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.
Showing posts with label West Bank wall. Show all posts
Showing posts with label West Bank wall. Show all posts
Tuesday, August 2, 2011
Thursday, June 9, 2011
Silence over EU science grants to Israel's war machine
Top European Union officials seem to be in denial about how they are subsidising Israel’s war industry in the name of innovation.
Although it probably won’t send pulses racing in many newsrooms, a vitally important debate is taking place at the moment about the future of Europe’s policy on scientific research. The debate directly concerns Israel because it is the most active non-European participant in the Union’s multi-annual programme for research. Manufacturers of the weapons used to blitz Gaza during Operation Cast Lead have proven especially adept at accessing funds from the programme, which has been allocated 53 billion euros ($37 billion) between 2007 and 2013.
The ethical and legal questions behind handing over taxpayers’ money to Israeli arms companies are being avoided by the Brussels elite. On Friday (10 June), Europe’s science commissioner Máire Geoghegan Quinn will host a conference to discuss what the priorities of the successor programme – beginning in 2014 – should be. If the agenda for the event is anything to go by, the discussion will be dominated by big picture themes like “strengthening competitiveness” and “tackling societal challenges”. Israel is barely mentioned in preparatory documents – or at least in those that have been made public.
The EU’s cowardice towards Israel is in stark contrast to the stance taken by Norway. In 2009, the Oslo government decided that a state-owned pension scheme should withdraw its investment in Elbit because that Israeli company had supplied an electronic surveillance system to the annexation wall in the West Bank. Yet despite how the wall was declared unlawful by the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in 2004, Elbit has been deemed eligible to take part in at least four EU-funded science projects for the 2007-13 period.
Both Elbit and Israel Aerospace Industries (IAI) made the pilotless drones or unmanned air vehicles (UAVs) used to bomb Gaza’s civilians in 2008 and 2009. IAI has similarly contributed components to surveillance equipment fitted into the West Bank wall. And IAI is doing nicely, too, out of the EU, taking part in no fewer than 15 of its research projects.
I have quizzed Geoghegan Quinn and her aides about Israel on several occasions. The pat response I have always got is that all of the schemes being financed are of a civilian nature, so there’s nothing to worry about. That is hogwash. There are no safeguards in place to stop the Israeli companies from applying the fruits of this research to developing more sophisticated warplanes than they have in their present arsenal. And you don’t need to be a bearded boffin to see how the results of these projects could be adapted for military purposes. A 70 million euro project named Maaximus – involving IAI and bankrolled by Europe - aims to create lighter and more affordable aircraft. Could it be helping develop the slimmed-down warplanes of the future?
It is a measure of how reliant academics have become on corporate and even military funding that they can defend this grotesque situation. Konstantin Novoselov, 2010 winner of Nobel Prize for Physics, was in Brussels during May to give his input to the debate on Europe’s science policy. The Russian-British scientist told me he was “sick” of people complaining about Israel and argued that the EU gains more from Israel’s participation in its research activities than Israel does itself. It is unlikely to be a coincidence that his views echo those of many Brussels officials, who claim that because Israel invests heavily in technology, the EU needs to court Israel if the Union’s domestic technology sector is to ever flourish.
Fortunately, there are other academics more willing to speak out. The British Committee for the Universities of Palestine (BRICUP) has filed a complaint with the European Commission recently. “The EU continues to fund Israeli research in full knowledge of its exploitation by the state of Israel in the oppression of the Palestinian people,” BRICUP wrote. In total, the Israelis expect they will have pocketed more than 500 million euros from the current research programme once it concludes at the end of 2013.
The aforementioned ICJ verdict stipulated that every country is under an obligation not to “render aid or assistance” that would help sustain the illegal situation created by the West Bank wall. Surely, the granting of EU subsidies to companies that helped build that wall constitutes such “aid or assistance”. Why are Europe’s representatives so nonchalant about their support for crimes against humanity?
·First published by Mondoweiss (www.mondoweiss.net), 8 June 2011
Although it probably won’t send pulses racing in many newsrooms, a vitally important debate is taking place at the moment about the future of Europe’s policy on scientific research. The debate directly concerns Israel because it is the most active non-European participant in the Union’s multi-annual programme for research. Manufacturers of the weapons used to blitz Gaza during Operation Cast Lead have proven especially adept at accessing funds from the programme, which has been allocated 53 billion euros ($37 billion) between 2007 and 2013.
