Tuesday 27 March 2018

Thinking clearly about Russia

The West is in a fever about Russia, due apparently to the ghastly attempt to murder two Russians, one of them a former double agent from the FSB, in a shopping centre in Salisbury a couple of weeks ago.  The assassination attempt utilized a nerve agent - a 'chemical weapon' - which used to be manufactured by the USSR.  Russia has denied responsibility for the assault.

Over the last couple of days, 16 EU countries, and the United States, have announced the expulsion of upwards of 100 Russian diplomats, now labeled as spies.  Taoiseach Leo Varadkar has apparently been to the forefront of the butch EU response, leading the charge with President Macron. The Irish government, having ordered a 'security review' of the 17 Russian diplomats based in Dublin, is due this morning to announce action which may include expulsions.  Ireland is dependent for most of its intelligence information and assessment in this situation (and in many other situations) on allies such as the UK.

There are a number of problems here.  Firstly, it is not entirely clear why more of the evidence or 'intelligence' which leads Britain to conclude that the attack was made by Russian agents cannot be made public.  It's likely that my expressing such an opinion is naive, in that for Britain to expose its information would be to reveal its own intelligence procedures and the kinds of information that count as 'evidence': one only needs to remember the 'evidence' which was produced to justify intervention in Iraq in 2003 by both Britain and the United States.  But of course just because the information in 2003 was a tissue of lies and fantasies does not mean that the information now is similar.  More openness about it is surely up for discussion.

Secondly, it's transparent that expulsions of diplomats are merely symbolic.   A much more powerful and credible action for Britain and its allies, including Ireland, to take would be to let the existing inquiries by the police and other agencies at Salisbury to come to their conclusions, and on the basis of those investigations, on the basis of some effort to establish the truth of what happened, then to take action.  If Western powers such as the United Kingdom and its EU allies wish to portray themselves as governed by the rule of law, in a way which distinguishes them from Russia and other countries, then surely the course of the law must run?

Thirdly, my naivety does not extend to failing to notice that Prime Minister May's very large success in winning international diplomatic support to attack or push back against an old enemy and rival comes at a time of utter confusion in British politics due to the Brexit negotiations and the cupidity, ignorance and rank incompetence they have revealed within the Conservative party and government, and the diplomatic rancour with Europe which they have caused.  Opposing Russia helps close ranks inside Britain and between Britain and its erstwhile European partners.  It makes Mrs May look like a strong leader, and makes a mendacious and self-serving booby like Boris Johnson look, briefly, like he might be on the right side of an argument.  Any situation where Irish intelligence assessment or information gathering is dependent on figures as ideologically partisan and given to lies as Johnson is worrying.

Fourthly, the current dispute comes at a moment of wider souring of relations between the West and Russia.  Gone are the days when Vladimir Putin was seen as a modernising and democratising leader, gone are the days when he could talk of closer relations with the EU and even of Russia applying to join NATO.   Western leaders now prefer to talk about Russian belligerence, corruption, gathering authoritarianism: oppression of  gay people, support for Bashar al Assad's brutal government in Syria's civil war, a rigged presidential election.  The rhetoric now is of a 'new Cold War'.  Political rhetorics are not unrelated to material conditions, but they also have a worrying way of shaping reality themselves.  The problem with the discursive framework of 'the new Cold War' is its de-historicising tendency - the  implication that what is going on now between Russia and the West is a replay of 'what went on' between 1946 and 1991 between the West and the USSR.  This notion is profoundly inaccurate, and very unhelpful.

Before going any further, I should point out that I am aware of the deeply unpleasant character of the current Russian government, and I am in no way a champion of Russia or Mr Putin as a moral counterweight to Western imperialism or American influence, as some on the Left unfortunately and misguidedly are.  The Russian government is corrupt, violent towards its own people, both supportive of and a symptom of the brutal turbo-capitalism which has taken root in Russia since the 1990s.  Russia is not a democracy and its human rights record is terrible.  But the current characterisation of Russia on the international stage as a potentially world-threatening behemoth is ludicrous and dangerous.

