International

In the Occupied Territories Israel imposes ‘apartheid’ between Arabs and settlers. Frank Shouldice Trader Jack stands in the doorway of his souvenir shop in Manger Square in Bethlehem. Fifty yards from the Church of the Nativity it’s a prime location for selling knick-knacks and miniature religious crafts. Jack is not Bethlehem’s most famous son but he’s lived in historic times. A teenager when the Israeli State was created, he grew up watching Palestinians scatter worldwide as refugees, felt his country shrink to 12% of its original size, and now witnesses the bloody tumult of the second intifada pushing what’s left of Gaza and the West Bank over an economic and political precipice. “We need Israel and Israel needs us”. He wonders aloud: “it’s a two-State system but now they are taking the best land in our territory – do they not have enough?” A working pensioner in his mid-70s, he finds ordinary life is getting a lot harder. The water supply often cuts off without warning. He can’t take his car outside the Occupied Territories and needs a special permit to travel to Jerusalem, five miles away. All around him are Jewish settlements, the fruits of a key Israeli strategy since 1967. About half a million Israelis now call the Occupied Territories home. Most of them live on land confiscated from Palestinians. Both the UN Security Council (1979) and the International Court of Justice (2004) declared the settlements illegal. Israel’s Minister for Foreign Affairs, Avigdor Lieberman, does not concur. The Minister lives in Nokdim, a West Bank settlement not far from Jack’s souvenir shop. In marked contrast to shanty-like Arab hillside dwellings, the hilltop houses are modern and attractive. Settlers get financial incentives from the State to buy them. As if joining up the dots, these hilltops are connected by a highway system that is off-limits to Palestinians. The effect is to create a hermetically-sealed Statelet which, in turn, paralyses movement for non-Israelis. Gilo is a typical model, built on a hilltop heavily fortified by the Israel Defensive Forces (IDF). “They build them up there so they can dominate us”, shrugs a Palestinian mother. “Many settlements – Ariel, for example – let sewage run down the hill and destroy farmland belonging to Palestinians. That’s what they think of us”. Palestinian commerce has virtually collapsed. Tourists have been scared away. While Jack stands outside his empty shop, groups of unemployed young men sit around the vacant square, passing time. Waiters in an adjoining café idle in the doorway, fanning the breeze with unperused menus. Tonight, the 72-room Bethlehem Star Hotel is home to four guests. For Zoughbi Zoughbi, founder of the Wi’am Palestinian Conflict Resolution Centre, these are troubling times. A campaigner committed to non-violence, he believes the settlement programme is the greatest single obstacle to peace. But directly in front of his office looms another hurdle: the security wall. Also built on land appropriated from Palestinians, it stands eight metres high and runs for over 500 miles through the West Bank, protecting Jewish settlements, separating communities and in places ensuring cash crops like olives rot on the ground while the farmers who own the lands go bankrupt. “It is an apartheid wall”, says Zoughbi, glancing at the concrete horizon that greets him each morning. “It’s about annexation. It is used to confiscate more land and the best places for aquifers. It is also used to further divide and isolate Palestinian areas from each other”. Comparisons with the Berlin Wall are all too obvious but it is ironic that Israel should imitate so enthusiastically a policy dreamt up by a former German régime. The rationale is to reduce attacks by Palestinian militants; however another logic suggests that creating so much bitterness will provoke a violent backlash to reinforce the mindset that built the wall in the first place. In the name of national security, each consciously bewildering maze outside the Occupied Territories tapers into a crossing point. Arab residents, including women and children, clutch possessions through the babble of disorderly queues, routinely herded through a permit control-system, while armed guards bark orders from behind mirrored sunglasses. The scene conjures its own echoes of a Jewish past. “It is not easy”, concedes Boughbi, soft-selling a gospel of non-violence to growing legions of disenchanted Palestinians. “I am one of those who would like to deprive the Israelis of an enemy. Through its daily provocations Israel tries to push us to use greater violence, precisely because the Israeli government is well-equipped to deal with violence. It seems that [the] Israeli Government is threatened more by thoughts of peace and non-violence than by war”. And then there is Hebron. Nowhere else in the West Bank have Jewish settlers been placed among the Arab community. With a total population of about 160,000, Hebron is one of the West Bank’s primary cities. A busy marketplace fills the newer parts but what makes Hebron unique is the Old City, languishing in desolation. In a policy of aggressive displacement, over 200 Palestinian shops and houses have been shut down by military order, over a hundred more evacuated after its main drag Al-Shuhada was declared “a settler-only street”. The settler controversy here traces back to a 1929 pogrom when 67 Jews were murdered and Hebron’s minority Jewish community was driven out. The city passed through British, Egyptian and Jordanian hands until Israel assumed full control at the end of the Six Day War in 1967. Afterwards, former Israeli Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion told a BBC interviewer that “in the cause of peace Israel should take nothing in the conquered territories with the exception of Hebron – which is more Jewish even than Jerusalem”. Hebron’s religious significance relates to the Cave of Machpelah, burial site for Abraham, patriarch of Jews, Christian and Muslims. The Ibrahimi Mosque beside it now serves as the disputed focus for rival traditions. Jewish settlers ignored a prohibition on civilian settlements and set up the Kiryat Arba camp on the outskirts. In 1979, a small number

