[News] Palestine - Security Council undermines justice and UN Charter

[Anti-Imperialist News]

Security Council undermines justice and UN Charter

Hasan Abu Nimah and Ali Abunimah, The Electronic Intifada, 24 December 2008
http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article10048.shtml

The United Nations Security Council passed its first resolution on 
the Palestinian-Israeli conflict in almost five years, on 16 
December. But far from marking a break with the Council's abdication 
of responsibility for the fate of the Palestinian people, United 
States- and Russian-sponsored resolution 1850 is the final nail in 
the coffin for even the pretense that international law and 
institutions will play any serious role in ending 60 years of 
dispossession and occupation, and bringing about a just peace.

Adopted 14-0, with Libya abstaining, the resolution also attempts to 
give the UN body's official seal of approval to the ongoing 
usurpation of Palestinian democracy by the puppet regime of 
Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas and his external sponsors.

Before analyzing what is in the resolution, it is important to note 
what is not. Under the UN Charter, the Security Council's primary 
responsibility is to act to maintain "international peace and 
security." And yet the new resolution makes no mention of Israel's 4 
November ground and air attack on the Gaza Strip killing six 
Palestinians and leading to the collapse of the six-month-long truce 
Israel negotiated with Palestinian resistance factions. It does not 
mention the blockade Israel has imposed on Gaza deliberately reducing 
1.5 million people to eating animal feed and scavenging garbage while 
dozens die for lack of medical care. It ignores the desperate 
warnings of a mounting humanitarian crisis by officials of UNRWA, the 
UN agency for Palestine refugees, as they shut down food distribution 
to hundreds of thousands of persons because Israel would not allow 
supplies in to Gaza.

The resolution makes no mention of these unconscionable crimes even 
UN officials have termed "collective punishment" -- a grave breach of 
the 1949 Fourth Geneva Conventions by which Israel is bound as the 
Occupying Power in the Gaza Strip (Israel's so-called "disengagement" 
in 2005 does not absolve it of these responsibilities). If the 
Security Council were minimally abiding by its own responsibilities 
it would refer Israeli political and military leaders to the 
International Criminal Court for arrest and trial at The Hague for 
these crimes as well as their escalating threats against an occupied, 
colonized people who have few means of self-defense. Indeed, the 
resolution does not even mention the word "occupation."

For the Security Council to ignore Israel's detention and expulsion 
of UN human rights envoy Richard Falk just a day before it passed the 
new resolution sends a clear message to other outlaw regimes that UN 
authority can be trampled on with impunity.

Instead, resolution 1850 is full of deceptive language. The world's 
highest international body welcomes, for instance, the 9 November 
"statement from the Quartet," and the "Israeli-Palestinian Joint 
Understanding" announced at the Annapolis summit a year earlier. The 
Security Council also "Declares its support for the negotiations 
initiated at Annapolis" and its "commitment" to their 
"irreversibility" -- whatever that means.

The resolution "Supports the parties' agreed principles for the 
bilateral negotiating process and their determined efforts to reach 
their goal of concluding a peace treaty resolving all outstanding issues."

The frequent references to Annapolis and subsequent negotiations are 
meaningless because one year of intensive talks did not result in one 
single word of an agreement on any issues being written down as the 
parties have themselves repeatedly confirmed. Thus, this "support" 
amounts to no more than a statement saying "wouldn't it be nice if 
there were a solution to one of the world's toughest and most 
dangerous conflicts? What a pity we're not going to do anything to help."

But what is also hidden in this language is very dangerous indeed. By 
defining the so-called "core issues" as "bilateral," to be subjected 
to "negotiations" between two hopelessly unequal parties, the 
Security Council is in effect sidelining decades of international 
law, undermining its own authority, and writing off Palestinian rights.

To see just how cynical and dishonest the "peace process" has become, 
let us go back to an earlier Security Council Resolution, 465 of 
1980. In that resolution, the Security Council:

"Determine[d] that all measures taken by Israel to change the 
physical character, demographic composition, institutional structure 
or status of the Palestinian and other Arab territories occupied 
since 1967, including Jerusalem, or any part thereof, have no legal 
validity and that Israel's policy and practices of settling parts of 
its population and new immigrants in those territories constitute a 
flagrant violation of the Fourth Geneva Convention ..."

Resolution 465 -- only one of many to do so -- called on Israel "to 
rescind those measures, to dismantle the existing settlements and in 
particular to cease, on an urgent basis," new settlement 
construction. It called on all UN member states not to provide Israel 
with any support facilitating colonization.

