As Khader Adnan begins the 62nd day of his hunger strike, the European Union’s foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton might finally say something about his suffering.
Two days after I contacted Ashton’s office requesting an urgent comment, I was told this morning that “there is actually a statement in the making.”
I wasn’t told when the statement will be issued but Maja Kocijancic, a spokeswoman for Ashton, did make the following remarks: “The EU requests the government of Israel to do all it can to preserve the health of Mr Adnan and handle this case while abiding by all legal obligations under international law.
“The EU reiterates its longstanding concern about the extensive use by Israel of administrative detention without formal charge. Such a procedure should be used only in exceptional circumstances, and without prejudice to the rights of detainees under international and national laws, in particular their right to be informed about the charges underlying any detention and their right to a fair trial.”
Well, isn’t that a pathetic response? Unlike the Carter Center (founded by former US president Jimmy Carter) and Amnesty International, Ashton’s team is not calling for Adnan to be immediately released or charged, merely asking Israel to “do all it can” to preserve his health. And Ashton accepts that administrative detention may be used under certain unspecified circumstances, even though it abuses the right of prisoners to know why they are in custody and to a fair and prompt trial.
Resembling Blair
Ashton’s stance resembles that of her mentor Tony Blair. As Britain’s prime minister in 2003, Blair secretly recommended that members of Hamas and Islamic Jihad should be interned without trial. Blair’s advice originally came from MI6, the UK intelligence service.
This indicates that Britain’s political elite continues to have an imperial mindset. Internment without trial was not only a monstrous injustice when it was imposedin the North of Ireland during the 1970s, it needlessly stoked the flames of conflict there.
Internment without trial is a synonym for administrative detention.
●First published by The Electronic Intifada, 17 February 2012.
Showing posts with label Palestinian prisoners. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Palestinian prisoners. Show all posts
Friday, February 17, 2012
Wednesday, February 15, 2012
The EU's shameful silence on Khader Adnan
What does the European Union have to say about the plight of Palestinian hunger striker Khader Adnan? Not one word.
I have just entered Adnan’s name into the search facility on the website for the EU’s diplomatic service. The result: zero hits. A moment later, I searched under the words “Gilad Shalit” and received 230 hits.
Catherine Ashton, the bloc’s foreign policy chief, publicly sympathised with the family of Shalit at every conceivable opportunity, never acknowledging that the Israeli soldier belonged to an army of occupation and was taking part in acts of aggression against the Palestinian people when he was captured. Does she regard his life as more important than that of Adnan, a man in detention without being charged or convicted of an offence?
Is she more worried about the oppressor, than the oppressed? It would appear so.
Almost 12 hours ago, I contacted Ashton’s office, requesting an urgent explanation for her silence on Adnan’s hunger strike. I have still not received a response.
Too busy?
Perhaps her advisors too busy with matters they consider more pressing than the imminent death of a prisoner. Yet on Monday, her team was able to drop whatever other work it was doing and hastily respond to the attacks on Israeli embassies in India and Georgia.
That same day, she (or her aides) found time to express concern about how Iranian opposition leaders Mir Hossein Moussavi and Mehdi Karroubi have now been under house arrest for an entire year. Her statement noted (properly) that these men – and Moussavi’s wife Zahra Rahnavard – have been detained “without any legal process.”
Khader Adnan is in jail without any legal process. Why has Ashton not protested at his treatment?
Dignity and freedom
Marking Human Rights Day in December 2011, Ashton recalled that “human rights are universal and that people everywhere aspire to live in dignity and freedom.”
Khader Adnan is undertaking a courageous and awe-inspiring protest to defend the rights of Palestinians to live in dignity and freedom.
And what does Catherine Ashton have to say? Not one miserable word.
●First published by The Electronic Intifada, 15 February 2012.
I have just entered Adnan’s name into the search facility on the website for the EU’s diplomatic service. The result: zero hits. A moment later, I searched under the words “Gilad Shalit” and received 230 hits.
Catherine Ashton, the bloc’s foreign policy chief, publicly sympathised with the family of Shalit at every conceivable opportunity, never acknowledging that the Israeli soldier belonged to an army of occupation and was taking part in acts of aggression against the Palestinian people when he was captured. Does she regard his life as more important than that of Adnan, a man in detention without being charged or convicted of an offence?
Is she more worried about the oppressor, than the oppressed? It would appear so.
Almost 12 hours ago, I contacted Ashton’s office, requesting an urgent explanation for her silence on Adnan’s hunger strike. I have still not received a response.
Too busy?
Perhaps her advisors too busy with matters they consider more pressing than the imminent death of a prisoner. Yet on Monday, her team was able to drop whatever other work it was doing and hastily respond to the attacks on Israeli embassies in India and Georgia.
That same day, she (or her aides) found time to express concern about how Iranian opposition leaders Mir Hossein Moussavi and Mehdi Karroubi have now been under house arrest for an entire year. Her statement noted (properly) that these men – and Moussavi’s wife Zahra Rahnavard – have been detained “without any legal process.”
Khader Adnan is in jail without any legal process. Why has Ashton not protested at his treatment?
Dignity and freedom
Marking Human Rights Day in December 2011, Ashton recalled that “human rights are universal and that people everywhere aspire to live in dignity and freedom.”
Khader Adnan is undertaking a courageous and awe-inspiring protest to defend the rights of Palestinians to live in dignity and freedom.
And what does Catherine Ashton have to say? Not one miserable word.
●First published by The Electronic Intifada, 15 February 2012.
Tuesday, August 2, 2011
Summer reading on Palestine
What books should a Palestine solidarity activist bring on vacation?
Well, I’ve nothing against any campaigner who tries to switch off completely from his or her cause during a badly-needed break by only packing novels or glossy magazines. But I find that summer can be a good time to tackle tomes that I wouldn’t otherwise get around to reading. So in between long walks, cycling, bowling, guzzling chocolate and gazing at West of Ireland sunsets, I checked out these five titles recently:
Extreme Rambling by Mark Thomas (Ebury Press, 2011): An English comic, Thomas has proven on three occasions that it’s possible to write page-turners about international politics. Having previously explored the trade in torture instruments (As Used on the Famous Nelson Mandela) and human rights abuses linked to Coca Cola (Belching Out the Devil), his new book has him walking all 415 kilometers of the wall Israel has built in the West Bank, as well as part of the unfinished route. Incensed by how families in East Jerusalem have been forced out of their homes to make way for illegal settlers, how mothers have died in childbirth because they have been blocked from reaching maternity wards and how unemployment has shot up because Palestinians are stopped from going to work, Thomas explodes the myth that the wall enhances Israel’s security.
