How EU planned a new prison for Jenin during an Israeli invasion

An EU team visits the new prison in the Jenin area of the occupied West Bank. (EUPOL COPPS)

Annexation is back on the agenda.

Bezalel Smotrich, a senior Israeli government minister, is threatening that 2025 will be the “year of sovereignty in Judea and Samaria.”

If he is serious – and there’s no reason to suspect the self-proclaimed “fascist homophobe” is bluffing – then we can expect Israel will soon formally claim ownership of the Palestinian land it has stolen in the West Bank.

Of course, Israel will not include a confession to land theft in any announcement. Calling the West Bank “Judea and Samaria” is a way of asserting a biblically-ordained “right” to a territory Israel has occupied since 1967.

No other nation recognizes that “right.” But Smotrich and his colleagues are hoping that the US will do so – once Donald Trump is inaugurated as president in January.

Mike Huckabee, Trump’s pick as US ambassador to Israel, has already signaled that annexation could occur.

Will the European Union prove less acquiescent than Trump?

Four years ago, a formal annexation of Israel’s settlement blocs in the West Bank seemed imminent. At the time, the EU warned that any such move would inevitably have consequences for its relationship with Israel.

With the benefit of hindsight, there are reasons to doubt that Brussels officials regarded their own warnings as credible.

Genocide should be an even bigger red line than formal annexation. Yet the EU has kept on cooperating with Israel as it wages a war of extermination against Gaza.

Josep Borrell, the EU’s foreign policy chief, has condemned Smotrich’s new threat on the basis that it jeopardizes “any prospects for” a two-state solution.

I unequivocally condemn Minister Smotrich’s call to “apply sovereignty” in the West Bank, a clear step towards illegal annexation.

Such rhetoric undermines international law, violates Palestinians’ rights and threatens any prospects for a 2-state solution.
— Josep Borrell Fontelles (@JosepBorrellF) November 11, 2024

The endless repetition of the two-state mantra does not alter an unpalatable truth: The European Union has paved the way for annexation.

It has done so by playing a significant role in carving up the West Bank.

Under the Oslo accords – signed in the 1990s between Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) – the territory was divided into three zones. The largest zone – Area C – comprises more than 60 percent of the West Bank and encompasses Israel’s main settlements.

As Israel’s domination was essentially guaranteed when the accords were being implemented, the Israeli authorities were easily able to exploit them so that colonization could be ramped up. The logical next step is to do precisely what Smotrich is proposing: annex Area C.

Solitary confinement

By enforcing the Oslo accords, the European Union has helped to corral Palestinians into a sliver of their historic homeland.

For most of the past two decades, the EU has assumed responsibility for training the Palestinian Authority’s police force and prison administrators.

That force is obligated to keep out of Area C. In the other parts of the West Bank, it is completely subservient to Israel.

Its subservience has been emphasized each time this year that Israel has invaded Area A of the West Bank – the largest Palestinian towns and cities. The PA’s forces were, for all intents and purposes, absent as Israel killed and maimed Palestinians, many of them children.

Israel’s raids of Jenin and Tulkarm in August and September lasted for 10 days. It was the longest such offensive against the West Bank since 2002 – when the notoriously bellicose Ariel Sharon was Israel’s prime minister.

Grotesquely, the EU spent the days and weeks before, during and after the raids in August and September helping the Palestinian Authority to establish a new prison just outside Jenin.

Through a freedom of information request, I have obtained several reports drawn up by the EU’s policing mission in the West Bank on that prison.

They describe how the prison – named the Barghasha Rehabilitation Correction and Rehabilitation Centre – has eight solitary confinement cells.

As the documents have been censored, it is not known what comments the EU team made about solitary confinement, though it undertook to raise concerns about the privacy of detainees.

I contacted the EU policing mission asking if it was seeking to avoid the use of solitary confinement in Palestine. The mission, which goes by the acronym EUPOL COPPS, refused to answer my question, bar claiming that its work on detention is “always aligned with international standards.”

The Palestinian Authority has a record of coupling solitary confinement with other cruelty toward prisoners.

In 2022, a number of detainees went on hunger strike after they had been arrested by PA forces. Amnesty International and other human rights groups documented how they were placed in solitary confinement, as well as being physically tortured.

EUPOL COPPS has publicly lauded the new prison beside Jenin as a “model” rehabilitation center.

The internal documents I have obtained indicate that there is something quite murky behind the “model.”

The new prison has been set up ostensibly to address overcrowding in other jails.

One of the internal papers indicates that the EU team held discussions on 29 August – the day after Israel’s invasion of Jenin began – with a brigadier serving the Palestinian Authority. The paper notes that “the brigadier will ask for coordination from the Israeli authorities for the transport of the prisoners” to Jenin from other jails.

Another document indicates that Israel checks “electricity equipment” in the prison.

The way such “coordination” and “checks” are treated as purely practical belies the fact that Israel is calling the shots more than ever.

The destruction of Gaza and the increased violence by Israel’s soldiers and settlers in the West Bank are aimed at ousting Palestinians from their homeland.

Francesca Albanese, the United Nations special rapporteur on Palestine, stated last month that “the devastation inflicted on Gaza is now metastasizing in the West Bank, including East Jerusalem.”

She observed that Israel as a state is “predicated on the goal of Palestinian erasure.”

Opening a “model” prison does not magically change how Israel is not only depriving Palestinians of basic freedom but ultimately trying to wipe them out. And the European Union’s propaganda cannot obscure how it is helping Israel to advance its objectives.