFI). They included 120 members of the European Parliament (MEPs) -- one-sixth of that assembly’s total membership.

When I checked The Daily Mail’s online archive, I could find no reference to the February trip. That was despite how British MEPs are among some of the EFI’s most zealous supporters. The Conservative Party’s Charles Tannock was one of the group’s founders in 2006, declaring at the time that the EFI was required to counter the “black propaganda” of Palestine solidarity activists.

Mimicking AIPAC

Although the EFI has claimed to be independent of AIPAC, it is mimicking that committee’s modus operandi. AIPAC has not made details of the itinerary for this week’s visit by Congress members public. It’s a safe bet, though, that the itinerary is broadly similar to that followed by the EFI earlier this year. As well as being given a chance to marvel at the production sites for Israeli weapons, participants in that jaunt were greeted by Benjamin Netanyahu, the prime minister, and other leading political figures.

One crucial difference between the US and Europe is that there is some degree of transparency about how AIPAC behaves in Washington. By searching “lobbying disclosure” sites, I learnt that AIPAC $2.75 million on schmoozing Congress in 2010. I could also peruse lists of laws the group has sought to tweak in its favor.

By contrast, the EFI has not signed up to a register of “interest representatives” set up by the European Commission, so we don’t know how much it spends in Brussels and other European capitals. Unlike the US, the European Union does not have a mandatory financial disclosure system for lobbyists who prowl the corridors of its institutions.

On a few occasions over the past three years, I have asked the EFI’s office and parliamentarians belonging to it for details of how its work is funded. All of my requests have either been refused or have elicited no reply.

Donors a mystery

The only “information” that the EFI has given me is that its donors are from Europe. Yet The Jerusalem Post has reported that one of the group’s key contributors is Alexander Machkevitch. When I did some research on Machkevitch, I realized he is a mining magnate with dual Kazakh and Israeli nationality. Given that neither Kazakhstan nor Israel belong to the European continent, it would appear that EFI’s staff either flunked geography at school or have deliberately tried to mislead me.

While I consider AIPAC to be dangerous and racist, American citizens are at least able to track what it is up to. There is far greater secrecy about the Israel lobby in Europe and no appetite by most journalists to expose how it is a growing force. Surely, this culture of silence should be challenged.

·First published by The Electronic Intifada (www.electronicintifada.net), 11 August 2011

Israel lobby dictates who may run for Ireland's president

Until recently, I was convinced that the tiny pro-Israel lobby in my native Ireland was of little significance. When the first Gaza Freedom Flotilla was attacked last year, the best that lobby could do was wheel out two guys named Tom. Both Tom Carew and Tom Cooney competed with each other on the TV3 channel to see who could make the most absurd argument in support of Israel’s murder of nine peace activists onboard the Mavi Marmara.

On a quick visit to Dublin last week, I was surprised to hear that one of this wacky duo is now working for the national government. In April, Cooney was named an advisor to Alan Shatter, the Irish minister for justice and defense. A statement announcing the appointment indicated that Cooney, a law lecturer in University College Dublin, was something of an iconoclast, alluding to his track record of championing civil liberties at home and the struggle against apartheid in South Africa.

There was no mention of his views on Israel, a curious omission given that his new boss Shatter is a committed Zionist. Whereas the Irish government was generally more balanced in commenting about the Freedom Flotilla II than many of its EU counterparts over the past few months, Shatter was openly hostile to the effort, declaring it was “something of a mystery” to him why anyone could feel the need for a “political protest” against the Gaza blockade. Worryingly, Shatter has been put in charge of the department of defense by Ireland’s relatively new prime minister Enda Kenny; that department has awarded contracts to Israeli weapons firms in the not-so-distant past.

My trip also coincided with a protracted debate about who should be Ireland’s next president. Even though the role of the president in Ireland is largely ceremonial and the holder of that office has no executive power, elections for the position can be vicious affairs.

According to opinion polls, the front-runner in the race (the election is still several months away) was David Norris, a scholar of James Joyce who undertook an eventually successful legal challenge against Ireland’s ban on homosexual relations in the 1980s. This week, however, Norris from the contest after it emerged he had written a letter to an Israeli court in 1997 urging that it be lenient in sentencing his former partner Ezra Nawi, who was convicted of statutory rape of a 15 year old Palestinian.

