Israel was at the centre of the most important news story this week – but you won’t have heard about it

The European Court of Human Rights has asked France to pay back €100,000 to 11 harmless activists who expressed their political views – and then found themselves criminalised for doing so. Robert Fisk explains

Judges of the European Court of Human Rights listen in Strasbourg (AFP/Getty)

I’ve never been a boycott man. Sanctions against Italy after Musso’s invasion of Abyssinia? Forget it. Sanctions against Spain in the civil war? It crippled the legal republican government. South Africa? Personally, I always thought the Apartheid thugs just realised the time was up – they were too vastly outnumbered to survive.

Sanctions against Saddam Hussein? Laughable. Sanctions against Syria? They didn’t bring Assad down – so we’re going to sanction Syria again. And let’s not forget sanctions against Russia. Has anyone seen Putin packing up his tent in Sevastopol?

Sanctions against Israel? Even Uri Avnery was against it. I rather agree with him.

BUT.

Yes, there’s always a but – and, right now, it deserves capital letters. Like so many important stories, the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) ruling against France’s conviction of 11 activists demanding a boycott of Israeli products was buried beneath the pandemic of journalistic obsession with Covid-19. Back in 2015, to a background of political condemnation by Israel itself, France’s highest appeal court in Paris upheld rulings that convicted the campaigners on the basis of inciting racism and antisemitism.

What this meant, to my mind – though no French court ever dared to suggest as much – was that anyone who tried to persuade shoppers or businesses in Paris, Lyon or Marseilles not to buy oranges or grapes or security systems from Israel was an antisemite. I’ve always said and written that there are plenty of real Nazis and antisemites in the world – whom we must all fight together – but that falsely accusing critics of Israel of racism will make antisemitism respectable.

No matter: 11 people who were part of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement – who were committing the horrific offence of handing out leaflets in the carpark of an Alsace supermarket and wearing T-shirts calling for the boycott of Israeli goods – were sentenced. They were told to pay €13,000 in fines and damages to the pro-Israeli groups who filed the original lawsuit against them.

It’s not difficult, looking back on the case, to see why the ECHR could not digest this piece of blatant political theatre when it gave its own judgement just over a week ago.

When the BDS movement demands an Israeli withdrawal from occupied Palestinian land, Israeli itself is busy drawing up a plan with the Americans to annex – against all international law – the property and territory of Arabs, with spurious arguments that the Palestinians don’t have a nation and thus don’t qualify as “occupied”. They merely live on “disputed” territory, the same phrase which the US State Department, to its eternal shame, also uses – although, to be fair to the messianic Trump, it was Colin Powell, as George W Bush’s secretary of state, who first told American embassies to use that cowardly word. Israel’s suggestion that it can now gobble up somebody else’s land on the grounds that they don’t hold a national passport was clearly too much for the European Court to swallow.

The BDS – another of those acronyms which I loathe – has drifted out of sight these past few months. Only Reuters and The Irish Times – with its own nation’s history of colonial expropriation – gave any space to what was in fact a very trenchant news story. When you realise that the original sin of the French protesters was to wear “Palestine Shall Live” T-shirts and display in Carrefour supermarket trolleys in Alsace (in 2009 and 2010) both avocados and baby wipes were imported from Israel (and hand out leaflets which spoke of Israel’s “crimes in Gaza”) it’s not difficult to see why the European judges regarded the whole affair as a charade.

The French, they decided, would have to fork out €101,180 and hand it back to the 11 harmless men and women who expressed their political views and then found themselves criminalised for doing so.

Article 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights guarantees freedom of expression. It’s also important to name the groups which filed the lawsuit against the protesters for incitement to discrimination: the International League Against Racism and Antisemitism, Lawyers Without Borders, Alliance France-Israel and the “National Bureau for Vigilance Against Antisemitism”.

It’s even more important to repeat what the seven European judges eventually concluded: that the convention “leaves little room for restrictions on freedom of expression in the field of political discourse or questions of general interest. Political discourse is often virulent by nature and a source of disagreement. It is nonetheless in the public interest, unless it degenerates into incitement to violence, hatred or intolerance.”

France had violated Article 10 of the convention, the judges said. The French case, it is instructive to note was brought under an 1881 law on freedom of the press.

What is also interesting is that, while the world often shows its indifference to the BDS campaign, the Israeli government is extremely concerned at its effects on both the economy of Israel and the status of the nation itself. It has been especially upset by the focus of rights groups on weapons and technology used by Israel in suppressing Palestinian demonstrations which have in whole or in part been manufactured in Europe and/or the US. How soon, for example, will an Arab family whose relative has been killed by an EU-or American-made weapon sue the arms makers on their home territory for selling their products to Israel?

But before anyone cheers too loudly for European judicial independence – ECHR decisions take precedence over European national courts – it’s also worth taking a look at the International Criminal Court in The Hague. It’s just decided, after a reputation of prosecuting largely black African offenders of human rights, that it needs to take a close look at abuses perpetrated by the Americans in Afghanistan and Israel in the occupied Palestinian territories.

Neither the US nor Israel ratified the Rome Statute which established the ICC – perhaps because they wished to avoid being dragged to the Netherlands for a bit of international juridical observation? Michael Pompeo, Trump’s current state department apparatchik, has already said he’s not going to have Americans and their “allies in Israel ... hauled in by this corrupt ICC”.

The State of Palestine is recognised by the UN and itself ratified the Rome Statute five years ago. But once again, Israel says that Palestine lacks the normal features of a sovereign state – which it could hardly possess since it is under Israeli occupation. And guess what Benjamin Netanyahu accused the International Criminal Court of being last January? You guessed it. “Antisemitic”.