Amnesty International United Kingdom warned that the new trade deal between Britain and Israel could allow the latter to consolidate its settler-colonialism and apartheid in the occupied Palestinian territories.
It stressed in a statement on Thursday that the new UK trade deal with Israel “must not be a betrayal of Palestinians’ human rights,” as it began negotiations on the deal.
Amnesty further warned that a “poorly-drafted deal could allow the Israeli authorities to consolidate unfounded claims to occupied Palestinian land, expand illegal settlements, and perpetuate the system of apartheid associated with this.”
It stressed that the faulty European Union-Israel trade arrangement is currently allowing Israeli exporters to pass off settlement goods as Israeli ones.
This free trade agreement is one of the UK’s trade continuity agreements – UK trade deals with countries, which had an agreement with the EU before January 1, 2021.
With some modifications, these deals generally replicate the terms of EU trade agreements, which the UK enjoyed before leaving the EU.
Amnesty International UK’s Economic Affairs Director Peter Frankental said a new trade deal with Israel must not be a betrayal of Palestinians’ human rights and must uphold the UK’s obligations under international law.
“In their haste to agree a shiny new trade deal with Israel, there’s a distinct danger that UK negotiators will fail to ensure absolute clarity over the precise origins of goods destined for the UK market,” he added.
Frankental stressed that a UK Free Trade Agreement needs to be distinctly better than this.
“The bottom line here is that UK-Israel trade should not incentivize Israel’s system of apartheid against the Palestinians.”
The statement pointed out that in line with international law, the UK government currently does not recognize as a legitimate part of Israel the territories that Israel has militarily occupied since June 1967 - a stance that is supported by the overwhelming majority of the international community and is reflected in numerous UN resolutions.
It expressed concern that a lack of clarity in the terms of a new trade deal could nevertheless see the UK treating goods and services sourced from Israeli settlements built on stolen Palestinian land as legitimate items of trade, thus tacitly supporting Israel’s wider occupation, settlement and annexation project.
A major source of concern, explained Amnesty’s briefing, is that the new trade deal is likely to closely follow the terms of an existing EU-Israel Association Agreement, which has proved unable to fully demarcate goods according to place of origin.
Amnesty emphasized that a renegotiated trade agreement needs to ensure that the UK can readily differentiate between goods originating in Israel and goods originating in the occupied Palestinian territories for the purpose of determining tariff and quota treatment.
