sfgate.com
Intel chip plant located on disputed Israeli land. Intel could face political, legal problems with chip plant in Israel
Henry Norr
Monday, July 8, 2002
Just how diligent was Intel's due diligence when it
chose to build a multibillion-dollar chip plant in
Qiryat Gat, Israel?
Will choosing that location eventually come back to
haunt the company, or at least drag it into some
pesky, embarrassing and costly legal
entanglements?
These questions are on my mind after checking out
the history of the site --
not only on several Web sites dedicated to the
Palestinian cause, but also in Israeli government and
United Nations documents collected by a prominent
Israeli historian.
Whatever your views on the Middle East crisis, the
issue deserves some scrutiny -- even though it
involves a detour into what many now consider
ancient history.
Intel calls the plant Fab 18 ("fab" being
chip-industry jargon for a facility where the silicon
wafers that are eventually turned into working chips
are fabricated). The fab, which went into production
in 1999, was the fruit of a $1 billion investment by
the Santa Clara company, supplemented by a $600
million grant from the Israeli government.
Just a year after opening, its output had reached up
to $3 million a day, and it accounted for $1.3 billion
of Intel's $2 billion in exports from Israel.
According to the company's annual report, it's
Intel's second-largest facility outside the United
States, after one in County Kildare, Ireland.
Qiryat (sometimes spelled Kiryat) Gat is close to
the geographical center of Israel, along a major
north-south rail line and the route of the planned
Trans-Israel Highway. It's on land that would have
been part of Arab Palestine under the partition plan
adopted by the United Nations in 1947, but within
the larger Israel that emerged from the 1948 war
between that country and its neighbors.
In other words, it's on land the United States and
most of the world's governments consider a
legitimate part of Israel, not in the territories Israel
conquered in the 1967 war, from which the United
Nations has demanded its withdrawal.
But from a legal and historical point of view, Qiryat
Gat happens to be an unusual location: It was not
taken over by the Israeli military in 1948. Instead, it
was part of a small enclave, known as the Faluja
pocket, that the Egyptian army and local Palestinian
forces had managed to hold through the end of the
war. (Among the Egyptian officers was Gamal
Abdel Nasser, who became his country's president
six years later.)
The area was surrounded by Israeli forces,
however. When Israel and Egypt signed an
armistice agreement in February 1949, the latter
agreed to withdraw its soldiers, but it insisted that
the agreement explicitly guarantee the safety and
property of the 3,100 or so Arab civilians in the
area.
Israel accepted that demand. In an exchange of
letters that were filed with the United Nations and
became an annex to the main armistice agreement,
the two countries agreed that "those of the civilian
population who may wish to remain in Al-Faluja
and Iraq al Manshiya (the two villages within the
enclave covered by the letters) are to be permitted
to do so. . . . All of these civilians shall be fully
secure in their persons, abodes, property and
personal effects."
(The fullest account of this episode I've found is
"The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem,
1947-1949," a scholarly treatise by Benny Morris,
a prominent Israeli historian, published by
Cambridge University Press. Born and reared in
Israel and now a professor at Ben Gurion University
in Beersheba,
Morris can hardly be called pro-Palestinian, to
judge by articles of his published in the June 13 and
June 27, 2002, issues of the New York Review of
Books. Other Israeli historians have produced
similar accounts.)
Within days, the security the agreement had
promised residents of the Al- Faluja pocket proved
an illusion. Within weeks, the entire local population
had fled to refugee camps outside of Israel. (Photos
of them on the road are posted at
www.palestineremembered.com/Gaza/al-faluja -- a
site dedicated to preserving the memories and
experiences of Palestinian refugees.)
Morris presents ample evidence that the people of
the Al-Faluja area left in response to a campaign of
intimidation conducted by the Israeli military. He
quotes, among other sources, reports filed by Ralph
Bunche, the distinguished black American educator
and diplomat who was serving as chief U. N.
mediator in the region.
Bunche's reports include complaints from U.N.
observers on the scene that "Arab civilians . . . at
Al-Faluja have been beaten and robbed by Israeli
soldiers," that there were attempted rapes and that
the Israelis were "firing promiscuously" on the Arab
population.
Even though Bunche won the Nobel Peace Prize in
1950 for his efforts, some might be inclined to
doubt that he understood the whole story of what
was happening in the area.
But even the staunchest supporter of Israel would
have a hard time impugning Morris' other main
source on this episode: Moshe Sharett, Israel's
foreign minister at the time.
Sharett, it turns out, was acutely embarrassed by
the behavior of his country's military in the area. In a
sharply worded memo to the army chief of staff, he
noted both overt acts of violence by soldiers in the
area and "a 'whispering propaganda campaign
among the Arabs, threatening them with attacks and
acts of vengeance by the army."
