[News] UN must immediately adopt and act on Goldstone report
Anti-Imperialist News
news at freedomarchives.org
Mon Oct 5 10:59:24 EDT 2009
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)
Freedom Archives
522 Valencia Street
San Francisco, CA 94110
415 863-9977
www.Freedomarchives.org
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