David Cronin - Europes Alliance With Israel: Aiding the Occupation

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EUROPES ALLIANCE WITH ISRAEL

Europes Alliance with
Israel

Aiding the Occupation

David Cronin

First published 2011 by Pluto Press

345 Archway Road, London N6 5AA and

175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010

Distributed in the United States of America exclusively by

Palgrave Macmillan, a division of St. Martins Press LLC,

175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010

www.plutobooks.com

Copyright David Cronin 2011

The right of David Cronin to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 978 0 7453 3066 2 Hardback

ISBN 978 0 7453 3065 5 Paperback

ISBN 978 1 8496 4555 3 PDF eBook

ISBN 978 1 7837 1425 4 Kindle eBook

ISBN 978 1 7837 1424 7 EPUB eBook

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data applied for

This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental standards of the country of origin.

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2

Designed and produced for Pluto Press by

Curran Publishing Services, Norwich

Printed and bound in the European Union by

CPI Antony Rowe, Chippenham and Eastbourne

CONTENTS

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I very much appreciate the help I have received from the following people:

Roger van Zwanenberg and everyone at Pluto Press, Agns Bertrand-Sanz, Angela Godfrey-Goldstein, Merav Amir, Martin Konecny, Richard Stanforth, Shir Hever, Ben Hayes, David Nichols, Jeff Halper, Hamdi Shaqqura, Charles Shamas, Majed Abu Salama, Nathalie Stanus, Michelle Pace, Nathalie Tocci, Brigitte Heremans, Pierre Galand, Amjad Shawa, Gizem Sucuoglu, Husam El Nounou, Wesam Ahmad, Khalil Abu Shammala, Steve McGiffen, Sanjay Suri, Miren Gutirrez, Arthur Neslen, Stephen Gardner, Tom McEnaney, Rachel Henderson, Caterina Amicucci, Greig Aitken, Antonio Tricarico, Fakhri Abu Diab, Maher Hanoun and family, John Hilary, Kaye Stearman, Wendela de Vries, Patrice Bouveret, David Landy. Several others have helped me on condition of anonymity, I would like to thank them namelessly.

Special thanks to my parents Vincent and Mary Cronin and my parents-in-law Tom and Kathleen Carroll.

And extra special thanks to my wife Susan Carroll for her constant love and support and for tolerating my occasional grumpiness while this book was being written.

Note: the individuals listed above do not necessarily share the opinions I express in this book.

David Cronin

INTRODUCTION

It was not journalisms finest hour.

In August 2009, the Swedish tabloid Aftonbladet published a feature about the illicit international trade in human organs. The article hopped from news that had recently broken in the United States to rumours that had circulated in the Middle East 17 years earlier. In the first case, a New York man faced charges of arranging the sale of a kidney from a donor in Israel. In the second, Israeli soldiers were said to have carried out autopsies on the corpses of young Palestinian men and then ripped out their organs for use in medical transplants. As there was no evidence of a link between the two sets of allegations other than that Israel was mentioned in both their juxtaposition was clumsy and crude.

Nonetheless, the newspaper deserves a little credit for highlighting a scandal that the Western media had ignored until then. During the Palestinian uprising or intifada between 1987 and 1993, many Palestinian families complained about the corpses of their sons or siblings being returned to them with missing body parts, after Israel had conducted post mortems without the families consent. In 2002 and 2005, the institute where these autopsies took place Abu Kabir near Tel Aviv was investigated by the Israeli authorities over suspicions it had sold body parts to medical research centres. Yehuda Hiss, director of Abu Kabir at the time, admitted that the transfer of organs had occurred, and said that they belonged to Israeli soldiers who had been killed while on active service. But Hiss has never been convicted of any wrongdoing, and has continued working at the institute as a pathologist.

The fact that there are many unanswered questions about this episode might help explain why Aftonbladet touched a raw nerve in Israel. Shortly after the article appeared, a campaign was launched imploring Israelis to stop buying IKEA furniture, Volvo cars and Absolut vodka. And the Israeli government demanded that the Swedish state censure Donald Bostrm, the author of the piece. After Carl Bildt, the Swedish foreign minister, not only refused to condemn the journalist but implicitly defended his right to express himself, the rage within Israeli officialdom soared once more. Avigdor Lieberman, Bildts Israeli counterpart, drew a hysterical comparison between Stockholms standoffishness and an infamous anti-Semitic tract from the early 1900s that warned of Jews planning to take over the world. He said:

The story published this week is a natural continuation of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion and blood libels like the Beilis trial, in which Jews were accused of adding Christian childrens blood to Passover matzot [flat bread]. Its a shame that the Swedish foreign ministry fails to intervene in a case of blood libel against Jews. This is reminiscent of Swedens stance during World War II, when it failed to intervene as well.

This diplomatic row was not a purely bilateral affair. Because Sweden had assumed the European Unions rotating presidency the previous month, it cast a pall over Israels relations with the 27-country-strong European Union for a number of weeks.

It would be wrong, however, to deduce that such relations are constantly strained. On the contrary, Israel has developed such strong political and economic ties to the European Union over the past decade that it has become a member state of the European Union in all but name. Javier Solana, then EU foreign policy chief, recognised as much while visiting Jerusalem later in 2009, when he candidly admitted that Israel is considerably closer to the European Union than Croatia, even though the former Yugoslav state is on the cusp of formally joining the European Union. Solana said:

There is no country outside the European continent that has this type of relationship that Israel has with the European Union. Israel, allow me to say, is a member of the European Union without being a member of the institutions. Its a member of all the [EUs] programmes, it participates in all the programmes.

What Solana didnt acknowledge was that this deepening relationship is being built at the expense of human rights. While EU representatives routinely speak of how they are wedded to fundamental values such as human rights and democracy, their alliance with Israel is largely devoid of ethical integrity. This was illustrated by the Unions lily-livered response to the slaughter of around 1,400 Gazans by Israeli forces during December 2008 and January 2009.

Even though there was ample prima facie evidence to suggest that international law had been violated during that offensive labelled Operation Cast Lead by Israel the European Union dithered on calling for an independent investigation. When the Unions foreign ministers met in January 2009, the statement that they issued merely committed them to monitoring the results of any such probe. It took until June that year before the European Union voiced support for the four-member team appointed by the United Nations to examine the violations. That support turned out to be short-lived.

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