At a talk in Dublin for Nakba Day this year, Lubnah Shomali from the Palestinian rights organisation BADIL was asked what she made of the Irish government’s plans to recognise a Palestinian state. Her response cut to the chase: “this is a play by the Irish government to appease your demands. You’re calling for a ceasefire and sanctions. We’re calling for a ceasefire and sanctions. Regardless of whatever image they have in mind for that ‘state,’ how is recognition going to bring about a ceasefire and sanctions? It’s not.”
Shomali emphasised the basic reality that in the face of both spectacular and structural genocidal violence, symbolic gestures and strong words are ultimately worthless if they’re not backed up. Interventions without material impact or tangible cost will not divert the focus of a militarised state in the throes of a war of elimination and ethnic cleansing. Indeed, the problem is not just, as Mohammed El-Kurd has emphasised, that “mere recognition” is insufficient if unaccompanied by any concrete sanctions, but that such symbolic steps are often taken precisely and purposefully to evade taking any such material measures.
Thinking, then, about a spectrum of symbolic moves from various quarters in recent months – the recognition of a Palestinian state by a small cohort of European governments; the strong denunciations of Israeli genocide by Latin American leaders; the landmark case against Israel at the ICJ brought by South Africa, and so on – we must also ask what those states and leaders are not doing in response to Israel’s campaign of obliteration and extermination in Gaza and its longstanding apartheid regime throughout historic Palestine. In the performance of these political, diplomatic, and judicial spectacles, what economic levers are not being pulled? How do we understand the political economy of “normal” trade relations with a genocidal entity as it continues to perpetrate daily massacres? And where might we look for signs of more material anti-imperial responses on the horizon?
These questions bring certain contradictions into stark focus: while most states around the world have recognised Palestine since the PLO’s 1988 Algiers Declaration, they have nearly always also maintained normal trade and economic relations with Israel. This is true of governments with rhetorically supportive positions on Palestine—be that the likes of Spain or Ireland within the imperial west, or South Africa or Brazil in the global south—and regardless of the given context of the time: intifada, annexation, genocide.
Between Recognition and Ammunition
Spain and Ireland have been celebrated as being among a small group of progressive outliers on Palestine in the European context because of some of the statements and stances they have taken. Both states recognised the (phantom) Palestinian state in late May 2024. In June, Spain submitted its intervention to the ICJ in the South Africa v. Israel genocide case, and Ireland has committed to do likewise. And Spanish prime minister Pedro Sánchez has been vocal in his criticisms of Israel’s war on Gaza, while Irish leader Simon Harris declared: “Prime Minister Netanyahu, we are repulsed by your actions.”
From an Irish perspective, at least, the spectacle of neoliberal leaders from a historically reactionary and partitionist party like Harris’s Fine Gael being lauded for their position on Palestine is stomach-turning. It masks the chasm that exists between the genuine sense of empathy that most Irish people hold for the Palestinian struggle and the shallow rhetoric of the ruling class. More immediately troubling, however, is that the Irish state’s apparent support for Palestinians has been accompanied by continuing and expanding economic relations with the Israeli state.
Ireland, which ranks 120th in the world by population size, is now Israel’s 4th largest export market — largely owing to the particular positions of the two countries in the global tech economy and high levels of trade in microchips and electronic components. This puts Israel as Ireland’s 7th largest source of imports, which also include government-purchased military drones from Israeli state-owned arms producers and Israel’s largest weapons company, Elbit Systems. In the first quarter of 2024 alone, Irish government purchase orders on Israeli drones contracts had already doubled the 2023 total. On the other side of the books, in early 2024—while Ireland was arguing in the ICJ advisory opinion proceedings that all states are required to prevent trade that entrenches Israel’s settlement and annexation of Palestinian land—Irish exports to Israel increased by 28% from the equivalent period in 2023.
A significant portion of those Irish exports to Israel are what are known as “dual-use goods”—products, services, or technologies that have both a civilian and military use. In 2023, such goods accounted for 13.5% of total exports, an almost seven-fold increase from 2022 to 2023, with the majority of that spike coming after 7 October 2023. The issuing of new export licences for dual-use goods to Israel has carried on apace in 2024 as the genocide in Gaza continues. According to the Irish government, no applications for dual-use licences have been rejected in that time, with ministers maintaining (without offering any detail) that they conduct all required reviews and assessments of human rights and humanitarian law compliance by the end user. The government is essentially insisting that it has no issues with the sale of dual-use equipment and technology to a state perpetrating mass atrocities on a catastrophic scale.