The 'new Cold War' framework has a number of problematic implications.  It suggests a parity of power and influence between Russia and its Western antagonists.  It suggests, to some, that Russia is now a serious military threat to central and Western Europe.  It suggests, in its most extreme version, that Russia has world-conquering ambitions.   None of these implications are correct.

Russia is a shadow - economically, militarily, diplomatically and ideologically - of the USSR.  Its economy is about half the size of that of the United Kingdom.  Its military capacity - boosted and expanded and rationalised in recent years, certainly - is incomparably weaker than that of NATO and the United States.   Because Russia's economy is actually rather weak, Russia has no 'soft power' - no ability to influence friends or enemies by economic or financial means.  The old USSR, at least until the 1970s, represented a profound ideological or systemic alternative (though an over-rated threat) to Western capitalism and liberal democracy: those days are long gone - if anyone wishes to see capitalism red in tooth and claw, it's not to Los Angeles you need to go, but Moscow.  The USSR's 'alliance' of Stalinist regimes in eastern Europe, the Warsaw Pact, is no more - yet NATO still exists and even grows.

Russia carries itself as a great power, and its government wishes to return it to superpower status.  It still has some of the badges of the latter - permanent membership of the Security Council, nuclear weapons - but its real power is minute in comparison to that of the United States.  The United States spends more on defence than any other country in the world,  and more than the next seven largest spenders (which include Russia, China, India, Israel, Britain, France) put together.  The United States maintains hundreds of bases and facilities necessary for 'forward force projection' around the globe, particularly in the Middle East and the Far East.  The United States still keeps enormous naval power in the Mediterranean, in the  western Pacific, and in the  Persian Gulf - each of these naval task forces is more powerful than the entire naval capacity of Russia (and of all other countries).   Under the dovish Barack Obama, the United States initiated a large review and expansion of its nuclear forces.

By comparison, the Russian armed forces are weak and often out of date.  The Russian military is staffed by conscripts.  Whole sections of the Russian army, navy and airforce were neglected to the point of becoming useless during the 1990s, when the Russian economy underwent a collapse which no Westerner has yet understood.  It is true that under Putin the Russian military has been modernised, reformed and to a degree professionalised, but it was starting from a position of degeneracy best compared to the state of the old imperial Russian army at the point of its collapse in 1917. 

Irish media recently reported on overflights of Irish territorial waters or areas close to Ireland by 'Russian Bear bombers', as if enormous fleets of Russian aircraft were encroaching on Irish airspace.  But the story is full of holes.  Russia never produced a plane called a 'Bear' - NATO used to give Soviet bomber aircraft code-names beginning with the letter 'B' - hence 'Bear' (the Tu-95), or 'Backfire' (the Tupolev bomber of the same generation as America's Rockwell B-1).   So the planes seen near Ireland were 'Bears' only in NATO nomenclature.  The Tu-95 is a large turboprop aircraft designed in the late 1940s or early 1950s.  Originally, large numbers were constructed and they served as long-range bombers, intended to deliver nuclear weapons - the nearest American  equivalent was the Boeing B-52.  But from the 1970s onward, Tu-95s were mostly phased out of bomber service - their huge size, lack of manoeuverability, lack of low-level performance and sheer noise made them unsuitable for penetrating hostile airspace.  A much smaller  number were re-fitted as long-range reconnaissance aircraft and it's in this form that they still are used today.  A few have been equipped with modern cruise missiles; a few have been deployed in Syria.  The Putin government is keen to retrofit more Tu-95s as cruise-missile platforms, but the entire fleet (about 50 remaining) was grounded in 2017 after two crashed in service.  Russian aircraft are as entitled to use international airspace as any other aircraft.