Jewish Identity and Palestinian Rights: Diaspora Jewish Opposition to Israel by David Landy (Zed Books, 2011): A friend and one-time flatmate of mine, Landy is an Irish sociologist who has studied how a network of Jewish groups critical of Israel has developed since the outbreak of the second Palestinian intifada in 2000. Although I struggled with the theoretical analysis that dominates its early chapters, the core findings of Landy’s research are fascinating. I was particularly struck by how he explains that rejecting Zionism can be just as agonizing for many Jews as “coming out” is for homosexuals. It’s also striking that while Landy appears broadly sympathetic to groups such as Jews for Justice for Palestinians, he doesn’t balk at berating them for being overly influenced by the Israeli left.
The Political Economy of Israel’s Occupation: Repression Beyond Exploitation by Shir Hever (Pluto Press, 2010): True, the aforementioned Israeli left is generally wishy-washy and patronizing towards Palestinians. Yet Israeli economist Shir Hever provides a refreshing exception to this exceptionalism. In this mostly accessible 226-page work, he underscores how Israel has rigged the economy of the occupation so that it benefits a corporate clique.
Hamas: The Islamic Resistance Movement by Beverly Milton-Edwards and Stephen Farrell (Polity, 2010): I have serious reservations about this book. The authors often act as stenographers to the powerful by, among other things, describing Salam Fayyad, the Palestinian Authority “prime minister” (by diktat, not election) as “internationally respected”, without addressing how he is a puppet of the International Monetary Fund, an institution controlled by the US and Europe. That said, they offer an informative account of how Hamas unexpectedly became the most trusted political party in the West Bank and Gaza in 2006.
Threat: Palestinian Political Prisoners in Israel, edited by Abeer Baker and Anat Matar (Pluto Press, 2011): This is a suburb collection of essays on how Israel has sought to criminalize an entire people. The statistic that 700,000 Palestinians have been detained by Israel since it occupied the West Bank and Gaza in 1967 may leave the reader unmoved but the detailing of individual prisoners’ experiences surely won’t. One of the most troubling facts I learned is that the Israeli authorities have decided to replicate methods with which they suppress street protests by Palestinians in the more confined space of prisons. It is hard to single out the most cruel thing Ariel Sharon did in his political and military career. Approving the use of tear gas behind bars was certainly one of them.
·First published by The Electronic Intifada, 2 August 2011.
Well, I’ve nothing against any campaigner who tries to switch off completely from his or her cause during a badly-needed break by only packing novels or glossy magazines. But I find that summer can be a good time to tackle tomes that I wouldn’t otherwise get around to reading. So in between long walks, cycling, bowling, guzzling chocolate and gazing at West of Ireland sunsets, I checked out these five titles recently:
Extreme Rambling by Mark Thomas (Ebury Press, 2011): An English comic, Thomas has proven on three occasions that it’s possible to write page-turners about international politics. Having previously explored the trade in torture instruments (As Used on the Famous Nelson Mandela) and human rights abuses linked to Coca Cola (Belching Out the Devil), his new book has him walking all 415 kilometers of the wall Israel has built in the West Bank, as well as part of the unfinished route. Incensed by how families in East Jerusalem have been forced out of their homes to make way for illegal settlers, how mothers have died in childbirth because they have been blocked from reaching maternity wards and how unemployment has shot up because Palestinians are stopped from going to work, Thomas explodes the myth that the wall enhances Israel’s security.
Jewish Identity and Palestinian Rights: Diaspora Jewish Opposition to Israel by David Landy (Zed Books, 2011): A friend and one-time flatmate of mine, Landy is an Irish sociologist who has studied how a network of Jewish groups critical of Israel has developed since the outbreak of the second Palestinian intifada in 2000. Although I struggled with the theoretical analysis that dominates its early chapters, the core findings of Landy’s research are fascinating. I was particularly struck by how he explains that rejecting Zionism can be just as agonizing for many Jews as “coming out” is for homosexuals. It’s also striking that while Landy appears broadly sympathetic to groups such as Jews for Justice for Palestinians, he doesn’t balk at berating them for being overly influenced by the Israeli left.
The Political Economy of Israel’s Occupation: Repression Beyond Exploitation by Shir Hever (Pluto Press, 2010): True, the aforementioned Israeli left is generally wishy-washy and patronizing towards Palestinians. Yet Israeli economist Shir Hever provides a refreshing exception to this exceptionalism. In this mostly accessible 226-page work, he underscores how Israel has rigged the economy of the occupation so that it benefits a corporate clique.
Hamas: The Islamic Resistance Movement by Beverly Milton-Edwards and Stephen Farrell (Polity, 2010): I have serious reservations about this book. The authors often act as stenographers to the powerful by, among other things, describing Salam Fayyad, the Palestinian Authority “prime minister” (by diktat, not election) as “internationally respected”, without addressing how he is a puppet of the International Monetary Fund, an institution controlled by the US and Europe. That said, they offer an informative account of how Hamas unexpectedly became the most trusted political party in the West Bank and Gaza in 2006.
Threat: Palestinian Political Prisoners in Israel, edited by Abeer Baker and Anat Matar (Pluto Press, 2011): This is a suburb collection of essays on how Israel has sought to criminalize an entire people. The statistic that 700,000 Palestinians have been detained by Israel since it occupied the West Bank and Gaza in 1967 may leave the reader unmoved but the detailing of individual prisoners’ experiences surely won’t. One of the most troubling facts I learned is that the Israeli authorities have decided to replicate methods with which they suppress street protests by Palestinians in the more confined space of prisons. It is hard to single out the most cruel thing Ariel Sharon did in his political and military career. Approving the use of tear gas behind bars was certainly one of them.
·First published by The Electronic Intifada, 2 August 2011.