Don’t get me wrong. I am horrified by the very idea of an adult having sex with a child. Unquestionably, Norris showed poor judgment in making his appeal, particularly by writing it on official headed paper supplied by the Irish Senate, of which he is a long-standing member.

Nonetheless, there is no evidence than Norris did anything more sinister than seek mercy for somebody he loved.

It is telling that it was not child protection advocates that drew attention to Norris’ relationship with Nawi. Rather, it was Zionist blogger John Connolly, an Irish law graduate living in London.

Connolly stated that his “main problem with Norris in recent times has been his outspoken criticism of Israel”. Among the alleged misdemeanors he cited were that Norris had invited Ilan Pappé, the dissident Israeli historian, to address his colleagues in the Oireachtas, Ireland’s parliament.

Connolly’s blog post inspired journalists with the reactionary Irish Independent to delight in Norris’ difficulties. Kevin Myers, one of Ireland’s best-paid columnists, inferred that Norris wouldn’t dream of writing to Arab governments demanding that they treat gay men or lesbians fairly. This was a patently ludicrous claim as Norris has been a consistent champion of human rights throughout the world.

Despite being few in number, Irish Zionists appear to be growing in clout to such a degree they can determine who may and may not stand in elections. The conclusion that they have no qualms about undermining democracy seems inescapable.

·First published by The Electronic Intifada (www.electronicintifada.net), 3 August 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.

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

Dutch firm shirks responsibility for apartheid wall

On a recent visit to Ramallah, I heard a fascinating tale about two entrepreneurial brothers and how they are trying to evade prosecution for aiding Israeli apartheid.

Doron Livnat is the director of Riwal, a Dutch company that supplied cranes used in building the 650-kilometre wall that snakes through the West Bank. In October last year, Riwal’s headquarters in Dordrect, The Netherlands, were raided by the country’s national crime squad, investigating a complaint into the firm’s activities in the occupied Palestinian territories.

The probe has led to a hasty corporate makeover, with Riwal changing the name of its Israeli subsidiary to Rom. Rik Maaskant, a spokesman for Riwal, told me there is “no relationship whatsoever” between the two firms now. Yet there are several coincidences indicating that his assurance should be treated skeptically.

1. Under a 2003 international crimes law, any Dutch citizen can be prosecuted for violating human rights anywhere in the world. Doron Livnat has dual Dutch and Israeli nationality. Should we be surprise, then, that his brother Adi, who does not have Dutch citizenship, has been placed in charge of Rom?
2. Both firms continue to have an almost identical logo: it is oval-shaped with the name of the firm marked in yellow against a dark blue background. The only discernible difference between the logos of each firm is that the name Riwal is featured in one and Rom in the other.
3. Riwal has a reputation for being economical with the truth. It even supplied false information to a government minister in the past.

The involvement of Riwal in the wall’s construction first came to light in 2006 when a Dutch TV documentary was broadcast, showing that its cranes were being used in Hizma, a village on the wall’s route. After Bert Koenders, a member of parliament with the Dutch Labor party, protested at Riwal’s activities, the then foreign minister Ben Bot said he did not have “any indication” that the Dordrecht-based company was assisting the project. Bot stated that the cranes in question were owned by a firm called Lima. It soon transpired, however, that Bot had been misled by Riwal’s management. Although he described Lima as Israeli, it was in fact Dutch-owned and had been authorised to use the brand name Riwal.
By all accounts, Bot was furious at being deceived. Despite making his displeasure known in Dordrecht, Riwal cranes remained a visible fixture at various spots along the wall. In the summer of 2007, for example, Riwal-branded machinery was found next to the village of Al-Khader, near Bethlehem.

The case against Riwal was brought by Al Haq, a Palestinian human rights group, which had gathered photographic evidence of how cranes and other equipment supplied by the company were used in the construction of the wall. According to Al Haq, the building of the wall may have involved the crimes of apartheid and persecution. Both offenses are covered by the Dutch international crimes act.

“The building of the wall potentially entails committing the crime of apartheid,” said Salma Karmy, a representative of Al Haq. “It results in the commission of inhuman acts in the context of a regime aimed at the domination of one racial group over another. We’re saying that the Dutch company Riwal was an accessory to this and other crimes. The crimes were primarily committed by the Israeli government but Riwal helped knowingly.”