The ethical and legal questions behind handing over taxpayers’ money to Israeli arms companies are being avoided by the Brussels elite. On Friday (10 June), Europe’s science commissioner Máire Geoghegan Quinn will host a conference to discuss what the priorities of the successor programme – beginning in 2014 – should be. If the agenda for the event is anything to go by, the discussion will be dominated by big picture themes like “strengthening competitiveness” and “tackling societal challenges”. Israel is barely mentioned in preparatory documents – or at least in those that have been made public.
The EU’s cowardice towards Israel is in stark contrast to the stance taken by Norway. In 2009, the Oslo government decided that a state-owned pension scheme should withdraw its investment in Elbit because that Israeli company had supplied an electronic surveillance system to the annexation wall in the West Bank. Yet despite how the wall was declared unlawful by the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in 2004, Elbit has been deemed eligible to take part in at least four EU-funded science projects for the 2007-13 period.
Both Elbit and Israel Aerospace Industries (IAI) made the pilotless drones or unmanned air vehicles (UAVs) used to bomb Gaza’s civilians in 2008 and 2009. IAI has similarly contributed components to surveillance equipment fitted into the West Bank wall. And IAI is doing nicely, too, out of the EU, taking part in no fewer than 15 of its research projects.
I have quizzed Geoghegan Quinn and her aides about Israel on several occasions. The pat response I have always got is that all of the schemes being financed are of a civilian nature, so there’s nothing to worry about. That is hogwash. There are no safeguards in place to stop the Israeli companies from applying the fruits of this research to developing more sophisticated warplanes than they have in their present arsenal. And you don’t need to be a bearded boffin to see how the results of these projects could be adapted for military purposes. A 70 million euro project named Maaximus – involving IAI and bankrolled by Europe - aims to create lighter and more affordable aircraft. Could it be helping develop the slimmed-down warplanes of the future?
It is a measure of how reliant academics have become on corporate and even military funding that they can defend this grotesque situation. Konstantin Novoselov, 2010 winner of Nobel Prize for Physics, was in Brussels during May to give his input to the debate on Europe’s science policy. The Russian-British scientist told me he was “sick” of people complaining about Israel and argued that the EU gains more from Israel’s participation in its research activities than Israel does itself. It is unlikely to be a coincidence that his views echo those of many Brussels officials, who claim that because Israel invests heavily in technology, the EU needs to court Israel if the Union’s domestic technology sector is to ever flourish.
Fortunately, there are other academics more willing to speak out. The British Committee for the Universities of Palestine (BRICUP) has filed a complaint with the European Commission recently. “The EU continues to fund Israeli research in full knowledge of its exploitation by the state of Israel in the oppression of the Palestinian people,” BRICUP wrote. In total, the Israelis expect they will have pocketed more than 500 million euros from the current research programme once it concludes at the end of 2013.
The aforementioned ICJ verdict stipulated that every country is under an obligation not to “render aid or assistance” that would help sustain the illegal situation created by the West Bank wall. Surely, the granting of EU subsidies to companies that helped build that wall constitutes such “aid or assistance”. Why are Europe’s representatives so nonchalant about their support for crimes against humanity?
·First published by Mondoweiss (www.mondoweiss.net), 8 June 2011
Friday, January 7, 2011
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
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
Tuesday, September 28, 2010
Israeli army donations enjoy tax perks
Organisations raising funds to benefit the Israeli army and illegal settlements in the West Bank enjoy tax-exempt status in Europe, an investigation has shown.
The Sar-El Foundation is one of several groups working in the Netherlands dedicated to supporting the Israel Defence Forces. It organises regular visits to Israel, where Dutch volunteers spend three week periods training with the IDF.
Max Arpels Lezer, the foundation’s Amsterdam-based chairman, said that he tries to encourage volunteers to work in Israeli hospitals but if “that is not possible they can do civilian work on military bases.” He has previously stated that while the volunteers do not become soldiers, “they help in the battle against the Palestinians”. But he would not comment when asked why he wishes to assist the Israeli army, given that a United Nations inquiry led by retired South African judge Richard Goldstone found that its troops committed war crimes during a three-week offensive against Gaza in 2008 and 2009.