Monday, June 13, 2011
How Europe bankrolls Israel's jails
In these times of austerity, the idea that politicians should go on a long holiday is not something I am inclined to advocate. Yet I will make an exception for Catherine Ashton. The EU’s foreign policy chief urgently needs to take time off from dashing around the world and to study the background to some of the conflicts she is reportedly trying to resolve.
Even though Ashton has made numerous trips to Israel and the occupied Palestinian territories, she continues to display a spectacular level of ignorance about the political situation there. Like her mentor Tony Blair, she has swallowed the canard that resistance to the occupation amounts to terrorism. Take how she uses almost every available opportunity to call for the release of an Israeli soldier captured by Hamas in 2006. “I want to see the people of Gaza with a future and I also want to see Gilad Shalit, captive for years in Gaza, given the chance to go home to his mother and father,” she said last month.
Here are a few facts for Ashton to consider. Shalit is a staff sergeant in an army representing a rogue state that violates international law with impunity. Of course, he should be treated humanely and releasing him would be the decent thing to do, especially given that he has been away from his parents for so long. But the fact remains that he is a military officer trained to kill, maim and oppress, not – as Ashton implies – an innocent victim.
Shalit is the first Israeli soldier to be captured by a Palestinian armed group since 1994. By contrast, 700,000 Palestinians have been detained under Israeli military orders in the occupied territories since 1967. That amounts to one-fifth of the total Palestinian population in those territories. By placing so much emphasis on one Israeli, Ashton is turning a blind eye to the infinitely worse suffering that Palestinians have to endure. She does not even acknowledge – as far as I can tell – that Israel’s response to Shalit’s capture was disproportionate, to use a word that rolls regularly from the tongues of EU representatives. At the moment, there are some 900 prisoners from Gaza in Israeli custody. Following Shalit’s capture, Israel has denied those prisoners visits from their families, thereby breaching its international obligations (the Fourth Geneva Convention of 1949 says: “Every internee shall be allowed to receive visitors, especially near relatives, at regular intervals and as frequently as possible.”)
If Ashton reads only one book this summer, then I would recommend “Threat: Palestinian Political Prisoners in Israel”, a new collection of essays edited by Abeer Baker and Anat Matar. She should take her time digesting all the valuable information in it, then ask herself why Shalit is more worthy of her concern than this Palestinian portrayed by the Israeli lawyer Michael Sfard: “Hamed hasn’t seen his mother for four years. He hasn’t seen his brothers and sisters ever since his arrest, 24 years ago. He has brothers who were born after his arrest, whom he has never met. But most troubling for Hamed, so he told me when last I met him, is his concern that he will never again see his 75-year-old mother, who is ill.”
Or maybe Ashton could ask her aides to investigate the case of Noura Mohamed Shokry El Hashlamon. In 2007, Hashlamon undertook a hunger strike to protest at her detention without trial. Throughout her 27-day strike, she was held in solitary confinement “in a 2 metre square cell, with sewage leaking from the plumbing, glass fragments on the floor and a 1 metre by 0.5 metre barred window without any glass to protect the cell from the cold weather,” according to Addameer, a prisoner support organisation.
Or maybe Ashton could phone Javier Solana, her predecessor as EU foreign policy chief, and ask him why he wasn’t more critical of Ariel Sharon. Among the litany of cruelties attributed to Sharon in his intertwined military and political career was that he approved the introduction of a more harsh prison regime. Sharon was prime minister in 2003, when Yaakov Ganot was appointed head of the Israel Prison Service. Labelled a “blatant racist” by Palestinian prisoner Walid Daka, Ganot order the use of tear gas and batons on detainees. He also had dogs set on Muslim prisoners, knowing full well that doing so would be considered a grave insult to their religion.
Most importantly, Ashton should be incensed by Daka’s well-researched conclusion that the EU is subsidising Israel’s detention practices. Each Palestinian prisoner receives a payment of 500 shekels (100 euros) per month, as well as a pension varying from 1,500 to 6,000 shekels (depending on such factors as number of years served). Although these prisoners are held within Israel, the bill for their expenses is paid by the Palestinian Authority (PA). To meet these bills, the PA receives special grants from the EU to be spent on prisoners. Part of this money goes to Israeli companies that provide food and cleaning supplies to the jails.
This means that the European taxpayer is unwittingly bankrolling the mass incarceration of Palestinians. As these subsidies are providing prisoners with a modicum of dignity, I’m not arguing they should be stopped. Rather, Ashton should be pressing for sanctions to be imposed on Israel for defying international law. If she does that, then she can take as long a holiday as she wants.
·First published by New Europe (www.neurope.eu), 12-18 June 2011.
Even though Ashton has made numerous trips to Israel and the occupied Palestinian territories, she continues to display a spectacular level of ignorance about the political situation there. Like her mentor Tony Blair, she has swallowed the canard that resistance to the occupation amounts to terrorism. Take how she uses almost every available opportunity to call for the release of an Israeli soldier captured by Hamas in 2006. “I want to see the people of Gaza with a future and I also want to see Gilad Shalit, captive for years in Gaza, given the chance to go home to his mother and father,” she said last month.
Here are a few facts for Ashton to consider. Shalit is a staff sergeant in an army representing a rogue state that violates international law with impunity. Of course, he should be treated humanely and releasing him would be the decent thing to do, especially given that he has been away from his parents for so long. But the fact remains that he is a military officer trained to kill, maim and oppress, not – as Ashton implies – an innocent victim.
Shalit is the first Israeli soldier to be captured by a Palestinian armed group since 1994. By contrast, 700,000 Palestinians have been detained under Israeli military orders in the occupied territories since 1967. That amounts to one-fifth of the total Palestinian population in those territories. By placing so much emphasis on one Israeli, Ashton is turning a blind eye to the infinitely worse suffering that Palestinians have to endure. She does not even acknowledge – as far as I can tell – that Israel’s response to Shalit’s capture was disproportionate, to use a word that rolls regularly from the tongues of EU representatives. At the moment, there are some 900 prisoners from Gaza in Israeli custody. Following Shalit’s capture, Israel has denied those prisoners visits from their families, thereby breaching its international obligations (the Fourth Geneva Convention of 1949 says: “Every internee shall be allowed to receive visitors, especially near relatives, at regular intervals and as frequently as possible.”)