Adherents of the 'new Cold War' thesis like to point to 'Russian expansionism' in the form of wars in Georgia and Chechnya, support for the Syrian dictatorship, the annexation of the Crimea, and the  fomenting of civil war in the Ukrainian Donbass.   At this  point it's very hard not to invoke the charge of wild hypocrisy.  The world of power politics is one which is rife with hypocrisy, of course, but let's take a look at the record. The 2008 crisis and war with Georgia turned on matters such as trans-Caucasian oil pipelines and the pro-Russian sympathies of South Ossetia and Abhazia (regions of Georgia).  In a brief five-day conflict, Russian forces summarily bundled the Georgian army out of these areas and Russia then recognised the new 'republics'.   Russia's renewed war against Chechnya in 1999-2000 was pursued with a grim ruthlessness of violence justified to home audiences by the charge that Chechen Islamists were responsible for a series of major terrorist attacks in Russia in the late 1990s and into the 2000s.  Russian support for Assad has largely swung that civil war in the favour of the Alawite regime.  The annexation of the Crimean peninsula came in the context of tension in Ukraine as it swung in the 2000s between pro-Western and pro-Russian forces.  In both Crimea and the Donbass, large ethnic Russian local majorities influenced Moscow's action.

In none of these regions and disputes are Russia's hands clean.  In all of these cases save the Syrian war, Russia is acting in the 'near abroad', the zone of former parts of the USSR or the Russian empire.  In most of these cases, Russian cynicism was explicit.   In all of these situations, however, Russia was not acting alone: everywhere, except perhaps Chechnya, there is the trace of Western influence. Russian leaders point with some justice to an undertaking given by James Baker, American Secretary of State under the elder Bush in 1990, that NATO would not extend its scope eastward in the wake of German reunification.   Debate about the nature or legal worth of this understanding has raged ever since.  In Georgia, it's worth remembering that the then-president, Saakashvili, was a corrupt and authoritarian leader bent on making his country a member of NATO.  In Ukraine, the Euromaidan protests of 2013 had turned on Yanukovych's move away from closer ties to the EU.  International vote monitoring had shown that Yanukovych's election in 2010 was legitimate.  But the EU had incautiously pushed forward the possibility of Ukrainian association with and eventual membership of the Union, without thought as to the dubious politicians (such as Yulia Timoshenko) to which it was hitching its wagon.  A Russian reaction, therefore, was inevitable, and duly came with Russian support of protesters and militias in the east.  In Crimea, Russia was acting after several attempts by the regional government to hold referendums on rejoining Russia were quashed arbitrarily by Kiev.  The annexation which took place has been overwhelmingly popular in the peninsula.  In Syria, Russian support of the Assad regime came while Western powers dithered - that dithering allowing the Islamist opposition to Assad to absorb or crush any kind of secular or liberal opposition.  Meanwhile the Western willingness to put pressure on Gulf states which were, directly or indirectly, funding and supporting ghastly elements in Syria such as the Jamaat al-Nusra (an Al Qa'ida affiliate also at times supported by Israel) or Islamic State itself, was nil.

None of these situations are simple or clear.  Russian action was mostly cynical and self-interested.  But so has been that of NATO and the  EU.  Meanwhile, we need to remember the instances of annexation or interference carried out by Western or Western-supported powers in the last several decades.  In 1974, Turkey, a NATO member, unilaterally took over Northern Cyprus and has since annexed this region without being ejected from the alliance and while discussion of Turkish membership of  the  EU has come and gone and is currently being talked about again.  Israel has annexed the Syrian Golan Heights, and effectively annexed the West Bank, over the last 51 years, while remaining the single greatest beneficiary of American overseas aid and a crucial ally of the US, and also enjoying favoured trading status with the  EU and no protest of any seriousness by the Union.  In 1975, the United States connived with the Indonesian invasion and occupation of East Timor, an event the organisation of which was explicitly acknowledged and claimed by Daniel Patrick Moynihan, America's then UN Ambassador.  Over the course of the Indonesian tenure in East Timor, the island's population declined by a third.  And the West has turned a blind eye to the Moroccan annexation of the Western Sahara since 1991.

One might then also mention American or 'NATO' wars of dubious legitimacy in Yugoslavia in 1999, in Iraq in 2003, and  Libya in 2011: no Security Council resolutions supported the attacks  on Yugoslavia and Iraq and the declaration of 'no-fly zones' over Libya rapidly turned into a NATO bombing campaign.  The briefest examination of these countries now shows that the situation in Serbia  and Kosovo remains unstable, and Iraq and Libya have been racked by civil war ever since.

