Here is Sharon Otterman’s report in yesterday’s New York Times on the United Nations Human Rights Council’s decision and what it means going forward:
The United Nations Human Rights Council on Friday endorsed a report that details evidence of war crimes committed by the Israeli Army and Hamas militants during the Gaza war last winter.
The council’s vote in Geneva was, in part, an attempt to press both the Israelis and the Palestinians to conduct their own credible investigations into the war-crimes accusations.
But the Human Rights Council’s resolution, by endorsing several dozen recommendations within the report, also threatened action by the United Nations Security Council and possibly the International Criminal Court should there be no serious internal investigations.
That is considered very unlikely, however, because the United States has a veto over the Security Council agenda.
Of the 47 members of the Human Rights Council, 25 supported the measure, 6 opposed it, 11 abstained and 5 cast no vote.
Israelis and Palestinians both say that the progress of peace talks depends on the war crimes investigation issue: Palestinians want the investigations to go forward, and Israel wants them dropped:
“We are being asked to take risks for peace,” Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu said Thursday as Israeli diplomats worked to defeat the resolution. “At the same time, we are being told that we will be unable to defend ourselves if peace talks fail. If an area we vacate is used to launch rockets at our citizens, we will be expected to sit and do nothing — our hands will be tied.”
[…]
Ibrahim Khraishi, the Palestinian envoy to the United Nations, said Friday that Palestinians “want to live in peace, side by side, with the state of Israel. We want a state having East Jerusalem as its capital.” But, he added, “until we achieve this goal, our people will never forgive the international community if they leave the criminals and perpetrators of crimes to have impunity.”
Reading between the lines, Khraishi appears to be suggesting that the intensity of Palestinian feeling about war crimes investigations is related to, and affected by, their perception of Israeli intransigence on the larger issue of Palestinian self-determination. In other words, if Palestinians could see some hint of any evidence of good faith on Israel’s part, or any objective sign that Israel understood, in even the smallest part, the depth of Palestinian suffering, resentment, and anger over specific Israeli policies, actions, and decisions that continue even as Israel denies responsibility for any war crimes in Gaza and refuses to cooperate with international bodies in their attempts to investigate such crimes — then perhaps Palestinians could be more flexible about the timing of those investigations.
What am I talking about? I’m talking about stuff like this (emphasis is mine):
For Mahmoud Abbas the future is bleak, even after the UN Human Rights Council endorsed a report condemning both Israeli and Hamas for their actions in last winter’s Gaza war.
Although the Palestinian President managed to beef up the resolution — with additional clauses condemning Israel’s restrictions of movement for Palestinians in East Jerusalem and the ongoing Israeli blockade of Hamas-run Gaza — it is unlikely to be enough to wash away the stain of his initial reluctance to back Judge Richard Goldstone’s report.
Mr Abbas, popularly known as Abu Mazen, was already weak before the latest fiasco. His public opposition to violent resistance to the Israeli occupation of the West Bank has set him at odds with many militant groups, still popular in the Palestinian territories, while his endless talks with Ehud Barak, the former Israeli Prime Minister, resulted only in the expansion of Jewish settlements in the West Bank.
He had hoped that the new US Administration’s call for a total settlement freeze would bolster his standing and refused to enter any talks with the new right-wing Israeli Government of Binyamin Netanyahu until settlement expansion was halted.
Mr Netanyahu simply stared the White House down, refusing to halt settlement growth and allowing the issue to snag on haggling over whether existing settlements should be allowed to build extra kindergartens and house extensions.
Faced with the damning report from the UN-appointed South African judge, who has served on tribunals looking into war crimes in the former Yugoslavia, Israel said that an endorsement would bring the peace process to a grinding halt — even though, by the admission of Avigdor Lieberman, the Foreign Minister, Israel was not expecting a peace deal for years anyway.
Mr Abbas then made what may prove to be a fatal mistake. He bowed to US and Israeli pressure to delay backing by his Palestinian Authority for the Goldstone report, a move seen by Palestinians as a betrayal of their struggle and their war dead. Senior aides scrabbled to redress the error as Hamas exploited the gaffe as evidence that Mr Abbas was an Israeli “collaborator”.
“Mahmoud Abbas might as well be considered a dead man; Binyamin Netanyahu and Ehud Barak [now Defence Minister] have killed him,” said a commentary in the Israeli centre-left daily Haaretz.
So, let’s see what we’ve got here. Let’s do the bullet-point takeaway:
- Palestinian Authority leader Mahmoud Abbas — who is in a politically precarious position with Palestinians because he has publicly condemned Palestinian violence against the Israeli military occupying the West Bank — tries to regain Palestinians’ trust and support by pushing the U.S. to call for Israel to implement a total freeze on new settlements in the West Bank.
- He then goes even further toward the end of that limb he’s on by agreeing, under enormous pressure from the U.S. and Israel, to delay by six months a UN decision on whether to endorse the Goldstone report’s findings.
- So, having put himself in such a politically and even physically risky position with his own people in order to please Israel and hopefully get something for it, what does he get in return? Does Israel take any steps to soften its position on the Gaza embargo? On the West Bank settlements? On East Jerusalem? On anything? No, Israel does not take any such steps — and in fact, Netanyahu takes one giant step further in the direction opposite to softening, by, to quote the Times piece again, “allowing the issue to snag on haggling over whether existing settlements should be allowed to build extra kindergartens and house extensions.”
- The UNHRC, having taken up the Goldstone report after Abbas was forced to reverse himself on the six-month delay following a storm of Palestinian outrage, votes to endorse the report’s findings. Hawkish Israelis, as well as the hawkish, right-wing Israel-is-always-right-even-when-it’s-wrong (and-it’s-never-wrong) crowd in this country are predictably shocked, dismayed, devastated, and appalled.
Israel wants everything for nothing, and it ain’t gonna happen.
Here is an ably reasoned pro-human rights point of view provides a badly needed bit of context on these issues:
In one of my early reactions to the Goldstone report last month, I noted that many of the folks who have wanted to bury or set aside Goldston’s recommendations about winning accountability for past actions in Gaza said they wanted to do so “in the interests of peacemaking; that is, the interests of the future rather than the past.”
However, I also noted that Gaza’s 1.45 million people face conditions of horrendous inhumanity and stress in the present; and that those conditions continue, day by day by day.
The prime interest of everyone concerned about relieving suffering in the Israeli-Palestinian theater should therefore surely be on lifting Israel’s quite inhumane siege of Gaza. A siege that is, as [Goldstone] noted, itself an instance of quite illegal collective punishment.
I gather that last night, at a dinner hosted by the American Task Force on Palestine, Obama’s national security adviser, Gen. Jim Jones, told attendees that “All three of the crossings between Israel and Gaza should be opened.”
Those are the crossings through which goods, and a small number of people, flow. Since it is still, under international law, the occupying power in Gaza, Israel has direct responsibility for the wellbeing– we could even say, the normal human flourishing– of the residents of Gaza. So obviously, those gates should be opened.
Winter approaches, but the Gazans haven’t been able even to rebuild their homes, businesses, and basic infrastructure after the destruction Israel wrought last winter.
Gen. Jones can tell an audience that “the gates should be opened.” But the US government continues to provide immense, and in many fields quite unequalled, benefits to the government of Israel– in the military, economic, diplomatic, and many other arenas.
So when will we see the Obama administration start to apply some strict accountability to Israel’s government regarding lifting the siege of Gaza?
Deeds, not words, please. On all aspects of Israeli-Palestinian peacemaking and the protection of Palestinian– along with Israeli– rights.
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