[News] UN must immediately adopt and act on Goldstone report

[Anti-Imperialist News]

UN must immediately adopt and act on Goldstone report

October 05, 2009 By Omar Barghouti
http://www.zcommunications.org/znet/viewArticle/22782

Palestinian civil society has strongly and almost unanimously 
condemned the Palestinian Authority's latest decision to delay 
adoption by the UN Human Rights Council of the report prepared by the 
UN Fact-Finding Mission, headed by justice Richard Goldstone, into 
the recent Israeli war of aggression against the Palestinian people 
in the occupied Gaza Strip.  A common demand in almost all 
Palestinian statements issued in this respect was for the UN to adopt 
the report and act without undue delay on its recommendations in 
order to bring an end to Israel's criminal impunity and to hold it 
accountable before international law for its war crimes and crimes 
against humanity committed in Gaza and, indeed, all over the occupied 
Palestinian territory.

Succumbing to US pressures and unabashed Israeli blackmail, the 
president of the PA himself reportedly was himself responsible for 
the decision to defer discussion at the Council of the Goldstone 
report, dashing the hopes of Palestinians everywhere as well as of 
international human rights organizations and solidarity movements 
that Israel will finally face a long overdue process of legal 
accountability and that its victims will have a measure of 
justice.  This decision by the PA, which in effect delays adoption of 
the report at least until March 2010, giving Israel a golden 
opportunity to bury it with US, European, Arab and now Palestinian 
complicity, constitutes the most blatant case yet of PA betrayal of 
Palestinian rights and surrender to Israeli dictates.

This is not the first time, though, that the PA has acted under 
orders from Washington and threats from Tel Aviv against the express 
interests of the Palestinian people.  The historic advisory opinion 
of the International Court of Justice in July 2004 that found 
Israel's Wall and colonies built on occupied Palestinian territory 
illegal had presented a rare diplomatic, political and legal 
opportunity that could have been used to isolate Israel as apartheid 
South Africa was after a similar ICJ decision in 1971 against its 
occupation of Namibia.  Alas, the PA squandered it and systematically 
-- quite suspiciously, actually -- failed to even call on world 
governments to comply with their obligations stated in the advisory opinion.

The whole clause on Israel and Palestinian rights that was to be 
discussed at the recent UN Durban Review Conference in Geneva was 
dropped after the Palestinian representative gave his green 
light.  Efforts by non-aligned nations and the former UN General 
Assembly president, Father Miguel d'Escoto Brockmann, to push for a 
UN resolution condemning Israel's war crimes in Gaza and establishing 
an international tribunal were thwarted mainly by the Palestinian 
ambassador to the UN, causing several prominent diplomats and 
international law experts to wonder which side the official 
Palestinian representative was on.

The Mercosur-Israel Free Trade Agreement was almost ratified by 
Brazil this last September after the Palestinian ambassador there 
expressed approval, only urging Brazil to exclude Israeli settlement 
products from the Agreement.  With prompt action by Palestinian and 
Brazilian civil society organizations and eventually by the PLO's 
Executive Committee, this ratification was averted and the Brazilian 
parliamentary committee in charge of this file recommended that the 
government refrain from approving the FTA until Israel complies with 
international law.

In all these cases and many similar ones, the instructions to the 
Palestinian representatives came from Ramallah, where the PA 
government has illegally appropriated the PLO powers to lead 
Palestinian diplomacy and set foreign policy, conceding Palestinian 
rights and acting against the Palestinian national interests, without 
worrying about accountability to any elected representatives of the 
Palestinian people.

This latest forthright collusion of the PA in Israel's campaign to 
whitewash its crimes and undermine the application of international 
law to punish these crimes came a few days after the far-right 
Israeli government publicly blackmailed the PA, demanding that it 
withdraw its support for adopting the Goldstone report in return for 
"permitting" a second mobile communications provider to operate in 
the occupied Palestinian territory.  It therefore undermines the 
great efforts by human rights organizations and many activists to 
bring justice to the Palestinian victims of Israel's latest massacre 
in Gaza: the more than 1400 killed (predominantly civilians); the 
thousands injured; the 1.5 million who are still suffering from the 
wanton destruction of infrastructure, educational and health 
institutions, factories, farm lands, power plants, and other critical 
facilities, and from the long criminal Israeli siege against them.

It is nothing short of a betrayal of Palestinian civil society's 
effective Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) campaign against 
Israel, with all its recent, remarkable growth and achievements in 
mainstream western societies and among leading unions.

It is also betrayal of the global solidarity movement that has worked 
tirelessly and creatively, mainly within the framework of the fast 
spreading BDS campaign, to end Israel's impunity and to uphold 
universal human rights.

It is crucial to remember that the PA does not have any legal or 
democratic mandate to speak on behalf of the people of Palestine or 
to represent the Palestinians at the UN or any of its agencies and 
institutions.  The current PA government has never won the necessary 
constitutional approval of the democratically elected Palestinian 
Legislative Council.  Even if it had such a mandate, at best it would 
only represent the Palestinians living under Israel's military 
occupation in the West Bank and Gaza, excluding the great majority of 
the people of Palestine, particularly the refugees.

