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JOINT COMMITTEE ON FOREIGN AFFAIRS (Sub-Committee on Human Rights) debate -
Wednesday, 16 Jun 2004

Human Rights in Israel and the Occupied Territories: Presentation.

I welcome the delegation from Amnesty International. The members of the delegation include Professor Jeff Halper, Co-ordinator, Israeli Committee against House Demolitions and Ms Anne Marlborough, who was here some weeks ago to give a more general overview of Amnesty's priorities.

The members of the delegation should be aware that while members of the committee have absolute privilege, it does not apply to witnesses appearing before the committee. I invite the members of the delegation to make their presentation.

Ms Anne Marlborough

I thank members of the committee for giving us this opportunity to speak about our concerns regarding human rights violations in Israel and the Occupied Territories. Amnesty in Ireland recently chose a new way of working. It has decided that henceforth it will focus its work on three countries, Zimbabwe, Mexico and Israel and the Occupied Territories. It is just beginning its campaign around Israel and the Occupied Territories. We want to draw attention to the human rights abuses that exist in the Occupied Territories. We want to examine who is responsible for these abuses in the various regions. We also want to examine the global dimension to the issue and the response Ireland can make to try to do something to halt human rights abuses in Israel. We want to examine the role of the Irish Government and the measures it can take in the area of leadership within the EU and within Ireland in regard to corporate responsibility. The issues about which we have been concerned are the construction of the wall and house demolitions, both of which violate so many international humanitarian and human rights law.

Visiting us from Israel is Professor Jeff Halper, Professor of Anthropology at Ben Gurian University. He is also co-ordinator of the Israeli committee against house demolitions. He will tell the committee his experiences of violations of human rights in the Occupied Territories.

Professor Jeff Halper

I thank members of the committee for having me here. It is important for members of the Israeli peace movement to be able to present our position abroad and to get support from the international community. This type of forum is very important for us.

We are now in a new political situation which is often not appreciated. Israel's policy since 1967, particularly since 1977 when the Begin Government was elected and Sharon was appointed head of the ministerial committee on settlements, which put him in a position of being the architect of the settlement enterprise, Israel's policy has been to create facts on the ground that prejudice any kind of negotiations. In other words, it would make Israel's occupation permanent and foreclose the establishment of any viable Palestinian state. For 26 or 27 years, Sharon, in complicity with the Labour Party when it was in power, including the years of Oslo, proceeded in a very vigorous and aggressive way to expand Israel's permanent settlements, infrastructure and now the construction of this massive security barrier of a wall plus electronic fences. This is intended to make the Israeli presence permanent.

Israel denies that it has an occupation. In other words, it refuses to accept the fourth Geneva Convention or any international laws that apply to occupation. Its position is that there is no occupation because this is its country, the entire country from the Mediterranean to the Jordan river, therefore, one cannot occupy one's own country. Israel has never recognised the Palestinians as claimants to the land under the pretext that the Palestinians never had an independent state of their own, even though a Palestinian state was declared by the United Nations in 1947.

Israel also denies the basic principle of international law which prohibits the acquisition of territory by force. A basic principle of international law is the inadmissibility of acquiring territory by force. Israel denies the basic principle that in the 21st century we cannot go out and conquer anymore. Its policy of creating facts is designed to make its presence permanent, because it does not have an occupation, in other words, to take the whole issue of Israeli control and annexation of the West Bank out of the political realm and out of negotiations and make it an accepted fact on the ground while at the same time foreclosing the establishment of a viable Palestinian state.

Israel needs a Palestinian state. Even though Israel claims the entire country, from the Mediterranean to the Jordan river, and it has de facto made it one country through the establishment of a massive settlement and infrastructure network, it cannot take the next step and make it one country because there are approximately four million Palestinians that Israel cannot digest. If it made it one country and gave the Palestinians citizenship — after all, Israel claims to be the only democracy in the Middle East — Israel would cease to be a Jewish state because half the population of the country is Palestinian. If, on the other hand, Israel made it one country and did not give the Palestinians citizenship, it would be outright apartheid. Even in a world of George Bush, it is not easy to sell apartheid.