It will be interesting to see how the case progresses, not least because there could be repercussions for the overall Dutch relationship with Israel. While the judicial system in the Netherlands is nominally impervious to political meddling, the relatively new Dutch government would doubtlessly prefer that the investigation is dropped. Uri Rosenthal, the foreign minister, is regarded by Israel as one of its most reliable supporters in Europe. At the beginning of March, he upbraided the United Nations Human Rights Council for approving too many resolutions critical of Israel.

Doron Livnat, meanwhile, is a prominent figure in two of the key groups belonging to the pro-Israel lobby in the Netherlands. He is a board member for the Centre for Information and Documentation on Israel (CIDI) and president of a team advising Collective Action Israel (known by its Dutch acronym CIA).

Based in The Hague, CIDI has consistently campaigned in favour of the apartheid wall, ignoring how it was declared illegal by the International Criminal Court in 2004. An article on the CIDI website claims that the wall has “saved countless lives from terrorist attacks”. Amsterdam-based CIA collects funds for the training of Israeli soldiers, particularly on the use of advanced technology. In February, it hosted a tour of the Netherlands for Tsahal, a band of musicians serving in the Israeli army.

Riwal, as it happens, enjoys name recognition well beyond the construction industry. Thanks to a sponsorship deal, its logo is emblazoned on jerseys worn by FC Dordrecht, a soccer team playing in the Dutch First Division. Time will tell if the Livnats’ support for Israeli apartheid proves to be an own-goal.

·First published by Mondoweiss (www.mondoweiss.net)

Dutch democracy under threat from Israel lobby

Since I first came here to Amsterdam in 1998, I have been in the Netherlands on many occasions and have always enjoyed myself. While I intend to continue visiting this country, I have realised that I need to reassess some of my assumptions about it.

Until recently, I was under the impression that the Netherlands was a democracy, in which freedom of expression was regarded as sacrosanct. Then I read some comments attributed to your foreign minister Uri Rosenthal.

The minister is putting pressure on the Dutch anti-poverty organisation ICCO to cease funding The Electronic Intifada, an excellent website that consistently defends the rights of the Palestinian people. Rosenthal has indicated that he cannot tolerate how ICCO supports this website, given that the Dutch government is a strong supporter of Israel. He has threatened to withdraw Dutch state grants to ICCO, telling the organisation: “It is alright to be critical but not to directly oppose the government”.

Rosenthal’s comments about The Electronic Intifada follow a report by a Zionist lobby group called NGO Monitor. This group accused The Electronic Intifada of being anti-Semitic without providing any evidence to back up its claims. Sadly, this is a typical tactic of the pro-Israel lobby. As soon as somebody tells the truth about Israel being an apartheid state and a vicious colonial project, it is only a matter of time before the lobby will label him or her an anti-Semite. This is a deliberate move designed to muzzle debate.

When Rosenthal says “it is alright to be critical but not to directly oppose the government”, we need to ask exactly what he means.

I am proud to be a contributor to The Electronic Intifada because I know that it defends the core human values enshrined in international law. It fearlessly exposes how international law is violated by such activities as the expansion of Israeli settlements in the West Bank and the merciless blockade of Gaza.

Is it no longer acceptable in the Netherlands to defend international law?

Rather than becoming so exercised about The Electronic Intifada, I would urge Rosenthal and his government colleagues to investigate those Dutch organisations that facilitate abuses of international law.
Perhaps, for example, they could take a trip to the Israel Centre in Nijkerk, which is run by Christians for Israel. I visited this centre myself last summer and discovered how its shop sells many products manufactured by companies who are active in illegal Israeli settlements. These included cosmetics from Ahava, a firm based in the West Bank settlement of Mitzpe Shalem.

Perhaps, too, the Dutch government could examine the activities of the Sar-El Foundation, one of several organisations here in the Netherlands dedicated to supporting the Israeli army. Max Arpels Lezer, the chairman of this foundation, has boasted of how Dutch volunteers who take part in training exercises with the Israeli army “help the battle against the Palestinians” as if helping the oppression of an entire people is something admirable.