We've said that Russia has no 'soft power' or very little in comparison to what even the USSR had before 1991.  Where are the phalanxes of Russophile countries in Latin America?  In Africa?  In the Middle East, Russia supports Assad's murderous regime, and has moderately warm relations with Iran.  But every other Arab regime, including the neofeudal Gulf tyrannies, not to mention Israel, the Palestinian Authority and all of the Maghreb, is variously within the Western orbit.  In the Far East, Russia increasingly plays third or fourth fiddle to China (which meanwhile cheerfully continues its colonisation of Tibet to almost no Western protest), Japan and India.

In the overall context of Western interventions, then, not to mention Western tolerance for Saudi Arabia's savage war in Yemen, Israel's theft of the Golan and the West Bank and its keeping Gaza 'on a diet', Turkey's recent incursions into Syrian Kurdistan - one could go on and on - Russian 'expansionism' seems rather puny.    Not legitimate (but then the Israelis certainly believe in the confluence of conquest and right), and certainly not disinterested, but on a small scale in comparison to the blunders of the United States and its European confederates.

The best writer on the international situation involving Russia whom I have encountered is John J Mearsheimer.  He is a professor of international relations at the  University of  Chicago.   Mearsheimer stands outside of the American-centered discourses of 'grand strategy' and 'Kremlinology' in important and useful ways.  Yet he is not a radical leftist, either: on the contrary, he'd like to see America pursue a clear-eyed 'realist' foreign policy, suited to its interests.  He's the author or co-author of two particularly notable books.  The second, much better known, is The Israel Lobby (co-written with Stephen Walt).  This book became a cause celebre for its daring to suggest that American foreign policy in the Middle East is distorted and bent away from American interests by the influence of the Israel lobby in Washington.   It led to all the usual and in this case nonsensical charges of anti-Semitism.   The earlier and theoretically more important book is The Tragedy of Great Power Politics, Mearsheimer's masterpiece, published in 1999.  Setting out his theory of 'offensive realism', Mearsheimer, with patience, learning and clarity, skewered the then-regnant discourse of the 'new world order' and 'the new military humanism' in international politics.  Suggesting that states will always compete for power and influence, he argued that the end of the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet Union would not, in fact, bring a new era of Kantian 'perpetual peace'.  Rather, in a unipolar world, with one weakening superpower without visible rivals, war and bloody competition would become more likely and more frequent.   Mearsheimer's prognostications have almost entirely been borne out.  On his website, he jocularly posts a picture which imposes his face on the figure of Niccolo Machiavelli - a warning that we should nurse no illusions about his advocating a statecraft attuned to human rights or the ressentiment of the weak.  But he nevertheless cuts, brusquely and lucidly, through the layers of liberal piety which tend to envelop American and European policy statements most of the time.

I am pasting in here links to some of Mearsheimer's work, which he makes freely available at his University of Chicago website in pdf form. I will also put in some other pieces, some of them more notable as background than immediate analysis, to allow us all to come to a calmer assessment of the situation regarding Russia.

John J. Mearsheimer, "Why the Ukraine Crisis Is the West's Fault" Foreign Affairs, Vol. 93 No. 5 (September/October 2014), pp. 1-12. [pdf]

John J. Mearsheimer, "Moscow's Choice," Foreign Affairs, Vol 93, No. 6 (November/December 2014), pp. 167-171. [pdf]

John J. Mearsheimer, “Defining a New Security Architecture for Europe that Brings Russia in from the Cold,” Military Review, Vol. 96, No. 3 (May/June 2016), pp. 27-31. [pdf]


Here is a recent discussion of the American commitment not to extend NATO membership to the borders of Russia (this hyperlink leads to a pdf document):


Deal or No Deal? The End of the Cold War and the U.S. Offer ...



