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WSWS : News & Analysis : Middle East
Europe seeks greater role in Middle East
By Jean Shaoul
30 August 2001
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The assassination of Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine leader Abu
Ali Mansour and the subsequent invasion of Palestinian controlled areas
show the continued push by Israel for war. It took place within days of the
announcement by Germany that it would host talks between Yasser Arafat,
Chairman of the Palestinian Authority (PA) and Shimon Peres, Israel�s
Foreign Minister, confirming a pattern whereby Israel�s Prime Minister Ariel
Sharon responds to every peace initiative by stepping up the provocations
against the Palestinians.
The talks appear to be doomed before they begin. Sharon has no intention of
making any of the concessions necessary for peace to be restored. He
continues to insist on a complete seven-day cease-fire before he will
consider implementing the Mitchell Report that calls for an end to the
violence and a halt to the expansion of Israeli settlements in the Occupied
Territories. This demand makes a nonsense of Peres� proposal for a so-
called �gradual cease fire�, in which Israel would lift closures on Palestinian
areas that are deemed to be quiet and allow Palestinian workers from those
areas into Israel in return for PA cooperation in preventing further violence.
But even if it was implemented, the poposal would amount to a strategy of
divide and rule, designed to further exacerbate the political and social
tensions among the Palestinians.
The Palestinian Authority dismissed the Peres initiative as a gimmick to
distract attention from action on the ground. Saeb Erekat, Palestinian
negotiator, said, �We are not against dialogue but we are sick and tired of
this double language�. Palestinian Information Minister Yasser Abed Rabo
clearly understood the talks were a non-starter and anticipated further
provocations from Sharon when he said, �Whenever Peres asks for a joint
meeting with our people, we witness more escalation by Israeli occupation
forces against our people. Those who are na�ve believe in a possible
breakthrough via Peres�in the final analysis, it will be Sharon who decides.�
Despite these inauspicious circumstances, however, the fact that the
Europeans in general, and Germany in particular, should have intervened to
try to broker some agreement and prevent the slide to an all out war, is
something of a political watershed.
German Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer made it quite clear that the
Europeans were seeking to assert their interests in the Middle East and to
challenge the United States� domination over the region. In his talks with
Avraham Burg, the Speaker of the Israeli Parliament who is seeking to
become the next leader of the Labour Party, Fischer said that the time had
come to establish a wide international peace coalition that would include
Europe and Russia. The Israeli daily paper, Yediot Aharonot, also reported
that Fischer wanted to get support for $1bn in grants to the Palestinians, but
this was denied.
Direct intervention by the EU into what has largely been seen as the US�s
bailiwick undoubtedly reflects the European powers� frustration with their
reliance upon the US and concern that its ever more open support for
Sharon�s warmongering is threatening their own vital interests in the region. It
further indicates how anxious the European powers are to break from US
tutelage and once more become an independent political force in the Middle
East.
The desire of the Democrats under President Clinton for a settlement in the
Middle East never signified an abandonment of Israel as the US�s main ally.
But under President George W Bush, the Europeans see an Administration
uninterested in reaching any kind of settlement and committed to supporting
Israel as its �strategic asset� in the region through thick and thin. Israel�s
military and economic offensive against the Palestinians, its murderous
policy of assassinations, and its reoccupation of the West Bank and Gaza
could not have gone ahead without the complicity if not outright support of
the US. Therefore the European powers, fearful that the Israelis will provoke
an all out war in the Middle East that will destabilise the reactionary rulers
upon whom their corporations depend for oil and profits, have launched a last
ditch attempt to salvage the situation.
The European powers and the Middle East in the 1990s
When the Madrid talks�the first initiative to find a resolution to the conflict in
more than a decade� held under the auspices of America and Russia
reached a stalemate in 1991, it was the Norwegians who secretly hosted the
second track, informal talks between the Israelis and Palestinians in 1992
that were to result in the 1993 Oslo Accord.
The Clinton Administration soon seized the initiative back from the
Norwegians and hosted a series of meetings at Wye River and Camp David,
aimed at bringing about a final settlement on terms acceptable to Israel and
the US. It was largely through the insistence of Secretary of State Warren
Christopher that Israel and Jordan institutionalised their longstanding,
pragmatic modus vivendi by signing a formal peace treaty in October 1994.
He also secured the lifting of the secondary Arab boycott against Western
corporations that traded with or invested in Israel.
But with all the official barriers to trade with Israel now down, the European
powers exploited the new trade opportunities with Israel. At Barcelona in
1995, they negotiated a new European-Mediterranean Partnership agreement
with twelve countries bordering the southern and eastern shores of the
Mediterranean, including Israel and its Arab neighbours. The Barcelona
partners soon became enmeshed in a network of multinational committees
devoted to joint programmes in agriculture, industry, communications, and
transport.
