Before you boycott Israel, remember the history—and help us build a better future

Over the past few days, Britain has moved from criticism of Israel towards economic action.

Foreign Secretary Ed Miliband has announced an import ban on goods from Israeli settlements and a new sanctions regime that will go further, targeting companies and individuals involved in construction, infrastructure, financing and real estate connected to settlement expansion. Britain says this is necessary to preserve the possibility of a Palestinian state.

I confess, I struggle to understand the logic.

Britain wants to advance peace by introducing a boycott. It wants to help Palestinians through measures that may also cost Palestinians jobs and livelihoods. It wants to preserve a political architecture born out of Oslo without seriously confronting what happened to the assumptions underlying Oslo. And it is prepared to reach into the Israeli economy—including potentially its financial system—to prevent one population from creating “facts on the ground,” while treating construction by the other population very differently.

What troubles me most is how much history—and how much recent experience—seems to have disappeared from this policy.

A contiguous Palestinian state is presented as the destination that must be preserved. E1 therefore becomes a threat. Jewish construction becomes an obstacle to peace. Economic restrictions become a legitimate way of preventing Israel from changing the map.

But before His Majesty’s Government uses economic power to preserve that political architecture, perhaps it should ask whether the assumptions behind it still withstand history and reality.

A few weeks ago, I was driving up Highway 1 towards Jerusalem, past Ma’ale Adumim and E1.

I had been reading the familiar warnings about Jewish construction creating irreversible “facts on the ground.” Yet across the hills I saw large new Palestinian apartment blocks and expanding Arab communities.

They simply looked like another suburb.

This landscape is still routinely described using Areas A, B and C. But these divisions were created by the Oslo process as an interim arrangement, not permanent borders. Area A came under Palestinian civil and security control, Area B under Palestinian civil administration with different security arrangements, while Area C remained under Israeli civil and security control pending a negotiated settlement.

And the purpose of that process was supposed to be peace.

At Oslo’s heart was an extraordinary bargain: mutual recognition........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)