MPs’ chance to press for action on Gaza humanitarian crisis

Debate at 2.30-4 pm Wed 5th February

MPs will have a chance to debate the deepening humanitarian crisis in Gaza when Conservative MP Sir Tony Baldry introduces a 90-minute debate on Gaza on Wednesday.

The cause of the crisis is the Israeli blockade of Gaza, but this has been exacerbated in recent months by the winter storm and the closure of tunnels to turn the long-running humanitarian crisis into a disaster.

Aid minister Alan Duncan and Middle East minister Hugh Robertson have both visited Palestine recently and staked out a more robust position on Gaza.  Alan Duncan warned that Gaza  could become ‘unliveable’ by the autumn with no food, power or clean water and could soon be ‘unfit for human habitation’.

Hugh Robertson pointed out recently that the Israeli blockade of Gaza and occupation of the West Bank cost the Palestinian economy 85% of its Gross Domestic Product every year – and urged Israel to relax its ban on building material imports to Gaza.

If the talks break up at the end of April without an agreement, as seems likely, the ministers will need to back up their words with actions that will persuade the Israelis to lift the blockade and let imports and exports flow freely in and out of Gaza again.

Netanyahu will try to blame the Egyptians for the crisis, but this is disingenuous. Egypt has only a passenger crossing into Gaza and has been forced by US and Israeli pressure to refuse access to goods.

As Alan Duncan pointed out in the Commons last year, citing an IMF report, the blockade and other restrictions imposed by the Israelis cost the Palestinians 78% of their GDP or $6.3 billion a year. Without the restrictions, Palestine would no longer be dependent on aid.

The Israelis promised under the Oslo Accords to build a ‘land bridge’, a secure road to connect Gaza to the West Bank, which would allow the Gazans to restart their mothballed factories and export to their natural market, only 25 miles away, but Netanyahu has blocked it.

Instead the Israelis have continued to control Gaza’s borders, ports, airspace, passports and telecommunications and maintain constant surveillance from drones and helicopters. They still occupy Gaza in every way except boots on the ground.

Here are useful things to read:

Latest UN reports on Gaza

UN weekly report with update to January 27th 2014> th 2014> 

UN Humanitarian Monitor October 2013 

UN OCHA Five Years of Blockade, June 2012>

The death of Nelson Mandela has reminded the world of the power of a boycott in ending apartheid in South Africa and the existence of another form of apartheid in Palestine.

Mandela said in a speech in 1997 that “our freedom is incomplete without the freedom of the Palestinians”.  The parallels between South Africa’s struggle against apartheid and the Palestinians struggle have not only been drawn by Palestinians. Alon Liel, who was Israeli ambassador to South Africa in 1992-4, has said: “The situation that has developed in the West Bank over four and a half decades is a kind of apartheid. If you compare the suffering of black people in South Africa under 40 years of apartheid, and the suffering of the Palestinians under 46 years of occupation, I don’t know who suffered more.”

Liel has drawn parallels also between Mandela and Marwan Barghouti, who has spent nearly 12 years in an Israeli prison but is still one of the most popular politicians in Palestine. Liel is possibly the only man who has known both Mandela and Barghouti well.

From his Cell n°28 in Hadarim prison in Israel, Barghouti wrote an appreciation of Mandela in which he said: “From within my prison cell, I tell you that our freedom seems possible because you reached yours”.

Last year his wife Fadwa Barghouti sat in Mandela’s old cell in the B section of Robben Island prison and signed an international declaration calling for the release of Marwan Barghouti and all the other political prisoners in Israeli jails.  She was accompanied by Ahmed Kathrada, Nelson Mandela’s close friend who had launched a similar international campaign for his release many years earlier, and Archbishop Desmond Tutu.

Tutu, the architect of South Africa’s own truth and reconciliation process, is among those who believe that if the Israeli government really wanted peace, they would release Marwan Barghouti.

They had a chance when they agreed to release 1,027 Palestinian prisoners in an exchange deal for the captured Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit in 2011.  They were asked by both Fatah and Hamas to release him as part of the deal. They did release 1,027 prisoners, including many who had been convicted of multiple murders and were serving life sentences, but not Barghouti.

They had the opportunity again when they released 104 long-term prisoners as part of the deal negotiated by US State Secretary John Kerry for peace negotiations last nine months between August 2013 and May 2014.  But, again, they have not released him.

The Israeli politicians who have supported his release include the Israeli President Shimon Peres who declared in January 2007 that he would sign a presidential pardon for Marwan Barghouti if elected to the Israeli presidency.  He was elected, but he has not signed the pardon.