Now some articles from the London Review of Books, where Perry Anderson and Tony Wood are always worth reading:

Tony Wood:

Eat Your Spinach

Stephen Holmes of NYU's Law School on Putin:

Transitology

Perry Anderson on Putin's Russia:

Russia’s Managed Democracy

And from Anderson's superb survey and critique of American foreign policy and its thinkers, a reminder of just how peaceable Obama was:

Predator DroneAmerican Foreign Policy Under Obama




Conor

Sunday 11 March 2018

Omar Barghouti on 'Israeli Settlements in Palestine, and the European Union' - address to the European Parliament, March 7, 2018

http://www.aurdip.fr/towards-ending-eu-complicity-in.html

[Omar Barghouti, Palestinian human rights activist and co-founder of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement against Israel, addressed the European Parliament on Wednesday at the invitation of Portuguese MEP Ana Gomes to take part in a discussion panel on « The Israeli Settlements in Palestine and the European Union ». This is the text of his speech.]

Despite Israel’s descent into unmasked, right-wing extremism, particularly with the current escalation of its brutal military occupation and repression, and its rhetoric notwithstanding, the European Union (EU) has failed to uphold its legal obligations under international law vs. Israel’s settlement enterprise and remains largely complicit in enabling and maintaining Israel’s occupation and violations of Palestinian rights. Only effective European civil society pressure can bring this EU complicity to an end, thus contributing significantly to the pursuit of a just and comprehensive peace in our region.

Israel’s serious breaches of international law trigger legal obligations for the EU, Israel’s largest trade partner, and to its member states. As reiterated in the 2004 decision by the International Court of Justice, to ensure respect for international humanitarian law and for the right of the Palestinian people to exercise self-determination, states must refrain from any act that would entail recognition of Israel’s settlement enterprise and from providing any form of assistance to maintaining the illegal situation arising from it.


By trading with Israel’s illegal settlements and supporting companies that are involved in the settlement enterprise, as defined by the OHCHR, the EU is violating both obligations of non-recognition and non-assistance.

The EU maintains a web of military relationsweapons researchbanking transactions and settlement trade with Israeli companies, banks and institutions that are deeply implicated in human rights violations.

For instance, the EU imports goods from the Israeli settlements at an estimated annual value of $300 million. This is more than 17 times the average annual value of Palestinian goods imported by the EU between 2004 and 2014.


Through its Horizon 2020 research program the EU has approved more than 200 projects with Israeli companies, such as Elbit Systems and Israel Aerospace Industries, that are accused of deep complicity in Israel’s war crimes and possible crimes against humanity. Another Israeli beneficiary of EU funding is Technion University, a main hub for developing Israeli weapon systems used to perpetrate crimes against Palestinian civilians.


European banks continue their business relations with Israeli banks, despite the latter’s pivotal role in financing, providing services to, or otherwise supporting Israel’s illegal settlements. A recent report by Human Rights Watch concludes that “businesses cannot fulfill their human rights responsibilities if they continue carrying out activities inside or for the benefit of settlements.”


Despite pressure by hundreds of European civil society unions and NGOs and more than 60 MEPs, the EU has obstinately refused to enforce the human rights clause in its Association Agreement with Israel. This has continued even after a legal report published last year by a UN agency found that Israel has established a regime of apartheid against the entire Palestinian people. Apartheid is the second most serious crime against humanity in international law, it is worth mentioning.


If Palestinian rights are seen today as the “litmus test for human rights,” as described by John Dugard, the prominent South African jurist, the EU has failed this test. Merely labeling some of the illegal products of Israeli colonies instead of banning them all is considered by Palestinians as yet another EU failure to uphold European and international law.


Although the EU still votes as a bloc in support of UN resolutions upholding basic Palestinian rights, including the right of return for Palestine refugees, and still condemns Israel’s settlements as illegal, these positions have not been translated into any effective measures of accountability against Israel.


In contrast, the EU swiftly adopted sanctions against Russia after its takeover of the Crimea, which pales in comparison to Israel’s 50-year-old military occupation of Gaza and the West Bank, including East Jerusalem. Nothing can justify this hypocrisy.