If Ashton reads only one book this summer, then I would recommend “Threat: Palestinian Political Prisoners in Israel”, a new collection of essays edited by Abeer Baker and Anat Matar. She should take her time digesting all the valuable information in it, then ask herself why Shalit is more worthy of her concern than this Palestinian portrayed by the Israeli lawyer Michael Sfard: “Hamed hasn’t seen his mother for four years. He hasn’t seen his brothers and sisters ever since his arrest, 24 years ago. He has brothers who were born after his arrest, whom he has never met. But most troubling for Hamed, so he told me when last I met him, is his concern that he will never again see his 75-year-old mother, who is ill.”
Or maybe Ashton could ask her aides to investigate the case of Noura Mohamed Shokry El Hashlamon. In 2007, Hashlamon undertook a hunger strike to protest at her detention without trial. Throughout her 27-day strike, she was held in solitary confinement “in a 2 metre square cell, with sewage leaking from the plumbing, glass fragments on the floor and a 1 metre by 0.5 metre barred window without any glass to protect the cell from the cold weather,” according to Addameer, a prisoner support organisation.
Or maybe Ashton could phone Javier Solana, her predecessor as EU foreign policy chief, and ask him why he wasn’t more critical of Ariel Sharon. Among the litany of cruelties attributed to Sharon in his intertwined military and political career was that he approved the introduction of a more harsh prison regime. Sharon was prime minister in 2003, when Yaakov Ganot was appointed head of the Israel Prison Service. Labelled a “blatant racist” by Palestinian prisoner Walid Daka, Ganot order the use of tear gas and batons on detainees. He also had dogs set on Muslim prisoners, knowing full well that doing so would be considered a grave insult to their religion.
Most importantly, Ashton should be incensed by Daka’s well-researched conclusion that the EU is subsidising Israel’s detention practices. Each Palestinian prisoner receives a payment of 500 shekels (100 euros) per month, as well as a pension varying from 1,500 to 6,000 shekels (depending on such factors as number of years served). Although these prisoners are held within Israel, the bill for their expenses is paid by the Palestinian Authority (PA). To meet these bills, the PA receives special grants from the EU to be spent on prisoners. Part of this money goes to Israeli companies that provide food and cleaning supplies to the jails.
This means that the European taxpayer is unwittingly bankrolling the mass incarceration of Palestinians. As these subsidies are providing prisoners with a modicum of dignity, I’m not arguing they should be stopped. Rather, Ashton should be pressing for sanctions to be imposed on Israel for defying international law. If she does that, then she can take as long a holiday as she wants.
·First published by New Europe (www.neurope.eu), 12-18 June 2011.
Wednesday, October 13, 2010
CSI Palestine: Europe complicit in West Bank rights abuses
A bizarre public relations exercise is now underway in the West Bank. Doubtlessly inspired by the enduring popularity of TV drama CSI: Crime Scene Investigation, the European Union has been trying to glamorise a forensic science course it has been running for Palestinian police since mid-September. As well as being tutored on fingerprinting techniques and the use of chemicals following a murder or armed robbery, officers completing the six-week programme will be given CSI vans of their own, “updates” promoting the course tell us.
It is not difficult to see why EU officials are eager to obtain favorable publicity for their police support “mission”, headquartered in Ramallah. For all of its five-year life, the mission has been something of a poor relation to the other major international policing initiative in the occupied Palestinian territories: that run by US security coordinator Keith Dayton (replaced by Michael Moeller earlier this month). At a time when the EU’s 27 governments are nominally striving to make a greater collective impact on the world stage, it is logical that they should be highlighting foreign policy work that at first glance appears laudable.
The reality is far from glamorous. Rather than helping to nurture institutions that could prove essential in a future Palestinian state, both the EU and US are acting as proxies for the Israeli occupation. Moreover, they are acquiescent in human rights abuses perpetrated by the Palestinian security forces against their own people.
Contrary to the impression frequently created by news stories, the Palestinian Authority does not have a police force that can justifiably be viewed as independent of Israel. Under the Oslo accords from the 1990s, the PA was given full responsibility for security in a region dubbed “Area A”. This comprises six West Bank cities - Jenin, Nablus, Qalqilya, Ramallah, Tulkarem and Bethlehem – and part of Hebron. In Area B – other towns and villages, where 68 percent of Palestinian inhabitants in the West Bank lived – the authority was tasked with maintaining public order but Israel was allowed “overriding” responsibility for security. Then in Area C – 62 percent of the West Bank, including Jewish-only settlements and other areas deemed of “strategic importance” to Israel – total control over security remained in Israeli hands.
For the Palestinians, it has proven impossible to operate a police service that could comply with international norms. Regular incursions by Israeli troops throughout the West Bank has meant that patrols by Palestinian officers cannot be undertaken in any city, apart from Ramallah, between midnight and six o’clock in the morning.
The response from the EU mission (its proper name is the Coordinating Office for Palestinian Police Support or COPPS) to Israel’s everyday acts of aggression and intimidation has been timid, to say the least. The strongest words that Hendrik Malmquist, the Swedish officer heading the mission, has used on the record to criticise the Israeli incursions is to call them a “public embarrassment” for the Palestinians.
Maybe his nonchalance is best explained by how COPPS is part of what the tireless Israeli human rights campaigner Jeff Halper calls the “matrix of control” imposed by Israel on the occupied territories. Visiting Brussels in May, Malmquist said that Israel is “happy we are there in order to contribute to better security in the [occupied] territories.” Probably the main reason for Israeli satisfaction with his work is that his 80-strong staff, has been assisting the forces of occupation to strengthen their grip over most aspects of Palestinian life.
When I contacted EU officials in Ramallah recently, they sought to downplay the significance of their role in fostering cooperation between Israeli and Palestinian security forces. The officials pointed, for example, to how they have organised joint Israeli-Palestinian training seminars on apparently uncontroversial issues such as traffic management. “We are not in the political game,” one official insisted.
