by Isi Leibler
The European Union has disposed
of any pretense of even-handedness with Israel, and has effectively
repudiated the concept of disputed territories, which will be one of the
principal issues of contention at the forthcoming peace talks sponsored
by US Secretary of State John Kerry.
Newly issued EU guidelines
prohibit the issuing of funding, grants, prizes or scholarships to
Israeli institutions located beyond the Green Line. Part of a 2014-20
financial framework, they cover all areas of cooperation between the EU
and Israel, including economic, science, culture, sports and academia.
While they do not directly affect trade agreements, the move is a clear
penalty that could, in the future, extend to goods produced in the
settlements, and launch of a new European anti-Israeli offensive.
The EU is Israel’s most
significant trade partner. In 2012, Israel imported $22.4 billion and
exported $14.2 billion to the EU. Thus, the material and symbolic
implications of the exclusion of settlements from EU trade agreements
should not be underestimated.
By no longer recognizing
“disputed territories” the EU is demanding that Israel acknowledge that
“settlements” and all territories occupied after 1967 are not part of
the sovereign Israeli state. This not only incorporates the major
settlement blocs that will never be forfeited, but also the officially
annexed Golan Heights, the Jewish suburbs of East Jerusalem and the Old
City, including the Western Wall.
It means that the EU has
abrogated its own Quartet Roadmap by unilaterally determining that the
borders of Israel will be the 1949 armistice lines. It is also in
violation of UN Security Council Resolution 242, which stipulates that
these are not deemed to be legal or permanent borders and specifies that
Israel should have “secure and recognized boundaries.” Rather than
supporting direct negotiations with the Palestinians, the EU is now
imposing upon us indefensible borders that will endanger our future
existence.
This EU policy is utterly
perverse and certainly will not advance the cause of peace. On the
contrary, it will undermine the forthcoming peace talks, and provide an
incentive to the Palestinians to reject any compromise knowing that
intransigency will be rewarded by intensified European and global
pressure on Israel to make additional unilateral concessions.
Ironically released on the fast
of Tisha B’Av, the EU announcement caught the Israeli government by
surprise. But the writing has been on the wall for a long time. Moral
relativism has dominated European thinking since World War II. This,
combined with post-colonial guilt and mounting pressure from powerful
Moslem groups, has encouraged Europeans to treat Jews, and in particular
the Jewish state, as their scapegoats.
But it goes further. The
traditional anti-Semitism rooted in European culture throughout two
millennia that went into remission after the horrors of the Nazi
Holocaust is now rapidly re-emerging and actively directed against the
Jewish nation-state. Many Europeans are deeply offended and agitated by
suggestions that their policies towards Israel are motivated by bias or
anti-Semitism. Yet the April 2004 Berlin Declaration of the Organization
for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) specifically defines
anti-Semitic behavior as the application to Israel of “double standards
by requiring of it a behavior not expected or demanded of any other
democratic nation,” “drawing comparisons of contemporary Israeli policy
to that of the Nazis,” or “describing Israel as ‘a racist endeavor’.”
Opinion polls consistently show
that Europeans are convinced that Israel represents an equal or greater
threat to world peace than North Korea or Iran. More ominously, a recent
European poll indicated that 150 million Europeans endorse the view
that Israelis treat Palestinians like the Nazis treated Jews.
It is almost surreal that the EU
is taking a punitive stand against Israel at a time when the civil war
in Syria has cost more than 120,000 lives, Iran seeks to become a
nuclear power, and Egypt and most of the region is in total flux. At the
same time, the EU has been agonizing for more than a year whether or
not to proscribe the so-called “military” wing of Hezbollah as a
terrorist entity. In this context, it is obscene for the EU to flex its
muscles against Jews living in the Jewish suburbs of East Jerusalem.
Moreover, the EU knows that 90%
of Palestinians in the West Bank already live under the authority of the
Palestinian Authority and that Gaza is totally controlled by Hamas. The
Europeans are also aware that, despite Israel’s repeated offers to
negotiate without preconditions, the Palestinians have been the
intransigent party, increasing their demands for unilateral concessions
as a precondition and treating Israel as a supplicant.
But the double standards applied
against Israel have always been blatant. The EU has never made similar
demands of China’s occupation of Tibet, India’s occupation of Kashmir or
even Turkey’s control of one third of Cyprus. It is only toward Israel
that it seeks to impose such extreme discriminatory measures.
It is unclear where the Obama
administration stands on this matter. Theoretically, the White House and
State Department should be opposed to the new EU policy because it
undermines even the remote prospects of a successful outcome to the
forthcoming negotiations with the Palestinians. But neither the White
House nor the State Department have criticized the initiative, and there
is a lurking suspicion that there are those in the administration who
welcome and may even have encouraged this move to exert pressure on
Israel.
Indeed, in his efforts to court
the Palestinians to agree to negotiations, Kerry has been ominously
hinting that the “disputed territories” should be substituted by the
terminology used in the Arab League peace proposal. This could pave the
way for the US to blame Israel for a breakdown in negotiations if we
refuse to consider Arab demands for using the 1949 armistice lines as
the benchmark for territorial negotiations.
In combating this new European
challenge, the need is greater than ever for our government to speak
with one voice. Recent provocative statements by government ministers
repudiating a two-state solution under any circumstances and calling for
annexation of the territories in direct contradiction to official
government policy provided a rationale for dispensing with the concept
of disputed territories, which made it respectable for the EU to do the
same.
We must not concede to this
malevolent, new EU demand which, if played out further, would entail
abandoning hundreds of thousands of law-abiding citizens. We must make
every possible effort to prevent the EU from expanding this move toward
broader sanctions. And we must make clear that whilst this
discriminatory clause remains in effect, we can no longer consider the
EU an honest broker or an intermediary in peace negotiations.
The European initiative is a
wake-up call. While Israel has a powerful and resilient economy that can
withstand trade restrictions, it cannot endure further isolation. We
cannot write off Europe, but instead must exploit all our resources to
shame the EU and more aggressively expose the double standards and bias
it continues to employ against us.
He may be contacted at ileibler@leibler.com
This column was published in the Jerusalem Post and Israel Hayom
Isi Leibler
Source: http://wordfromjerusalem.com/?p=4741
Copyright - Original materials copyright (c) by the authors.
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