The Palestinians are likely to by hit by Dutch foreign policy and development aid reforms, writes Giles Scott-Smith on The Holland Bureau.

With the Dutch media poised like a swarm of piranhas around raw meat with the Wikileaks exposures, desperately waiting for the first batch of cables from the US Embassy in The Hague to be released – with only a couple tit-bits emerging so far on Maxime Verhagen’s pro-Americanism (no news) and US nuclear weapons in the Netherlands (no news) – HB will plough on with its tried and tested formula of avoiding media hype (until the doodoo really hits the fan with the release of the Hague cables, then we’ll see….)
So. In line with recent calls for reform in Dutch development policy, the budget for development aid, currently standing at 4.9bn Euro, is going to be reduced by 900 million over the next two years. This will bump it down 0.1%, from 0.8% to 0.7%, as % of Dutch GDP – still fairly respectable, and in line with the UN’s 0.7% norm.
Since this portfolio is now in the hands of State Secretary Ben Knapen, and earlier this year Knapen was a member of the Advisory Council on Government Policy team that issued a report calling for major changes in this policy area, it has all the markings of a neat fait accompli.
One of the key aspects of this reform is the reduction in the number of recipient nations for development aid. There are 37 on the current list – and this will go down to 10. The emphasis will also be more focused, ditching broad category under headings like ‘gender’ – and possibly ’human rights’ – in favour of projects aimed at economic development. In doing so the goal is to both reduce the ambition but raise the profile for this policy area, since it will become more obvious to everyone what it is supposed to be doing.
This is a crucial issue, since political support for development aid has been crumbling. While the VVD was the only party that wanted to raise defence spending in their election manifesto, they have been far more willing to jettison other areas of Dutch foreign relations (under the mantra ‘if its not maintaining security and not business-related, its expendable’). Meanwhile the PVV would gladly bin the entire development aid budget in one go.
One of the casualties of this process will probably be the Palestinians, now receiving 22.2 million Euro from the development budget (20th in the list, between Yemen and Nicaragua) but surely a target in the PVV-supported outlook of the current cabinet.
While the VVD-CDA-PVV Tolerance-Accord refers only to immigration, security, pensioners, and financial policy, the VVD-CDA agreement states that the Netherlands “will invest in the connection with the state of Israel.” Will the PLO / Palestinian Authority / Hamas in Gaza survive the Knapen-initiated cuts in development aid? Unlikely.
Dutch involvement in the occupied territories is a longer story, and it doesn’t always have to do with human rights. Multinationals such as Unilever (with subsidiary Beigel & Beigel) and Heineken (with subsidiary Tempo Drinks) have been pushed by pressure groups into abandoning investments in the West Bank (for more on Unilever’s escapades, see here). The latest ‘victim’ was Riwal, a company connected with providing cranes for the construction of the wall separating Israel from the Palestinian territories.
Riwal – active in Israel since 2003 and with a chunk of its shares in the hands of an Israeli holding company – was raided by criminal investigators on 15 October for its involvement in building the security wall. Needless to say, the same wall was declared illegal by the International Court of Justice – based in The Hague – in 2004.
Where is this heading? Not sure. But while Dutch business interests are penalised for benefitting from the Occupied Territories, the Dutch government is almost certainly moving in the opposite direction in support of Israeli interests in the very same region.
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