Shortly after I became a European commissioner in 1999 I visited Gaza and the West Bank to see how the European Commission, under strong international pressure, could speed up disbursement of development assistance. I recall in particular visits to Gaza airport, subsequently plowed up by the Israeli Army, and to a general hospital. I visited the morgue that was under construction. It must have been badly overloaded in recent years.
After the second intifada began in the autumn of 2000, Israel stopped the transfer of tax receipts owed to the Palestinian Authority. In the following summer, the commission began payment of direct budgetary assistance to the authority. There were tough conditions, overseen by international financial institutions. The infrastructure built by European money on the West Bank and in Gaza was systematically trashed by the Israeli Army Defense Forces in 2002. They were responding to horrific suicide bombings in Israel. Anything that might be seen to provide the sinews of government was destroyed — including the land registry, courts and police stations. This did not obviously advance the prospect of a two-state solution.
Throughout the period when budgetary support was provided, the European Commission was accused by some Israeli lobby groups of bankrolling terrorism and corruption. We just about achieved our aim and managed to keep the Palestinian Authority afloat — even to reform it. As the responsible commissioner, I was privately encouraged by senior US State Department officials to continue the support, and was never asked by Israeli officials to stop it. Europe was in effect fulfilling its now historic role of financing the terrible failure of policies laid down not in Brussels, but in Tel Aviv and Washington. Doubtless Europe is getting ready to do the same again. From 2000 to 2008, European Commission funding to Palestine totaled nearly 3 billion euros. Over the last 10 years about 50 million euros have been spent in Gaza on physical infrastructure work, part of a much larger sum committed but not spent.
After the recent assault on Gaza, the collecting tin is once again being passed round. Leaving to one side the controversy over the BBC’s lamentable failure to air the Disasters Emergency Committee appeal, on a state and European level we should be generous in giving humanitarian relief. But it is worth questioning the point of further development assistance in the absence of political progress. With no political movement, and with a ban on any contact at all with Hamas, Tony Blair’s purported role as Palestine’s George Marshall — bringing peace through development — has been totally irrelevant. Forgive the question, but isn’t this the same Tony Blair who rightly used to talk to Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness in the pursuit of peace; the same Tony Blair who released terrorist murderers from prison in the same cause? If Europe is to write more checks, surely we should insist on some political movement.
The first step would be to respond positively to the call from Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian Authority president, for the formation of a unity government. There was one after Hamas won a majority of seats in the 2006 parliamentary elections. After active diplomatic efforts by Saudi Arabia, Hamas and Fatah were locked into an uneasy truce which was split asunder in part by the US and European refusal to deal with Hamas. Presumably, any unity government formed today would require another Fatah-Hamas deal, brokered by Arab governments. But would the world then deal with the government that emerged? Without Hamas, how would any peace deal be sold to the Palestinians? The diplomatic trick is not how to justify the isolation of Hamas but how to ease them out of their isolation, to get them to endorse a permanent cease-fire, and to release captive Gilad Shalit.
