“With so much else going on in the Middle East, why always Palestine?”

• The government takes action against human rights abuses in other countries, but not in Israel.  That’s why we focus on it.
• We go on about injustice in Palestine because injustice in Palestine goes on and indeed is getting worse.
• Just because there are human rights abuses in other countries does not excuse or belittle human rights abuses in Israel
• Israel claims to be a liberal democracy which makes its treatment of Palestinians all the more reprehensible
• Palestine is the poison in the well of international relations. It creates a sense of injustice and double standards that infects the whole of the Middle East and the Muslim world.
• Granting impunity to Israel undermines international law
• Other countries have poverty but in Palestine is it created deliberately

“How can you say they are poor. There’s a luxury shopping mall in Gaza.”

• Because of the tunnels more goods are now available, but few can afford them.
• 38% of Gazans are “poor”, 44% are “food insecure” and 80% depend on food aid[1]
• Gazan poverty is be the world’s worst, but it is the only one created deliberately
•  As a result of the blockade Gazans are 17% poorer than they were in 2005[2]
• The only shopping mall sells goods that would be considered cheap in theUK

“What’s the problem?  The Palestinian economy is booming.”

• Palestinian income per head fell by 34% between 2000 and 2008[1]
• Palestinians are still poorer than they were in 1999[2]
• The FCO says this is “largely a result of Israeli closure policies”[3]
• Growth in last three years has been “heavily dependent on donor aid” [4]
• Unemployment never fallen below 20%[5], poverty never below 25%[6]

“The attack on Gaza was self-defence.”

• During the Israeli assault that started on 27 December 2008 and lasted 22 days, 13 Israelis were killed and 1,400 Palestinians.[1]
• The Israeli attack codenamed Operation Cast Lead actually followed a six-month calm in which there were no Israeli deaths. Even when Israel broke the calm, killing 17 Gazans in November, Hamas stood still and did not retaliate.[2]
• There was also a huge dis proportionality in arms. Israeli airstrikes are made by F-16s, Apache helicopters and drones while al-qassam rockets were, according to the UN’s Goldstone Report, “fashioned from rudimentary materials such as hollow metal pipes (…) relatively unsophisticated weapons and lacking a guidance system”.

Background 

• An Egyptian-brokered six-month ceasefire between Israel and Hamas came into force on 19 June 2008, policed in Gaza by Hamas, and expired on 19 December. On 27 December Israel began the assault on Gaza which ended on 22 January 2009 with 1,400 Palestinians dead.
• Operation Cast Lead is the Israeli term for the bombardment of Gaza during December 2008 and January 2009. The term gives the impression it was a legitimate military operation or a war. Under international law, as occupying power, Israel is obliged to protect the Gazan civilian population. The wholly disproportionate nature of the attack and the deliberate assault on civilians and civilian infrastructure were widely condemned. Armed conflict in Gaza was not between two states or even between a state and a non-state actor, but against a defenceless population.

“If we talk to Hamas, we will be encouraging terrorism”

“We are ready to talk peace but the Palestinians are not sincere about wanting peace.”

• The leaked Palestine papers clearly demonstrate that the Palestinian leadership is in desperate search of a settlement.
• In the 20 years since the Madrid peace talks started, the Israelis have more than doubled the number of settlers in the West Bank from 230,000 to over half a million
• When Netanyahu’s former vice-premier Moshe Ya’alon was asked why Israeli governments went in for “all these games of make-believe negotiations”, he replied: “You have to create the illusion that an agreement can be reached.  Time works for those who make use of it…. and we in government know how to make use of time.”
• Netanyahu’s ex-head of Shin Bet, Yuval Diskin, said: “We are not talking to the Palestinians because this (Israeli) government has no interest in negotiations…no interest in solving anything with the Palestinians. And I say this with certainty.”[1]
• In 1973 in a letter to a friend, which he thought would never be published, Ariel Sharon said his strategy was to make the West Bank like a pastrami sandwich: “We’ll insert a strip of Jewish settlements in between the Palestinians and then another strip right across the West Bank so that, in 25 years, neither the United Nations, nor the US, nobody, will be able to tear it apart.”
• 25 years later, in 1998, when his pastrami sandwich was already a reality,Sharon was secretly recorded telling a group of religious party youth activists: “Everybody has to grab as many hilltops as they can to enlarge the settlements because everything we take now will stay ours… Everything we don’t grab will go to them.”

Background

• The minutes of the Palestinian Negotiation Support Unit published by Al Jazeera, known as the Palestine Papers, gave an insight into the Palestinian negotiating position: they were ready to make huge concessions to arrive at a draft peace agreement and were widely condemned for being ready to give too much away.^[1]
• The Israelis tell the outside world they are interested in peace, but they use peace talks as cover for extending settlements and absorbing more Palestinian land. They are gradually taking over all land designated under Oslo as Area C, which is 60% of the West Bank, which would leave only unconnected islands or “bantustans” under Palestinian control.
• Israelis play a long game, always saying they want “a little more”. In the 1920s they wanted Jewish neighbourhoods, in the 1930s a Jewish-Arab commonwealth, in the 1940s a state, in the 1970s a few settlements in the West Bank, in the 80s a few more. Now they are gradually taking over Area C and if they succeed, Palestinians will be left not with 22% but 13% of historic Palestine
• A former legal adviser to the Palestinian Liberation Organization, Mr Ziyad Clot, states that “There will be no Palestinian State” as it is practically impossible by now.[2]

“The Israelis are ready to start talks without preconditions. The Palestinians are setting a precondition – a settlement freeze.”

• It is not a precondition to abide by International Law – it is a legal requirement.

• The Israelis are trying to build a pre-condition in bricks and mortar. They want the starting point for talks to be “facts on the ground” – the existing settlements, built illegally, and the 500,000 Israeli settlers on Palestinian land.
• The starting point should be the legal status quo – that the whole of the West Bank and East Jerusalem within the 1967 borders is Palestinian land as unanimously agreed by the UN Security Council in Resolution 242.

• It’s inherent in the idea of negotiations that neither side can change the parameters while negotiations are in progress. It’s not a precondition to say goalposts should not be moved in the middle of a football match.

 Background 

• Israel settles its own civilian population in what they call “settlements” in the occupied territories. The law that applies to military occupations, the Fourth Geneva Convention, states quite explicitly that “the Occupying Power shall not (…) transfer parts of its own civilian population into the territory it occupies”. [1]
• Israel then presents these settlements as “facts on the ground” that become the starting point for negotiations, so they have the effect of extending Israeli territory.
• The Palestine Liberation Organisation’s position has been since Camp David that certain settlements, albeit illegal, may remain in return for land swaps.
• Palestinians have already made their historic compromise by dropping their claim to 78% of historic Palestine.  They cannot be expected to compromise on compromise.
•  Only 15% of the wall is built along the 1967 border with Israel and 85%[2] is built inside the West Bank with the same objective of extending Israeli territory by creating “facts on the ground”.
• The International Court of Justice declared the wall illegal insofar as it is built in Palestinian (1967) territory in an advisory opinion entitled “Legal Consequences of the Construction of the Wall in the Occupied Palestinian Territories”.[3]