Image Courtesy: Hannah McKay/Reuters

Ireland has advanced a bill which will prevent the sale of goods from Israel’s illegal settlements in the occupied West Bank.
 
The Israeli foreign ministry has reprimanded Ireland’s ambassador Alison Kelly after the lower house of Irish parliament voted in favour of a bill that will ban the purchase of goods and services from the illegal Israeli settlements.
 
In a statement, the office of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said it was a shame that Ireland “condemns the only democratic state in the Middle East”.
 
“Israel is outraged over the legislation against it in the Irish parliament, which is indicative of hypocrisy and anti-Semitism,” the statement said.

 
The lower house of the Irish parliament – the Dail – yesterday voted in favour of the bill as the goods procured from settlements are considered illegal under international law. The bill was previously passed through the parliament’s upper house – the Seanad – before proceeding to the lower house and receiving a 78-45 majority in favour, Al Jazeera explained.
 
The bill – officially known as the Control of Economic Activity (Occupied Territories) Bill – still needs to pass several more stages before being signed into Irish law, but it is expected to progress given its broad base of support from Irish opposition parties.
 
Once approved, the law would see fines of up to €250,000 ($284,000) or five years in jail be handed down for those found guilty of importing or selling any goods or services originating in the Golan Heights, East Jerusalem or West Bank settlements, the Jerusalem Post reported.
 
“Though estimates put the value of settlement-made exports to Ireland at between only $580,000 and $1.1 million annually, the symbolic value of the bill and its potential to influence other European countries to follow suit has been hailed as a victory by the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement. Mustafa Barghouti, the secretary-general of the Palestinian National Initiative party, said the bill is a “great victory for the BDS movement” and vowed that “we will seek to pass similar laws in a number of European countries in the near future,” Middle East Monitor reported.
 
The Israeli PMO statement added that “Instead of Ireland condemning Syria for slaughtering hundreds of thousands of civilians, Turkey for the occupation of Northern Cyprus and the terrorist organizations for murdering thousands of Israelis, it attacks Israel, the only democracy in the Middle East. What a disgrace.”
 
Ireland has been a consistent and long-time supporter of the BDS movement.

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Israel and the US have attacked the database and want to prevent its release. On November 26, Israel’s UN ambassador, Danny Danon, told The Associated Press “we will do everything we can to ensure that this list does not see the light of day”.

Israeli diggers work on opening new roads on a land prepared for the construction of the first Israeli West Bank settlement of Amichai in 25 years, 21 June 2017. EPA/ATEF SAFADI

The database is being established under the auspices of the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR). This effort has recently been supported by dozens of international and local rights groups, including Amnesty International, the International Federation for Human Rights, and Human Rights Watch. As a regulatory initiative for the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights (UNGP), the database’s aim is to help businesses and states ensure that they do not contribute to or benefit from activities in Israel’s settlements.

The UN is due to release the database by the beginning of 2018, after reportedly engaging with as many as 150 companies, of which 60 are foreign and the rest Israeli.

To protect the legitimacy of the database and shield it from criticism, the UN must clarify its function, and show that it is not a punitive device but a vital resource for furthering business transparency and enabling business and state compliance with their existing obligations under international law.
 

Human rights compliance

The database began with a recommendation in a 2013 UN fact-finding mission report on Israel’s settlements, endorsed by the Human Rights Council in March 2016.

In Israel’s settlements, as the Human Rights Council’s March 2017 resolution affirmed, “it is not possible for businesses to take appropriate steps in view of the immitigable nature of the adverse impact of their activities on human rights”. All business transactions in or related to Israel’s settlements contribute to the illicit financial flows generated by the wrongful enjoyment of unlawfully appropriated property rights obtained by the Israeli government.

The need to monitor the involvement of foreign and Israeli businesses in Israel’s settlements was kindled by UN Security Council Resolution 2334, which held that Israel’s settlement activity in occupied territory has “no legal validity and constitutes a flagrant violation under international law,” and called on third states to exclude settlement-based entities and activities from their dealings with Israeli entities.

To date, some 18 European government advisories warned businesses of the economic, financial, and legal risks of business activities in Israel’s settlements. In recent years a host of companies, financial institutions and pension funds, among them a Norwegian government fund, Dutch pension fund, Danish bank and Dutch engineering company decided to terminate operations in the Palestinian territories.
 

Engagement, not punishment

The UN database is a mechanism to document, report, and engage primary interested parties. It does not have the mandate to adjudicate the responsibility of concerned parties, nor to act as a coercive tool of law enforcement. Thus, commentators who refer to it as a “blacklist” misrepresent it and undermine its legitimacy.

To maximise its effectiveness, the database must be able to engage and cooperate with businesses that operate in the territories and their home states. It cannot afford to alienate its target audiences by operating as an adjudicative or coercive body.

The OHCHR should learn from the pitfalls of previous UN-led efforts to list businesses. Take the UN Center for Transnational Corporations: its mandate to report on businesses in Apartheid-era South Africa never gained adequate support because it was presented as a sanction. The UN panel on the plunder of resources in the DRC produced a list of businesses, which was discredited for failing to gain businesses’ cooperation.

There is no doubt that the UN database will be embroiled in political turmoil. It may not be the first of its kind, but it could well become the first to function as a regulatory tool that gains support, and encourages compliance with international law.

To ensure its ability to further respect for international law, the database should be seen as a pilot mechanism that could be used beyond the Israel-Palestine context. And the mechanism behind the database could be readily applied in other parts of the world where military occupation is used to pursue the permanent acquisition or transformation of territory.
 

Valentina Azarova, Postdoctoral Fellow, Koç University Istanbul

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

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In this three-minute episode, which originally aired on AJ+ Labs, host Dena Takruri explains what Israeli settlements are, the violence they cause to Palestinians, and their critical role in fueling conflict.
 
Courtesy: Jaddiliya.com

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