Written answers since the last FCO questions have elicited the answer (see below) that ministers are “deeply concerned by the chronic humanitarian situation in Gaza, which has been exacerbated by recent severe weather, leading to significant flooding and property damage. Widespread flooding has necessitated the evacuation of hundreds of families in Gaza…..Heavy rain and snow in Gaza has led to widespread flooding and power cuts. Electricity feeder lines from Egypt and Israel were damaged on 12 December and, although they have been mostly repaired, subsequent bad weather has continued to damage the domestic network and electricity supply. On 16 December, following a Qatari donation to the Palestinian Authority to fund the purchase of fuel for Gaza, the Gaza power plant restarted partial operations for the first time since 1 November.”

They have also elicited the fact that the blockade of Gaza and the occupation of the West Bank “have been estimated as costing the Palestinian economy up to 85% of its Gross Domestic Product every year”.

The Israeli government has postponed the Prawer-Begin Bill that would have forcibly relocated 40,000 Bedouin Arabs from their ancestral lands in the Negev to government-designated towns.

But this may only be a temporary delay for consultations. The Bill’s co-sponsor admitted he had not consulted the Bedouin about his plan. “I didn’t tell anyone that the Bedouin agreed to my plan. I couldn’t say that because I didn’t present the plan to them,” said former minister Benny Begin.

The Israelis call it the “relocation” Bedouin. The “relocation” is done by evicting them and demolishing their houses and farm buildings.

http://jfjfp.com/?page_id=32203

At the same time they are trying to “relocate” Bedouins in semi-desert areas around to Jerusalem to make way for new illegal settlements.

http://jfjfp.com/?p=31801

Bedouins are families who live in semi-arid areas and traditional live a semi-nomadic lifestyle, moving their flocks of sheep or goats around according to season.

Hugh Robertson pledged his support for the Foreign Office-funded report Children in Military Custody and its 40 recommendations: “I entirely support it and during my time as a minister, I will do everything I can to ensure that its recommendations are properly and correctly implemented.”

The report’s authors, Sir Stephen Sedley QC, Baroness Scotland, and others, will revisit Israel in March to review progress.  So far only two or three of their 40 recommendations have been carried out by the Israelis, reducing the maximum period of detention of children without charge from 60 to 40 days and the maximum before appearing before a judge from 4 days to one for 12-13 year-olds and to two for 14-15 year olds.

This does only a little to reduce the abuses which mainly occur in the first 24 hours after Palestinian children are arrested in the middle of the night, interrogated without parents or lawyers present, bullied into signing confessions in a language they do not understand and jailed sometimes as young as 12.

Children in Military Custody report>

 

US State Secretary John Kerry was in Jerusalem and Ramallah again last week for his tenth visit trying to re-energise the talks, but it is fast becoming clear that progress is severely hampered by the continuing expansion of settlements.

A breakthrough is always possible, and would be most welcome, but one has to be very optimistic to believe there could be a settlement by the end of the nine months in April.

Last week Netanyahu released the third group of Palestinian prisoners, all of whom have already served more than 22 years, but he “balanced” the release by announced yet more new settlements in the West Bank.

The Palestinians revoked their claim on 78% of historic Palestine in 1988 in the belief that all the remaining 22% would become a Palestinian state and all their prisoners would be released. They have made their historic compromise. They should not be asked for more.

On the day of the last Foreign Office questions – December 3^rd – Hugh Robertson finally published his long-promised “business guidance” to firms trading with illegal settlements by uploading it onto the DTI’s Overseas Business Risk website, but he made no announcement and did not even mention it when he was questioned about settlement trade in the Commons.

Now, six weeks later, is the first opportunity to question him about it. The first thing is to congratulate him on at least saying the Government “does not encourage” trade with illegal settlements. The second is to press him to go further than this very cautious first step.

It took the press a week before they even noticed that new business guidance was up on the website – so has he notified companies already trading with settlements?  Has he warned companies that they are running legal and reputational risks by trading with illegal settlements?

The guidance says:

• We do not encourage economic or financial activities in the settlements. We do not offer support to such activity.
• Firms must be aware of legal and economic risks in financial transactions, investments, purchases, procurements, other economic activities, including tourism, in Israeli settlements or benefiting Israeli settlements owing to disputed titles to land, water, mineral or other natural resources
• They must also be aware of potential reputational implications of getting involved in economic and financial activities in settlements.

William Hague applauds the effectiveness of economic sanctions on Iran and says this week’s deal “vindicates the policy of pressure through sanctions”, but recoils from effective economic pressure on Israel even though he admits Israel is in clear breach of international law on settlements, on the wall, on prisoners in Israeli jails and on east Jerusalem.