A document published by the Israeli foreign ministry in April indicates that the cooperation goes deeper. Titled “Measures Taken by Israel in Support of Developing the Palestinian Economy”, it says that COPPS has played a “central role” in encouraging and implementing “capacity-building” in the West Bank. The purpose of this “capacity-building”, the paper makes clear to anyone who reads between its lines, is to stress that the Palestinian forces are subservient to Israel. Last year, the ministry gloats, was a record one for “coordinated actions” between Israeli and Palestinian security forces, with almost 1,300 taking place, a 72 percent rise over 2008.
In its monthly newsletters, COPPS promotes the training offered by its human rights specialist Diane Halley to Palestinian police. This propaganda cannot be allowed to mask how the EU has enabled a situation develop where gross abuses occur within a culture of impunity. Whereas COPPS’s original mandate allowed it to support police in both the West Bank and Gaza, the Union’s refusal to engage with the de facto Hamas administration in Gaza has meant that it has been encouraging disunity among Palestinians.
Worse again, the EU has connived in the creation of what an alliance of Palestinian human rights groups recently called “a police state” within the occupied territories. While these groups – including the Palestinian Center for Human Rights, Al Haq and the Women’s Center for Legal Aid and Counselling – stress that most violations committed by the Palestinian authorities are a “direct result” of tensions between Fatah and Hamas, the EU has been largely silent about the abuses.
During a press briefing in May, Malmquist stated that COPPS wishes to “export core European Union values” such as respect for fundamental rights. A few minutes later, a Palestinian police spokesman Yossef Ozreil insisted that there is “no more torture” by his colleagues against political rivals.
Malmquist did not contradict this assurance, yet evidence amassed by the Arab Organisation for Human Rights suggests that Ozreil was dishonest. Mohammed Jamil, a spokesman for the organisation, said that there is an average of seven arrests in the West Bank each day, with between 700 and 800 rounded up in the Hebron area last month after Hamas gunmen killed four Israeli settlers. Torture of detainees is widespread, he added. Methods found to have been used include tying people to the ceiling and suspending them, aping crucifixions by tying people to doors with their arms and legs outstretched and beatings by sticks. One of the victims had a boiled egg placed on his backside, Jamil told me. “They [the security forces] made jokes about him – that he was like a chicken giving birth to eggs.”
On paper, the main distinction between COPPS and the US security coordinator in the West Bank is that the former interacts with the Palestinian civil police and the latter with the more militarised National Security Force. In practice, there is extensive overlap between the two international operations; Dayton has said that one of his objectives was to eliminate any duplication of efforts between aid donors to the Palestinian Authority. As well as employing several British members of staff in his team, Dayton enjoyed close contacts with the two Britons who headed COPPS before Malmquist took up his post in January this year: Colin Smith and Paul Kernaghan.
The extent to which Dayton may have advised forces loyal to Fatah to resort to brutal means in attacking Hamas supporters has not yet been revealed. One thing that is clear, however, is Dayton’s understanding that his job was to underscore the Palestinian Authority’s subordination to Israel. “We don’t provide anything to the Palestinians unless it has been thoroughly coordinated with the state of Israel and they agree to it,” he has said.
Daud Abdullah, director of Middle East Monitor, a research institute in London, says it is inconceivable that Dayton was unaware of the abuses conducted by Palestinian security forces. “There has been no let-up in abuses as far as we know,” Abdullah added. “The fact that money is still flowing and [international] officials are still on the ground makes them culpable for what is happening.”
COPPS has a budget of nearly 7 million euros (9.7 million dollars) for this year. This sum appears small on its own. Yet it cannot be separated from the wider support that the EU gives to the Palestinian Authority, which amounts to 947 million euros since 2008.
Europe’s representatives rarely miss an opportunity to trumpet their generosity to the Palestinians. Although donors are undoubtedly financing the provision of many essential services in the occupied territories, tough questions need to be asked about much of this aid and how it is being tailored to serve Israel’s interests. Few taxpayers would be pleased to know that their hard-earned euros are subsidising an illegal occupation.
·First published by The Electronic Intifada (www.electronicintifada.net), 12 October 2010
It is not difficult to see why EU officials are eager to obtain favorable publicity for their police support “mission”, headquartered in Ramallah. For all of its five-year life, the mission has been something of a poor relation to the other major international policing initiative in the occupied Palestinian territories: that run by US security coordinator Keith Dayton (replaced by Michael Moeller earlier this month). At a time when the EU’s 27 governments are nominally striving to make a greater collective impact on the world stage, it is logical that they should be highlighting foreign policy work that at first glance appears laudable.
The reality is far from glamorous. Rather than helping to nurture institutions that could prove essential in a future Palestinian state, both the EU and US are acting as proxies for the Israeli occupation. Moreover, they are acquiescent in human rights abuses perpetrated by the Palestinian security forces against their own people.
Contrary to the impression frequently created by news stories, the Palestinian Authority does not have a police force that can justifiably be viewed as independent of Israel. Under the Oslo accords from the 1990s, the PA was given full responsibility for security in a region dubbed “Area A”. This comprises six West Bank cities - Jenin, Nablus, Qalqilya, Ramallah, Tulkarem and Bethlehem – and part of Hebron. In Area B – other towns and villages, where 68 percent of Palestinian inhabitants in the West Bank lived – the authority was tasked with maintaining public order but Israel was allowed “overriding” responsibility for security. Then in Area C – 62 percent of the West Bank, including Jewish-only settlements and other areas deemed of “strategic importance” to Israel – total control over security remained in Israeli hands.
For the Palestinians, it has proven impossible to operate a police service that could comply with international norms. Regular incursions by Israeli troops throughout the West Bank has meant that patrols by Palestinian officers cannot be undertaken in any city, apart from Ramallah, between midnight and six o’clock in the morning.
The response from the EU mission (its proper name is the Coordinating Office for Palestinian Police Support or COPPS) to Israel’s everyday acts of aggression and intimidation has been timid, to say the least. The strongest words that Hendrik Malmquist, the Swedish officer heading the mission, has used on the record to criticise the Israeli incursions is to call them a “public embarrassment” for the Palestinians.
