<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" standalone="yes"?><oembed><version><![CDATA[1.0]]></version><provider_name><![CDATA[Occupied Palestine | فلسطين]]></provider_name><provider_url><![CDATA[https://occupiedpalestine.wordpress.com]]></provider_url><author_name><![CDATA[occupiedpalestine]]></author_name><author_url><![CDATA[https://occupiedpalestine.wordpress.com/author/hajarhajar/]]></author_url><title><![CDATA[ei: EU turns blind eye to Palestinian citizens in&nbsp;Israel]]></title><type><![CDATA[link]]></type><html><![CDATA[<p><span class="text14"><span class="content"><img src="https://i2.wp.com/electronicintifada.net/artman2/uploads/3/110412-lydd-palestinians.jpg" border="1" alt="" width="483" height="322" /></span></span></p>
<p><em><span class="text14"><span class="content"><span class="text11">Palestinian children in the city of Lydd near Tel Aviv. (Oren Ziv/<a href="http://www.activestills.org/">ActiveStills</a>)</span></span></span></em></p>
<p><span class="text14"><strong>David Cronin, <em>The Electronic Intifada,</em> 12 April 2011 </strong></p>
<p><span class="content"> </span></span></p>
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<p><span class="text14"><span class="content">Answering questions from YouTube viewers over the past few weeks,  Benjamin Netanyahu depicted Israel as an oasis of interracial harmony in  a region of strife. &#8220;There&#8217;s only one country in the heart of the  Middle East that has no tremors, no protests,&#8221; the Israeli prime  minister said. &#8220;That&#8217;s Israel. Because we&#8217;re the only one where we  respect human rights. The only one that respects the rights of Arab  citizens. Twenty percent of our population are Arabs. And they enjoy  full civil rights in Israel. It&#8217;s the only place in this entire vast  expanse where Arabs and Muslims enjoy complete freedom and complete  equality before the law.&#8221;</p>
<p><strong>It was a statement of characteristic <em>chutzpah</em>. Despite his  claim that Israel &#8220;respects the rights of Arab citizens,&#8221; its national  parliament &#8212; the Knesset &#8212; had just approved two pieces of legislation  that discriminate against the country&#8217;s 1.4 million Palestinian  citizens.</strong></p>
<p>First, on 22 March, <a href="http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article11884.shtml">a bill was passed to withdraw state funding from any institution that commemorates the Nakba</a>,  the forced displacement of Palestinians in 1948 that accompanied the  establishment of the State of Israel. Then, six days later, the Knesset  approved a new law, which allows for Israeli citizenship to be removed  when someone is convicted of terrorism or treason. Opponents of the law  noted that it was directed at Palestinians and that it was virtually  unthinkable that Jewish Israelis would have their citizenship revoked as  a result.</p>
<p>Netanyahu&#8217;s comments were made ahead of a short European tour, confined  to Germany and the Czech Republic. Predictably, they did not elicit any  protest from the political leaders he met in Berlin and Prague. Angela  Merkel, the German chancellor, went out of her way to exude warmth  towards her guest.  Insisting she is &#8220;never irritated&#8221; by Netanyahu  (notwithstanding reports they had exchanged cross words in February over  the expansion of Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank,  including East Jerusalem), Merkel described her contacts with him as  &#8220;fun.&#8221;</p>
<p>Merkel&#8217;s silence over the treatment of the Palestinian minority in  Israel is mirrored by the stance of the entire 27-country European  Union.</p>
<p>Since Catherine Ashton was appointed the EU&#8217;s foreign policy chief in  2009, she has not issued a single statement focusing exclusively on the  plight of Palestinians within Israel. Her reticence stands in marked  contrast to her hasty reaction to incidents that affect Israeli Jews.  For example, she swiftly condemned the rockets fired by Hamas from Gaza  into southern Israel on 7 April.</p>
<p>Ashton frequently meets Avigdor Lieberman, the Israeli foreign minister,  whose party Yisrael Beiteinu (Israel Our Home) has been part of the  country&#8217;s ruling coalition for the past two years. During that time,  Lieberman and his colleagues have been the main sponsors of  approximately twenty laws and bills designed to worsen the  discrimination faced by Israel&#8217;s Palestinian minority.</p>
<p>In 1973, the United Nations recognized that the crime of apartheid did  not only apply to South Africa but also to other situations where one  racial group dominated over another. Israel has long enshrined its  racism against Palestinians in quasi-constitutional legislation. The  1950 Law of Return enables Jews throughout the world to move to Israel  and gain citizenship. Yet Palestinians forced to leave their homes  during the 1948 Nakba and since then are denied that right.</p>
<p>When I asked Ashton&#8217;s spokeswoman Maja Kocijancic why EU representatives  never utter the words &#8220;Israel&#8221; and &#8220;apartheid&#8221; in the same sentence,  she replied that &#8220;Israel is a democratic country and a partner of the  European Union. Human right issues and possible shortcomings in this  respect are discussed in the regular dialogue we have with the Israeli  authorities.&#8221;</p>
<p>Israeli historian and political dissident Ilan Pappe disagrees with  Kocijanic&#8217;s assessment. In an interview published earlier this month by <em>New Internationalist</em> magazine Pappe explained that &#8220;Israel is what we in political science call a <em>herrenvolk</em> democracy, democracy only for the masters&#8221; (<a href="http://www.newint.org/features/web-exclusive/2011/04/01/palestine-israel-interview-pappe/">Reframing the Israel-Palestine conflict</a>).  He added that &#8220;The fact that you allow people to participate in the  formal side of democracy, namely to vote or to be elected, is  meaningless if you don&#8217;t give them any share in the common good or in  the common resources of the state, or if you discriminate against them  despite the fact that you allow them to participate in the elections. On  almost every level &#8212; from official legislation through governmental  practices to social and cultural attitudes &#8212; Israel is only a democracy  for one ethnic group.&#8221;</p>