A report in The Independent this week says that the OECD is holding an inquiry into G4S’s sale of surveillance equipment to Israeli for use in checkpoints in Palestine.  Also this week Dutch pension fund PGGM has withdrawn over of million euros from five Israeli banks because of their involvement in illegal settlements in the West Bank.

FCO takes first step in putting economic pressure on Israel

Firms warned of ‘reputational’ risks

The Foreign Secretary has finally issued his long-promised business guidance to UK firms engaged in trade with illegal Israeli settlements in the West Bank – as he has been urged to do by MPs from all the main parties.  Although he does not go as far as he has been urged to, he does tell UK firms in clear terms that “we do not encourage” firms to trade with illegal settlements and “we do not offer support” to firms that do. Business guidance is purely advisory, but most UK firms will abide by the FCO’s country-specific guidance published on the Department of Trade and Industry’s Overseas Business Risk Register. The guidance restates the Foreign Office view that settlements are “illegal under international law, an obstacle to peace and threaten to make a two-state solution impossible”. It then goes further by saying: We do not encourage economic or financial activities in the settlements. We do not offer support to such activity. Firms must be aware of legal and economic risks in financial transactions, investments, purchases, procurements, other economic activities, including tourism, in Israeli settlements or benefiting Israeli settlements owing to disputed titles to land, water, mineral or other natural resources They must also be aware of potential reputational implications of getting involved in economic and financial activities in settlements. They must be aware of possible abuses of the rights of individuals. Those contemplating economic or financial involvement should seek legal advice. The UK will continue to enforce the labelling guidelines to identify settlement goods because “we understand the concerns of people who do not wish to purchase goods exported from Israeli settlements”. The UK will also continue to enforce the EU ruling that denies imports from illegal settlements the preferential tariff that applies to Israeli and Palestinian imports. In a move that seemed designed to avoid publicity, the advice was uploaded to the DTI website last Tuesday without any announcement or press release and was not even mentioned during that day’s Foreign Office questions. It will however have the effect of increasing the pressure on Israel to start making some overdue concessions in the peace negotiations which have now reached the half-way stage without any sign of significant progress. By referring to the reputational risk of trading with settlements, it will also increase pressure on firms such as G4S and Veolia to pull out completely from their involvement with the Israeli occupation. US State Secretary John Kerry was in Jerusalem and Ramallah again last week trying to re-energise the talks, but it is fast becoming clear that progress is severely hampered by the continuing expansion of settlements. The Government’s new business advice does not go as far as recommended by the British and other EU ambassadors in a confidential report to the EU last year. As leaked copies of the report showed, they recommended that EU governments should “prevent/discourage financial transactions in support of settlement activity”. During the summer there was a protracted argument, both within the EU and the Foreign Office, over whether to use the words “prevent” or “discourage” or to water the advice down to a morally neutral statement that firms should “be aware of the risks” of trading with settlements. The Foreign Office has gone for a half-way house, not actually discouraging firms but not encouraging them either. But since the purpose of the DTI website is to encourage trade, to say trade with settlements is ‘not encouraged’ is tantamount to saying it is ‘discouraged’. This is a minor breakthrough because until now the Foreign Office policy has been to do nothing while the talks are in progress on the grounds that that any initiative would “destablise” the talks. In practice the opposite has been true. It was an EU initiative in July, that persuaded both Israelis and Palestinians to sit down to talks because it persuaded them that the EU would at last follow up on its threats. The Foreign Office has clearly agonised for a long while of this step as the new business guidance was promised in August, and then by the end of September, but it can hardly be described as radical. Even the Dutch and the Germans, traditionally the Israelis’ strongest allies in the European Union, have already gone further and discouraged their own companies from trading with settlements. The Dutch government discouraged the engineering firm Royal Haskoning from participating in a project in East Jerusalem and the company heeded the advice and withdrew from the project. The Dutch foreign minister Frans Timmermans said: “Although not prohibited, economic relations between Dutch companies and companies in the settlements in the occupied territories are discouraged by the Dutch government.” The German transport minister opposed the involved of the German rail company Deutsche Bahn in an Israeli train project that cuts through the occupied West Bank. Deutche Bahn ended its involvement in the project shortly after. The next steps for the Foreign Office would be to upgrade its business advice to “discourage”, to intervene with individual companies before they sign contracts, to clarify the rules on public sector procurement so that councillors do not feel threatened by surcharges if human rights issues are taking into account and ultimately to ban all financial relationships with companies that operate in illegal settlements. Why we need a settlement freeze> Why we need to stop trade with settlements>

