Ireland should use its EU presidency to pressurise Israel into complying with international law over its occupation of the Palestinian territories, writes Raymond Deane.
How should Ireland best confront the Israel/ Palestine conflict during the six months of our EU presidency? In his recent Opinion piece (December 12th) Eamon Delaney writes: "It would be nice if Ireland could now get the EU to face the dispute more robustly, rather than . . . wait around to see how the latest US initiative proceeds . . ." These are words that I endorse fully, but in a different sense entirely than that intended by their author.
For Mr Delaney believes the EU "lean \ too much to the Arab side to be seen as a \ honest broker". This curious language implies that "the Arab side" is somehow synonymous with that of the Palestinians, a contention true in rhetoric only.
In reality "the Arab side", i.e., the congeries of dictatorships and police states surrounding Israel/Palestine, depends too much on US financial and military backing to offer effective opposition to Israel's colonial project, towards which the US undoubtedly leans too much to be seen as an honest broker.
If Mr Delaney simply means "the Palestinian side", then he should clarify that this is the side which has total backing in international law, as interpreted by a broad international consensus.
That Israel and its fellow-travellers dispute this interpretation is only to be expected, and demonstrates their contempt for the norms by which other nations seek to regulate their mutual interaction. Is he implying that, like the US, Europe should disregard the status quo in international law in favour of the one that has been established by the brute force of Israel's army of occupation?
When he advocates a "more balanced" approach by the Minister, Mr Cowen, does he mean a "balance" between these two types of status quo, which is to say: between legality and blatant illegality? Such a balance, I believe, would amount to blatant complicity in an ongoing crime against humanity.
Instead, Ireland should encourage its EU partners to use any means at their disposal to pressurise Israel into complying with international law by ending its occupation of the Palestinian territories, withdrawing its illegal settlers from those territories, and dismantling the "separation fence" or "apartheid wall" that, in President Bush's unusually perceptive words, "snakes through the West Bank".
One such means is the Euro-Mediterranean Association Agreement, which grants Israel (along with several other non-European Mediterranean states) preferential trading terms with the EU, conditional on observance of Article 2, a "human rights clause".
On April 10th, 2002, in the wake of Israel's savage assault on the Palestinian camps and in particular on Jenin, the European Parliament - in theory the only democratically accountable EU institution - voted to suspend the association agreement, a vote that was blithely disregarded.
In a parliamentary question last May, Mr Michael D. Higgins TD asked Mr Cowen "if he has raised the issue of possible suspension of the Euro-Mediterranean Association Agreement with Israel" and "his views on whether the human rights aspects enshrined in Article 2 of the agreement are being upheld by Israel".
The reply was singularly unhelpful: "The Government does not consider that suspension . . . would serve any useful purpose. Any such action . . . would have undesirable consequences, such as undercutting as far as Israel is concerned, the role which the European Union has in the peace process . . ."
In other words, the EU must allow Israel to breach agreements with impunity lest Israel be annoyed and undercut our putative role in the putative peace-process - a role that is presumably also conditional on Israel's approval. Such self-inflicted impotence hardly bodes well for the EU's future role in international affairs. Yet this is the kind of prevarication that Eamon Delaney describes as "leaning too much to the Arab side . . ."
No doubt Israel's defenders would argue that the suspension of its association agreement with the EU would constitute discrimination, as many - if not all - of the other Mediterranean states enjoying such agreements are equally guilty of abuses against human rights.
This is indeed a valid argument for a more rigorous application of the human rights clause in such cases, but it is not an argument for its neglect in the case of Israel.
Others will argue that such a suspension would be inappropriate in the light of ongoing peace moves between Israelis and Palestinians. The reality, however, is that these moves are entirely unofficial and provide a smokescreen behind which the illegal settlements continue to be expanded, the separation barrier continues to be built, and the occupation forces continue to run amok with impunity.
There is no doubt that certain EU countries will oppose any attempt to hold Israel accountable for its actions. The United Kingdom functions within the EU as a proxy for the US. Holland feels guilty that its police gave lists of Dutch Jews to the Gestapo in the second World War. Germany perpetrated the Holocaust against one Semitic people and now seeks absolution by making another Semitic people the scapegoat for its crimes.
For Ireland to pressurise these countries to take their responsibilities seriously would take courage and might temporarily dent its flimsy popularity in some quarters. For Ireland to shirk this challenge would be cowardly.
A recent survey showed that 59 per cent of EU citizens consider Israel to be the greatest threat to world peace.
This clearly demonstrates that EU governments, in this matter as in so many others, are dangerously remote from their citizens, a gulf symbolised by the jettisoning of the European Parliament's vote.
It also brings home the necessity for a more proactive approach, as espoused by Mr Delaney, if this gulf is not to translate into a further erosion of faith in democracy, and further contempt for EU institutions.
Were the Irish Government to advocate the suspension - or even the threat of suspension - of the Euro-Mediterranean Association Agreement with Israel, it would be working in favour of democracy within the EU as well as of justice in Israel/Palestine.
If Israel then wished to avoid the suspension of the agreement, it would merely have to comply with its human rights clause by withdrawing its troops from the Occupied Territories and granting the Palestinian people their inalienable right to self-determination.
Raymond Deane is chairman of the Ireland Palestine Solidarity Campaign