The EU’s stance against Israel is often seen as being critical and harsh. While EU relations with the Middle-East are generally sensible, and while Israel has certainly overreacted in many situations, the EU still appears to downplay Israel’s rights.
Europe’s criticisms are based on what it mistakenly believes is a clear-cut legal case, a lack of its own realpolitik, and ignorance of how to deal with terrorism.
Civilians
It is sad that innocent Palestinians suffer restrictions on their freedom and rights. Yet these restrictions are because, in among the innocents, lie the terrorists. Allowing freedom for all allows terror for all. It is simple arithmetic: security and barricades allow for Israelis to live in peace, though both the innocents and terrorists suffer; removal of security restrictions causes fear and leads to widespread disruption and a greater risk of loss of life. At least under the first scenario, some people benefit; the second ensures only that all lose.
Brussels has argued that Israel should reduce its security presence and military activity. The EU Israel Action Plan states that security operations should have a minimal impact on the civilian population. This is naïve and unenforceable, as terrorists always exploit and operate within civilian populations.
Intelligence
The EU local mission has called numerous times for Israel to stop operations in areas under the control of the Palestinian Authority (PA), and has opposed raids on ‘civil society’ organisations such as the Union of Palestinian Women Committees which the EU cooperates with. This, the EU argues, undermines the PA and the institutions building civil society. However, the EU opposition on 30 January 2013 or in December 2012 to the Israeli raids paid no attention to the use of intelligence by Israel; intelligence that stated that some of the organisations had links to terrorists.
It should be patently obvious that Israel acts on intelligence, yet the EU instead chose to align itself with the suspect organisations and idealistically wax lyrical about civil society institutions.
What’s a terrorist?
The EU’s understanding of what a terrorist is might also be called into question. On 13th June 2013, the EU issued a statement saying that it had not listed Hezbollah as a terrorist organisation. Apparently the 2008 bombing of a US embassy, a 2011 bombing in Istanbul and the probable involvement of Hezbollah in the murder of six people in Bulgaria (on EU territory) in 2012 were clearly not enough for the organisation to be registered as terrorist.
Shot in the foot
It is widely known that Israel has one of the best, if not the best, intelligence gathering agencies in the world. By alienating Israel, the EU is defeating its own attempts at developing its foreign policy capabilities. The US and UK have benefited immensely precisely because there is intelligence sharing with Israel. Brussels would do well to note this.
Sense and the Gaza blockade
Despite the intelligence Israel had of weapons being taken into Gaza, prompting its blockade in 2010, the EU reacted by condemned it, demanding the unconditional opening of borders for the flow of aid, and condemning Hamas’s violence in the process.
Yet the flow of weapons was coming via the aid, precisely Israel’s point. The aid and weapons flow were connected. Israel began the blockade (with Egypt) to pressure Hamas, the organisation responsible for, amongst others, the 1996 Jaffa Road Bus bombing, the 2002 Passover massacre, and the 2010 murder of four civilians, including a pregnant woman, and the organisation the EU has been softening its stance towards recently.
Whilst the Israeli reaction to the Gaza flotilla was badly handled, resulting in the deaths of civilians, the EU failed to acknowledge the Israeli offer for the flotilla to dock in an Israeli port, from which the goods being carried would have been transported to Gaza, after being security screened. Surely, this would have been a wise way forwards?
Israeli Security Fence V EU’s anti-migrant fence
Brussels has also opposed the Israeli security barrier, built after a wave of 73 terrorist attacks between 2000 and 2003 killed 292 Israeli’s and injured nearly 2000. The security fence (most of it is a fence, not a wall) was built to reduce terror, as opposed to the EU’s helping of Spain to build a fence in Ceuta and Melilla to keep sub-Saharan Africans out of Europe.
Between 2003-2006, only two attacks occurred, while the EU was arguing the fence was illegal. By 2009, there were no attacks, and when someone has gotten through, gaps in the fence have been blamed. Yet protestors, happily living far from the threat of being blown up on a bus, have felt free to condemn Israel for doing this.
Biased opinion on a legal mess
On 31 May 2013, the EU responded to media reports of settlements in East Jerusalem, by stating that settlements are illegal, making a two-state solution impossible, and recognising only the pre-1967 borders. “The EU’s objective is a two-state solution” is the official policy objective.
Yet using language such as ‘illegal’ is unhelpful. The ICJ in 2004 stated that settlements were illegal, but as Yale’s Nicholas Rostow pointed out, the ICJ started from the premise that the West Bank was created for Palestinians to live there. In fact, Palestine has never been defined, as it originally included all of Jordan as well as all of Israel. The Balfour Declaration aimed to create a Jewish homeland while not discriminating against the other inhabitants of the land.
The 1947 UN General Assembly recommendation concerning the borders was never accepted by the Security Council or the Arab states, and the 1949 armistice agreement concluded with Jordan, which in 1950 annexed the West Bank (recognised by only two states) did not bind future claims. Jordan since then handed its claim on the West Bank to the Palestinian Liberation Organisation, which at that time was regarded by the US as a terrorist organisation. The ICJ ruling also did not claim that the Armistice line is Israel’s final border, leaving the West Bank, and settlements within it, in a legal mess.
Certainly, settlements have not aided the process to peace, but surely the issue should be as much about why many Arab states have still refused to recognise Israel, and as about settlements. Yet the EU has taken the view that things are clear-cut and there is not, as is in reality, a messy situation on the ground (clearly stating that Palestinian land exists at the Second EU-League of Arab States meeting of 13 November 2013).
Conclusions
Brussels is not taking into account all the facts when dealing with the Israeli-Palestinian problem, and is heavily biased by popular opinion and media campaigns. Instead of seeing the legitimate concerns of the country that offered Yasser Arafat a two-state solution at Camp David in 2000, and which again offered Mahmoud Abbas one in 2008 (both including over 90% of the West Bank’s land), the EU tends to take the other side, and in so doing, is undermining its own global position.
