On Monday, the Israeli government made a rare appearance before the U.N. Human Rights Committee. Each member state is reviewed every four years for its compliance with the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. That task was especially significant coming just weeks after Israel ended an assault on Gaza that killed nearly 2,200 Palestinians, including more than 500 children. Emi Palmor, the director-general of Israel’s Justice Ministry, pledged her government’s “sincere approach” to the panel’s mandate.
But as the session got underway, a key problem emerged: Israel would not be answering for conditions in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, the territory it’s occupied for nearly half a century. While Israel provided a written report for human rights within its own borders, it did not agree the covenant applies to its actions in the Occupied Territories. In response, two U.N. panelists expressed their frustration.
As The Jerusalem Post reported at day’s end, Israel’s Emi Palmor, quote, “said she was relieved that the delegation had not been extensively quizzed about the IDF’s military actions in Gaza this summer under Operation Protective Edge. Israel had imagined that committee members would focus on that issue,” The Jerusalem Post said.
Richard Falk talking:
as far as their cooperation with the U.N. is concerned, this report that you just showed your audience is very misleading. They have refused to cooperate with the Commission of Inquiry in—that the Human Rights Council appointed to look into the allegations of war crimes associated with the attack on Gaza in July and August. And they refused to cooperate with my successor, an Indonesian diplomat who they favored, actually, and they persuaded the president of the Human Rights Council to appoint, with the expectation that they would cooperate with him. But as I’ve said all along, you only have to be 10 percent objective to come to the same critical conclusions that I came to in relation to Israel’s violation of fundamental human rights in the West Bank, East Jerusalem and Gaza, the three segments of occupied territory.
the conclusion is flagrant violations that are official policy—it’s not deviations—from the extension of the settlements as a violation of international humanitarian law, not disallowing transfer of the occupying country’s population to the occupied society, the imposition of a regime of collective punishment on the whole civilian population of Gaza. And locking that civilian population into the combat zone during Protective Edge is a distinctive atrocity, where women and children were not allowed to become refugees, and there was no opportunity to be an internally displaced person. As horrible as things were for civilians in Syria and in Iraq in recent years, they always had—the civilian population always could leave the combat zone. Here, they’re literally locked into the combat zone, and only those Gazans with foreign passports were allowed to leave. That involved 800 people out of 1,800,000. So it is a very extreme situation that is not treated as an ongoing humanitarian catastrophe for geopolitical reasons. The U.S. has a geopolitical veto over what the U.N. can do in relation to a situation of this kind. We react to Kobani, as we spoke earlier, but we ignore what is happening day by day in Gaza, particularly, but to a lesser extent, in the West Bank.
there were two main kinds of obstacles. I was very much attacked in a kind of defamatory way by UN Watch and other very extreme Zionist organizations, which tried—wherever I went, anywhere in the world, they would try to prevent me from speaking and mounted a kind of defamatory campaign, called me an anti-Semite, a leading anti-Semite. The Wiesenthal Center in L.A. listed me as the third most dangerous anti-Semite in the world, which was—made me feel I must be doing something right in this role. And the only two people that were more dangerous than I was the supreme leader of Iran and the prime minister of Turkey, Erdogan.
it certainly has been a consistent anti-Israeli critical narrative, because that’s what the reality is. I mean, if you take international law seriously and, as I said, you’re 10 percent objective, you have to come to these conclusions. And that’s why this Indonesian, who was determined to please Israel—he told me that. Makarim Wibisono. It turned he’s already angered Israel, because you can’t—you can’t look at these realities without coming to these conclusions, unless you completely somehow blindfold yourself.
Palestinian Authority is caught between the militancy of its own people and this kind of pragmatic adaptation to the power situation, and its economic dependence on funding that is controlled by Israel and the U.S. And also, its security forces have been—the PA’s security forces have been trained under U.S. authority. So it’s a—they’re in a very compromised position. So the Palestinian Authority leadership, in order to retain some modicum of legitimacy, has to appear to be reflecting the will of the Palestinian people. And they’ve been trying to walk this tightrope all along, and it becomes more and more difficult. And the recent polls show that Hamas, even on the West Bank, would now win an election if an election was held. And that’s not because there’s a shift toward an Islamic orientation. It’s because Hamas, for all its problems and failures, resists and is resilient and has maintained the spirit of resistance that’s so important to the political morale of the Palestinian movement.
I don’t purport to speak for the Palestinians. And one of the tragedies of the Palestinians, ever since the Balfour Declaration, is that others have decided what’s good for Palestine. And so, what I was—I was partly being descriptive. The Palestinians have failed with armed struggle. They failed, with the Arab neighbors, trying to liberate Palestine from Israeli control. They failed with the Oslo-type intergovernmental diplomacy. So what they’ve tried in the last several years, increasingly, is a combination of nonviolent resistance in various forms within the occupied territory and this growing global solidarity movement that has centered on the BDS campaign.
I think that’s—and I don’t say—I wouldn’t judge their desire to or their feeling that the only effective form of resistance is to defend themselves violently. I mean, that’s a decision that I don’t think it’s appropriate for someone outside the context of oppression to make. Hamas, which is accused of being a terrorist organization, of course, has limited its violence since its political election in 2006 to responding to Israeli provocations. It hasn’t used violence as a way of promoting the empowerment of a Palestinian movement of liberation. In fact, its politics have been directed toward long-term peaceful coexistence with Israel, if Israel withdraws to the ’67 borders. It’s offered a 50-year plan of peaceful coexistence.
“the legitimacy of hope”. What I mean is that if you look at the way in which conflicts have been resolved since the end of World War II, particularly involving foreign domination or foreign rule in a Third World country, the decisive factor in their resolution has been gaining the high ground of international morality and international law. And not having—military superiority has not produced political outcomes favorable to the intervening or the more powerful side. And so, the hope comes from this pattern of gaining legitimacy, in what I call “legitimacy war,” being more significant politically than being able to control the results on a battlefield. And that’s a profound change in the whole structure of power in the world that hasn’t been absorbed by either Israel or the United States.
— source democracynow.org