Under normal circumstances, outlaw states are not invited to 
negotiate with their victims over whether or not they will abide by 
basic tenets of international law, while the Security Council sits 
idly by, or worse, supports the aggressor as is the case now.

Resolution 1850 does not even bother to pay lip service, as the 
Security Council did in the past, to Israel's obligations under 
international law. Instead, it merely "Calls on both parties to 
fulfill their obligations" under the Quartet's "Roadmap," and 
"refrain from any steps that could undermine confidence or prejudice 
the outcome of negotiations." Hence, it places occupier and occupied 
on the same footing, and reduces the right for Palestinians not to be 
violently thrown off their land to a mere matter of "confidence" 
between "negotiators."

By deferring to the Quartet and its failed "Roadmap," the Security 
Council demeans itself. What is the Quartet? It is a self-appointed, 
ad hoc committee made up of representatives of the US, EU, Russia and 
the UN secretary-general. In practice, however, the other members 
have merely been decorative while the US calls the shots. But how can 
the UN, representing 200 member states, reduce itself to a single 
member of a committee itself composed of a self-selected club of UN 
member states? And how can the Security Council abdicate its own 
authority to such a body, especially one that has proven so 
unremittingly ineffective?

As absurd and bad as these things are, they are the culmination of 
creeping trends evident also in the way the UN allowed itself to 
legitimize post facto the US-led invasion and occupation of Iraq. 
What is new, and equally disturbing about resolution 1850 is its 
frontal attack on Palestinian democracy.

The resolution "Calls on all States and international organizations 
to contribute to an atmosphere conducive to negotiations and to 
support the Palestinian government that is committed to the Quartet 
principles and the Arab Peace Initiative and respects the commitments 
of the Palestinian Liberation Organization ..."

This translates as a call to continue boycotting the 
democratically-elected Palestinian government that is now caged in 
the Gaza Strip, while the so-called international community continues 
to grant legitimacy and money to the "government" headed by Salam 
Fayyad and appointed by Abbas in violation of Palestinian law, after 
the failed US-sponsored attempts to overthrow the elected government 
in June 2007. Abbas' own term as Palestinian Authority president 
expires on 9 January. By all indications he will simply remain in his 
chair illegally. Lacking all democratic legitimacy, Abbas will now be 
able to point to the UN resolution as his basis for clinging to power 
just because he, unlike the elected government, has capitulated to 
the Quartet's one-sided conditions.

In short, the Security Council has decided that it, not the 
Palestinian people, has the right to choose Palestinian leaders. This 
is not only a usurpation of a fundamental aspect of Palestinians' 
right to self-determination, but an assault on democracy everywhere.

While masquerading as an attempt to support peace, resolution 1850 is 
replete with other cynical gestures. Corrupt Palestinian Authority 
officials and external peace process industry consultants and 
non-governmental organizations will no doubt be thrilled by the 
Security Council's call on "States and international organizations" 
to "maximize resources available to the Palestinian Authority," and 
to continue to fund the failed "Palestinian institution-building 
program." This is also an indirect way to legitimize the efforts of 
outside powers to arm and train the militias loyal to Abbas whose 
purpose is to crush Palestinian resistance to the occupation.

The Arab League's irrelevance is confirmed when the resolution merely 
notes in passing "the importance of the 2002 Arab Peace Initiative." 
And, the declaration that "the two-state solution" is the "only" 
possible solution is an effort to cover up decades of failure, and 
silence the growing debate about democratic alternatives.

It is disappointing that Russia, after it was subjected to the same 
kind of arbitrary and illogical decisions from the West after 
Georgia's surprise attack on South Ossetia last August, should 
collude in the further erosion of Palestinian rights and UN 
authority. But that was probably the price Russia had to pay for a 
petty reward: the resolution promises yet another sterile 
"international meeting" of the Quartet in Moscow next year. It is not 
the first time that Palestinian rights have been traded for such 
insignificant benefits for others.

With its latest intervention, the Security Council sought to bestow 
legitimacy on Israeli occupation, colonization and those who abet its 
oppression. Instead it simply exposed ever more shamelessly its own 
illegitimacy and subservience to powers who have no regard for 
international law and for the rights of those it is supposed to protect.

Hasan Abu Nimah is the former permanent representative of Jordan at 
the United Nations.

Co-founder of The Electronic Intifada, Ali Abunimah is author of 
<http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article10048.shtml>One Country: A 
Bold Proposal to End the Israeli-Palestinian Impasse (Metropolitan 
Books, 2006).

This article first appeared in The Jordan Times and is reprinted with 
the authors' permission.



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