Only the Palestine Liberation Organization, the PLO, can 
theoretically claim to represent the entirety of the Palestinian 
people: inside historic Palestine and in exile.  For such a claim to 
be substantiated and universally accepted by Palestinians everywhere, 
though, the PLO would need to be revived from the grassroots upwards, 
in a transparent, democratic and inclusive process that involves 
Palestinians everywhere and encompasses all the political parties 
that are outside the PLO structures today.  In parallel with this 
democratic reclamation or popular take-back of the PLO by the people 
and their representative unions and institutions, the PA must be 
responsibly and gradually dismantled, with its current powers, 
particularly the representation seats at the UN and other regional 
and international institutions, returned to where they belong, to the 
real representative of all the people of Palestine, the revived and 
democratized PLO.  This dissolution of the PA, however, must at all 
times avoid creating a legal and political vacuum, as history shows 
that hegemonic powers are often the most likely to fill such a vacuum 
to the detriment of the oppressed.

The fact is the PA has been gradually and irreversibly transformed 
since its establishment 15 years ago from a mere -- often powerless, 
obsequious and coerced -- sub-contractor of the Israeli occupation 
regime, relieving it of its most cumbersome civil duties, like the 
provision of services and tax collection, and, most crucially, very 
effectively helping it safeguard the security of its occupation army 
and colonial settlers, into a willing collaborator that constitutes 
Israel's most important strategic weapon in countering its growing 
isolation and loss of legitimacy on the world stage as a colonial and 
apartheid state.  Israel's hundreds of nuclear weapons and its fourth 
largest army in the world proved impotent or at least irrelevant 
before the growing BDS movement, particularly after Israel's acts of 
genocide in Gaza.  The almost unlimited diplomatic, political, 
economic and scientific support Israel receives from the US and 
European governments and its unparalleled impunity have also failed 
to protect it from the gloomy fate of apartheid South Africa.

Even before Israel's war on Gaza, many unions around the world had 
joined the BDS campaign, from Canada to South Africa, and from the UK 
and Norway to Brazil.  After Gaza, though, the four years of 
preparing the ground and spreading BDS, the international shock at 
the sight of Israel's white phosphorus showers of death visited upon 
the children of Gaza cowered in UN shelters, and the universal 
feeling that the international order has failed to hold Israel to 
account or to even end its slaughter of civilians, not to mention its 
ongoing ethnic cleansing campaign in the occupied West Bank, 
particularly in East Jerusalem, BDS leaped into a new, advanced 
phase.  It finally reached the mainstream.

In February, weeks after the end of Israel's bloodbath in Gaza, the 
South African Transport and Allied Workers Union (SATAWU) made 
history when it refused to offload an Israeli ship in Durban.  In 
April, the Scottish Trade Union Congress followed the lead of the 
South African trade union federation, COSATU, and the Irish Congress 
of Trade Unions in adopting BDS against Israel to bring about its 
compliance with international law.  In May, the University and 
College Union (UCU), representing some 120,000 British academics, 
reiterated its annual support for the logic of boycott against 
Israel, calling for organizing an inter-union BDS conference later 
this year to discuss effective strategies for implementing the boycott.

Most recently, this last September, the Norwegian government's 
pension fund, the third largest in the world, divested from an 
Israeli military contractor supplying equipment to the illegal Wall 
in violation of the ICJ ruling.  Shortly after that, a Spanish 
ministry excluded an Israeli academic team representing a college 
illegally built on occupied Palestinian land from participating in an 
academic competition.  Also in September, the British Trades Union 
Congress, representing over 6.5 million workers, adopted the boycott, 
ushering in a new chapter in the spread of BDS that reminds observers 
of the beginning of the end of the apartheid regime in South 
Africa.  According to concrete, persistent and mounting indicators, 
Palestinians are witnessing the arrival of their "South Africa moment."

Amidst all this comes the Goldstone report, quite surprisingly -- 
given the judge's strong connections with Israel and Zionism -- 
providing the straw that may well break the camel's back: irrefutable 
evidence, meticulously researched and documented, of Israel's 
deliberate commission of war crimes and crimes against 
humanity.  Despite its clear shortcoming, this report presented 
Israel with the daunting and not entirely improbable prospect of 
standing trial at an international tribunal, a development that would 
effectively end Israel's impunity and open the possibility of finally 
applying international justice to its crimes and persistent 
violations of international law.  In this dire context for Israel, 
only one strategic weapon in its arsenal could be used to fend off 
the foretold crushing legal and political defeat: the PA.  And it did 
use it indeed at the right time, in a fatal way, almost killing the 
Goldstone report.

Ultimately, the failure of the UN Human Rights Council to adopt the 
Goldstone report is another proof, if any is needed, that 
Palestinians cannot hope at the current historical moment to obtain 
justice from the US-controlled so-called "international 
community."  Only through intensified, sustainable and 
context-sensitive civil society campaigns of boycott and divestment 
can there be any hope that Israel will one day be compelled to end 
its lawlessness and criminal disregard of human rights and recognize 
the inalienable Palestinian right to self determination.  This right, 
as expressed by the great majority of the Palestinian people, 
comprises ending the occupation, ending the legalized and 
institutionalized system of racial discrimination, or apartheid, and 
recognizing the fundamental, UN-sanctioned right of the Palestine 
refugees to return to their homes of origin, like all other refugees 
around the world, including Jewish refugees of World War II.

We simply cannot afford to give up on the UN, though.  Human rights 
organizations and international civil society must continue to help 
the Palestinian struggle to pressure the UN, at least its General 
Assembly, to adopt and act upon the recommendations of the Goldstone 
report at all levels.  If the UN fails to do so it will send an 
unambiguous message to Israel that its impunity remains intact and 
that the international community will stand by apathetically the next 
time it commits even more egregious crimes against the indigenous 
people of Palestine.  This would gravely undermine the rule of law 
and promote in its stead the law of the jungle, where no one will be 
protected from total chaos and boundless carnage.

Omar Barghouti is a founding member of the BDS movement 
(<http://www.bdsmovement.net/>www.BDSmovement.net)




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