This is the text of the chapter I contributed to the Labour Friends of Palestine pamphlet, Stop Building Hatred.
THE occupation of the West Bank is rightly seen as central to the campaign for Palestinian rights and has been the main focus for media coverage of Israel’s construction of illegal settlements. But this has led to relatively little attention being paid to Israeli settlements in the Golan Heights, although these are equally in violation of international law and the continued occupation of the Golan stands as a major obstacle to a regional peace agreement.
Like the West Bank, the Golan Heights were seized by Israel in 1967 during the Six Day War, in this case from Syria. Most of the population was expelled (or fled voluntarily, if you believe the Israeli version of events) and Israel systematically destroyed 244 of the 249 Arab villages in the Golan so that the former inhabitants could never return to their homes. The displaced Golan Arabs and their families are now said to number about half a million.
In 1981 Israel passed the Golan Heights Law which annexed the region, declaring it to be subject to the Israeli state’s “laws, jurisdiction and administration”. Syria continues to insist that the Golan is part of its own territory, under foreign occupation, while Lebanon lays claim to a small area known as the Shebaa Farms.
The 1981 annexation was condemned by UN Security Council Resolution 497, adopted unanimously, which stated that “the Israeli decision to impose its laws, jurisdiction and administration in the occupied Syrian Golan Heights is null and void and without international legal effect”. The UN has consistently upheld this position and last year the General Assembly voted 161-1 in favour of a motion reaffirming support for Resolution 497 on the “occupied Syrian Golan”.
The issue of Israeli annexation of the Golan Heights hit the news recently when a pro-Israeli website bearing the misleading name of Honest Reporting launched a campaign under the slogan “Golan residents live in Israel not Syria” in protest against Israeli settlers being required to register Syria as their country of origin on Facebook. Regrettably, Facebook appears to have backed down in the face of this campaign, which was plainly aimed at legitimising Israel’s illegal occupation, and Golan residents are now allowed to register their country as either Israel or Syria.
In the years immediately following the Six Day War, Israeli civilian settlement of the Golan Heights proceeded slowly, as the area was seen as a potential future battleground and in 1972 there were still only 77 settlers there. After the end of the 1973 Arab-Israeli War numbers began to increase sharply and by 1989 the figure had reached 10,000. Today there are some 20,000 Israeli settlers occupying the territory in over 30 settlements.
The figures for Golan settlers may seem small compared with the 300,000 settlers in the West Bank or the 200,000 in Israeli-annexed East Jerusalem. But the growth of settlements has now reached the point where Israelis constitute over half the population of the Golan Heights – the remainder being members of the Druze community who remained there after the Israeli invasion in 1967. The Israeli-occupied areas include farms, cattle ranches, orchards and vineyards and even a ski resort, in addition to a number of military bases.
The objective of expanding Israeli settlement in the Golan Heights is of course the same as in the West Bank – to establish a permanent Israeli presence as one of the “facts on the ground” that will serve as an obstacle to any re-drawing of borders.
Three years ago settler leaders launched a $250,000 advertising campaign to attract young Israelis to the Golan with the promise of free land, the declared aim of the campaign being to double the Jewish population to 40,000 over the course of the following decade. In 1999, when the settler population stood at 17,000, Israeli treasury officials estimated that, in the event of a pull-out from the Golan, compensation to the settlers for losing their homes would amount to $10 billion. Obviously, existing Golan settlers calculate that the more Israelis they can persuade to join them there, the greater the financial obstacle to withdrawal.
The Syrians have repeatedly stated that if Israel will agree to end its occupation of the Golan Heights they are prepared to join Egypt and Jordan in signing a peace agreement with Israel. But Syria insists on a complete Israeli withdrawal to the pre-1967 border, which would return the eastern shore of the Sea ofGalilee to Damascus, whereas Israel wants to retain its control of the whole ofGalilee.
Talks between Israel and Syria over the future of the Golan heights have continued on and off over the years but without ever reaching a conclusion. Danny Yatom, who was head ofMossad during Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu’s first term of office in 1996-99, recently stated that Netanyahu had at that time indicated that Israel was willing to withdraw from the entire Golan heights in exchange for a peace deal with Syria and the normalisation of relations between the two countries.