For some bizarre reason, the Sar-El Foundation is considered to be a charity. Donations to the foundation are, therefore, tax deductible. This is despite how the Israeli army that it supports has committed crimes against humanity, according to the United Nations investigation led by the retired South African judge Richard Goldstone into Israel’s attacks on Gaza in late 2008 and early 2009.

Can somebody please explain to me how one Dutch organisation can be treated as a charity, when it supports violations of international law? But when another Dutch organisation – such as ICCO – defends international law, the government threatens to punish it. Where is the justice here?

Late last year a very interesting diplomatic cable from the American embassy in The Hague was released by the website WikiLeaks. Drafted by Clifford Sobel, as he was preparing to step down as ambassador to the Netherlands in 2005, the cable states that Britain and the Netherlands are America’s most trusted allies in western Europe. The cable commends Dutch diplomats for being willing to act as America’s “eyes and ears” in the countries where they are posted and describes the Dutch as “go-to-guys” when the US is seeking a mediator to resolve internal disputes in NATO.

Among the similarities between The Netherlands and the US are that both governments consistently accommodate Israel’s crimes against the Palestinian people. Some veteran observers of the Israel-Palestine conflict to whom I have spoken have gone so far as to name The Netherlands as Israel’s most steadfast supporter in Western Europe.

Maxime Verhagen, the Dutch foreign minister until last year, proved especially amenable to Israeli propaganda.

During 2008 and 2009, Verhagen blamed the violence in Gaza entirely on Hamas. In doing so, he ignored how Hamas observed an Egyptian-brokered truce with Israel between June and November 2008. It was Israel which resumed the cycle of violence by attacking Gaza on 4 November that year, a day when the world was preoccupied with the election of a new American president.

Almost all of the victims of Operation Cast Lead, the three-week bombardment of Gaza that Israel launched in late December 2008, were Palestinians. In total, 1,387 Palestinians were killed. Almost 800 of these took no part in the hostilities, according to investigations by human rights monitors. These included 320 children.

By contrast, nine Israelis were killed during the violence. Six of them were Israeli soldiers, three were non-combatants.

If gestures of solidarity were required in early 2009, then surely it was the people of Gaza who required them most. Verhagen decided instead to express his solidarity with Israel. In January 2009, he travelled to Sderot in southern Israel, where he voiced concern about the rockets being fired by Hamas. If he had extended his trip by a few kilometres and ventured into Gaza, Verhagen would have witnessed far worse suffering caused by far more lethal weapons. But he refused to visit Gaza, showing no interest in seeing first-hand what was happening.

Could this be the same Maxime Verhagen who had previously presented a strategy paper to the Dutch parliament officially aimed at giving human rights a central role in his country’s foreign policy? Could it be the same Maxime Verhagen who stated in 2008 that “human rights apply to all people, in all places and at all times”?

I have a question for Verhagen and for other Dutch politicians today. Why do the human rights you claim to champion not apply to the Palestinian people?

·Excerpt from a presentation given in the ABC Treehouse, Amsterdam, 15 January 2011. Thanks to the Netherlands Palestine Committee for organising the event.

New year, new lies from Israel lobby

One of Israel’s most dubious inventions is a form of public relations generally unconnected to the truth. It is called hasbara, a Hebrew term that has no “real, precise” translation into other languages, according to a senior Israeli diplomat Gideon Meir.

The hasbara machine was cranked into action early in 2011. On New Year’s Eve, Jawaher Abu Rahmah collapsed from inhaling tear gas fired by Israeli troops during the weekly protest against the massive wall that penetrates deep into her native Bilin, a West Bank village. After she died the following morning, the Israeli army spread malicious rumours – reported faithfully in some newspapers – that she may not have attended the demonstration and instead perished from cancer.

The practice of hasbara is not restricted to official organs of the Israeli state, as a recent article by Daniel Mariaschin from the Zionist lobby group B’nai B’rith illustrated (“Europe’s misguided meddling in Israel”, EUobserver, 5 January). In taking a swipe at 26 former office-holders who have appealed for EU sanctions against Israel if it does not halt the expansion of settlements on occupied Palestinian land, Mariaschin attempts to dress up several falsehoods as facts.

