• 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.