Beyond these direct exports, the Irish state also economically supports Israel through its Strategic Investment Fund, which holds investments in a range of companies named on the UN blacklist of corporations involved in Israeli settlements. While the government has finally committed to divesting from some of these companies—and is facing related legal action claiming its investments in the criminal colonial settlement enterprise are producing revenue which itself amounts to proceeds of crime—it nevertheless maintains its investments in other UN-blacklisted companies. Over recent years, successive Fine Gael-led Irish governments have also jettisoned legislative initiatives put forward by opposition members to ban trade with settlements and divest from settlement entities. Most recently, the government stalled a proposed Arms Embargo Bill designed to restrict the transit and export of weapons from and through Ireland to Israel and to ensure proper inspections of US imperial aircraft which are currently stopping over in Ireland uninhibited and uninspected. The carriage of weapons through Irish territory is already supposed to be prohibited under existing legislation, but in practice since the time of the Iraq war the US military has been given carte blanche in Shannon airport, and thousands of annual exemptions to avoid inspections are granted by the government to the US and Germany.
Underlying all of this reluctance to engage in any material disruption is the political economy of the Irish comprador capitalist system, the state’s role as part tax haven, part conduit for the US tech economy and its circuits of capital, and the extent to which the Irish ruling class is beholden to US investment. When the American Chamber of Commerce or a US state-level Secretary of Commerce lean on Irish leaders not to ban trade with Israeli settlements, this tends to have the desired effect. The result has been a business-as-usual approach to trade with Israel, even as it ramps up genocidal bombardments of “safe zones” in Gaza and enforces famine and starvation on the people.
The Spanish state has likewise continued normal trade relations with Israel. When it comes to the arms trade specifically, Spanish weapons exports to Israel have increased significantly in recent years, approaching record levels in 2023. Despite claims by Spanish ministers to have halted arms export licences after 7 October 2023, Spain in fact continued to export ammunition to Israel. Recent analysis from the Centre of Studies for Peace concludes that “military relations between Spain and Israel have essentially remained as they were before October 7,” with Spain also continuing to acquire armaments from Israel “as it had been doing before October 7.” Yara Hawari’s question is on the money: “What does recognition of a people’s statehood mean when you remain complicit in funding, arming and equipping the regime that is destroying the very people of that state?”
Between Litigation and Capitalist Relations
While Ireland, Spain and a few others have been anointed as principled voices of exception to the dominant European foreign policy on Palestine, the most robust and sustained criticism of Israel has come from the global south. South Africa’s genocide case against Israel at the ICJ and related events—Namibia’s caustic put-down of Germany’s inability to learn the lessons of its own genocidal history; Nicaragua’s own case against German complicity—have been heralded as a historic and potentially transformative rupture in the established politics and hierarchies of international law. To many, these actions represent the global south refusing to accept the institutional hegemony of the western imperial powers. As Balakrishnan Rajagopal put it: “South Africa’s case at the ICJ is a harbinger of a new world order led by the formerly oppressed and enslaved. A real TWAIL (Third World Approaches to International Law) moment of hope.”
These are a compelling and valid narratives in many ways. It is obviously an appealing story to hold onto in such dark times. After the ICJ’s initial order in January 2024, South Africa has continued to back up its case with multiple follow-up requests for further provisional measures; with a lengthy submission to the UN Security Council documenting Israel’s genocidal intent in Gaza and calling for the Council to enforce the ICJ’s orders; and with promises to arrest and prosecute dual nationals who return from fighting in or alongside the Israeli army in Palestine.
But for many Palestinians and others on the sharp end of imperial violence, the “sorcery” of international law and the ICJ’s January order lies in the illusion that it does something dramatic and disruptive without actually touching the material structures of power. While the resonance of “post”-apartheid South Africa bringing apartheid Israel to court for its genocidal atrocities is powerful, we also can’t escape the fact that South Africa has remained Israel’s largest trading partner on the African continent. Despite major social movement pressure before and since October 2023, the South African government has refused to ban trade, cut financial ties or impose economic sanctions on Israel. Even on the diplomatic front, when the South African parliament voted to close the Israeli embassy and expel the ambassador in November 2023, the executive opted not to follow through on that.
South Africa has, in other words, continued to engage in diplomatic and economic relations with a state that it has repeatedly and damningly accused of perpetrating genocide in one ICJ case, and of “apartheid-style atrocities” in another. In defiance of the logical conclusion of its own arguments, South Africa treats Israel as a normal trading partner while simultaneously appealing to the ICJ in existential terms to act “now — before it is too late — to do what is within its power” to prevent genocidal starvation in Gaza.