Mariaschin asserts that the signers of the appeal – including Javier Solana, the EU’s foreign policy chief for most of the past decade – “all know Israel well and are surely familiar with its desire for peace”. Yet he provides not one shred of evidence to prove that Israel, the world’s third highest spender on the military (as a proportion of gross domestic product) and the only Middle Eastern country with nuclear weapons, has a “desire for peace”.

He defends the construction of exclusively Jewish neighbourhoods in East Jerusalem by claiming that Jerusalem has been the “capital of Israel for 3,000 years”. This perception has no basis in international law. In 1980, the United Nations Security Council declared Israel’s claims over East Jerusalem to be “null and void”.

Just as absurdly, Mariaschin argues that Israel’s control over Jerusalem “enables Jews, Christians and Muslims each to freely worship at their own holy sites in the city”. Where was that magical freedom in 2010, when Israel sealed off crossings in order to stop Christians in the West Bank from celebrating Easter in Jerusalem?

And Mariaschin regurgitates the trite Israeli line that it “withdrew” from Gaza in 2005, only to be bombarded by rockets from Hamas. He neglects to mention that Hamas observed an Egyptian-brokered truce with Israel between June and November 2008. It was Israel which resumed the cycle of violence by attacking Gaza on 4 November that year, a day when the world was preoccupied with the election of a new American president. Israel’s dismantlement of its settlements in Gaza does not alter the area’s status; the 1907 Hague regulations make clear that a territory is occupied when a foreign power exerts “effective control” over it. As part of its determination to maintain control of Gaza, Israel has imposed a brutal blockade by land and by sea. Gaza’s fishermen, for example, are regularly fired at by Israeli naval vessels while doing nothing more sinister than trying to earn a living.

Nonetheless, I have some sympathy for Mariaschin’s observation that the Palestinian leadership “is on its way to betraying its own people”. If the “leadership” Mariaschin is referring to is the Palestinian Authority, then I would go further by saying that it has been engaged in a steady process of betrayal. A US diplomatic cable made public lately by WikiLeaks indicates that Mahmoud Abbas, the authority’s “president” (his mandate expired in 2009) was told in advance about Israel’s plans to bomb Gaza in late 2008 but that he was so fixated on the rivalry between Hamas and his party Fatah that he kept silent.

To its shame, the European Union has been pressurising Abbas to act as a quisling. The late scholar Edward Said drew a distinction between how Fatah has behaved in the occupied territories and the African National Congress behaved in South Africa. Even after the ANC was granted recognition by the apartheid regime, it refused to supply police “in order to avoid appearing as the white government’s enforcer,” Said wrote. This in stark contrast with the situation in the West Bank; during 2011, the EU will give more than €8 million to the Coordinating Office for Palestinian Police Support (COPPS). This “mission” is confined to a sliver of the West Bank; Palestinian police trained under it may only arrest their kinfolk, not Israeli settlers on stolen land. In other words, the Palestinians are being required to police their own occupation – with unwitting assistance from the European taxpayer.

Shamefully, too, the EU has been helping Israel to hone a neo-colonial “divide and rule” strategy in the occupied territories. Catherine Ashton, the Union’s current foreign policy chief, has chosen Israel and the West Bank for her first working trip abroad this year. Although she met Fatah representatives, she refused to talk to anyone from Hamas, the victors of parliamentary elections in 2006 that official EU monitors deemed to be free and fair. The EU’s decision to ostracise Hamas – originally taken under pressure from Washington – does nothing to advance the search for peace to which the Union is rhetorically committed. Rather, it advances Israeli imperialism and the attendant dispossession of the Palestinians.

It is telling that senior politicians wait until they have left office before they criticise Israel. Before stepping down in 2009, Javier Solana exulted in how Israel enjoys a closer relationship with the EU than any other state outside the Union’s borders. Participating in EU programmes ranging from archaeology to enterprise promotion, Israel is a member of the Union, without being a member of its institutions, Solana noted.

The widespread public revulsion in Europe at how Israel treats the Palestinians as subhuman is not shared by our leaders. True, they feign concern every so often from one side of their mouths. From the other, they give Israel all the support it needs to keep subjugating an entire people.

·First published by EUobserver (www.euobserver.com), 7 January 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).

I ain't no Nazi copycat

Sometimes the best comedy is made by people who are not trying to be funny. At least, that’s what I discovered when I was accused of emulating the Nazis.