Global aid to developing countries is less than the $160bn lost annually by them to tax dodging by multinationals. Sorley McCaughey Every year, the world’s poorest countries lose billions of dollars in potential revenue through the tax dodging of unscrupulous multinational companies (MNCs). For example, between 2005 and 2007, Ireland contributed €95million to Mozambique, but in the same period €18.21million was lost in tax dodging. Abusive transfer pricing and false invoicing alone cost them $160 billion each year, according to Christian Aid estimates. These figures dwarf the total amounts provided in global development aid each year, and far exceed any estimates of what would be required to attain the Millennium Development Goals. This is money that could be spent on basic services – health, education, infrastructure etc. Indeed it is money that, in the long-term, has the potential to move countries away from a reliance on aid to a more sustainable and predictable source of income – legitimate tax revenue. Abusive transfer pricing occurs when related companies – subsidiaries of the same parent company – deliberately inflate or deflate the value of transactions in order to minimise their tax liability in a country. For example, 5000 tonnes of bananas were exported to the US in 2009 at a price of $0.20/ kilo, when the arms’ length price (or agreed market price) was $0.85/kilo. False invoicing, for its part, occurs when two unrelated companies agree on a bogus price for a commodity being sold between them with the effect of minimising tax liability. The profit accrued can then be split between them. Apart from being morally reprehensible, this clearly flies in the face of the international development approach. But this is not just a development issue. There are implications for the Irish Government in terms of the coherence of their policy agenda. Irish Aid is committed to ensuring that the actions or policies of other institutions do not negatively impact on its work. When the international regulations that govern multinational activities (which the Irish Department of Finance has a role in formulating) facilitate this, the incoherence at government level is contributing negatively to the plight of millions of poor people around the globe. In addition, Irish people have a right to expect – particularly at a time when every cent is being watched- that their money that is being spent overseas is not being undermined by other government departments’ inaction. The volume of money lost is in itself enough reason to be concerned. But an effective taxation system also generates additional benefits. An efficient taxation system also promotes good governance. It promotes mutual accountability between those who are paying tax and the government. So what should be done? Civil society recommends three connected solutions to the situation. The first is a requirement for MNCs to report their profits on a country by country basis – not only a global consolidated profit figure. Such information would be invaluable to countries (and not just poor countries) in identifying where possible cases of abusive transfer pricing have occurred. Secondly, civil society is calling for tax information to be exchanged automatically between jurisdictions. Existing bilateral tax information exchange agreements have failed to achieve the transparency needed to identify those companies and individuals who hide money in offshore tax havens. The burden of proof on those countries requesting information is so great that even wealthy countries have found them to be ineffective. Only a global agreement on a multilateral automatic information exchange will deliver the transparency that poor countries need to start clawing back the billions they are owed in tax. Thirdly, and critically, it is crucial to respond to the capacity needs of countries’ tax authorities, oversight bodies such as parliaments, and audit institutions – to process and act on the information that becomes available to them. Irish Aid is already carrying out important work in this area, but more needs to be done in the international tax arena where key decisions around financial regulation are made. In a way, campaigners on this issue are riding a wave of opportunity brought about by the recession and the associated demands for greater financial transparency. There is a recognition now that the characteristics that have contributed to crippling the Irish economy – light touch regulation, a lack of financial transparency and tax arrangements skewed in favour of the wealthy – are the ones that have allowed unscrupulous companies to shift billions out of developing countries. It can no longer be acceptable for profit to be pursued without regard for the negative social consequences for millions of ordinary people around the world. The results of such behaviour are all too evident both in Ireland and the developing world.

When Obama came to power last year, he pledged to close the prison at Guantanamo within one year, by January 2010. Not only did he fail to do that, but he has also maintained a second similar prison in Afghanistan, at Bagram Air Base, near Kabul.

UN’s ambitious upgrading of its role including to state-building
has backfired

Latvia, Bulgaria, Romania and others are lacerating their equality budgets too

Proinsias De Rossa has just returned from leading a European Parliament delegation whose permission to enter Gaza was revoked by Israel