IT WAS difficult enough to mediate a way out of the impasse surrounding the siege of the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem, but in agreeing to house the thirteen Palestinian militants, the EU has given itself a conundrum of near mythical proportions. The Europeans cannot decide where to send them while the Cypriots are beginning to suspect that their help in providing temporary accommodation is about to be abused.
The problem is not that European governments are worried about becoming future terrorist targets if they take the men. Six countries — Belgium, Ireland, Italy, Greece, Spain and Portugal — have indicated that they will take a number of them, though not all. That is deemed a risk too far.
The problem is their legal status; it is a problem that the Europeans should perhaps have thought earlier.
None of these men has committed any crime in Europe. So there is nothing to stop them having a short vacation in Dublin or Rome or wherever at the EU’s expense and then boarding the first plane back to the Middle East. An undertaking was given to the Israelis that this will not happen, but no European state has the power to prevent it. If the police try to stop them leaving it will end up in court — and the Palestinians will win.
The only way that these men could be legally detained is if the Israelis demand their extradition. That is always a chance of that, even though the Israelis apparently agreed in private not to do so, not least because Ariel Sharon would take considerable malicious pleasure from the wave of anti-European anger that would sweep across the Arab world as a result. The Europeans cannot stop such a process from happening. Their courts are independent — some more so than others — and there are extradition treaties which cannot be abrogated. If the Israelis start proceedings, the process will have to run its course before the politicians can impose a ruling. The attempted extradition from Britain to Spain of Gen. Pinochet shows the difficulties involved. Neither the British nor the Spanish wanted the case to happen.
It was started by a private Spanish lawyer who took advantage of the independence of the two countries’ courts. It took a lot of British government ingenuity, and time, to find a way out.
The fact that individual lawyers can use Europe’s law courts for their own political purposes adds to the problem. Sharon may be only too happy for others in Israel to launch an extradition request while claiming that his hands are clean — very much what his party’s refusal to recognize a Palestinians state seems to be about.
The EU was quick enough to congratulate itself on finding a diplomatic solution to the impasse. No matter the scale of the problem, it will have to sort the problem out. It has accepted the responsibility for these men. It will have to deal with them — and deal with them in a manner that is patently aboveboard.
It is difficult, however, not to see its present quandary over them in more metaphoric terms. It does not know what to do with them, just as it (and so much of the world) does not know what to do about Palestine. What is their future, one asks. But then what is the future of Palestine?
The Bethlehem 13 are a symbol, not merely of Palestinian resistance, but of the world’s indecision about Palestine.
