[News] Abbas helps Israel bury its crimes in Gaza

[Anti-Imperialist News]

Abbas helps Israel bury its crimes in Gaza

http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article10807.shtml
Ali Abunimah, The Electronic Intifada, 2 October 2009


Representing the moribund Palestine Liberation Organization, the 
executive committee of which seen here, Mahmoud Abbas has abandoned a 
resolution to hold Israel accountable for its alleged war crimes in 
Gaza. (<http://www.maanimages.com/>MaanImages/POOL/Omar Rashidi)

Just when it seemed that the Ramallah Palestinian Authority (PA) and 
its leader Mahmoud Abbas could not sink any lower in their complicity 
with Israel's occupation of the West Bank and the murderous blockade 
of Gaza, Ramallah has dealt a further stunning blow to the Palestinian people.

The Abbas delegation to the United Nations in Geneva (officially 
representing the moribund Palestine Liberation Organization) 
abandoned a resolution requesting the Human Rights Council to forward 
Judge Richard Goldstone's report on war crimes in Gaza to the UN 
Security Council for further action. Although the PA acted under US 
pressure, there are strong indications that the commercial interests 
of Palestinian and Gulf businessmen closely linked to Abbas also played a part.

The 575-page Goldstone report documents evidence of shocking Israeli 
war crimes and crimes against humanity during last winter's assault 
on the Gaza Strip which killed 1,400 Palestinians, the vast majority 
noncombatants and hundreds of them children. The report also accuses 
the Palestinian resistance movement Hamas of war crimes for firing 
rockets into Israel that killed three civilians.

Goldstone's report was hailed by Palestinians and supporters of the 
rule of law worldwide as a watershed; it called for suspects to be 
held accountable before international courts if Israel failed to 
prosecute them. Israel has no history, ever, of holding its political 
and military leaders judicially accountable for war crimes against 
the Palestinians.

Israel was rightly terrified of the report, mobilizing all its 
diplomatic and political resources to discredit it. In recent days, 
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu claimed that if the report were 
acted on, it would "strike a severe blow to the war against 
terrorism," and "strike a fatal blow to the peace process, because 
Israel will no longer be able to take additional steps and take risks 
for peace if its right to self-defense is denied."

Unsurprisingly, an early ally in the Israeli campaign for impunity 
was the Obama Administration, whose UN ambassador, Susan Rice, 
expressed "very serious concerns" about the report and trashed 
Goldstone's mandate as "unbalanced, one-sided and basically 
unacceptable." (Rice was acting true to her word; in April she told 
the newspaper Politico that one of the main reasons the Obama 
Administration decided to join the UN Human Rights Council was to 
fight what she called "the anti-Israel crap.")

Goldstone, whose daughter has publicly described her father as a 
Zionist who loves Israel, is a former judge of the South African 
Supreme Court, and a highly respected international jurist. He was 
the chief prosecutor at UN war crimes tribunals for Rwanda and the 
former Yugoslavia.

That the Goldstone report was a severe blow to Israel's ability to 
commit future war crimes with impunity is not in doubt; this week 
bolstered by the report, lawyers in the UK asked a court to issue an 
arrest warrant for visiting Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak. That 
action did not succeed, but Israel's government has taken 
extraordinary measures in recent months to try to shield its 
officials from prosecution, fearing that successful arrests are just 
a matter of time. Along with the growing international campaign of 
boycott, divestment and sanctions, the fear of ending up in The Hague 
seems to be the only thing that causes the Israeli government and 
society to reconsider their destructive path.

One would think, then, that the self-described representatives of the 
Palestinian people would not casually throw away this weapon. And 
yet, according to Abbas ambassador Ibrahim Khraishi, the Ramallah PA 
shelved its effort at the request of the Americans because "We don't 
want to create an obstacle for them."

Khraishi's excuse that the resolution is merely being deferred until 
the spring does not pass muster. Unless action is taken now, the 
Goldstone report will be buried by then and evidence of Israel's 
crimes -- necessary for prosecutions -- may be harder to collect.

This latest surrender comes less than two weeks after Abbas appeared 
at a summit in New York with US President Barack Obama and Netanyahu 
despite Obama abandoning his demand that Israel halt construction of 
Jewish-only settlements on occupied Palestinian land. Also under US 
pressure, the PA abandoned its pledge not to resume negotiations 
unless settlement-building stopped, and agreed to take part in 
US-mediated "peace talks" with Israel in Washington this week. 
Israel, meanwhile, announced plans for the largest ever West Bank 
settlement since 1967.

What makes this even more galling, is the real possibility that the 
PA is helping Israel wash its hands of the blood it spilled in Gaza 
for something as base as the financial gain of businessmen closely 
linked to Abbas.

The Independent (UK) reported on 1 October:

"Shalom Kital, an aide to defense minister Ehud Barak, said today 
that Israel will not release a share of the radio spectrum that has 
long been sought by the Palestinian Authority to enable the launch of 
a second mobile telecommunications company unless the PA drops its 
efforts to put Israeli soldiers and officers in the dock over the 
Israeli operation." ("Palestinians cry 'blackmail' over Israel phone 
service threat," The Independent, 1 October).

Kital added that it was a "condition" that the PA specifically drop 
its efforts to advance the Goldstone report. The phone company, 
Wataniya, was described last April by Reuters as an "Abbas-backed 
company" which is a joint venture between Qatari and Kuwaiti 
investors and the Palestinian Investment Fund with which one of 
Abbas' sons is closely involved. Moreover, Reuters revealed that the 
start-up company apparently had no shortage of capital due to the 
Gulf investors receiving millions of dollars of "US aid in the form 
of loan guarantees meant for Palestinian farmers and other small to 
mid-sized businesses" (See "US aid goes to Abbas-backed Palestinian 
phone venture," Reuters, 24 April 2009).

Just a day before the Abbas delegation pulled its resolution in 
Geneva, Nabil Shaath, the PA "foreign minister" denounced the Israeli 
threat over Wataniya as "blackmail" and vowed that the Palestinians 
would never back down.

The PA's betrayal of the Palestinian people over the Goldstone 
report, as well as its continued "security coordination" with Israel 
to suppress resistance and political activity in the West Bank, 
should banish all doubt that it is an active arm of the Israeli 
occupation doing tangible and escalating harm to the Palestinian 
people and their just cause.

Co-founder of The Electronic Intifada, Ali Abunimah is author of 
<http://electronicintifada.net/bytopic/store/548.shtml>One Country: A 
Bold Proposal to End the Israeli-Palestinian Impasse.



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