Sanctioning the West Bank will hurt Palestinians |
The passengers on an El Al flight from Tel Aviv last week to Amsterdam’s Schiphol airport were quickly separated and ordered to put their luggage through a screening machine. New checks have been implemented to ensure that travellers are not bringing in forbidden goods from East Jerusalem, the West Bank or the Golan Heights. Writing in Nieuwrechts, a conservative website, Sivan Behr described how surly customs officers corralled the passengers, many of them Israeli, into a separate queue, while shouting at them. Dutch officials, of course, have always been efficient at separating Jews and non-Jews. During the war they separated 107,000 Jews and sent them to the Nazi camps. Only 5,000 returned.
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Can we expect such scenes soon at Heathrow or other British airports? Doubtless much of the Labour party, the Greens and the Gaza bloc MPs would welcome such measures. The government has announced similar restrictions, with the details to be published in several months. Settlement goods will be banned. Any business, organisation or individual providing finance, infrastructure or other services for settlements will face penalties. In fact the decision is an economic absurdity, the equivalent of Argentina sanctioning Surrey but not Sussex for sovereignty over the Falklands. It is not possible to sanction a section of a national economy or shared currency area without significant consequences for the remainder – in this case, the Palestinian........