However, since forming his new administration in March this year Netanyahu has adopted an intransigent position over the Golan heights. Syria’s President Bashar al-Assad points out that it is futile trying to pursue negotiations over the Golan when there is no partner for talks on the Israeli side.
Obama has stated that the resumption of talks between Israel and Syria is one of his main foreign policy goals. Certainly, given Israel’s political, economic and military reliance on the US, the Obama administration is in a position to exercise serious pressure on Netanyahu if the political will exists. The future of the Golan Heights therefore hinges on the question of whether Obama, unlike his predecessors in the US presidency, will defy the powerful pro-Israel lobby and confront the Israeli government. Adopting a carrot and stick approach, an Israeli hand-over of the Golan could perhaps be sweetened by the promise of a financial contribution from the US to help underwrite the cost of withdrawal. It’s President Obama’s call.
Last Thursday evening I shared a platform with Lawrence Bloom, a leading light from the World Economic Forum, where I outlined my views about the forthcoming conference of the parties in Copenhagen for the post-Kyoto agreement on climate change.
First I expressed my concern that, whatever is agreed at Copenhagen, it is likely that the US will face difficulties in ratifying it, given the problems that are already occurring in the Senate with the Obama adminstration’s proposed cap-and-trade legislation. This indeed would be in line with what happened with the Kyoto agreement, where the US took the whole world down the yellow brick road of tradeable permits, only for Al Gore to be unable to get it ratified in the US. This time round it’s going to be a lot more difficult for the US to persuade the world to swallow market-based solutions anyway, given the paradigm shift away from the Washington consensus.
If there is to be a Plan B, l emphasised the importance of mega-cities like London working to limit the impact of climate change, as some 75 per cent of CO2 emissions comes from our cities and towns where over 50 per cent of humanity now resides. Nation states will meet in Copenhagen but there is a lot of scope for cities to collaborate and take their own initiatives, and even become a conference of parties themselves with international agreements at city level. There is a localised green economy effect possible, particularly in the transport and housing sectors, and with the right city level leadership it would help move us to a less carbonised world.
Finally l made a moral plea for some thinking beyond the box, in connection with climate refugees, because environmental degradation leaves the poor most vulnerable to natural disaster. Migration as an adaptative response to poverty, hunger and environmental disasters is a practice humankind has followed since the beginning when our species came out of Africa. Today’s environmental refugees should be acknowledged and assisted in the host countries by a similiar Geneva Convention to that for political refugees. Such a safety net is the least we in the developed world should offer, in recognition of our contribution to global environmental problems and our imposition of particular models of development on the developing world.
With the recent publicity over the outstanding Congestion Charge payments due from embassies in London (see pdf document here), triggered by the arrival of the new US ambassador representing the Obama administration, once again we have to rehearse the arguments why the diplomats should shut up and pay up.
Firstly, and contrary to the claim by the US embassy, the Congestion Charge is clearly a user-charge – not a tax, from which diplomats are exempt under the Vienna Convention on consular relations. The Congestion Charge requires drivers to pay to use a small geographical area in central London during specific hours, and as such it is no different in principle from the charge made to drive along an American toll road, which British and other foreign diplomatic staff in the US are all required to pay.
And let’s not forget that the diplomats who refuse to pay the charge neverthless benefit from its results – not only from the freer movement of traffic in central London but also from the local and global environmental impact of the reduction in CO2, PM10 and NOx levels.
It should be remembered that the US embassy paid the congestion charge for more than two years following its introduction in February 2003. It was only in July 2005, after the charge increased from £5 to £8, that they announced they were not going to pay it any more. Quite how a £3 increase transformed a user-charge into a tax they did not explain.
The refusal of embassies to pay the charge means that Londoners are having to carry the burden of a total of £30 million of embassies’ debts on their shoulders during a recession – over £3 million of which is owed by the US embassy alone. If any of us behaved like that we would have had the bailiffs around a long time ago. l don’t think that’s acceptable at all, and it stretches our hospitality too far.
The US embassy’s refusal to pay the Congestion Charge was exactly the sort of regressive political decision we had come expect under the presidency of George Bush. Now that we have a new administration, which has emphasised its green credentials, particularly in the build-up to the Copenhagen climate change negotiations in December, we expect something different. Hence my letter to President Obama (pdf here) urging him to reverse the decision made under his predecessor.