"There is no doubt," Sharett wrote, "that there is a
calculated action aimed at increasing the number of
those (Arab civilians) going to the Hebron Hills (in
the West Bank, then controlled by Jordan) as if of
their own free will, and, if possible, to bring about
the evacuation of the whole civilian population" of
the pocket.
Sharett's main concern, it appears, was that the
campaign in Al-Faluja called into question "our
sincerity as a party to an international agreement."
Whether he had any moral scruples about the
situation isn't clear. A few months later, when Arab
civilians in other parts of Israel's newly conquered
territory resisted similar pressures, he wrote, with
what sounds like regret, "It is not possible in every
place to arrange what some of our boys engineered
in Faluja (where) they chased away the Arabs after
we signed an . . . international commitment."
Nowadays we'd call the Al-Faluja events ethnic
cleansing.
LEGAL RECOURSE?
In substance, what happened to the people of
Al-Faluja and Iraq al Manshiya isn't very different
from what happened to the residents of hundreds of
other Palestinian villages.
Only a few things make this case unique: the legal
agreement that was supposed to guarantee the
residents' security, the Sharett memos recording
what happened to that guarantee -- and the fact that
40 years later their land,
having been converted by the Israelis into an
industrial park, became the site of an Intel fab.
Now Palestinians in the United States and
elsewhere are starting to organize around this case.
A Connecticut organization called the Palestine
Right to Return Coalition (www.Al-Awda.org) is
encouraging Palestinians and their supporters to
write to the media about the case. (A version of the
story appeared earlier, in somewhat garbled form,
in The Register, a British Web site covering
technology).
The group is calling on Intel to, among other things,
divest from Israel.
It's also tracking down the original Arab villagers
and their descendants --
now almost 15,000 people in all, including people
living in Texas, Louisiana and New York.
While the group hasn't announced any plans for
legal action, some Palestinian lawyers are looking
for ways to pursue their cause in the courts. At least
some experts think the residents of Al-Faluja and
Iraq al Manshiya could make a strong case.
For example, Francis Boyle, a professor of
international law at the University of Illinois at
Urbana-Champaign, said he wasn't familiar with the
details of the situation. But based on my summary of
the history, he said that the original inhabitants and
their heirs could take Intel to a U.S. court in a type
of suit known as an in rem proceeding or under
similar doctrines in many other countries and seek
to attach Fab 18's assets.
"Intel and its lawyers and bankers had better be
very careful here," he said, noting that a similar legal
strategy was used in cases involving the former
British colony of Rhodesia -- and by Jewish
survivors of the Holocaust.
Boyle is a longtime supporter of the Palestinian
cause, so I talked to a lawyer at the opposite end of
the political spectrum: Abraham Sofaer, George P.
Shultz Distinguished Scholar and Senior Fellow at
the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, a
former federal judge who served as legal adviser to
the State Department from 1985 to 1990.
Not surprisingly, Sofaer was less sanguine about the
prospects for any such lawsuit, but he also said he
wasn't familiar with the facts of the case. The main
obstacle, he said, is the absence of a treaty
resolving the conflict between the Israelis and the
Palestinians and legal structures for settling property
claims.
"Without that," Sofaer said, "the courts are going to
be very reluctant to get involved" in such cases. But
if peace ever comes, he said, "I'd be very happy to
represent the Palestinians."
Noting that native Americans won compensation in
several major cases once Congress adopted
procedures for dealing with such claims, he said, "It
sounds as if there's potential in the long run for
recovery here."
LAND OWNERSHIP
Several weeks ago, I asked Intel spokesman Chuck
Mulloy about the history of the land where Fab 18
sits. He said the company had acquired rights to it in
a deal that was legal under the laws of a recognized
sovereign state. "We don't think it's appropriate for
us now to question the Israeli government.
"We cannot insert ourselves into the middle of what
is really a political issue" between Israel and the
Palestinians, he said.
Those arguments are understandable, though I'm
sure they won't placate the Palestinians, and I
wonder how they'll stand up if the case ever gets to
court.
Mulloy also said the fab is not actually in the area
that made up the Al- Faluja pocket in 1948. "These
claims didn't come up until after we built the fab --
there were no Web sites and no campaigns about it
when we did our due diligence" in the mid-1990s,
he said.
When I went back to my sources, those arguments
didn't check out. The maps I examined seem to
confirm the Palestinians' claim that Fab 18 is on land
that was part of the village of Iraq al Manshiya. As
for when the issue arose, I checked and found that
Morris' book was first published in 1987 and
widely debated in Israel.
I left Mulloy several follow-up messages reporting
what I'd found, but he didn't respond.
I also called the Israeli consulate in San Francisco
to get its perspective,
but the first official I spoke to there said he didn't
believe the story, and the press spokesman he
referred me to hasn't called back. |