Israel’s Far-Right Government Drops the Mask


As Israel’s regime becomes more overtly associated with the global far-right, including white supremacist and anti-Semitic groups in the United States and Europe, and as it becomes the model for Trump’s xenophobic policies of ethnic profiling, refugee and Muslim ban, and the racist wall with Mexico, its popularity is sinking. A recent BBC poll shows that Israel has the fourth lowest popularity rating among many countries, with over 60% of the public in the UK, France and Spain viewing it negatively.


More and more people of conscience around the world — including taxpayers in states that continue to arm Israel, such as the US, Germany, UK, Italy and France — are recognizing and acting on their moral duty to end their governments’ respective complicity in Israel’s crimes.


Crucially, support for holding Israel to account is growing among Jewish Americans and the broader US public. A 2014 poll by J Street showed that 46 percent of non-Orthodox Jewish American men under forty support a full boycott of Israel to end its occupation, while a 2016 Brookings Institution survey reveals that almost half of all Americans support imposing sanctions on Israel to stop its illegal settlements.


With the unparalleled loyalty to its fanatic policies in the Trump White House and in Congress, Israel’s regime of occupation, settler-colonialism and apartheid has become so drunk with power that it is dropping its thin, worn-out mask of democracy, shedding the veneer of supporting a “two-state solution” and cheering Trump’s rise to power as a rare opportunity to bury the Palestinian right to self-determination.


Israel’s government, the “most racist” in its history, is perpetrating serious crimes against the indigenous people of Palestine with unprecedented hubris and impunity, alienating the liberal western mainstream, which has for decades formed the backbone of its support base in the West shielding it from accountability to international law.

Israel is intensifying its land-grabbing construction of its illegal settlements and wall in the occupied West Bank, especially in East Jerusalem.

It is tightening its fatal, decade-long siege of two million Palestinians in Gaza, denying them basic necessities, even crayons and musical instruments, while counting the per-capita calories that are allowed in to keep them at the edge of starvation, or to put them “on a diet,” as a senior Israeli official once admitted. As a result, the UN predicts that Gaza will be unlivable by 2020.


It is entrenching what even the US Department of State once characterized as a system of “institutional, legal, and societal discrimination” against Palestinian citizens of present-day Israel, enforced by more than sixty five racist laws. Last year, Israeli armed forces demolished the Bedouin village of Umm al-Hiran in the Naqab (Negev) to build on its ruins a new, Jewish-only settlement, eerily called “Hiran.”


It also continues to deny the internationally-recognized rights of Palestinians in exile, predominantly refugees, who account for 50 percent of all Palestinians.


In light of this ongoing Nakba, and given the failure of the international community under the US-EU hegemony to uphold Palestinian rights under international law, the BDS movement for Palestinian rights was launched in 2005 by the broadest coalition in Palestinian civil society. It calls for ending Israel’s 1967 occupation, ending its system of legalized racial discrimination, and upholding the UN-stipulated right of Palestinian refugees to return to the homes and lands from which they were uprooted and dispossessed since the 1948 Nakba.


These three basic rights correspond to the three main components of the Palestinian people : those in the occupied Gaza Strip and the West Bank, including East Jerusalem (38 percent of the Palestinian people, according to 2016 statistics) ; Palestinian citizens of Israel (12%) ; and those in exile (50%). More than two thirds of Palestinians are refugees or internally displaced persons.


Anchored in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, BDS has consistently and categorically opposed all forms of racism and racial discrimination, including anti-Semitism, anti-Black racism and Islamophobia. One’s identity, the movement upholds, should never diminish one’s entitlement to rights. BDS, as a result, targets complicity, not identity.


Arguing that boycotting Israel is intrinsically anti-Jewish is not only false, but it also presumes that Israel and “the Jews” are one and the same. This is as absurd and bigoted as claiming that a boycott of a self-defined Islamic state like Saudi Arabia, say, because of its horrific human rights record, its legalized discrimination against women, or its war crimes in Yemen, would of necessity be Islamophobic.