The trick for Israel is how to keep control of the entire country while getting rid of the Palestinian population. They cannot transfer them physically out of the country yet, although that is discussed openly in the Israeli Parliament and media. There is a policy of what we call the "quiet transfer", of administratively forcing the Palestinian middle classes in particular out of the country. There is that type of policy but they cannot really transfer them out. What they have to do, therefore, is try to create a mini-state or bantustan, like in South Africa, which leaves them in control of the country but locks the Palestinians into a state where they are off the Israelis' hands but at the same time are confined, dependent and unable to exercise the right of self determination.

The policy for years has been to create facts on the ground and make them a reality. The watershed was last month with the meeting between Sharon and Bush in Washington, which was later supported by Blair, in which the United States essentially said that it accepted those facts on the ground as political realities. We now have new parameters for negotiations. Rather than negotiating the status of the Occupied Territories, the 22% of the country in the West Bank, east Jerusalem and Gaza that was conquered by Israel in 1967, the United States now recognises the demographic realities and, therefore, will not require Israel to withdraw to the 1967 borders. Essentially, the United States recognises Israel's major settlement blocks, so that has been taken out of the negotiations. In a sense all we are left with, and this is a major turning point in the Israel-Palestinian conflict, is the Palestinians negotiating how big their bantustan prison state will be. Will 40% or 60% of the West Bank be left to them after the settlement blocks have been removed? In many ways, Sharon feels he has won, that this conflict is over and that there is no further possibility of negotiating a viable Palestinian state.

For the international community, this means the prospect of seeing the emergence of a new apartheid situation on the southern border of Europe. This is not on the southern tip of Africa. On the southern border of Europe a new apartheid situation is emerging before our eyes. It is not like apartheid or an emerging apartheid. It is an apartheid system in which an entire people is being imprisoned in a non-viable so-called state of four or five islands with no viable economy.

In many ways one might say that a Palestinian bantustan is worse than a South African bantustan. In South Africa, the concept of the bantustan was that the black Africans would be confined there but they would be a cheap labour force that would come into South Africa to work. In this case, the Palestinians are imprisoned in their bantustan but they are not allowed into Israel to work. Israel has a cheaper labour force, which is foreign workers being imported from China, Thailand, the Philippines, Romania and west Africa, so it does not need the Palestinians.

We are, therefore, faced with a situation where the Palestinians are being imprisoned in a tiny mini-state on approximately 10% to 15% of the country with no viable economy, no border with an Arab country, no control over its water, no control over Jerusalem which is the heart of the Palestinian economy, no freedom of movement, no ability to bring the refugees back because there is no economic infrastructure and no ability to meet the future needs of their people. Approximately half the Palestinian population is under the age of 18 years. They have tremendous national responsibilities but no territory, no coherent economy and no ability to develop. They are locked into a prison state.

One of the elements of this permanent occupation that really concerns us is the wall that is being built. The reason Amnesty International invited me to come here is partly because the Irish company CRH, a major cement company, has a 25% stake in the Israeli cement concrete monopoly. Not only is Ireland in a sense complicit, even though the Irish Government's policy has been good and progressive on the conflict, in allowing its companies to engage in these kinds of illegal practices but certain Irish companies must also be called to account.

I will give the committee an idea of the dimensions of the wall. Simply talking about a wall or fence is abstract and hard to grasp. I brought some pictures of it for the committee. In the populated Palestinian areas, this is a wall of concrete that is 26 feet or eight metres high. It completely surrounds Palestinian communities. The important thing about the wall, which is illustrated in one of the pictures, is that it does not separate Israelis from Palestinians. We claim that the wall is not a security barrier. It does not separate Israelis from Palestinians but Palestinians from each other. The wall is built so deeply into Palestinian territory, sometimes more than 20 kilometres inside the territory, that Israelis do not even see it. Approximately 300,000 Palestinians are permanently trapped in islands, enclaves and corridors between the 1967 line, the green line that separates Israel from the Palestinian territories, and the wall. A civilian population that is not a terrorist population, has never been accused of anything and is composed of non-combatants in every sense of the term is virtually being imprisoned by this massive wall.