The seemingly “perplexing” nature of South Africa’s relationship with Israel again has to be understood in the context of a neoliberal commitment to free trade, and an acute awareness of the broader dynamics of transnational capital and investment flows, particularly with an eye to keeping an already sceptical US on board. Alaa Hajyahia and Reshard Kolabhai frame some of this in relation to the ANC’s own neocolonial tendencies and lack of domestic legitimacy. The party, they argue, “can abhor genocide without explicitly specifying further legal, institutional, or political-economic arrangements” for how power and social relations should be restructured in South Africa itself, or elsewhere.
Since South Africa’s fourth and most recent provisional measures request to the ICJ in May 2024, the ANC has lost its majority and is now leading a broad but discernibly more right-wing coalition that includes parties with avowedly Zionist positions. While the ANC has retained the key ministries and promised that it remains fully committed to Palestine and the ICJ case, opposition representatives are already accusing the ANC of toning down its position under the watch of its largest coalition partner, the Democratic Alliance. Indeed, DA leader John Steenhuisen previously questioned the validity of his own state’s genocide case against Israel in telling terms: “one man’s genocide is another man’s freedom.”
Fuelling Genocide
Similar to Ireland and Spain in Europe or South Africa and Namibia in the African context, states like Brazil and Colombia have been at the forefront of denouncing the Israeli genocide from Latin America. But unlike some of the others, Colombia’s economic policy has started to match its rhetoric.
Over the past nine months, calls for an arms embargo or suspension of arms export licences have dominated international political discussion. These calls are obviously most relevant to the particular western powers who are supplying Israel with weapons and fighter jets, as well as to transit countries and ports who may be able to block the passage of the “shipments of death” from delivering their ammunition. But Palestinian workers, unions and environmental groups have also called for a total global energy embargo on Israel — to cut off the supply lines that keep the war machine and the war economy moving.
Despite this, the fossil fuels have so far largely continued to flow. This includes specialist jet fuel for Israeli warplanes “to rain death and destruction down on Gaza,” as well as the crude oil which Israel refines domestically to supply the military. Much of it comes from semi-peripheral and global south states. Apart from the US, Israel’s key sources for its oil and fuel imports since October 2023 have included Azerbaijan, Brazil, Gabon, Kazakhstan and Russia. Israel has also continued to receive “small but regular” offshore deliveries via the Sumed pipeline in Egypt, which carries crude oil from Saudi and the UAE.
In 2022, Brazil was Israel’s second-largest supplier of crude oil after Azerbaijan, providing 28.6% of total imports. Despite the strident condemnations of Israel’s atrocities since October 2023 by President Lula, large shipments of Brazilian crude oil were shipped to Israel in December 2023 and February 2024, as the genocide continued to ramp up and Rafah came under siege. Here, the supply chains of material commodities and energy sources that are fuelling the Israeli state and its military have not been interrupted despite the forceful language.
In Colombia, however, the success of the energy embargo campaign has shown that another way forward is possible. In June 2024, “after months of engagement with the Colombian government from an alliance of Palestinian and Colombian organizations, including coal miners union and indigenous groups,” Colombian President Gustavo Petro issued a decree suspending all coal exports to Israel. The material impact of this measure is itself significant. Coal supports nearly a quarter of the Israeli power grid, and Colombia was Israel’s largest supplier, providing 60% of its total supply. Israel has immediately looked to alternative suppliers to fill the gap, and reportedly received initial “positive responses from countries including South Africa and Russia,” its largest coal suppliers after Colombia.
Beyond its immediate effects, Colombia’s coal embargo may also prove consequential for its ripple effects. The sense of a prevailing tacit agreement—even for states in antagonistic relations with Israel—that “you never touch trade” has been eroded. And, as Shir Hever lays out, Israel is already facing “nothing less than an economic catastrophe” on the back of its onslaught in Gaza: fall-offs in foreign investment; tens of thousands of businesses bankrupt; workers and capitalists alike taking flight in potentially significant numbers; Israelis transferring their own investments and pensions to funds overseas for lack of confidence in the Israeli financial system. The only sector of the Israeli economy that is flourishing is, grotesquely but unsurprisingly, the arms industry. When it comes to the means of production and the tech sector that underpins Israel’s “start-up nation” brand, Hever reiterates the risks from Colombia’s coal embargo and its potential effect on guaranteed and continuous electricity supply: “Server farms do not work without 24-hour power, and no one knows how many blackouts the Israeli high-tech sector could potentially survive.”
It is clear that things are now at a critical juncture for the Israeli economy and Zionism itself, and that this is “unique moment for Palestinian liberation.” Palestinian campaigners have been quick to call on South Africa and others “to follow Colombia’s lead” in joining the energy embargo and severing other trade relations. For states who profess to be in solidarity with the Palestinian people, this is the litmus test now before them: whether they are ready to follow this lead, to go beyond performative condemnations and symbolic initiatives, and to impose material consequences against apartheid and genocide.