Everyone in the UK with progressive politics, myself included, greeted the election of President Obama with enthusiasm, hoping that it represented a change in direction for the US. One straightforward way the President can demonstrate to Londoners that his administration has indeed broken with the politics of the Bush period is to instruct the US embassy to start paying the Congestion Charge and clear its outstanding debts to Transport for London. Otherwise this one is not going to go away and will be a continuing source of political embarrassment to the US government. It’s not as though the richest country on the earth can’t afford to pay up.
During my recent trip to China to attend a conference on air quality in Shanghai it became quite clear to me that, while the first phase of the recession has not yet come to a close in the UK, with possible further economic gloom still ahead, along its east coast China is still booming. That is not surprising given that China’s annual GDP growth rate stands at 6-8 per cent while our economy is undergoing potentially a 4 per cent contraction.
From what I saw during my brief stay there, street life in the evenings in Shanghai seemed very lively, and the confidence in evidence on the street was also expressed by the politicians l met on the trip. They pointed out how we had been forced to bail out our banks when they did not have to, despite years of western complaints about the lack of transparency in China’s banking system. This is a clear sign that the world is moving away from the Washington consensus to a new paradigm of development where state intervention is more acceptable.
But what does China’s boom mean for London? Clearly Shanghai is a serious challenger to our status as a global financial centre and will be even more so after the Shanghai Expo, which will take place between May and October 2010. Some 70 million people are expected to attend this event, which is being promoted around the theme of “Better City and Better Life”.
The sad thing is that the UK is not part of China’s boom nor are we likely to be, a reflection of the global shift in economic power from the West to the East (see Anthony Hilton’s recent article in the Evening Standard). We certainly need to be out there promoting ourselves during the Shanghai Expo at the very least. We also have to be prepared to learn from China, as l did on the environmental front from their use of electronic street signs to inform the public about levels of noise and air pollution. This is something l hope we can duplicate on the streets of London.
Last Thursday I went to the US Embassy as invited guest to listen to Barack Obama’s Cairo address. And I came out mightily impressed by the depth and scope of his speech. Drawing on his own personal experience of Muslim-majority countries, which greatly helped convince his audience, the US President outlined the seven crucial issues that in his view need to be resolved for a new beginning in relations between the West and the Muslim world.
Though l do have two concerns. Firstly that, by defining the debate in religious terms, Obama didn’t include those in both the West and Muslim world who have no faith or do not regard their religious affiliation as the primary focus of their life and identity. Many such people exist and have an important contribution to make to this discourse. And secondly, while he touched on almost everything else, he didn’t address the importance of development aid, which has always been a major tool of foreign policy.
We should all welcome Obama’s comments on the occupation of the West Bank and illegal settlements, as this change in language is in itself very significant. In reality, though, he will be judged by his follow-up actions and not simply by his fine words. He needs to make it clear that aid to Israel will be cut if the construction and expansion of illegal settlements continues, as the Economistrecently suggested. Many US citizens will be amazed to hear that the biggest recipient of US aid is affluent Israel and that it has not been going to those in desperate need around the world. Obama also needs close the tax loophole that allows the private funding of illegal settlements by US-based charitable organisations.
Equally, continued US aid to Egypt should be made contingent on moves towards genuine democracy. The Mubarak regime has become much discredited, with its dictatorial nature having been exposed by dissidents, many of whom now live in London. The existing political system does not leave much space if any for those who disagree with Mubarak, and it would in everybody’s interest to democratise Egypt and allow its lively civil society to play a full role in politics. Otherwise, the political vacuum after Mubarak eventually leaves the scene could be filled by an even more repressive regime. Better for Obama to press for democratic reform now rather than leave it till it is too late.
Finally, while l feel much more comfortable with a USA led by Obama, I haven’t forgotten that the key issue for many Londoners with the US Embassy here is that it should pay its outstanding congestion charge bill. That will be something to pursue with the new US ambassador when he arrives. In the meantime, l think it’s time for me to pay a trip to the Al-Azhar, in Cairo.
This is the text of the chapter I contributed to the Labour Friends of Palestine pamphlet, Stop Building Hatred.
