EU Differentiation and the Push for Peace in Israel-Palestine

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Nov 26, 2016 Palestine-Israel
EU Differentiation and the Push for Peace in Israel-Palestine

EU Differentiation and the Push for Peace in Israel-Palestine

By : Jadaliyya Reports

[The following policy brief was written by High Lovatt and published by the European Council on Foreign Relations on 31 October 2016]

EU Differentiation and the Push for Peace in Israel-Palestine

Introduction

Next year will mark the 50 year anniversary of Israel’s de facto annexation and prolonged occupation of Palestinian territory. The approaching milestone will bring with it a renewed focus on both the failings and future direction of international peacemaking efforts. The lack of any viable path towards a two-state solution in recent years has shown that European policy is increasingly out-of-sync with realities on the ground at a time during which developments in the Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPTs) and in Israeli politics are moving in the wrong direction.

With the potential for a two-state solution growing increasingly unlikely, the EU’s desire to maintain a “business as usual” approach, predicated on high levels of financial and political investment, and an unwavering commitment to a Middle East Peace Process (MEPP) that has long since broken down, only perpetuates these negative trends.

Even though European leaders accept that the status quo in the OPTs is unsustainable, they fail to offer any course correction. Instead, they continue to repeat the failed choreography that has characterised the last 20 years of peace talks. Among many European policymakers the belief still persists that the Middle East Peace Process, in its current Oslo configuration, offers the path to resolving the conflict. Failing that, they believe the MEPP still represents an effective tool for managing the conflict provided that both sides can be coaxed back into talks. Current dynamics on both sides are increasingly challenging these two beliefs.

While the European Union and its member states frequently reaffirm their commitment to a two-state vision, they shy away from deploying the tools necessary to help make this a reality, or at least maintain it as a viable option. In continuing to promote a broken model, the EU and its member states are punching below their collective weight. Instead of taking the initiative, they continue to act solely as a placeholder in between successive rounds of United States-led diplomacy. Instead of restricting its energies to devising new formats and incentives to push Israelis and Palestinians back into the negotiating room, the EU could be tackling issues head on.

Getting the Palestinian house in order is a priority that the EU needs to push forward with its Palestinian interlocutors given its status as the largest donor of financial assistance. This includes affirming European support for reconciliation, national elections and PLO reform – challenges that will be important to overcome so as to smooth the way towards a future peace agreement. Tackling violence and accusations of incitement on both sides is another important element. But cause and effect should not be confused.

It is Israel’s policy of settlement expansion, the fragmentation of Palestinian territory and the domestic dynamics sustaining Israel’s settlement enterprise that ultimately represent the greatest and most immediate threat to the viability of a two-state solution. As ECFR’s July 2015 report on “EU differentiation and Israeli settlements” argued, EU law provides an effective legal framework for chipping away at the incentive structure that underpins Israeli public support for the occupation.[1] 

Fewer Incentives

The EU’s traditional approach to the Israeli-Palestinian peace process has been based on maintaining a framework of incentives. The traditional thinking has been that Israel can be incentivised to moderate its behaviour and move along the path of peace with its Palestinian neighbours. The lack of any real political horizon for ending the conflict 20 years after the launch of the Oslo peace process indicates that this incentive approach has clearly failed.

Efforts to incentivise Israel have meant that, with the exception of EU candidate countries and European neighbours, it now has a higher level of integration within the EU’s fabric than most other countries in the world. This has given it privileged access to a range of free trade opportunities, including in the fields of tourism, technology, security, and education.

In June 2008, the EU offered an unconditional upgrade in relations with Israel within the context of its European Neighbourhood Policy even as it expressed its deep concern over accelerated settlement expansion.[3] Four years later, in July 2012, the EU-Israel Association Council identified a list of 60 areas where bilateral relations could be unconditionally strengthened. Then, in December 2013, the EU proposed a Special Privileged Partnership (SPP) as part of a future peace agreement with the Palestinians.[4]More recently, in June 2016, the EU suggested that an additional interim package of incentives be developed to entice both sides towards peace.[5] 

All of this, however, has only fed Israel’s appetite for more carrots without taking any positive steps towards the Palestinians. In fact, Israel’s response to new upgrades has often been one of silence or vindication that continued settlement policies have not undermined its relations with Europe. Neither have all the carrots in the world saved Europe from accusations of anti-Semitism, nor slowed the pace of Israeli demolitions of EU-funded humanitarian projects in Area C and the further annexation of Palestinian land.[6] One Israeli politician, now a senior member of the ruling coalition, even described the SPP as an insult and tantamount to bribing Jews to give up their homeland.[7]

Far from furthering the prospects of peace, the EU’s existing policy further empowers Israeli occupation. Unconditional incentives only breed a sense of Israeli exceptionalism and impunity whilst undermining European credibility. The EU’s policy has encouraged Israel’s belief that the conflict can be managed and the settlement enterprise expanded without incurring any tangible cost to its international relations. A March 2014 poll of Israeli-Jewish opinion found that only 9 percent of those surveyed thought that present measures by European governments, businesses, and consumers would be costly for Israel if the existing situation did not change, including on the settlement issue.[8]

This perception will not change unless Israel’s aspirations, expectations, and understanding of the current reality are adjusted. In the same survey, 57 percent believed that a combination of incentives and disincentives would be the most influential method of getting Israeli politicians to accept a peace agreement with the Palestinians.[9] The lesson for Europe is clear: Introducing fewer incentives and more disincentives into its dealings with Israel is likely to prove the more effective formula for achieving positive change in support of a two-state solution.