The wall in Kalkilya completely surrounds Palestinian cities and a population of approximately 70,000 people. There is one gate that is manned by Israeli soldiers and it is closed on the Jewish sabbath, in the evenings and by whim. Sometimes these gates are supervised by sergeants in the army. They are closed as forms of collective punishment and if there is a security alert. In other words, they introduce an entirely arbitrary element into Palestinian lives. They have no idea if they will be able to get home or get in and out of the city.

In other parts of the country between the Palestinian populated areas there is a massive fence. It is an electronic fence, approximately three metres high, with sensors that detect movement and automatic machine guns that fire. It is patrolled by a breed of killer dogs imported from Holland. There are army patrols, ditches and surveillance cameras. This is located not only along the length of the West Bank but deep inside the West Bank.

The legal and human rights issue is not the building of the wall and the fence. We do not believe it is a good idea but if Israel had built this facility along the border or green line, there would not have been a problem with it. Israel would not have been brought before the International Court of Justice in the Hague. The problem is the route, which is invasive, oppresses the Palestinians and amounts to annexation which is against international law. Palestinians are imprisoned in ghettos, islands, enclaves and cells which are located especially around Jerusalem. They suffer humiliation as people have to climb over walls if they can. The wall is tearing apart a community fabric. It is not on a border, it goes through the middle of communities separating families. A husband has a West Bank identification, a wife has a Jerusalem identification, which separates their family completely. Children have to be taken out of schools and the wall interferes with businesses and so on.

The demolition of houses is of special concern to us. There are hundreds of Palestinian homes in the line of the wall that have been demolished or are threatened with demolition. We are talking about a massive barrier which is absolutely illegal in international law. It is illegal on two main bases. First, acquiring territory by force is inadmissible as a principle of international law. The wall annexes de facto around 60% of the land in the West Bank. By creating these facts on the ground and translating them into political facts accepted by the US, Israel is unilaterally annexing territory that it conquered. The fourth Geneva Convention, which deals with occupation, states that an occupation is by definition a temporary situation that can only be resolved through political negotiations. As soon as land is taken out of political negotiations and is unilaterally annexed, the convention is violated.

The other principal violated by Israel with its wall or fence, the settlements and other elements of its occupation, is the principle of proportionality. International law and the fourth Geneva Convention recognise that a country has a right to defend itself. A country is even permitted by international law to have an occupation. That happens in war. The issue is that the land can be held until political negotiations take place. The occupation is not allowed to become permanent, the creation of facts on the ground is not allowed. It is illegal under international law to move a population into an occupied area, to build settlements, to deport the local population. It is illegal even to use the resources of an occupied territory. For example, Israel gets approximately one third of its water from the occupied territories. That is an illegal exploitation of resources of an occupied territory. It is illegal to hinder the freedom of movement of a population either internally, or entering and exiting the country. On the contrary, an occupying power is enjoined to ensure the well-being of the population under its control.

I want to make a point as an Israeli and as a Jew. There is a very strong Jewish element to the fourth Geneva Convention. It was approved by the UN in 1949 on the basis of the Jewish experience in the Holocaust, in which the Jews were a defenceless, unprotected civilian non-combatant population, living under a hostile Nazi occupation. We know the results of that. Had the fourth Geneva Convention been adopted in 1939 and had the international community sought its application, the entire Holocaust could have been avoided. This is not an academic, legalistic type of argument. The fourth Geneva Convention has tremendous impact on the ground to protect civilian populations. That is the case here. On the one hand, international law permits Israel to do what it must do to protect itself by what is called military necessity. Israel is permitted to build a road to a military base in the West Bank if there is a direct and immediate military necessity to do so. That necessity includes controlling the West Bank until the political negotiations are finished, or defending its own population against terrorism. That is legitimate. However, military necessity has to be immediate and palpable. Security can not be used to create permanent facts on the ground.

In addition, there is a principle of proportionality. The military necessity has to be balanced with the well being of the civilian population under its control. For the sake of protecting one's own people, one cannot grossly violate the human rights of the people under one's control who are defenceless. They have no army, no police force, no government and no way of protecting themselves. Tens of thousands of acres of land have been unilaterally annexed and expropriated, more than half a million olive and fruit trees have been uprooted since 1967, a scorched earth has been created, the Palestinian population has been prevented from reaching and developing sources of livelihood. Their water has been taken and they are essentially being starved. The Palestinian population in the Occupied Territories is being kept alive by international aid agencies. There is no economy, 70% of Palestinians in the Occupied Territories live on under $2 a day. According to research in John Hopkins University, 30% of the children under the age of five in Gaza suffer from malnutrition. That is not justified by military necessity. One can not build a wall and carry out policies that create those conditions on the grounds of military necessity.