• The whole settlement project is sustained by EU imports worth €225 million a year while EU trade with Palestinians is only €15 million a year.
• Diplomatic pressure has no effect on Israel.  To quote Likud minister Danny Danon: “The international community can say whatever they want and we can do whatever we want.”
• Stopping trade with illegal settlements is the only policy that is consistent with the UK’s declared policy of support for the state of Israel, but opposition to settlements.  
• Stopping trade with illegal settlements will not affect the economy of Israel itself, only that of settlements that are not part of Israel.
• We are not asking for a boycott or a sanction to be imposed until certain conditions are met, but for a declaration that is wrong to trade with illegal settlements in all circumstances.
• Some international lawyers say we have an obligation to stop trading with illegal settlements. Other say we have the power (without breaking EU or GATT rules) rather than an obligation to do so. But all agree that settlements profit from the expropriation of Palestinian resources.  By trading with settlements, we profit from Palestinian poverty.

Many Israelis agree with Ran Gidor, former political counsellor at the Israeli Embassy in London, who said in the Commons that settlements are “the single biggest mistake in Israel’s history” – a disaster for Palestinians but a disaster 

Life gets worse for Palestinians while talks continue – Minister   Gaza water ‘too polluted for use by 2016’

The former head of Israel’s security service, Yuri Diskin, warned this week that a failure to reach a peace settlement with the Palestinians was a greater existential threat to Israel than Iran’s nuclear programme.His speech widened the rift exposed in the Oscar-nominated documentary ‘The Gatekeepers’ between the top brass of Israel’s security services, Shin Beit and Mossad, and Prime Minister Netanyahu.Diskin said Netanyahu should have conceded a settlement freeze before the talks instead of a prisoner release which he described as “a disgusting and cynical move born out of a desire to avoid freezing settlement building”. He attacked Netanyahu’s coalition partner Naftali Bennett for making a speech using the phrase “shrapnel in the buttocks” opposing the idea of a Palestinian state and advocating the annexation of most of the West Bank. In the speech Bennett used an analogy to explain why he thought it better for Israelis to live with a permanent occupation of the West Bank than to allow the creation of an independent state of Palestine: “I have a friend who’s got shrapnel in his buttocks and he’s been told that it can be removed surgically, but it would leave him disabled. So he decided to live with it.” Despite Kerry’s latest visit to Jerusalem and Ramallah this week, no Palestinians and few Israelis give the talks any chance of success while settlement building continues. Meanwhile in Britain the Middle East Minister Hugh Robertson has finally signed off risk guidance to UK business, which does raise the issue of trading with illegal Israeli settlements in the West Bank.  This advice is better than nothing, but doesn’t go far enough. If the Foreign Office issued guidance to UK firms to stop trading with settlements, it would put economic pressure on the Israelis to make the concessions necessary to reach agreement. Although the Foreign Office seems to believe any kind of pressure would destabilise the talks, a UK move would be far more likely to galvanise the talks and improve the chances of a peace agreement. At Foreign Office questions Hugh Robertson threw away two chances of giving a hint to the Israelis of what the UK will do if the talks end in failure when they run out of time in May. He was asked by Liberal Democrat MP Duncan Hames if he would if he would ” use his influence to shape European trade policies in a manner that is consistent with our Government’s view on the illegal settlements?” He replied: “Yes, we will….we welcome the EU guidelines on the eligibility of Israel entities for EU funding and the agreement reached last week that, on the other side, allows Israel to participate in Horizon 2020.” Labour MP Andy Slaughter then asked him, if he thought that raising the issue of settlement trade would “upset” the peace talks, what action he would take to support the peace talks? The Minister replied that he did not “understand the distinction” and repeated his mantra that settlements were “illegal under international law and undermine the possibility of a two-state solution”. It now appears as though the Government is going to wait for the talks to fail before they start putting pressure on to make them succeed. In a debate on water shortages in Palestine International Development Minister Alan Duncan said life for ordinary Palestinians was getting worse while the peace talks continued. “We have seen a spike in settlement announcements and demolition orders. Violence has erupted in east Jerusalem and the West Bank and unemployment is on the rise. “To make the case for peace, which this Government firmly believe in, we need to bring about real and tangible change on the ground and to do so before it is too late.” Answering a debate from Labour MP David Winnick, he said 90% of water in Gaza was already unfit for human consumption and the Gaza aquifer was set to become too polluted for use by 2016 and irreversibly damaged by 2020. “Water shortages are a stark reminder of the harshness of Palestinian daily life. From the farmer in the West Bank who cannot grow the same produce as his settler neighbour, to the family in Gaza having to wade through sewage to get home, the situation is unfair and untenable. Indeed, it is unjust.” As it appears in Hansard>