Stolen fruit: a date for lawmakers and enforcers

Latest round in the date war, this letter below went to a selection of ministers, law officers and local police. With each letter went a single stolen date, removed by me from the Swansea Tesco store.

Dear Peter Mandelson

FREE SAMPLE: CONFISCATED TESCO ‘WEST BANK’ DATE

You are now in receipt of stolen goods and whoever is in charge of import regulations may need to decide who’s responsible and what should be done.

I have recently removed this date among others, in packets labelled ‘Origin: West Bank,’ from the shelves of Tesco’s Swansea Marina store. Since last January I have confiscated a number of similar packets and written to Tesco CEO Terry Leahy explaining why. I offered to refund the price in full if he could show the dates were not the product of illegal Israeli settlements. In the ensuing correspondence, Tesco neither addressed the settlement issue nor took up my refund offer. I was banned from their stores but not prosecuted.

A more public ‘citizen’s seizure’ was then organised at the same Tesco store. Filmed and reported in the press, aYoutube clip of the event drew 50,000 hits. Although a woman accompanying me was charged, for some reason I was not. When the woman’s case came to Swansea Crown Court in June, the judge dismissed it.

Through my MP, Alan Williams I have written to government ministers urging them to bring UK law into line with the Geneva Conventions and UN Security Council resolutions to which we are signatories. Bill Rammell (then at the FCO) put the contradiction baldly in his reply: ‘…the building of Israeli settlements in the occupied Palestinian territories is illegal under international law. However the import and sale of products from Israeli settlements…is not prohibited by law in the UK, and we consider this is consistent with the UK’s international law obligations.’

This week I learned that that the government is citing a Security Council resolution to justify an otherwise illegal freeze on suspects’assets. This prompts me to adopt a similar line in a further citizen’s seizure. Where a process is inadmissible, not to mention cruel, so is its product – whether settlement dates, ‘blood diamonds’, evidence obtained by torture, or lampshades made of human skin. Where government lawmakers and enforcers fail to uphold our commitments in international law, citizens have a right and duty to step in.

Import and sale of settlement produce amounts to handling stolen goods, it undermines international law and helps prolong a conflict for which Britain bears heavy responsibility. I have auctioned previous consignments of confiscated West Bank dates in aid of Gaza relief (at £1 per date). Unless you need this sample as evidence, you may care to do the same. Or eat it and serve justice in some other way.

Yours sincerely



Greg Wilkinson (dgregwilkinson@yahoo.co.uk, phone 01792 455335)