OECD slammed for admitting Israel

Palestinians slam the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) for offering membership to Israel as complicity in Tel Aviv’s war crimes.

“OECD member countries show a blatant complicity with Israeli war crimes, destroying the very foundations of international law,” the Palestinian Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions National Committee (BNC) said in a statement on Monday.

“Rewarding Israel entrenches its impunity and dashes any realistic hope for achieving a just peace in the region,” Ma’an news agency quoted the statement as saying.

The Paris-based Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development invited Israel to join the body — the exclusive club of prominent world economies — underlining the transformation of Israel’s inflation-hit crushing economy to one of a growing and stable advancement.

But the Palestinian boycott movement criticized the decision, arguing the OECD’s member states “are perfectly aware that Israel does not comply with any of the objective criteria” it was required to meet for its accession to the OECD Convention.

“Yet, they have decided to single out Israel, elevate it above all these objective criteria, reward it for its defiance of the OECD, not to mention of international law, and make the entire accession process a farce.”

Earlier, Israeli Arab MP Jamal Zahalka had called on the OECD not to accept Israel as one of its members, calling attention to the Israeli atrocities in the January 2009 Gaza war, the collective punishment of the palestinains in the blockaded coastal sliver and the ongoing settlement construction and land grabbing in the occupied West Bank.

“Acceptance of Israel as a member in the organization will give legitimacy to Israel’s occupation practices, violations of human and political rights and the apartheid system it practices against the Arabs inside Israel,” he said in a letter to OECD chief Angel Gurria.

“Israel does not meet the OECD’s precondition for its membership which requires the country’s law be of democratic pluralism that reserves that rule of law and human rights.”