In the concluding part of his two-part feature, Nick Dearden examines international attitudes to the Palestinian crisis, and looks at how Sharon's dividing wall is affecting people in the occupied territories.
Part 1|
Part 2
International painkillers
As a recent War on Want report
‘Poverty in Palestine’ demonstrates, Palestinian impoverishment is centrally caused by the political structures of the occupation. The Israeli government would love us to believe that the situation facing the Middle East is primarily a religious dispute – indeed they are trying to turn it into one. A religious dispute seems foreign to us, intractable even, and there seems little point in getting involved. But the occupation is actually about something far more accessible: an ‘old-fashioned’ struggle for resources and power.
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| Reuters |
The occupation has systematically impoverished the Palestinian people over 35 years. It gives Israel full control over every aspect of Palestinian life. For example, it allows Israel to control and distribute all water resources in the Palestinian Occupied Territories. So while the average Israeli consumes 350 litres of water per day, the average Palestinian consumes only 50 to 70 litres – well below the World Health Organisation minimum level needed for healthy life (all figures from War on Want’s ‘Poverty in Palestine’). In refugee camps Palestinians sometimes only manage to obtain 19 litres of water per day. And within eye shot of these refugee camps are the gleaming white (and illegal) Israeli settlements to which the Occupied Territory’s water resources are diverted and used for gardens and swimming pools. The Third World meets the First World.
The occupation also serves to negate countless other Palestinian rights. In the Oslo period alone, when Israel was supposedly negotiating to end the occupation, 35,000 acres of Palestinian land was stolen for Israeli settlements. During the first year of the Intifada 500,000 Palestinian fruit trees were uprooted by settlers and soldiers. Palestinian employment is totally dependent on the Israeli system of identity cards, closures, curfews, roadblocks and so on.
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| Popperfoto/Reuters |
This systematic denial of rights forms the essence of the occupation. The Palestinians’ poverty is deeply political. International organisations working in Palestine must realise that, in the words of anti-wall campaigner Victor de Currea-Lugo they “cannot be limited to only providing Palestinians with painkillers, and this only when the Israeli government permits it”. An end to the occupation is an essential first step to ending this humanitarian disaster, and it is not only justified but essential that humanitarian organisations advocate in this debate. But Sharon’s plan does not bring the end of the Occupation closer. In fact, by using it to trade away other parts of international law and Palestinian rights, it could take us significantly further from this first step.
When a Wall is not a wall
The ‘disengagement’ of Gaza is mirrored on the West Bank by another ‘disengagement’ policy: the Separation Wall or as the Israeli government refer to it, the Security Fence. The Wall, when completed will be a 650km barrier, 90% of which is built on Palestinian land. It will cut off 270,000 Palestinians from Palestinian territory in the West Bank and a further 200,000 in East Jerusalem (Labour Middle East Council briefing, March 2004). It is estimated that when the Wall is completed agricultural production will decrease by 22.8% (Parliamentary Question to Hilary Benn, 17th March 2004).
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| © Reuters/Popperfoto |
The town of Qalqilya, for example, with 46,000 inhabitants, is completely surrounded by the Wall. The population is at the mercy of the teenage conscripts from the Israeli Defence Force who control the single gate through which they must pass to reach their fields, their families, the nearest hospital and other essentials of life. 15 of Qalqilya’s 39 wells have been confiscated (all facts from the Labour Middle East Council briefing, March 2004). Life is so unbearable in towns like Qalqilya that many people have already left. What small business remains has been decimated. People die when they cannot get to hospital. Schooling is at a minimum as children are traumatised by the violence they have grown up with. Animals and crops die as farmers cannot reach them.
Even the World Bank has strongly opposed the Wall’s construction saying: “Under consideration is a unilateral and unplanned step of Israel, as a substitute to negotiations” (quoted in Ha'aretz, 18th May 2003). In effect it changes “facts on the ground” by annexing large parts of the West Bank to Israel. But it does more than this. The Wall is part of an on-going attempt to make life unendurable for Palestinians. Several members of Sharon’s cabinet are openly in favour of “transfer” of the Palestinian population to Jordan. In any other country we would call that ethnic cleansing.
Earlier this year the UN General Assembly asked the International Court of Justice (ICJ) for a legal opinion on the Wall, into its legality and into the detrimental impact it already seems to be having on a population for whom Israel is responsible. Yet on 28th January 2004 the British government, which has for years been telling the Palestinians to take up their grievances through peaceful and legal means, wrote letters to the ICJ to try and block them doing just that.
The UK’s grounds for opposing an ICJ ruling include the fact that the case is bilateral and one party (Israel) has not agreed to participate, as well as that a ruling would be detrimental to the work of the UN as a whole. It is difficult to understand how much more difficult the UN’s work can become, given that the peace process is moribund, if not dead, and that the UN’s humanitarian arm in the Territories announced last week that it had to abandon emergency food aid to 600,000 refugees in the Gaza Strip because of Israeli obstruction.
Doing all we can?
