[E-rundbrief] Info 906 - EU subsidise Israeli security?

[Matthias Reichl]

E-Rundbrief - Info 906 - Ben Hayes (TNI, S): Should the EU subsidise 
Israeli security?

Bad Ischl, 1.4.2010

Begegnungszentrum für aktive Gewaltlosigkeit

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Should the EU subsidise Israeli security?

Ben Hayes

March 2010

The inclusion of Israel in the European Security Research Programme
undermines the EU's commitment to even-handedness in the Middle East.

Since the European Community began funding research in 1984, both the
amount of funding available and the range of topics on offer have
steadily increased (the latest framework programme, FP7, has a
seven-year budget of €53 billion). So has the participation of
researchers from outside the EU in collaborative projects.

In per capita terms, no non-EU country has received more from the EU's
largesse than Israel. Indeed, the European Commission says that the EU
is now second only to the Israel Science Foundation in Jerusalem as a
source of research funding for Israeli academics, corporations and state
enterprises.

More and more of that funding is finding its way to Israel's already
buoyant security sector. Israeli revenues from the export of
counter-terrorism-related products now top $1bn annually, according to
the Israeli government.

Since incorporating Israel into the ‘European research area', the
Commission has signed off on dozens of lucrative EU research contracts
to the likes of Israel Aerospace Industries (a state-owned manufacturer
of drones), Motorola Israel (producer of ‘virtual fences' around Israeli
settlements) and Elbit Systems (one of Israel's largest private military
technology firms, responsible for segments around Jerusalem of, to use
the United Nation's term, the separation wall constructed between Jewish
and Palestinian communities).

Some 58 EU ‘security research' projects have now also been funded under
the new €1.4bn ‘security research' component of FP7. Israeli companies
and institutions are participating in 12 of these, leading and
co-ordinating five of them. Only the UK, Germany, France and Italy lead
more projects.

Among this latest tranche of contracts is a €9.1 million project led by
Verint Systems that will deliver “field-derived data” to “crisis
managers” in “command-and-control centres”. (These contracts tend to
avoid phrases such as ‘surveillance' and ‘homeland security',
substituting less emotive terms.)

Verint describes itself as “a leader in enterprise workforce
optimisation and security intelligence solutions, including video
intelligence, public safety and communication intelligence and
investigative solutions”. What it primarily provides is workplace
surveillance, CCTV and wire-tapping facilities. Verint is now
effectively being subsidised by the EU to develop surveillance and
communication systems that may ultimately be sold back to the member states.

The raison d'être for establishing the EU security research programme
was to enhance the ‘industrial competitiveness' of the nascent European
‘homeland security' industry. The Commission argues that funding for
Israeli ‘homeland security' is wholly consistent with this aim (insofar
as it will enhance Europe's “knowledge base”).

But should the Commission be giving more money to Israel's flourishing
security sector than to its counterparts in most of the EU states?

More importantly, should it be subsidising it at all? Israel's control
of what remains of the Palestinian territories now depends as much upon
the hardware and software provided by its ‘homeland security' industry
as its traditional military supremacy.

The EU therefore risks complicity in the actions of a military that
frequently shows too little regard for the lives and livelihoods of
civilians. And the EU's subsidies make it appear less than even-handed
in the peace process.

In the eyes of many Palestinians, it is already fundamentally
compromised. Last September, Javier Solana, the EU's foreign policy
chief for a decade, told an audience in Jerusalem: “Israel is, allow me
to say, a member of the European Union without being a member of the
institutions.”

“No country outside the continent has the type of relations Israel has
with the European Union,” he said, adding that Israel's “relation today
with the European Union is stronger than the relation of Croatia” (which
still hopes for membership in 2011).

Solana apparently did not mind whether the EU appeared even-handed or
not, or how its research budget was being spent. But do European
taxpayers want the EU's administrators to allocate their money to an
industry at the heart of one of the bloodiest, most protracted and most
sensitive geopolitical issues of our time?

Transnational Institute
http://www.tni.org/article/should-eu-subsidise-israeli-security


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