Maybe his nonchalance is best explained by how COPPS is part of what the tireless Israeli human rights campaigner Jeff Halper calls the “matrix of control” imposed by Israel on the occupied territories. Visiting Brussels in May, Malmquist said that Israel is “happy we are there in order to contribute to better security in the [occupied] territories.” Probably the main reason for Israeli satisfaction with his work is that his 80-strong staff, has been assisting the forces of occupation to strengthen their grip over most aspects of Palestinian life.
When I contacted EU officials in Ramallah recently, they sought to downplay the significance of their role in fostering cooperation between Israeli and Palestinian security forces. The officials pointed, for example, to how they have organised joint Israeli-Palestinian training seminars on apparently uncontroversial issues such as traffic management. “We are not in the political game,” one official insisted.
A document published by the Israeli foreign ministry in April indicates that the cooperation goes deeper. Titled “Measures Taken by Israel in Support of Developing the Palestinian Economy”, it says that COPPS has played a “central role” in encouraging and implementing “capacity-building” in the West Bank. The purpose of this “capacity-building”, the paper makes clear to anyone who reads between its lines, is to stress that the Palestinian forces are subservient to Israel. Last year, the ministry gloats, was a record one for “coordinated actions” between Israeli and Palestinian security forces, with almost 1,300 taking place, a 72 percent rise over 2008.
In its monthly newsletters, COPPS promotes the training offered by its human rights specialist Diane Halley to Palestinian police. This propaganda cannot be allowed to mask how the EU has enabled a situation develop where gross abuses occur within a culture of impunity. Whereas COPPS’s original mandate allowed it to support police in both the West Bank and Gaza, the Union’s refusal to engage with the de facto Hamas administration in Gaza has meant that it has been encouraging disunity among Palestinians.
Worse again, the EU has connived in the creation of what an alliance of Palestinian human rights groups recently called “a police state” within the occupied territories. While these groups – including the Palestinian Center for Human Rights, Al Haq and the Women’s Center for Legal Aid and Counselling – stress that most violations committed by the Palestinian authorities are a “direct result” of tensions between Fatah and Hamas, the EU has been largely silent about the abuses.
During a press briefing in May, Malmquist stated that COPPS wishes to “export core European Union values” such as respect for fundamental rights. A few minutes later, a Palestinian police spokesman Yossef Ozreil insisted that there is “no more torture” by his colleagues against political rivals.
Malmquist did not contradict this assurance, yet evidence amassed by the Arab Organisation for Human Rights suggests that Ozreil was dishonest. Mohammed Jamil, a spokesman for the organisation, said that there is an average of seven arrests in the West Bank each day, with between 700 and 800 rounded up in the Hebron area last month after Hamas gunmen killed four Israeli settlers. Torture of detainees is widespread, he added. Methods found to have been used include tying people to the ceiling and suspending them, aping crucifixions by tying people to doors with their arms and legs outstretched and beatings by sticks. One of the victims had a boiled egg placed on his backside, Jamil told me. “They [the security forces] made jokes about him – that he was like a chicken giving birth to eggs.”
On paper, the main distinction between COPPS and the US security coordinator in the West Bank is that the former interacts with the Palestinian civil police and the latter with the more militarised National Security Force. In practice, there is extensive overlap between the two international operations; Dayton has said that one of his objectives was to eliminate any duplication of efforts between aid donors to the Palestinian Authority. As well as employing several British members of staff in his team, Dayton enjoyed close contacts with the two Britons who headed COPPS before Malmquist took up his post in January this year: Colin Smith and Paul Kernaghan.
The extent to which Dayton may have advised forces loyal to Fatah to resort to brutal means in attacking Hamas supporters has not yet been revealed. One thing that is clear, however, is Dayton’s understanding that his job was to underscore the Palestinian Authority’s subordination to Israel. “We don’t provide anything to the Palestinians unless it has been thoroughly coordinated with the state of Israel and they agree to it,” he has said.
Daud Abdullah, director of Middle East Monitor, a research institute in London, says it is inconceivable that Dayton was unaware of the abuses conducted by Palestinian security forces. “There has been no let-up in abuses as far as we know,” Abdullah added. “The fact that money is still flowing and [international] officials are still on the ground makes them culpable for what is happening.”
COPPS has a budget of nearly 7 million euros (9.7 million dollars) for this year. This sum appears small on its own. Yet it cannot be separated from the wider support that the EU gives to the Palestinian Authority, which amounts to 947 million euros since 2008.
Europe’s representatives rarely miss an opportunity to trumpet their generosity to the Palestinians. Although donors are undoubtedly financing the provision of many essential services in the occupied territories, tough questions need to be asked about much of this aid and how it is being tailored to serve Israel’s interests. Few taxpayers would be pleased to know that their hard-earned euros are subsidising an illegal occupation.
·First published by The Electronic Intifada (www.electronicintifada.net), 12 October 2010
Friday, September 3, 2010
Europe's Alliance With Israel
Nine years after it was delivered, Tony Blair’s speech to the 2001 Labour Party conference remains a chilling piece of hubris and hypocrisy. Britain’s government, he claimed, was not only concerned with the well-being of its own people but with the entire planet. “The starving, the wretched, the dispossessed, the ignorant, those living in want and squalor from the deserts of northern Africa to the slums of Gaza, to the mountains of Afghanistan: they too are our cause.”
Blair’s protégé Catherine Ashton has evidently learned a few tricks from the war criminal who masquerades as a peace envoy. As the EU’s foreign policy chief (“high representative” in Brussels parlance), Ashton has been diligently spreading the myth that she and other senior European politicians are even-handed in dealing with the Israel-Palestine conflict.
Ashton – appointed a life peer and a minister under Blair - recently denounced the criminal conviction that an Israeli military court handed down to Abdullah Abu Rahmeh, an organiser of weekly demonstrations against the massive wall that penetrates deep into the West Bank. Read on its own, Ashton’s two-paragraph response to the conviction appears laudable, giving the impression that the EU is determined to defend the Palestinians’ right to protest against the theft of their homeland.