Israel is responsible for the well-being of the Palestinians and the international community is also responsible. That is why this forum is relevant. Human rights and international law are universal. We hear the line that this is an internal dispute, an internal problem and the international community should butt out as it has no business. This line does not work anymore. Every violation of human rights is a concern of the entire international community. As part of the Israeli peace community, we call on members of the international community such as those present here today to help us achieve a just peace in the Middle East based on human rights. In addition to the road map, which exists and which is not being enforced, is another road map. That road map is human rights and international law. If we apply the international laws that exist today, including the fourth Geneva Convention which is signed by Israel and the US, with no new laws, no new political programme, no new discussions, the occupation would collapse by its own weight of illegality. The international community has therefore got a particular responsibility.

What brought me to Ireland was the involvement of companies like CRH in constructing the wall. Other Irish companies have been involved in manufacturing military hardware that is used by Israel. This all creates a situation, on the one hand, of complicity if one acts and, on the other hand, of accepting responsibility as a responsible member of the international community to try to intervene to prevent these violations of international law.

Of all the countries of Europe, and probably of the world, Ireland has probably the most progressive and constructive approach to the Middle East conflict. If the other countries even approached the Irish Government's position, we would all be in a much better position. We are seeking to ensure that the principled policy of the Irish Government towards a just peace in the Middle East is followed by actions as well and especially to try to prevent the emergence of a new apartheid situation in the world.

Thank you, Professor Halper. You have made a powerful presentation. I glanced through your publication, Obstacles to Peace, which is an interesting exposé of the profound difficulties in the Middle East at present.

You stated that you come before us today both as an Israeli and as a Jew, and in that sense your presentation is very interesting. Could you give us any indication of the numbers of people within your own community at home who would share your analysis and be as concerned as you? Is there the beginning of any political outlet for the type of arguments and thesis that you are putting forward or are you speaking from a minority perspective? Do you have a political voice, speaking up and presenting that argument?

Professor Halper

Unfortunately in most countries the voices of peace and critical voices are the minority. It is a complicated matter. The subtitle of the booklet I gave the committee reads: "Reframing the conflict." What Israel has succeeded in doing all these years is to frame the conflict in a self-serving way where the problem, in the Israeli framing, is terrorism and security. It dovetails nicely with President Bush's post-11 September discourse, which is very dangerous. It depoliticises the situation; in other words, if the problem is terrorism only and that these people have a difficult mentality, they are evil, there is an axis of evil and they are fanatical, then the difficulty with that kind of approach is that there is no solution or that the only solution is a final solution because if that is really the case, then we cannot negotiate with them and we should not even talk to them because they are evil people. We do not accept that, knowing both Palestinians and that this is a caricature in general, but also realising and insisting that this is a political conflict and therefore has a solution.

The problem for us is that 70% of the Israeli public, according to the latest polls, are not interested in the occupation; in other words, the government's aggressive policies of building settlements and of de facto annexing the West Bank to Israel does not come out of a public will to do so. The policy of a greater Israel, and of an Israel that goes to the Jordan river, etc., is not shared by most Israelis. Nevertheless the Israeli public has accepted the idea that we are in a war of terrorism, that the Palestinians want to throw us into the sea, that we are in a struggle for our survival and therefore everything we do is necessary.

The Israeli Government says we have to have the wall for security. Security becomes this magical catch-all whereby we have to have the wall and the settlements because otherwise one has an empty area where Arab armies can invade. We have to have control of the water. We have to have control of the borders. We have to have this and that. If everything is couched in a security language, the Israeli public basically says if that is what the generals say, then who are they to say otherwise with the result that they give in in a sense.

The Israeli courts are the same. Whenever the Israeli Army mentions security, the Israeli Supreme Court, which in general is a liberal court, states that is beyond its competency and therefore it refuses to rule or rules the way the army wants.