<p>The EU&#8217;s unwillingness to address the treatment of Palestinians within  Israel was exposed in a February report published by Adalah, a human  rights organization based in Haifa, and the Euro-Mediterranean Human  Rights Network (&#8220;<a href="http://www.euromedrights.org/en/publications-en/emhrn-publications/emhrn-puplications/9132.html">EU and the Palestinian Arab Minority in Israel</a>&#8220;).  It noted that the rights of the Palestinian minority in Israel are not  even mentioned in the &#8220;association agreement&#8221; between the EU and Israel  that came into effect in 2000 and sets out the main contractual basis of  relations between the two sides.</p>
<p>That omission was partly compensated for by an &#8220;action plan&#8221; on Israel  approved by top-level EU representatives in 2005. The plan listed  minority rights as one of the topics which the European Commission (the  EU&#8217;s executive) and Israel were prepared to hold discussions. While  Brussels officials appear to be monitoring the situation facing the  Palestinian minority in Israel, &#8220;the Commission&#8217;s language has neither  consistently hardened nor softened over the years,&#8221; the February report  says.</p>
<p>&#8220;The EU is not willing to compromise its relationship with Israel,&#8221;  Nathalie Tocci, the report&#8217;s author, told me. &#8220;This means it&#8217;s unwilling  to recognize Israel as not being a democracy. It is ready to criticize  Israel&#8217;s democratic deficiencies &#8212; regarding human and minority rights  &#8212; but would view these problems as analogous to those within some  European countries too.&#8221;</p>
<p>The socio-economic conditions in which Palestinians inside Israel live  also put them at a disadvantage. Throughout Israel, more than 20 percent  of households live below the poverty line. But the proportion rises to  50 percent for the Palestinian minority in general and to 80 percent for  Bedouins.</p>
<p>When Lieberman visited Brussels in February, the EU issued a  45-paragraph statement on its relations with Israel. It called on the  Israeli government to implement the recommendations of a panel chaired  by Eliezer Goldberg, a retired Israeli judge, on Bedouin communities in  the Negev. Issued in 2008, the Goldberg Commission report found that  62,000 Bedouins in 46 villages unrecognized by Israel were living in an  &#8220;unbearable state.&#8221; It urged Israel to confer a legal status on those  villages.</p>
<p>Lending its support to a commission mainly dominated by Israeli  establishment figures was an easy step for the EU to take.  Unsurprisingly, it did not go further by denouncing <a href="http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article11860.shtml">the role of the Jewish National Fund (JNF) in destroying Bedouin villages such as al-Araqib</a>, which has suffered more than twenty demolitions since July last year.</p>
<p>Even though the JNF&#8217;s bulldozers have been used in those demolitions and  other acts of dispossession against Bedouins, the fund is regarded as a  charity by some fifty countries worldwide. The JNF held a central  position in the Zionist movement well before the State of Israel was  established and used that position to advocate vigorously in favor of  ethnic cleansing. Yosef Weitz, one of the JNF&#8217;s leading figures during  the 1930s and &#8217;40s, argued repeatedly that Palestinians should be forced  out of Palestine.</p>
<p>The JNF has been given direct ownership of 13 percent of the land of  Israel and a role in managing most of the remainder. It is particularly  influential in Britain, where Prime Minister David Cameron is one of its  patrons. On its website, the JNF presents itself as a humanitarian and  environmental organization dedicated to planting trees in Israel.</p>
<p>&#8220;The JNF is involved in the illegal expropriation of Palestinian land  and the concealing of Palestinian villages beneath parks and forests,&#8221;  said Michael Kalmanovitz from the Stop the JNF Campaign in Britain. &#8220;The  fact that David Cameron is one of its patrons is a disgrace.&#8221;</p>
<p>Hassan Jabareen, director of Adalah, said that both the EU and the US  have tended to concentrate only on Palestinians living in the West Bank  and Gaza and not on the Palestinian minority within Israel. By turning a  blind eye to this community, the EU has failed to learn important  lessons from the experience of its own member states. &#8220;You couldn&#8217;t have  got peace between the UK and the Republic of Ireland without addressing  the situation in Northern Ireland,&#8221; Jabareen said. &#8220;Europe should  understand that.&#8221;</p>
<p>In his new book <em>Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions: The Global Struggle for Palestinian Rights</em>,  Omar Barghouti argues that Westerners promoting conflict resolution in  the Middle East have not grappled with the underlying injustices. &#8220;The  main culprit is the insistence of Israel and successive US governments  on exploiting the current massive power imbalance to impose a peace  devoid of justice and human rights on the Palestinians, an unjust  &#8216;solution&#8217; that fails to address our basic rights under international  law and undermines our inalienable right to self-determination,&#8221; he  writes.</p>
<p>Barghouti is correct to pin much of the blame on Washington. Yet  Europe&#8217;s contribution to this dismal state of affairs should not be  overlooked, either. As the biggest destination for Israeli exports, the  EU could have made the strengthening of its political and economic links  with Israel conditional on improving the situation of all three groups  that comprise the Palestinian people. These are the Palestinians in the  occupied West Bank (including East Jerusalem) and Gaza; those holding  Israeli citizenship; and refugees in the diaspora. The EU&#8217;s refusal to  attach such conditions exposes its never-ending declarations of support  for human rights as hollow.</p>
<p><em>David Cronin&#8217;s book </em>Europe&#8217;s Alliance With Israel: Aiding the Occupation<em> is published by Pluto Press (www.plutobooks.com).</em></span></p>
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