British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw repeats the usual Foreign Office line to the House of Commons. “It is unrealistic to believe that any outside interlocutor... can achieve that because the divide is so great and the hatred and fears on both sides so profound”.
But it might be worth trying.
We could start with arms sales. Following Sharon’s accession to power and the commencement of the worst period of human rights violations in the Territories to date, to double British arms sales to Israel was hardly the best use of diplomatic leverage. British weapons exported to Israel include components for tanks, F-16s, combat helicopters, as well as machine guns, tear gas, ammunition and much more. As we can all see from nightly TV reports, there is no doubt that these arms are used against an occupied people. Oxfam even asked MPs recently whether the murder of Hamas leader Abdul Aziz Al Rantissi was carried out with British weapons and components. The UK also purchase weapons from Israel – weapons tested against the Palestinians in the Territories.
Why do we continue to pump development aid into the Palestinian Authority – building schools, hospitals and government infrastructure – when we then provide Israel with the means to destroy the buildings this aid pays for? And it is also a question for NGOs. As Victor de Currea-Lugo wrote: “Why do the international NGOs provide food and other non-food aid when the biggest problem is human rights violations?... It is easier to distribute safe water than discuss on the political level the Israeli control of the water resources in Palestine”.
Then we could progress to economic pressure. As a minimum the EU-Israel trade agreement should be suspended. The agreement which grants Israel preferential access to European markets provides within its charter for the suspension of the agreement if its human rights provisions are not met. Yet judging by Parliamentary questions on the issue it seems no such measure has even been considered. On 26th March 2004, Government Minister Dennis MacShane MP stated that the UK “Government do not intend to raise the suspension of the EU/ Israel Association Agreement... [because] close engagement provides us with the greatest chance of encouraging both sides to take the necessary steps”. Given that it is difficult to imagine a much worse situation, it would be interesting to know what success close engagement has brought in recent years.
Every Palestinian NGO we are in contact with supports full economic sanctions against Israel. As one – the BADIL Center in Bethlehem commented – “people really should not worry about negative impact on the Palestinian people, we have nothing more to lose”. Despite common perceptions about the importance of the US to Israel, Europe is a far bigger trading partner than the US. We could operate effective pressure if we wanted to.
Watching a heavyweight beating a child
Even if we were looking at two sides fighting an equal battle, the British Government’s role falls far short of “balanced”. While blocking the Palestinians attempts to obtain justice through the international court, selling Israel arms and trading at preferential tariffs, they offer, at best, shallow condemnation of Israel’s numerous and severe violations of international law, backed by no action whatever. Following Jack Straw’s condemnation in Parliament of Sheik Yassin’s illegal assassination, the British representative then failed to vote in favour of condemning Israel when the issue reached the UN Security Council.
But more importantly we are not dealing with two equal sides. We are dealing with an occupier and the occupied. And rather than try to redress this inequality, to enforce the international law that it is legally obliged to uphold, to empower the victim, to give some hope to a people who feel more powerlessness and humiliation then we can possibly understand; the British government re-interprets the problem, arms the bully, and maintains the power imbalance that lies at the heart of Palestinian poverty.
Until the Palestinians are returned a fair share of what defines them as a nation with a history attached to a specific geographical land, and until they are afforded full social and economic rights, there is no prospect of peace in the region. Until there is a realisation that poverty, injustice and humiliation lead to violence and serious efforts are made to redress those causes, starting with an end to a violent and miserable occupation, there is no prospect of peace in the region. Until Western governments take their responsibilities seriously as enforcers of international law, and use their power to change an unjust situation which they have had a hand in perpetuating, there is no prospect of peace in the region.
Many campaigners currently focus on the illegality of the Wall – that it should be built on the Green Line. But Hasan Barghouti of the Democracy and Workers’ Rights Center says, there is a bigger point: “If the Israeli’s want to build a million walls inside the Green Line, they are free to do so. However we do not believe that people who build walls are thinking about the future. They will never be part of the Middle East if they separate themselves.”
Every step of the Israeli occupation has resulted in stamping on Palestinian dreams of their own country and their own future. The main difference is that Sharon is a little more honest. The current excesses we are witnessing – the Wall, assassinations, closure, curfews and other serious violations of human rights – are only extreme manifestations of this decades-long policy, which has been supported by the West.
But Sharon, like most Israeli leaders, is not so honest when it comes to his own people. For many Israelis also have dreams – of peace and security – and every country has a right to security, to live in peace. These dreams too are being destroyed by the Occupation. The only possibility of Israeli security is a radical change of course. It is well summed up by David Zonsheine, one of the growing number of refuseniks who refuse to serve in the Israeli army in the Occupied Palestinian Territories. He served in Gaza before the Intifada: “That was 1994. No buses exploded then, no suicide bombers, just the common occupation in everyday life... We did not stop terrorism - we were creating it.”
Nick Dearden is Global Justice Campaigns Officer
Part 1|
Part 2
Click here to read about the Palestine Demonstration at Trafalgar Square on 15th May 2004
Click here to see photos from the demo for Palestine held on May 15th
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