Yet this is the same Ashton who has generally displayed a shameful disregard for Palestinian prisoners until now. When she met Israel’s overtly racist foreign minister Avigdor Lieberman in July, the only detainee on Ashton’s mind was the Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit, who was captured (not “kidnapped”, as many newspaper stories would have us believe) by Hamas in 2006. Certainly, Shalit should be treated humanely and there are compelling reasons for arguing he should be released on compassionate grounds. But it was entirely wrong of Ashton to focus on a soldier who was enforcing a brutal occupation, while not uttering one word – in public, at least – about the plight of Palestinian prisoners. Had her advisers consulted the organisation Defence for Children International, she could have learnt that at the very moment she was posing for photographs with Lieberman, Israel was holding more than 280 Palestinians aged between 12 and 17. Each year Israel detains an average of 700 Palestinian children – usually for an offence no more serious than throwing stones at one of the world’s most powerful armies. Most of these children are held within Israel, in violation of international law; under the Fourth Geneva Convention, people convicted in an occupied territory may only be jailed inside that territory.
Or a glance at the website run by Addameer, a prisoners support group, could have equipped Ashton with the alarming statistic that 650,000 Palestinians – one-fifth of the population in the occupied territories – have been locked up by Israel since 1967. Indeed, the Israeli government is responsible for the incarceration of an entire people – Gaza is routinely and accurately described as the world’s largest open-air prison; the West Bank has become a patchwork of checkpoints and roadblocks, where the ill and injured often die because Israeli troops stop them from travelling to see a doctor.
Ashton’s chumminess with Lieberman – a man who does not live in the state that he represents but in an illegal settlement – is at odds with how she shuns Hamas, the winners of a 2006 election. Even though the EU’s own observers deemed that election to be free and fair, the unelected Ashton has refused to meet local political leaders on the two occasions she has visited Gaza. Such a snub would be virtually unthinkable if she was travelling anywhere else.
And what can be said of her reaction to the attack on the Gaza Freedom Flotilla at the end of May? Nine peace activists were murdered by the state of Israel in its unprovoked raid on the Turkish ship, the Mavi Marmara, but all we got from Ashton was an inspid statement describing the incident as a “tragedy” (this implied that she did not feel that the deaths had been caused deliberately). She has subsequently been reticent about the sham investigation that Israel has called into the attack. The proverbial dogs on the street know that David Trimble, a leading foreign observer to the inquiry, cannot be considered impartial; earlier this year the former Ulster Unionist leader set up a new “friends of Israel” group. Trimble is clearly a propagandist for Israel but Ashton cannot bring herself to say so.
On the subject of propaganda, Ashton appears to have gobbled up and digested many of the lies that flow interminably from the Israeli government. In July, she welcomed the minor modifications that Israel had made to its economic blockade of Gaza as a “significant step forward”. It is instructive that her message was almost identical to that which Tony Blair had been sending over the preceding month. Despite maintaining the pretence that he is an international “peace” envoy for the Middle East, Blair had been selling the planned “easing” of the blockade as a diplomatic triumph (he has sought credit for brokering it), long before he had been appraised of just how much easing would occur. The truth, of course, is far less cheery: the imports of tomato ketchup and mayonnaise now allowed to Gazans have not halted the wider strangulation of their economy, nor the denial of their elementary rights.
Ashton’s obsequious attitude towards Israel follows many years in which the EU has become increasingly acquiescent towards Israel’s crimes against humanity. Under the terms of an EU-Israel association agreement that came into effect in 2000, Israel is required to respect fundamental human rights in order to qualify for privileged commercial access to the Union’s markets. Heaps of documentation illustrating that Israel has not complied with this provision have been accumulated over the past decade, yet not only has the EU refused to rescind Israel’s existing trade privileges, it has granted further perks. An agreement on agricultural trade concluded in November 2009, for example, lets Israel export 80 percent of its fresh produce and 95 percent of its processed foods to the EU free of customs duties. Theoretically, this only applies to goods from within Israel’s internationally recognised borders. In practice, the Israeli exporter Agrexco mixes up crops grown in Israel and those grown in Israeli settlements in the West Bank in its warehouses, then labels the whole lot as “made in Israel”.
Meanwhile, Israel has been integrated into the EU’s economic and political programmes to such a degree that it has become a member state of the Union in all but name. That is not just my observation. Speaking in Jerusalem last year, Javier Solana – Ashton’s predecessor as foreign policy chief – said that Israel is “a member of the European Union, without being a member of the institutions.”
The EU-funded programmes involving Israel range from archaeology to enterprise promotion. While their activities vary, their effect is the same: they help confer a kind of respectability on Israel that this rogue state does not merit. One especially malevolent example of this cooperation is that Israeli weapons companies – the makers of weapons used to kill and maim civilians in Lebanon in 2006 and Gaza over the past two years – are busily drawing funds from the EU’s scientific research programme. Israeli firms and universities are on course to receive more than 500 million euros from this programme under its current duration (2007-13).
Diplomats say that EU-Israel relations tend to follow a simple logic. When the “peace process” is seen to be going well, the relationship improves; when it encounters difficulty, the relationship sours. Although efforts to formally “upgrade” the relationship so that Israel can be brought further into the EU’s structures have dragged somewhat lately because of widespread public revulsion at Israel’s attacks on Gaza, there is now a possibility that the momentum will be regained. The likelihood that “direct negotiations” soon to get underway between Binyamin Netanyahu, the Israeli premier, and Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian “president” (his term actually expired in early 2010) will lead to a meaningful peace is almost nil, at least if we understand peace as not being the absence of war but the presence of justice. However, the talks could conceivably give the EU’s 27 governments a pretext to clasp Israel closer to their bosom.
Israel’s serial defiance of international law and the way it treats Palestinians as sub-humans should be deplored by decent people everywhere. The willingness of our governments to accommodate Israel’s transgressions is similarly despicable and worthy of similar outrage.
•First published by New Left Project (www.newleftproject.org), 3 September 2010
Blair’s protégé Catherine Ashton has evidently learned a few tricks from the war criminal who masquerades as a peace envoy. As the EU’s foreign policy chief (“high representative” in Brussels parlance), Ashton has been diligently spreading the myth that she and other senior European politicians are even-handed in dealing with the Israel-Palestine conflict.