“I don’t wish to answer the question,” he said. “We don’t talk about politics. Our organisation is a non-political organisation.”
Under Dutch law, foundations such as Sar-El are exempt from tax and individuals giving money to them can deduct the donations from their income tax.
A similar group Collectieve Israël Action (Collective Action Israel) collects about 8 million euros (11 million dollars) per year, according to its website. Among the projects it assists are training for Israeli soldiers, particularly on the applications of advanced technology. The CIA’s board of advisers includes Doron Livnat, director of Riwal, a supplier of cranes used in the construction of the massive wall that Israel has built in the West Bank. That wall was found to be illegal in a 2004 opinion issued by the International Court of Justice in The Hague.
The Nachamoe Foundation, meanwhile, raises money for the upkeep of Israeli families. The foundation has admitted that some of the families live on Israeli settlements between Jerusalem and Bethlehem. These settlements violate international law; the 1949 Fourth Geneva Convention forbids an occupying power from transferring part of its own civilian population into the land it is occupying.
Some groups in the Netherlands have categorised support for the IDF as “humanitarian aid”. Visie voor Israël (Vision for Israel) encourages its sympathisers to give donations that will be used to buy gifts such as backpacks for Israeli soldiers. A newsletter from the organisation says that the quantity of gifts provided has increased substantially since the Israeli army’s offensive against Gaza over the past two years.
Shuva is one of several Christian Zionist organisations working in the Netherlands viewing the foundation of Israel and the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza as the fulfilment of a Biblical prophecy. According to one of its 2009 newsletters, it has financed a school in Nofei Nechemia, an extension (frequently termed an “illegal outpost” by Israeli newspapers) of the Israeli settlement of Ariel the West Bank. Shuva has stated too that it helps hundreds of settlers to establish themselves in four Israeli communities in the West Bank every year.
A spokesman for the Dutch inland revenue service said that the country’s tax rules do not contain any clauses relating to breaches of international law. He said that Dutch legislation allows non-profit organisations to apply for tax exemptions based on their stated goals. “At any given moment, the Dutch tax authorities may decide to revoke this favoured status” after examining the activities of those benefiting from it, he added. But the spokesman said he was unable to speak about the status enjoyed by any particular organisation.
Ghada Zeidan from United Civilians for Peace, a Palestinian solidarity group in the Netherlands, said it is “very difficult” to convince the authorities that they should take action against fundraising by pro-Israel organisations. “The problem is that there is a kind of culture of acceptance of it,” she added.
Earlier this year a campaign was launched in Britain to have the Jewish National Fund (JNF) stripped of its status as a charity. While the JNF presents itself as an ecologically-minded body that plants trees in Israel, it has actively supported violence against Palestinians for many decades. One of its leading figures Yosef Weitz explicitly advocated in 1940 – eight years before the state of Israel was founded - that Palestinians should be forced out of Palestine. More recently, the JNF has concentrated much of its energies on settling Jews in the Negev, a process that has involved the uprooting of indigenous Bedouins, often by the destruction of their homes.
The latest accounts made public by the JNF in London say that its total income for 2008 amounted to 7.7 million pounds (12.2 million dollars). Another priority for the fund has been to help the Benji Hillman Foundation; set up in memory of a soldier killed when Israel attacked Lebanon in 2006, it offers accommodation to young people who travel from abroad to join the Israeli army.
A spokesman for the British revenue authority would not say if any investigations have been undertaken into the JNF’s activities.
The International Solidarity Movement (ISM) – one of the organisations monitoring the JNF’s work – is seeking a probe into whether fund-raisers for foreign armies can be considered charities under British law. Matthew Richardson, an ISM activist, noted that the JNF has powerful allies – David Cameron, the current British prime minister, has agreed to be one of its patrons; so too did his predecessors Gordon Brown and Tony Blair. Richardson added: “The JNF is very embedded within the (pro-Israel) lobby and the political elite as a whole.”
•First published by Inter Press Service (www.ipsnews.net), 28 September 2010
The Sar-El Foundation is one of several groups working in the Netherlands dedicated to supporting the Israel Defence Forces. It organises regular visits to Israel, where Dutch volunteers spend three week periods training with the IDF.
