The UK and EU policy of gentle pressure on Israel
has failed
- The Government of Israel is not interested in an authentic peace
process.
- Gaza continues under Israeli blockade,
its children malnourished, its buildings, destroyed by Israeli bombing in
the 2008/09 war, still in ruins.
- Illegal Israeli settlers on the West Bank
live on land still being forcibly taken from Palestinians by the Israeli
state, drive on roads from which Palestinians are excluded, and are
allocated five times as much water, per capita, as the Palestinians.
- The rights of Palestinians to economic activity are severely restricted
by checkpoints where they are arbitrarily delayed and humiliated.
- Israel imprisons without trial hundreds of
Palestinians, including children.
- Palestinian families are evicted from their homes to make way for
Israeli settlers.
- Archbishop Desmond Tutu has called this state of affairs
'apartheid in Palestine'.
It is time for
the UK
and the EU to take a robust stand against these abuses.
The EU has an
Association Agreement with Israel,
which promotes economic and cultural ties. The preamble to the Association
Agreement makes clear ". . . the importance which the parties attach to
the principle of economic freedom and to the principles of the United Nations
Charter, particularly the observance of human rights and democracy, which form
the very basis of the Association".
We call upon the
Foreign Secretary and the EU High Representative to stand up for the principles
of non-racial democracy upon which the EU is based by insisting that Israel
observes the basis of its agreement with the EU. We call upon them in
particular to require:-
- the end of the siege of Gaza, and
- an immediate and total
freeze on new settlements in the West Bank,
as preconditions
for the continuation of the EU Israel Association agreement.
Our continued
acquiescence in apartheid and ethnic cleansing is abhorrent and intolerable,
and we demand that it should cease.
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