During a recent tour of Britain and Ireland to promote my book Europe’s Alliance With Israel: Aiding the Occupation, I heard that the Simon Wiesenthal Centre, a Zionist lobby group, had filed a complaint about me with the Dublin government. The centre had asked Brian Cowen, the Taoiseach (Irish prime minister), to publicly condemn me and my hosts, the Ireland Palestine Solidarity Campaign. Daring to criticise Israel at a time when Ireland’s own economy was collapsing was “sadly reminiscent of financial scapegoating” in 1930s Germany, Shimon Samuels, the centre’s director for international relations, alleged.

With equal absurdity, Samuels claimed that the cover of my book carried a “subliminal message” because it depicted a map of Europe beside a Star of David. Although Samuels did not spell out what subliminal message the cover sought to convey, he intimated that the artwork fitted the EU’s own definition of anti-Semitism.

I didn’t design the cover in question but I did authorise it. Had I thought for one second that it was intended to incite hostility towards Jews, I would have exercised my author’s prerogative by rejecting it.

If the Simon Wiesenthal Centre actually bothered to read my book, it would know that I don’t have an anti-Semitic bone in my body. The book is focused on the EU’s complicity in crimes perpetrated by the state of Israel against the Palestinians (who also happen to be Semites) and does not contain a single word directed against Jews as a people. As well as making it clear that I despise all forms of discrimination based on religion, race, gender or sexual orientation, the book stresses my admiration for the significant number of Jews brave enough to tell Israel that it does not act in their name. The Simon Wiesenthal Centre would probably categorise those Jews as “self-hating”; I regard them as humane and heroic.

It would be comforting if all missives by the centre and other pro-Israel zealots could be written off as being of no consequence. Yet the truth is that our politicians and civil servants are usually too puny to stand up to their bullying.

Perhaps the clearest manifestation of the centre’s influence came after the results of a 2003 survey conducted by the EU’s polling unit Eurobarometer became public knowledge. When a sample of 7,500 Europeans were asked which country posed the biggest threat to world peace, a majority – 59% - chose Israel. The Simon Wiesenthal Centre responded by urging that the EU be excluded from the so-called peace process in the Middle East and by claiming it was a “racist flight of fancy” to deem Israel as more bellicose than North Korea or Iran.

Instead of commending their citizens for being perceptive enough to realise that a country with a nuclear arsenal and an addiction to war (Israel) is more destabilising than does not yet possess nuclear weapons (Iran), senior EU representatives allowed themselves be persuaded that being a critic of Israel automatically made one a Jew-hater.

Over the following two years, the EU’s Monitoring Centre on Racism and Xenophobia (EUMC) in Vienna – subsequently renamed the Fundamental Rights Agency – drew up the aforementioned definition of anti-Semitism. This was in no way a scientific exercise; rather than trying to examine the surrounding issues impartially, the EUMC allowed the definition to be dictated by lobby groups that consistently defend Israel no matter what cruelty it metes out to the Palestinians. An EUMC paper indicated plainly that the work was guided by the American Jewish Committee and the European Jewish Congress. The definition that they successfully advocated was worded in such a way that anyone who called out the true nature of Israel’s crimes could be smeared with accusations of anti-Semitism. Describing the establishment of Israel as a “racist endeavour” or drawing parallels between the Israeli state and the Nazis were among the examples given for what should be considered as anti-Semitism. (That Israel was founded on racism – and remains so – is simply a statement of fact; this was confirmed once again lately when 50 of Israel’s leading rabbis, many of them state-employed, instructed Jews not to rent property to Arabs).

The Fundamental Rights Agency continues to view partisan lobbyists as sober analysts. In its latest report on anti-Semitism in Europe – published in April - the agency copies and pastes the findings of such organisations as the Information and Documentation Centre Israel (CIDI) in the Netherlands and the Anti-Defamation League in New York. The “study” also suggests that Europe’s far-left and many Muslims have tested positive for the “new anti-Semitism” since the Palestinian uprising, or intifada, began in 2000. The absence of supporting evidence for that suggestion displays how much the agency’s views continue to be shaped by a pro-Israel lobby that seeks to muzzle condemnations of Israel’s crimes against humanity by accusing activists of hating Jews in a “new” way. When I asked a spokeswoman for the agency why it lent so much credence to the statements of one-sided lobbyists, she said that her colleagues “don’t voice any political position”.