Since there is nothing Jewish about Israel’s regime of siege, ethnic cleansing and oppression, there is nothing inherently anti-Jewish, then, about a nonviolent, morally consistent human rights struggle to end this system of injustice. Support for BDS is growing substantially among Jewish millennials worldwide, in fact, with Jewish-Israeli BDS activists playing an increasingly significant role in the movement.


BDS draws a lot of inspiration from intersectional relations with movements defending the rights of refugees, immigrants, women, workers, Blacks, Muslims, indigenous nations and the LGBTQI communities as well as with the climate justice movement.


The BDS movement is supported by a near consensus in Palestinian society. Last month, the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), the sole, legitimate representative of the Palestinian people, declared its support for BDS and called for sanctions against Israel.


Impact of BDS


The strategic impact of the nonviolent BDS movement for Palestinian rights is now well recognized by the Israeli establishment.


Last December, Lorde, the famous New Zealand singer, cancelled a scheduled gig in Tel Aviv, becoming the most prominent and courageous artist of her generation to respect the Palestinian cultural boycott picket line. In response to an ugly smear campaign against her by Israel lobby figures in the US, over one hundred prominent artists, including Hollywood stars, signed a letter in the Guardian supporting her.


Of the twenty-six Oscar nominees in 2016 who were offered expensive propaganda trips paid by the Israeli government none has taken the offer to date.


Some of the largest churches in the US, including the United Methodist Church, the Presbyterian Church and the United Church of Christ, have divested from Israeli banks or complicit international corporations, like Caterpillar, HP, and G4S, because of their involvement in the Israeli occupation.


Even before the UN publishes its list of companies involved in Israel’s illegal settlement enterprise, major multinational corporations, like VeoliaOrangeCRH and G4S, have suffered major financial and/or reputational losses in the last few years, due to effective BDS campaigning across Europe, the US, the Arab world, or Latin America. As a result, they have ended all or most of their involvement in Israel’s violations of international law. Hewlett Packard (HP) is facing a snowballing global BDS campaign, with many US churches and the National Union of Teachers (NUT) in the UK announcing themselves HP-free.


Leading global investment funds in Norway, the NetherlandsDenmark and elsewhere have withdrawn their investments from Israeli banks or international corporations implicated in Israel’s human rights violations.

The municipality of Barcelona announced in 2017 measures to end complicity in Israel’s occupation, following dozens of local councils across the Spanish state that have declared themselves “Israeli Apartheid Free Zones” in the last two years.

Major international trade union federations, like the Norwegian LO, joined the BDS movement in 2017.

Academic associations and tens of student governments in the U.S., UK, Chile, South Africa, Canada, among others, have voted for various BDS measures.

The prestigious Catholic University of Leuven in Belgium has recently announced its withdrawal from Law Train, a particularly disturbing EU-funded research project aimed at developing common prisoner interrogation techniques with the partnership of the Israeli police and the Israeli Ministry of Public Security. Both Israeli entities have been accused by human rights advocates of deep involvement in extrajudicial killings and the torture of Palestinian prisoners, including children, among other serious violations of international law.


The Portuguese Justice Ministry was the first to withdraw from this project in July 2016. Twenty five prominent legal scholars have published a legal opinion confirming the illegality of the Law Train project due to the Israeli entities’ involvement in serious violations of international law.


Israel’s New McCarthyism


Having lost many battles for the hearts and minds at the grassroots level, Israel adopted a new top-down strategy in 2014 to fight BDS, replacing its previous, unsuccessful strategy of fighting the movement through “branding” and extensive propaganda alone.


Evoking memories of McCarthyism, the new Israeli strategy employs legal warfare and espionage with massive budgets to undermine, or even outlaw, peaceful BDS advocacy. Israel has even hired a large law firm to intimidate and silence BDS activists in North America, Europe and beyond, crossing “criminal lines,” as a whistleblowing Israeli lawyer has warned.”


A desperate Israeli government minister has established a “tarnishing unit” to smear Palestinian, Israeli and international human rights defenders in the BDS movement, while another has publicly threatened us with “targeted civil assassination.” Amnesty International has condemned these threats.


