Earlier this week I removed Tesco dates, in packets labeled “Origin: West Bank,” from the shelves of Tesco’s Swansea Marina store. Since last January, I have confiscated a number of similar packets and written to Tesco CEO Terry Leahy explaining why.
I offered to repay the cost of the goods I confiscated if he could show the dates were not the product of illegal Israeli settlements.
In the ensuing correspondence, Tesco neither addressed the settlement issue nor took up my refund offer. I was banned from their stores but not prosecuted.
A more public ‘citizen’s seizure’ was then organized at the same Tesco store. Although a woman accompanying me was charged, for some reason I was not. When the woman’s case came to Swansea Crown Court in June, the judge dismissed it.
Through my MP, Alan Williams, I have written to government ministers urging them to bring UK law into line with the Geneva Conventions and UN Security Council resolutions to which we are signatories.
Bill Rammell (then at the FCO) put the contradiction baldly in his reply: “…the building of Israeli settlements in the occupied Palestinian territories is illegal under international law. However the import and sale of products from Israeli settlements…is not prohibited by law in the UK, and we consider this is consistent with the UK’s international law obligations.”
This week, I learned that that the government is citing a Security Council resolution to justify an otherwise illegal freeze on suspects’ assets. This prompts me to adopt a similar line in a further citizen’s seizures.
Where a process is inadmissible, not to mention cruel, so is its product – whether settlement dates, blood diamonds, evidence obtained by torture, or lampshades made of human skin. Where government lawmakers and enforcers fail to uphold our commitments in international law, citizens have a right and duty to step in.
Import and sale of settlement produce amounts to handling stolen goods, it undermines international law and helps prolong a conflict for which Britain bears heavy responsibility.
I have auctioned previous consignments of confiscated West Bank dates in aid of Gaza relief (at £1 per date). Unless you need this sample as evidence, you may care to do the same. Or eat it and serve justice in some other way.
To highlight the inconsistency of the government’s position, and to help change it, I have posted a single date – stolen fruit from stolen land – with a letter of explanation to each of the following: Attorney General Baroness Scotland, Director of Public Prosecutions Keir Starmer QC, Supreme Court Chief Executive Jenny Rose, Justice Secretary Jack Straw, Foreign Secretary David Miliband, and South Wales Chief Constable Barbara Wilding.
Copies of the explanatory letter have been sent to Tesco CEO Terry Leahy, Swansea MP Alan Williams, the Palestine Solidarity Campaign in the UK, the Palestine Monitor group in Ramallah, and the Jewish Anti-war Network in Israel.
I first became aware of events in Palestine when I was working on an earthquake relief team in Lebanon in 1956 and a Palestinian friend gave me a book called Palestine is Our Business.
At Oxford I switched from Politics, Philosophy and Economics to Arabic, with a special study in modern history. During the 1967 war, when Israel took the West Bank, I was Reuters correspondent in Algiers. More recently I have served as an observer/accompanier on the West Bank for British Quakers (although I’m not one).
This brought home the human cost of ever-expanding settlements and the military occupation that sustains them. I also observed that while settlement products moved freely to local and international markets, Palestinian goods were blocked at every turn.
After the invasion of Gaza last winter, it was an Israeli peace group which alerted me to a Palestinian boycott call from Ramallah, and it was this that prompted me to my little local action. I targeted West Bank goods because these can only be the product of the settlements that the British government already recognizes as illegal.
Do you agree with what he did or is he nothing more than a petty criminal with morals in the wrong places? Should a teacher really be allowed to carry on teaching if he’s stealing West Bank produce from Tesco?
Hat-tip to Arnie Craven.
