It’s not quite a golden rule, more a rule of thumb;
but sometimes it appears that the degree of fury surrounding an issue bears an inverse
relationship to the importance of the substance. Israel’s fury at the
long-overdue statement by the UK government that sanctions will be imposed on
imports from illegal Israeli settlements in the West Bank is clear and
visceral. The UK’s condemnation of the illegality is welcome nevertheless; the
attempt to conflate disapproval of illegality with antisemitism is nonsensical
but just about par for the course. But what is the substance involved?
The amount of trade between the UK and Israeli West
Bank settlements is hard to calculate, but certainly tiny. It’s not as if the ‘country
of origin’ of settlement-grown dates is going to be emblazoned on the packaging
as ‘illegal settlements in the West Bank’. There are rules, of course, banning
such goods from being labelled as ‘product of Israel’, (although it seems to be
a fairly widespread practice) and perhaps, as this report from the
BBC suggests, the ban will act as something of a deterrent to that, although
the co-operation of the Israeli authorities is something that maybe we shouldn’t
rely on too heavily. Labelling them as having been produced in ‘Palestine’ is
another route currently being used, and is accurate in geographical terms at
least. One assumes that the intention of the UK government is not to target
Palestinian-produced produce, but, again, that’s easier to say than implement.
Al Jazeera (not always the most reliable source, but
this piece seems balanced and reasonably well-researched) estimates
that total UK trade with settlements amounts to around £40 million annually,
but the bulk of that is exports to the settlements (which are not covered by
the ban), leaving a maximum of around £6 million annually in imports, a total
which may well include goods produced by Palestinians as well as those produced
by Israelis. Obviously, other countries imposing a similar ban (whilst facing
the same problems of correctly identifying the affected goods) will increase
the extent of the economic impact, but it still looks like pretty marginal
sums.
It could be argued, not unreasonably, that it’s more of
a symbolic gesture than an immediately effective one. No less welcome for that,
but hardly an explanation for the ferocity of the response it has provoked. I
suspect that the response is aimed less at undoing the sanctions being imposed
now and more at mobilising opinion against any ratcheting up of sanctions in
the future, when the current sanctions will, inevitably, have proved themselves
to be of minimal effectiveness. How willing the UK Government is to go further
in the face of that fury is the real test.
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