Israeli’s demolition of three humanitarian aid shelters funded by the European Union near an Israeli colony is an outrage over which the EU should take action. It is time for the EU to embrace the boycott movement and officially ask all its member states to boycott all Israeli goods and services, particularly while such illegal activities are encouraged by Netanyahu’s government.
Any such boycott is well over due as the European Commission has just reported that between 2002 and 2012, Israel destroyed development projects worth €49.2 million (Dh251 million), of which €29.4 million had been funded by the EU or its member states. The three shelters destroyed last week were all prefabricated caravans, and were built for families made homeless in severe storms that hit the region in December. They were funded by the EU’s humanitarian aid wing, DG Echo, and some were provided by the French development agency, Action Contre La Faim.
An extra reason for concern is that previous similar demolition of Palestinian homes was followed by new building of illegal colonies, and these fears are compounded by the November 2012 announcement by the Netanyahu government of a zoning plan to build 3,000 Jewish housing units on the site of these three humanitarian shelters that would create a continuous urban corridor linking occupied Jerusalem and the Israeli colony of Ma’ale Adumim.
The latest Israeli action follows the near collapse of the peace talks between Palestine and Israel, sponsored by US Secretary of State John Kerry. This was a rash attempt to revive the discredited Oslo talks, and one obvious reason why the Palestinians had to be sceptical about Israeli commitment to this process was the way that Israel has ignored its international obligations to freeze colony activity. By 2011, illegal Israeli colonies housed over 520,000 colonists, according to the UN. And since then that number has expanded. Today a total of 43 per cent of the Palestinian West Bank is allocated to Israeli colonies. Any effort to revive the peace talks needs totally new thinking from the Netanyahu government.