An Israeli anti-BDS law now denies entry to organizations that endorse BDS or merely advocate for selective boycotts targeting Israeli settlements. The anti-BDS Israeli Ministry of Strategic Affairs is working on a “blacklist” of Israelis who are active in any form of BDS activity.


Glenn Greenwald has described attempts by Israel and its lobby groups to criminalize Palestine solidarity, especially in the most effective form of BDS, as “the greatest threat to free speech in the West.”

The BDS movement is winning some remarkable battles against this Israeli McCarthyism, however. The European Union, the governments of Sweden, Ireland and Netherlands, the parliaments of Switzerland and SpainAmnesty International, the International Federation for Human Rights (FIDH), Human Rights Watch, the Socialist International, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), among others, have all defended the right to boycott Israel as a matter of freedom of speech.

ACLU, which has condemned the application of anti-BDS legislation in Texas as “an egregious violation of the First Amendment [of the US Constitution], reminiscent of McCarthy-era loyalty oaths,” has recently scored a precedent-setting legal victory in a federal court against the Kansas state’s anti-BDS legislation.

In 2016, Federica Mogherini, the chief of EU diplomacy, said :
“The EU stands firm in protecting freedom of expression and freedom of association in line with the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union, which is applicable on EU Member States’ territory, including with regard to BDS actions carried out on this territory.”

In the same vein, the Dutch government confirmed that BDS advocacy is protected free speech, “enshrined in the Dutch Constitution and the European Convention on Human Rights.” It also rejected calls for punishing BDS on the grounds that it involved “discrimination” against Israel, affirming that “human rights, including the prohibition of discrimination, aim to explicitly protect individuals [and] groups of individuals. On the basis of freedom of speech it is allowed to call on a government to take sanctions against another country.”


Also in 2016, in a major blow to Israel’s repressive legal war on the BDS movement, a groundbreaking statement by more than 200 legal scholars from 15 European countries, including former international courts’ judges, defended the right to BDS saying :

“States that outlaw BDS are undermining this basic human right and threatening the credibility of human rights by exempting a particular state from the advocacy of peaceful measures designed to achieve its compliance with international law.”

Conclusion


While Palestinians appreciate European support for our steadfastness in our homeland, Palestinians do not seek charity but solidarity. At the very least, we expect the EU to do no harm.


The average of 300 million euros that the EU gives to the Palestinians annually largely subsidize the Israeli occupation and serves to cover up the EU’s ongoing complicity in maintaining it. Furthermore, it pales in comparison to the occupation’s cost for the Palestinian economy, which in 2010 alone reached approximately $7 billion − almost 85% of the total estimated Palestinian GDP.


Palestinians are calling on progressive members of the European Parliament as well as national parliaments across Europe and European civil society to intensify pressure on the EU to fulfill its obligations under international law vs. the Palestinian people by, at the very least :

  1. Banning the import of products of Israeli and other companies that illegally operate in the occupied territories.
  2. Suspending the EU-Israel Association Agreement until Israel abides by its second clause which requires respect for human rights.
  3. Implementing the recommendation of the European Council on Foreign Relations to halt all financial transactions with Israeli banks that finance Israel’s occupation, including the wall and settlements.
  4. Stop considering the import of Israeli natural gas or electric power given Israel’s pillage of Palestinian energy resources and the serious legal, financial and security risks involved in such an undertaking.
  5. Imposing a two-way military embargo on Israel, as was done against apartheid South Africa, including cutting funding to all Israeli companies and universities involved in military research that enables the commission of Israel’s war crimes.
Former South African anti-apartheid leader Archbishop Desmond Tutu once said, “If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor.” Far from being “neutral,” the EU is enabling the oppressor to carry on its injustices. It is high time to end that complicity to keep our hope alive that one day we can live in dignity, freedom, justice and true peace.



Omar Barghouti is a Palestinian human rights defender and co-founder of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement. He is a co-recipient of the 2017 Gandhi Peace Award.