One of the many troubling aspects of this state of affairs is that Israel’s most ardent supporters appear to have no interest in tackling genuine anti-Semitism. Research undertaken by the Community Security Trust found that 2009 was the worst year for anti-Semitic incidents in Britain since it began keeping records in 1984. It is no coincidence that 2009 kicked off with Israel’s murderous attacks on Gaza. This offers no excuse to anyone who vented their frustration with those crimes by vilifying innocent Jews but it does offer an explanation.

Anti-Semitism is not studied as rigorously and carefully as it ought to be. However, the data available to us leads to an inescapable conclusion: the state of Israel must shoulder a large degree of blame for any ill-feeling that Jews have to endure. The problem is surely compounded by how Israel’s supporters are refusing to address it honestly and thereby making it worse.

·First published by The Samosa (www.thesamosa.co.uk), 17 December 2011

How the Israel lobby dictates EU policy

There is an easy way for a mediocre politician to grab headlines: upset the Israel lobby. Karel de Gucht, the European commissioner for trade, discovered this to his cost in September when asked about Middle East “peace” talks on the Flemish radio station VRT.

Deviating from the official EU script, de Gucht rated the chances of the Obama administration resolving the Israel-Palestine conflict as extremely low. After describing the Zionist lobby as the “best organised” in US politics and inferring that it was a major obstacle to progress, he expressed a view about how Jews in general perceive Israel. “There is indeed a belief – it’s difficult to describe it otherwise – among most Jews that they are right,” he said. “And a belief is something that’s difficult to counter with rational arguments.”

Clearly, these comments lacked nuance and someone in de Gucht’s position should be wary of making blanket statements about an entire religious or ethnic group. But did they actually betoken hostility to Jews or, as The Wall Street Journal claimed, constitute an “anti-Semitic riff”?

One consequence of de Gucht’s remarks is that they highlighted how the Israel lobby is a force not only on Capitol Hill, but in Brussels, too, and that it is attempting to stifle debate about Israel’s sadistic treatment of the Palestinian people.

It is telling that the European Jewish Congress (EJC) reacted by alleging that sharply-worded criticism of Israel amounted to the same thing as hatred for Jews. “What sort of environment allows such remarks to be made openly by a senior politician?” the EJC’s president Moshe Kantor wondered. “This is part of a dangerous trend of incitement against Jews and Israel in Europe that needs to be stamped out immediately.”

While the overwhelming majority of Palestine solidarity and human rights activists – and indeed millions of decent people – can see a difference between Zionism as an ideology that is little more than a century old and Judaism as a religion dating back several millennia, the Israel lobby has been eager to blur the distinction between the two. Lamentably, it has had considerable success in convincing policy-makers that anyone who dares speak the truth about Israel should be labelled an anti-Semite.

In 2005, the European Union’s Monitoring Centre on Racism and Xenophobia – subsequently renamed the Fundamental Rights Agency – accepted a working definition of anti-Semitism. It stated that anti-Semitism is “a certain perception of Jews, which may be expressed as hatred towards Jews”. As well as being directed towards Jewish religious institutions, displays of anti-Semitism could “target the state of Israel, conceived as a Jewish entity,” the definition said. Examples of anti-Semitism given in an accompanying document included “claiming that the existence of the state of Israel is a racist endeavour” and “drawing comparisons of contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis.”

This definition was not the result of painstaking research by neutral observers. Rather, the monitoring centre has acknowledged that it was drafted in consultation with the aforementioned EJC, along with the American Jewish Committee.

Gauging exactly how much power the Israel lobby wields in Europe is fraught. Most of the relevant organisations are secretive about their activities. The Transatlantic Institute – a Brussels-based front for the American Jewish Committee – appears to be the only such grouping to have entered some details into a voluntary register of “interest representatives” set up by the European Commission. Apart from its address and phone number, all its entry reveals is that it has a reported budget of €255,000 for 2010.

