NGO Monitor is the latest in a long list of Israeli leaders and organizations to criticize the recent decision by the European Union. The EU this week decided to have nothing to do with anything emanating from the eastern & southern neighborhoods of Jerusalem, Judea, Samaria, or the Golan Heights.
In a press statement, NGO Monitor said, “the guidelines issued by the European Union to ban EU funding and cooperation with Israeli institutions beyond the 1949 Armistice Line reflects a policy dictated by political NGOs which are involved in the delegitimization campaign against Israel. The complex issues of the Arab-Israeli conflict are not aided by harmful steps such as boycotts which undermine a peace process based on negotiations and mutual respect.
The founder of NGO Monitor Prof. Gerald Steinberg added, “the new EU guidelines are evidence of the influence of political NGOs – some funded by the EU – on the EU’s policies. On occasion we have seen the EU rely on political NGOs’ reports without checking their veracity.”
EU Reveals its True Colors
The EU guidelines are clearly anti-Semitic: they are a unique set of guidelines crafted for the occasion of targeting Jews. The EU does not ask similar guarantees of China for Tibet, Turkey for Cyprus, or Indonesia for Western Papua.
Last week, the European Union issued guidelines regarding the use of EU funds in Israel. From now on, Israeli institutions cooperating with the EU or benefitting from EU funding must demonstrate that they have no direct or indirect links to Judea, Samaria, East Jerusalem or the Golan Heights. The guidelines, drawn up by the EU bureaucracy in Brussels, bind the EU, a supranational organization of 28 European nations, and one of the world’s largest donors of development aid. The guidelines also forbid any funding, cooperation, awarding of scholarships, research funds or prizes to anyone residing in Jewish settlements in Israeli territories outside Israel’s 1967 borders.
Only the 500,000 Jewish inhabitants of Judea, Samaria, East Jerusalem and the Golan Heights are singled out in this respect. The EU guidelines are clearly anti-Semitic: they are a unique set of guidelines crafted for the occasion of targeting Jews. The EU does not ask similar guarantees of Chinese institutions regarding their links with Chinese occupied Tibet, nor does the EU forbid any funding, cooperation, awarding of scholarships, research funds or prizes to ethnic Chinese residing in Tibet. Neither has the EU issued similar guidelines regarding Turkey and Turkish occupied Northern Cyprus, Morocco and Moroccan occupied Western Sahara, Indonesia and Indonesian occupied Western Papua, or territorial disputes anywhere else in the world.
In issuing the guidelines, the EU has come out in full support of the so-called “BDS” movement, which advocates “Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions” against the Jewish presence in Judea, Samaria, East Jerusalem and the Golan Heights.
The EU decided to draw up the guidelines last December, shortly after a group of 22 political NGOs, all of them supporting BDS, called on Brussels to join the BDS actions. Ironically, many of these political NGOs, despite their involvement in a delegitimization campaign against Israel, have themselves for years been beneficiaries of millions of euros of EU money. In effect, the EU has been funding political NGOs whose main objective it was to pressure the EU member states into adopting anti-Semitic policies.
 A Swedish poster urging the boycott of Israeli products. (Source: Creap) |
That a supposedly politically neutral organization, such as the EU, sponsors political groups that aim to force this organization to adopt certain policies is in itself irregular. As Prof. Gerald Steinberg of NGO Monitor points out, “The new EU guidelines are evidence of the influence of political NGOs – some funded by the EU – on the EU’s policies. The practical results are worrisome and reflect a faulty and one-sided agenda.”
However, that these policies are directed against one specific ethnic group, namely Jews, makes them not just irregular and worrisome, but outrageous. And the fact that taxpayers’ money is used to this end, including taxes paid by the Jewish citizens of the EU states, makes them shameful and repulsive.
Given the EU’s support for politicized attacks against Israel and its discrimination against, for example, Jews living in East Jerusalem, the EU can no longer be considered a neutral body in the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.
The new EU guidelines bolster the Palestinian claim to all territories east of the 1967 borders. The guidelines have angered Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu, who said: “We will not accept any outside diktat about our borders.” The EU guidelines are not helpful to the peace process either, since they attempt to predetermine the outcome of negotiations before the Palestinians even agree to sit at the negotiating table. There is little doubt that the EU diplomats are aware of that. They also know that the 1967 borders, which confine the state of Israel to the territory west of the 1949 armistice line, make the borders of the State of Israel militarily virtually indefensible. It is also clear that if the Golan Heights are returned to Syria, these strategic lands will fall into the hands of either Hezbollah or al-Qaida – organizations which have sworn to destroy Israel and drive the Jews into the sea.
Yet, that seems to be how the EU would love to have Israel: Indefensible and as small as possible. The EU guidelines indicate that Brussels denies Israel the right to an adequate and effective self-defense.
Considering the immense suffering which many of the current EU member states inflicted on the Jews seventy years ago, Brussels, rather than undermining the safety of the Jewish State, should insist on guaranteeing Israel a right to safe and viable borders. Sadly, by issuing guidelines steeped in anti-Semitism, it is doing exactly the opposite.
91 years has passed since the birth of the “Mandate for Palestine,” an historical League of Nations document, that laid down the Jewish legal right to settle anywhere in western Palestine, the area between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea, an entitlement unaltered in international law.
The “Mandate for Palestine” was not a naive vision briefly embraced by the international community. Fifty-one member countries—the entire League of Nations—unanimously declared on July 24, 1922:
“Whereas recognition has been given to the historical connection of the Jewish people with Palestine and to the grounds for reconstituting their national home in that country.”
It is important to point out that political rights to self-determination as a polity for Arabs, were guaranteed by the same League of Nations in four other mandates—in Lebanon and Syria [The French Mandate], Iraq, and later Trans-Jordan [The British Mandate].
Any attempt to negate the Jewish people’s right to Palestine—Eretz-Israel, and to deny them access and control in the area designated for the Jewish people by the League of Nations is a serious infringement of international law.
Continuous pressure from the “Quartet” [U.S., the European Union, the UN and Russia] to surrender parts of Eretz-Israel are contrary to international law that firmly calls to “encourage … close settlement by Jews on the land, including State lands and waste lands not required for public purposes.” It also requires the Mandatory for “seeing that no Palestine territory shall be ceded or leased to, or in any way placed under the control of the government of any foreign power.”
In their attempt to establish peace between the Jewish state and its Arab neighbors, the nations of the world should remember who the lawful sovereign nation is with its rights anchored in international law and valid to this day: The Jewish Nation.
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Isi Liebler: Europe Hypocritically Lashes Out Against Israel
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.