The Europeans clearly saw the agreement as an alternative to America�s four
decades-long role as guardian of Western interests in the Middle East. While
the agreement was not designed specifically to deal with Arab-Israeli
relations, it came to provide an important channel through which the
Europeans could assert their interests. For example, it provided the only
mechanism for the Israelis and Syrians to meet and embark on the 1995-96
talks.
Following Oslo, both Yitzhak Rabin, the Israeli Prime Minister, and Yasser
Arafat sought economic assistance for the Palestinian Authority from the
European Union�vital if the Palestinian Authority was to get off the ground.
The EU Commission proposed a $600m aid package for the Palestinians and
a further $104m grant to underwrite the new Palestinian police force. The EU
funded the first Palestinian �national� election in 1996. It also provided tens of
millions of dollars to Jordan in the aftermath of the Gulf War to cope with the
influx of Palestinian refugees from the Gulf.
In 1995, Arafat and Peres signed the Paris Protocol, an agreement under EU
sponsorship, authorising Palestinian exports to Europe on the same basis
as the EU-Med agreement. Three years later, the EU declared that the trade
concessions for Palestinian commodities applied to those goods produced
for Palestinian, not Israeli profit. The latter would not be accepted into the EU
without duties under either the Palestinian or Israeli category. In practice,
this was no more than a political gesture to demonstrate the EU�s even
handedness towards the two parties and was never implemented.
The greater willingness of the EU to deal with the Palestinians in no way
indicates animosity towards Israel. Indeed Israel�s growing importance to the
EU can be seen from the following trade statistics. The EU�s imports from
Israel grew from $526 million in 1976 to $6.6 billion in 1997. During the same
period, its exports to Israel climbed even faster from $1.3 billion to $14.8
billion. While both Israel and Palestine�s agricultural exports have suffered
from the competition with the EU�s Mediterranean members and associate
members that has undermined their agricultural economies, Israel has
become an important market for European goods.
By the mid-1990s the Europeans began to feel that they had made the
necessary down-payment to become a power broker in the region. Following
French President Chirac�s 1996 visit to Israel, the EU appointed its own
special emissary to Israel for Middle Eastern Affairs�a euphemism for the
Israeli-Palestinian negotiations.
Within the EU, it was Germany that had become Israel�s major financial
backer, following France�s short-lived special relationship with Israel in the
1950s. Israel�s first Prime Minister, David Ben Gurion, negotiated a $125
million annual reparations package with the West German government as
compensation for the suffering caused by the Holocaust and an aid package
that was to bankroll the Zionist state until the Americans became its sponsor
in the mid1960s. During the Iran-Iraq war in the 1980s when Israel supplied
Iran with advanced weaponry in breach of international agreements, it was
Germany that made its harbours and airports available to the Israeli supply
effort.
Israel was able to turn the build-up of Germany�s arms dealing in the Middle
East to her own advantage with the start of the Gulf War. During the Allied
bombing campaign against Iraq in 1991, it became clear that between 1982
and 1989 West German manufacturers had provided Iraq with weapons and
related technology worth $700 million. The German government had turned a
blind eye to a weapons export program that had transformed the
Bundesrepublik into Europe�s third largest arms dealer after the Soviet Union
and France. One company alone, Thyssen Rheinstahl Technik, had
constructed Iraq�s extensive chemicals weapons program, upgraded Iraq�s
Scud missiles, and constructed an elaborate bunker system to protect Iraq�s
military control centres and political leadership.
Within hours of Iraq�s Scud missiles falling on Tel Aviv, Israel sought
compensation directly from Germany, famously telling Chancellor Helmut
Kohl, �Mr Chancellor, three concepts can never be linked with one another:
Jews, Germans and poison gas�.
Kohl made an immediate commitment of DM250 million for reconstruction,
and later raised it to DM1 billion. Soon afterwards, the Israelis went to
Germany on a shopping spree that far outweighed the cost of repairing the
damage. They sought to obtain the two submarines from German shipyards,
which they had been forced to cancel several years earlier due to lack of
funds, as a gift. Not only did the Kohl government offer to provide the two
submarines for free, but it also agreed to fund half the cost of a third.
Germany enlarged its network of research and exchange projects between
the two countries. Germany�s three political parties, its trade union federation
and some eighty German municipalities, funded exchange programs that
brought Israelis to Germany.
The signing of the Oslo agreements vastly accelerated Germany�s
investment and tourism in Israel, although well before then Germany had
become Israel�s second most important commercial partner and second
most important arms supplier after the US. Now Daimler-Benz, Siemens,
Volkswagen, Henkel Detergents and Cosmetics Corporation made multi-
million dollar investments in Israel. Schneider Optical Works and Frankfurt�s
FG Bank were just two German corporations that went into joint ventures
with Israeli corporations. Israel�s principal attraction was its high tech
industry and educated workforce. Furthermore, by 1996 some 200,000
German tourists were visiting Israel annually. Today Germany is widely
viewed as the most pro-Israeli of the European powers.
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