Nor should the power of the lobby be exaggerated. The decision by EU and NATO – both headquartered in Brussels - to forge ever-closer ties with Israel over the past decade are largely explained by geo-strategic factors. Israel has skilfully – and cynically - positioned itself as an indispensable ally to the “war on terror” declared by George W. Bush. Moreover, its status as a key EU “partner” for scientific research is due to how Israeli firms have pioneered technologies ranging from instant messaging for the Internet to the drones used by NATO forces in bombing Afghanistan and Pakistan, Turkey in northern Iraq and, of course, by Israel itself in Gaza.

Although this deepening of relations may well have occurred without the growth of pro-Israel lobby groups in Brussels, those groups have certainly acted as a kind of match-maker. Conscious that the US may not dominate global politics during this century as stridently as it did in the second half of the twentieth century, the American Jewish Committee has decided that it must also influence important players outside Washington. And so it opened the Transatlantic Institute in Brussels six years ago, at a time when the EU’s efforts to present more cohesive foreign and military policies to the wider world were bearing fruit.

As well as persuading policy-makers to conflate criticism of Israel with anti-Semitism, the Transatlantic Institute has acted as an apologist for Israeli war crimes, while simultaneously pounding the drumbeat of war towards Iran. In January 2009, the institute’s then director Emanuele Ottolenghi wrote a piece for the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, in which he gloated at how “Iran got a bloody nose” through Israel’s three-week offensive against Gaza. (Ottolenghi’s theory was based on his assertion that because Iran had shown Hamas how to fire rockets further into southern Israel than it previously could, pain inflicted on Hamas could be felt in Tehran).

Like all propagandists, the Israel lobby feels under no obligation to tell the truth. After Israel’s murderous attack on the Gaza Freedom Flotilla at the end of May this year, the EJC tried to smear the nine Turkish peace activists killed. Moshe Kantor called on the EU to place the Foundation for Human Rights and Freedoms and Humanitarian Relief (known by its Turkish acronym IHH) on its list of terrorist organisations. In a letter to Catherine Ashton, the EU’s foreign policy chief, Kantor said that the IHH’s “ties to terrorist activities have been well-documented” yet cited no sources to support that accusation.

Fortunately, the Israel lobby is not yet as influential in Brussels as it is in Washington. Whereas the number of US legislators prepared to berate Israel can often be counted on one hand (a mere five members of Congress opposed the attack on Gaza in January 2009), the European Parliament has occasionally been willing to resist pressure from pro-Israel lobbyists. In March this year, MEPs were inundated with messages from the EJC urging them to reject a resolution endorsing the report of an official United Nations investigation into the Gaza attacks. (Headed by retired South African judge Richard Goldstone, the report stated that Israel had committed war crimes). To its credit, the Parliament still approved the resolution by 335 votes to 287.

That does not mean, however, that MEPs can always be relied on to defend the rights of the Palestinians. On the contrary, Zionist zealots have pulled off something of a public relations coup within the Parliament. Since September 2009, the assembly’s official delegation to the Knesset, Israel’s parliament, has been headed by Bastiaan Belder, a Dutch Christian fundamentalist who maintains that Israel does everything it can to avoid civilian casualties when it bombs the occupied Palestinian territories. Under Belder’s leadership, meetings of his delegation have been highly partisan; at one such meeting the main guest speaker was the aforementioned Emanuele Ottolenghi.

Another important initiative within the Parliament has been the foundation in 2006 of the European Friends of Israel (EFI). Functioning as a cross-party alliance of MEPs, it is at least partly modelled on the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), the best known pro-Israel lobby group in Washington. Dimtri Dombret, the EFI’s first director, has confirmed to me that he has attended several AIPAC events and studied how it operates.

Among the most active participants in the EFI is Charles Tannock, the foreign policy spokesman for Britain’s Conservative MEPs. Tannock is something of a mouthpiece for Israeli diplomats. In September, he urged colleagues to “be unswerving in our condemnation of Iran’s appalling human rights record”. By contrast, he has defended Israel’s human rights abuses; following the flotilla attack, he parroted the whitewash from the Netanyahu government by declaring: “What is sure is that the IDF [Israel Defence Force] had no intention to use lethal force”.

Writing in 1946, George Orwell stated that political language is “designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable.” The Israel lobby has elevated this language into an artform.

·First published by Spinwatch (www.spinwatch.org), 6 November 2010