That is the situation in Israel. It is not that the people want apartheid or that they want control of the West Bank. As a matter of fact, the wall really does reflect what Israelis want. The Israelis want separation. They want to get this albatross off their neck. They want to cut their losses. When Barik ran for prime minister in 1999, his electoral slogan was, "Us here, them there." That is what Israelis want.

The problem is that we are also "there". We have 400,000 Israelis living in the occupied territories and now the wall is coming to annex those settlements into Israel. We have a situation where most people are acquiescent to the government and give it a line of credit. The government then promises that if the people let them do what it is doing, it will bring them personal security and the public agrees to give the government a chance to do that. That is one reason one does not see among the Israeli public a rising up against these kinds of policies. The Israeli public supports the idea of the wall. It sees the wall in a technical way and it does not care what happens to the Palestinians, who are simply not a function in this whole matter.

I thank Professor Halper for his clear earlier presentation. I am not sure if I fully understand his references to the majority of Israelis and their views. I would have thought that the majority of Israelis acquiesce in so far as they vote in a government that does this sort of thing. On a daily basis we watch tanks being used against children. The majority of Israelis, I presume, see this happening. I do not see any significant movement in Israel to stop that sort of thing happening.

I am delighted that Amnesty International has selected Israel as one of the three areas it is focusing on because what is going on there seems at the root of much of the terrorism of Osama bin Laden and others in that they all justify what they are doing by what the Israelis are doing.

Having said that, I found Professor Halper's presentation quite outstanding and very clear. It put the lack of a road map into perspective. I would have relished having the directors of CRH here to listen to the presentation. Perhaps we should send them a video of this presentation and ask for their response to CRH's involvement in it. They should be held to account in so far as we can hold people like that to account. What is going on there is so unacceptable that no major corporation in this country can justify being involved in it.

Ms Marlborough

I thank Deputy Gregory for his comments about CRH. Professor Halper did have the opportunity to meet CRH yesterday. As a result of the meeting, we believe that it is probable that CRH is involved indirectly in the construction of the wall. CRH owns a 25% share in a company, Nesher, which in turn owns 100% of Mashav which has a monopoly on the cement market in the occupied territories.

We are very concerned about this. What we have suggested is that it would be appropriate for the Irish Government to do something about this. The Irish Government has taken a strong line on the wall. In January, the Minister for Foreign Affairs, Deputy Cowen, made a submission to the International Court of Justice in which he drew attention to all of the various provisions of international law of which the wall is in violation.

The Government claims to have a policy of coherence and consistency across all Departments. It might be a good idea if the Department of Enterprise, Trade and Employment started to look at the human rights situations in which Irish companies are operating. We have high human rights standards here and it would be appropriate to require the same standards of our companies wherever they are operating. There ought to be coherence between trade policy and foreign policy. We call on CRH to reflect on how it may be contributing, in all likelihood, to the construction of the wall, and call on the Government also to look into this matter.

With regard to the Irish Government's leadership on the broader issue, you made reference to the Minister for Foreign Affairs, Deputy Cowen's, January submission. Would it be your wish that the Government be seen to be more proactive? Admittedly, our Presidency of the European Union is now in its concluding days. Are you pushing for further Government intervention or action?

Ms Marlborough

Yes, we are. Next week we have the final but probably the highest profile event of the Presidency, the EU-US summit. On that occasion the Government has the opportunity if it wishes to place the question of Israel, the Occupied Territories and the wall on the agenda. As Professor Halper has outlined to us, the US has huge influence on Israel and the Occupied Territories, particularly in regard to support for the wall, so we would like to see the Irish Government, as President, continue to raise the issue of the wall and to do so forthrightly with the US at the summit.

Would it be your wish that this committee call on the Minister to pursue that line of action?

Ms Marlborough

Yes, we would be very glad if the committee were to pursue such a line of action.

Having you here brings clearly to our attention the scale of the problem. One of the interesting issues raised by Professor Halper was not just the question of why the wall is being built but where it is located. While we are not going to be able to solve the issue, it magnifies the problem to a new level, and not just the issue of this physical Berlin-type wall. I have heard this wall referred to previously as the new Berlin Wall. At least the Berlin Wall, in all its horrors, was the official dividing line, more or less, between the two parts of the city and the country, but the argument of the witnesses this morning is that this wall is not just a dividing wall but one of occupation to a degree. That must be taken into account also.