Ashton – appointed a life peer and a minister under Blair - recently denounced the criminal conviction that an Israeli military court handed down to Abdullah Abu Rahmeh, an organiser of weekly demonstrations against the massive wall that penetrates deep into the West Bank. Read on its own, Ashton’s two-paragraph response to the conviction appears laudable, giving the impression that the EU is determined to defend the Palestinians’ right to protest against the theft of their homeland.
Yet this is the same Ashton who has generally displayed a shameful disregard for Palestinian prisoners until now. When she met Israel’s overtly racist foreign minister Avigdor Lieberman in July, the only detainee on Ashton’s mind was the Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit, who was captured (not “kidnapped”, as many newspaper stories would have us believe) by Hamas in 2006. Certainly, Shalit should be treated humanely and there are compelling reasons for arguing he should be released on compassionate grounds. But it was entirely wrong of Ashton to focus on a soldier who was enforcing a brutal occupation, while not uttering one word – in public, at least – about the plight of Palestinian prisoners. Had her advisers consulted the organisation Defence for Children International, she could have learnt that at the very moment she was posing for photographs with Lieberman, Israel was holding more than 280 Palestinians aged between 12 and 17. Each year Israel detains an average of 700 Palestinian children – usually for an offence no more serious than throwing stones at one of the world’s most powerful armies. Most of these children are held within Israel, in violation of international law; under the Fourth Geneva Convention, people convicted in an occupied territory may only be jailed inside that territory.
Or a glance at the website run by Addameer, a prisoners support group, could have equipped Ashton with the alarming statistic that 650,000 Palestinians – one-fifth of the population in the occupied territories – have been locked up by Israel since 1967. Indeed, the Israeli government is responsible for the incarceration of an entire people – Gaza is routinely and accurately described as the world’s largest open-air prison; the West Bank has become a patchwork of checkpoints and roadblocks, where the ill and injured often die because Israeli troops stop them from travelling to see a doctor.
Ashton’s chumminess with Lieberman – a man who does not live in the state that he represents but in an illegal settlement – is at odds with how she shuns Hamas, the winners of a 2006 election. Even though the EU’s own observers deemed that election to be free and fair, the unelected Ashton has refused to meet local political leaders on the two occasions she has visited Gaza. Such a snub would be virtually unthinkable if she was travelling anywhere else.
And what can be said of her reaction to the attack on the Gaza Freedom Flotilla at the end of May? Nine peace activists were murdered by the state of Israel in its unprovoked raid on the Turkish ship, the Mavi Marmara, but all we got from Ashton was an inspid statement describing the incident as a “tragedy” (this implied that she did not feel that the deaths had been caused deliberately). She has subsequently been reticent about the sham investigation that Israel has called into the attack. The proverbial dogs on the street know that David Trimble, a leading foreign observer to the inquiry, cannot be considered impartial; earlier this year the former Ulster Unionist leader set up a new “friends of Israel” group. Trimble is clearly a propagandist for Israel but Ashton cannot bring herself to say so.
On the subject of propaganda, Ashton appears to have gobbled up and digested many of the lies that flow interminably from the Israeli government. In July, she welcomed the minor modifications that Israel had made to its economic blockade of Gaza as a “significant step forward”. It is instructive that her message was almost identical to that which Tony Blair had been sending over the preceding month. Despite maintaining the pretence that he is an international “peace” envoy for the Middle East, Blair had been selling the planned “easing” of the blockade as a diplomatic triumph (he has sought credit for brokering it), long before he had been appraised of just how much easing would occur. The truth, of course, is far less cheery: the imports of tomato ketchup and mayonnaise now allowed to Gazans have not halted the wider strangulation of their economy, nor the denial of their elementary rights.
Ashton’s obsequious attitude towards Israel follows many years in which the EU has become increasingly acquiescent towards Israel’s crimes against humanity. Under the terms of an EU-Israel association agreement that came into effect in 2000, Israel is required to respect fundamental human rights in order to qualify for privileged commercial access to the Union’s markets. Heaps of documentation illustrating that Israel has not complied with this provision have been accumulated over the past decade, yet not only has the EU refused to rescind Israel’s existing trade privileges, it has granted further perks. An agreement on agricultural trade concluded in November 2009, for example, lets Israel export 80 percent of its fresh produce and 95 percent of its processed foods to the EU free of customs duties. Theoretically, this only applies to goods from within Israel’s internationally recognised borders. In practice, the Israeli exporter Agrexco mixes up crops grown in Israel and those grown in Israeli settlements in the West Bank in its warehouses, then labels the whole lot as “made in Israel”.
Meanwhile, Israel has been integrated into the EU’s economic and political programmes to such a degree that it has become a member state of the Union in all but name. That is not just my observation. Speaking in Jerusalem last year, Javier Solana – Ashton’s predecessor as foreign policy chief – said that Israel is “a member of the European Union, without being a member of the institutions.”
The EU-funded programmes involving Israel range from archaeology to enterprise promotion. While their activities vary, their effect is the same: they help confer a kind of respectability on Israel that this rogue state does not merit. One especially malevolent example of this cooperation is that Israeli weapons companies – the makers of weapons used to kill and maim civilians in Lebanon in 2006 and Gaza over the past two years – are busily drawing funds from the EU’s scientific research programme. Israeli firms and universities are on course to receive more than 500 million euros from this programme under its current duration (2007-13).
Diplomats say that EU-Israel relations tend to follow a simple logic. When the “peace process” is seen to be going well, the relationship improves; when it encounters difficulty, the relationship sours. Although efforts to formally “upgrade” the relationship so that Israel can be brought further into the EU’s structures have dragged somewhat lately because of widespread public revulsion at Israel’s attacks on Gaza, there is now a possibility that the momentum will be regained. The likelihood that “direct negotiations” soon to get underway between Binyamin Netanyahu, the Israeli premier, and Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian “president” (his term actually expired in early 2010) will lead to a meaningful peace is almost nil, at least if we understand peace as not being the absence of war but the presence of justice. However, the talks could conceivably give the EU’s 27 governments a pretext to clasp Israel closer to their bosom.
Israel’s serial defiance of international law and the way it treats Palestinians as sub-humans should be deplored by decent people everywhere. The willingness of our governments to accommodate Israel’s transgressions is similarly despicable and worthy of similar outrage.
•First published by New Left Project (www.newleftproject.org), 3 September 2010
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)