[Click here to access the full policy brief]
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Feb 16, 2011 Lebanon
Jadaliyya Reports By :
Jadaliyya Reports

Past is Present: Settler Colonialism Matters!

On 5-6 March 2011, the Palestine Society at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in London will hold its seventh annual conference, "Past is Present: Settler Colonialism in Palestine." This year`s conference aims to understand Zionism as a settler colonial project which has, for more than a century, subjected Palestine and Palestinians to a structural and violent form of destruction, dispossession, land appropriation and erasure in the pursuit of a new Jewish Israeli society. By organizing this conference, we hope to reclaim and revive the settler colonial paradigm and to outline its potential to inform and guide political strategy and mobilization.

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is often described as unique and exceptional with little resemblance to other historical or ongoing colonial conflicts. Yet, for Zionism, like other settler colonial projects such as the British colonization of Ireland or European settlement of North America, South Africa or Australia, the imperative is to control the land and its resources -- and to displace the original inhabitants. Indeed, as conference keynote speaker Patrick Wolfe, one of the foremost scholars on settler colonialism and professor at La Trobe University in Victoria, Australia, argues, "the logic of this project, a sustained institutional tendency to eliminate the Indigenous population, informs a range of historical practices that might otherwise appear distinct--invasion is a structure not an event."[i]

Therefore, the classification of the Zionist movement as a settler colonial project, and the Israeli state as its manifestation, is not merely intended as a statement on the historical origins of Israel, nor as a rhetorical or polemical device. Rather, the aim is to highlight Zionism`s structural continuities and the ideology which informs Israeli policies and practices in Palestine and toward Palestinians everywhere. Thus, the Nakba -- whether viewed as a spontaneous, violent episode in war, or the implementation of a preconceived master plan -- should be understood as both the precondition for the creation of Israel and the logical outcome of Zionist settlement in Palestine.

Moreover, it is this same logic that sustains the continuation of the Nakba today. As remarked by Benny Morris, “had he [David Ben Gurion] carried out full expulsion--rather than partial--he would have stabilised the State of Israel for generations.”[ii] Yet, plagued by an “instability”--defined by the very existence of the Palestinian nation--Israel continues its daily state practices in its quest to fulfill Zionism’s logic to maximize the amount of land under its control with the minimum number of Palestinians on it. These practices take a painful array of manifestations: aerial and maritime bombardment, massacre and invasion, house demolitions, land theft, identity card confiscation, racist laws and loyalty tests, the wall, the siege on Gaza, cultural appropriation, and the dependence on willing (or unwilling) native collaboration and security arrangements, all with the continued support and backing of imperial power. 

Despite these enduring practices however, the settler colonial paradigm has largely fallen into disuse. As a paradigm, it once served as a primary ideological and political framework for all Palestinian political factions and trends, and informed the intellectual work of committed academics and revolutionary scholars, both Palestinians and Jews.

The conference thus asks where and why the settler colonial paradigm was lost, both in scholarship on Palestine and in politics; how do current analyses and theoretical trends that have arisen in its place address present and historical realities? While acknowledging the creativity of these new interpretations, we must nonetheless ask: when exactly did Palestinian natives find themselves in a "post-colonial" condition? When did the ongoing struggle over land become a "post-conflict" situation? When did Israel become a "post-Zionist" society? And when did the fortification of Palestinian ghettos and reservations become "state-building"?

In outlining settler colonialism as a central paradigm from which to understand Palestine, this conference re-invigorates it as a tool by which to analyze the present situation. In doing so, it contests solutions which accommodate Zionism, and more significantly, builds settler colonialism as a political analysis that can embolden and inform a strategy of active, mutual, and principled Palestinian alignment with the Arab struggle for self-determination, and indigenous struggles in the US, Latin America, Oceania, and elsewhere.

Such an alignment would expand the tools available to Palestinians and their solidarity movement, and reconnect the struggle to its own history of anti-colonial internationalism. At its core, this internationalism asserts that the Palestinian struggle against Zionist settler colonialism can only be won when it is embedded within, and empowered by, the broader Arab movement for emancipation and the indigenous, anti-racist and anti-colonial movement--from Arizona to Auckland.

SOAS Palestine Society invites everyone to join us at what promises to be a significant intervention in Palestine activism and scholarship.

For over 30 years, SOAS Palestine Society has heightened awareness and understanding of the Palestinian people, their rights, culture, and struggle for self-determination, amongst students, faculty, staff, and the broader public. SOAS Palestine society aims to continuously push the frontiers of discourse in an effort to make provocative arguments and to stimulate debate and organizing for justice in Palestine through relevant conferences, and events ranging from the intellectual and political impact of Edward Said`s life and work (2004), international law and the Palestine question (2005), the economy of Palestine and its occupation (2006), the one state (2007), 60 Years of Nakba, 60 Years of Resistance (2009), and most recently, the Left in Palestine (2010).

For more information on the SOAS Palestine Society 7th annual conference, Past is Present: Settler Colonialism in Palestine: www.soaspalsoc.org

SOAS Palestine Society Organizing Collective is a group of committed students that has undertaken to organize annual academic conferences on Palestine since 2003.

 

[i] Patrick Wolfe, Settler Colonialism and the Transformation of Anthropology: The Politics and Poetics of an Ethnographic Event, Cassell, London, p. 163

[ii] Interview with Benny Morris, Survival of the Fittest, Haaretz, 9. January 2004, http://cosmos.ucc.ie/cs1064/jabowen/IPSC/php/art.php?aid=5412