I have a final question for Professor Halper. You referred continuously to new facts on the ground. Are they almost now becoming the new tablet of stone, as such?

Professor Halper

In our evaluation the Israeli Government has succeeded in making its control of the occupied territories irreversible. There is such a massive presence. The word "settlement" minimises what is happening. One thinks of a couple of little structures on a hillside or something, but we are really talking about cities. In fact, last Thursday the Israeli Government announced the establishment of a new city between Jerusalem and the West Bank, right next to Bethlehem. A city of 55,000 people will be built that connects the southern part of Jerusalem to what we call the Etzion bloc, another important piece in creating this contiguity of the Israeli settlements.

We are not only talking about impunity and not listening to the international community. We are talking about impunity on a huge scale. If Israel put up four trailers on the hillside at night time that would be okay, but it announces in the light of day to everybody's face that it is now going to build a city of 55,000 people in the occupied territories, thus in a sense challenging the international community by asking what it is going to do about it. This shows the degree to which Israel feels that it is defended by the United States, is immune from any kind of international pressures and can act with impunity.

Another issue is the huge infrastructure that Israel has built during the Oslo peace process, including 29 new major highways in the West Bank that incorporate the West Bank physically into Israel proper, making it impossible to disentangle and so on. All of this has created a situation of irreversibility.

This raises the question of what happens if the two-state solution is finished, which is the basis on which we have all been working all these years — to have a viable Palestinian state alongside Israel. That is the language of the road map. The road map talks about not just a Palestinian state but a viable Palestinian state. That is gone. There is no viable state and nobody is going to make Israel withdraw significantly.

So then what? The idea of one state seems to be a non-starter. Is the international community going to agree to dismantle Israel and the Jewish state? That seems far fetched. Therefore, we are in a very difficult situation of not having a way out. We are beginning to explore the idea of a confederation. It is a useful approach to say that the fear of the Palestinians is being locked into a prison state. That, of course, is Israel's intention. If we disengage the idea of viability from sovereignty perhaps we can do something; in other words, try to induce the Palestinians to accept a state on less than all of the occupied territories, assuming that we are not going to remove the Israeli settlements. At the same time, they should do that on condition that Israel and Palestine form a confederation and that everybody in that confederation has the right to live and work wherever they want.

In that sense, one would break the Palestinians out of that prison. They would have access to the entire country, but at the same time it would not threaten Israel, which is the Israeli concern, as the Palestinians would be Palestinian citizens. They would not become Israeli citizens. Then, hopefully, that kind of federation would expand to include Jordan, Syria, Lebanon and perhaps other countries also. That would be a promising approach, but lacking it we are faced with apartheid.

Thank you both very much for your very interesting contributions. Your concluding remarks presented a different type of possibility which will be examined in due course. Deputy Gregory's comments about this problem being so central to so many world-wide problems today is something which this committee has to reflect upon. The Irish Government's policy and the two-state solution is what we have been working towards and advocating. It is important that this committee takes on board what you have said and takes on board your concerns in so far as we can.

It is also important that we try to remain balanced in our enquires, and I suggest to my colleagues that at the next meeting we invite in the Israeli Ambassador so that we can take up your issues of concern with him and seek a response from him. You have highlighted to us a very grave problem for the Palestinian people but also for the world as a whole and proper political order.

What you have said about the non-application of the fourth Geneva Convention is something which we must reflect upon and take up with the appropriate authorities. While I regret we are not able to offer any great words of comfort or any great solution, I sincerely thank both of you for attending. You have highlighted in detail the scale of the problem and it is something which we, as a human rights committee, are duty bound to keep before us. It is welcome that Amnesty International is putting the Israeli and Middle East issues at the top of its agenda. While the committee has a detailed and involved work programme, we must also consider keeping this issue at the top of our agenda and try to keep talking to all of the sides involved in the problem to inch towards a solution.

I thank you for being with us. I trust we will keep in contact with you, formally and informally, over the next 12 months or so, and through prioritising this issue in the Amnesty International office in Dublin. I apologise for my colleagues who had to leave to go to committee and other meetings.

The sub-committee adjourned at 1.11 p.m. sine die.

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