Max Arpels Lezer, the foundation’s Amsterdam-based chairman, said that he tries to encourage volunteers to work in Israeli hospitals but if “that is not possible they can do civilian work on military bases.” He has previously stated that while the volunteers do not become soldiers, “they help in the battle against the Palestinians”. But he would not comment when asked why he wishes to assist the Israeli army, given that a United Nations inquiry led by retired South African judge Richard Goldstone found that its troops committed war crimes during a three-week offensive against Gaza in 2008 and 2009.
“I don’t wish to answer the question,” he said. “We don’t talk about politics. Our organisation is a non-political organisation.”
Under Dutch law, foundations such as Sar-El are exempt from tax and individuals giving money to them can deduct the donations from their income tax.
A similar group Collectieve Israël Action (Collective Action Israel) collects about 8 million euros (11 million dollars) per year, according to its website. Among the projects it assists are training for Israeli soldiers, particularly on the applications of advanced technology. The CIA’s board of advisers includes Doron Livnat, director of Riwal, a supplier of cranes used in the construction of the massive wall that Israel has built in the West Bank. That wall was found to be illegal in a 2004 opinion issued by the International Court of Justice in The Hague.
The Nachamoe Foundation, meanwhile, raises money for the upkeep of Israeli families. The foundation has admitted that some of the families live on Israeli settlements between Jerusalem and Bethlehem. These settlements violate international law; the 1949 Fourth Geneva Convention forbids an occupying power from transferring part of its own civilian population into the land it is occupying.
Some groups in the Netherlands have categorised support for the IDF as “humanitarian aid”. Visie voor Israël (Vision for Israel) encourages its sympathisers to give donations that will be used to buy gifts such as backpacks for Israeli soldiers. A newsletter from the organisation says that the quantity of gifts provided has increased substantially since the Israeli army’s offensive against Gaza over the past two years.
Shuva is one of several Christian Zionist organisations working in the Netherlands viewing the foundation of Israel and the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza as the fulfilment of a Biblical prophecy. According to one of its 2009 newsletters, it has financed a school in Nofei Nechemia, an extension (frequently termed an “illegal outpost” by Israeli newspapers) of the Israeli settlement of Ariel the West Bank. Shuva has stated too that it helps hundreds of settlers to establish themselves in four Israeli communities in the West Bank every year.
A spokesman for the Dutch inland revenue service said that the country’s tax rules do not contain any clauses relating to breaches of international law. He said that Dutch legislation allows non-profit organisations to apply for tax exemptions based on their stated goals. “At any given moment, the Dutch tax authorities may decide to revoke this favoured status” after examining the activities of those benefiting from it, he added. But the spokesman said he was unable to speak about the status enjoyed by any particular organisation.
Ghada Zeidan from United Civilians for Peace, a Palestinian solidarity group in the Netherlands, said it is “very difficult” to convince the authorities that they should take action against fundraising by pro-Israel organisations. “The problem is that there is a kind of culture of acceptance of it,” she added.
Earlier this year a campaign was launched in Britain to have the Jewish National Fund (JNF) stripped of its status as a charity. While the JNF presents itself as an ecologically-minded body that plants trees in Israel, it has actively supported violence against Palestinians for many decades. One of its leading figures Yosef Weitz explicitly advocated in 1940 – eight years before the state of Israel was founded - that Palestinians should be forced out of Palestine. More recently, the JNF has concentrated much of its energies on settling Jews in the Negev, a process that has involved the uprooting of indigenous Bedouins, often by the destruction of their homes.
The latest accounts made public by the JNF in London say that its total income for 2008 amounted to 7.7 million pounds (12.2 million dollars). Another priority for the fund has been to help the Benji Hillman Foundation; set up in memory of a soldier killed when Israel attacked Lebanon in 2006, it offers accommodation to young people who travel from abroad to join the Israeli army.
A spokesman for the British revenue authority would not say if any investigations have been undertaken into the JNF’s activities.
The International Solidarity Movement (ISM) – one of the organisations monitoring the JNF’s work – is seeking a probe into whether fund-raisers for foreign armies can be considered charities under British law. Matthew Richardson, an ISM activist, noted that the JNF has powerful allies – David Cameron, the current British prime minister, has agreed to be one of its patrons; so too did his predecessors Gordon Brown and Tony Blair. Richardson added: “The JNF is very embedded within the (pro-Israel) lobby and the political elite as a whole.”
•First published by Inter Press Service (www.ipsnews.net), 28 September 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
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