Israel-Palestine: UN Council Endorses Goldstone Report --- What Now?

Israel-Palestine: No UN Progress on Goldstone Report on Gaza
Transcript: The Palestinian Authority Draft to UN Human Rights Council (15 October)

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On Friday the United Nations Human Rights Council endorsed the Goldstone Report, which found evidence of war crimes by both Hamas and Israel in the Gaza War. The vote was 25-6 with 16 abstentions. The US opposed the resolution while Britain and France did not vote. (The full list is at the bottom of the entry.)

The five-page resolution was remarkable for two reasons. First, it not only condemned Israeli crimes during Operation Cast Lead but also, beyond the war, denounced Israeli human rights violations in east Jerusalem, the West Bank, and Gaza. Second, although Goldstone Report cites both Hamas and Israel, the resolution explicitly names only Israel as a violator of international law. Goldstone criticized the UN decision to condemn only Israel, saying that the wording of the resolution was unfortunate.

Israel's Foreign Ministry rejected the resolution and called the decision "unjust":

Israel will continue to exercise its right to self-defense and to preserve the security of its citizens.

Israel believes that the decision harms efforts to protect human rights in accordance with international law and hinders efforts to promote the peace process as well as encouraging terror organizations around the world.

Israel thanks the countries that supported our position, and those who, with their vote, voiced their opposition to the unjust decision which ignores the murderous Hamas attacks against Israeli citizens... The decision ignores the fact that the Israel Defense Forces took unprecedented measures to avoid harming innocent civilians, and the fact that terror organizations used civilians as human shields in Gaza.

In contrast, Hamas welcomed the decision and said that they hoped that it would lead to "the beginning of the prosecution of the leaders of the occupation". The Palestinian Authority said that a follow-up on implementation of the recommandations in the report, "to protect the Palestinian people from Israeli aggression", was needed.

This may be the end of the line, however, for the report. The resolution asks that the Security Council forward the findings to the International Criminal Court, but the US, France, and Britain are unlikely to support the move. Indeed, with substantive action unlikely, the resolution may be an unexpected victory for Israel, with the United Nations proving its "one-sided position".

FOR the resolution: Argentina, Bahrain, Bangladesh, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, China, Cuba, Djbouti, Egypt, Ghana, India, Indonesia, Jordan, Mauritius, Nicaragua, Nigeria, Pakistan, Philippines, Qatar, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Senegal, South Africa and Zambia

AGAINST the resolution: United States, Hungary, Italy, Netherlands, Slovakia and Ukraine

ABSTAINING: Belgium, Bosnia, Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Gabon, Japan, Mexico, Norway, Korea, Slovenia, Uruguay, Britain, France, Madagascar, Kyrgyzstan and Angola

Comments

[David R. Evans]

"The Israeli military said....", "The Israeli military said..."...That is the problem, Awamori...."The Israeli military is going to say whatever it takes to cover it's actions. Bottom line is: The Israeli military violated the ceasefire agreement by crossing into Gaza, as the article states. Israeli troops had NO business, for whatever reason to cross into Gaza. Ostensibly, there was a tunnel. Even if there was, it posed no immediate threat. And even if the tunnel was to be used to capture another Shalit, so what? Israel has captured and imprisoned (and killed some under torture) 12,000 Palestinians and is holding them in rank prisons in Israel. No one gives a damn about these people, but everyone fawns all over ONE Israeli soldier who was legally captured in a conflict. This is just one example of how biased and lopsided this whole mess is. Israel good, Palestinian Arabs bad. Comic book wrestling crowd vision of reality that totally ignores justice.

[Awamori]

Sorry David, but would the "capturing another Shalit" be a break of cease fire? That's exactly what was prevented.

"Israel good, Palestinian Arabs bad." - Never said that.
But your are always saying "Israel is bad, Palestinians are good".
Balance, David, balance.

BTW, I don't think, that the average Palestinian hates Israel and justifies Hamas as much, as you do.

[Awamori]

David, I see the conflict in different perspective. Not "Israel vs. Palestinians" but "Israel vs. Arab World" or even "Israel vs. Muslim world."

After all, before 1967, when those territories where under Arab control, no one has reminded the "Palestinian nation" or "Palestinian State."

I don't think that Arabs themselves consider a Palestinians as a independent nation who deserves its own state. Nobody worried about a Palestinian state, when Gaza and WB were under Arab control untill 1967. After all, this territory used to be Arab colony, like Southern Spain or Northern Africa. So now they want it back, using "Palestinian rights" as a PR move.

Some good and balanced article regarding Arab and Jewish population of Ottoman and Mandate Palestine:

]http://www.mideastweb.org/palpop.htm

"...Therefore we cannot conclude that Jewish settlement displaced Arabs. On the contrary, Jewish settlement may have attracted Arabs, so that in the areas that that eventually became Israel in all probability there were more Arabs than there would have been without Jewish settlement. Another explanation is that the urban areas attracted Jewish settlers and Arabs because of better standard of living and employment opportunity. Health conditions were probably somewhat better in these areas as well. Note that Table 8 is not divided according to areas that did or did not become part of Israel. Therefore the data should not be misused to claim that a large number of Arabs present in Israel in 1948 had migrated from the non-Jewish areas of the West Bank and Gaza. Beersheba district, which became part of Israel, lost about 45,000 Arabs between 1931 and 1945, if we believe the survey.

The importance of the above is that it shows that rather than "dispossessing" or displacing the Arabs of Palestine, Zionist settlement apparently attracted them..."

[David R. Evans]

“…Therefore we cannot conclude that Jewish settlement displaced Arabs. ..."

This statement is rediculous:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Massacres_in_Palestine

Recent commentary about the future of Israel (One State vs. Two State) is mired in convoluted history revision and cherry-picked information and half truths. Let’s approach this issue from a purely logical perspective based on justice:

Would the world tolerate hundreds of thousands of Lutheran Protestants, for example, to immigrate into Germany, the birthplace of Lutheranism, from all over the world, and to declare all of Germany as their rightful homeland? Would the world tolerate military elements of these immigrants committing massacres on German people and driving hundreds of thousands of them from their homes and farms so that they, the immigrants, could inhabit the land and call it a new Lutheran State? Of course not; But this is exactly what happened in Palestine in 1948 during what Jewish Zionists call their “War of Independence”. For more information: http://ifamericansknew.com/

[David R. Evans]

Also, Awamori, consider some of the works of Jewish historian, Illan Pappe, particularly his book, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine

"Pappe’s argument, or as he gladly admits, his “j’accuse” rests on first demonstrating that Zionists from the very first days of Herzl in the 1890s recognized the demographic problem they faced if they were to realize a purely Jewish state in a land overwhelmingly non-Jewish. Using various source materials he shows how the idea of forced expulsion had always been there but emerged openly in the 1930s. Two particulary stark quotes from David Ben Gurion stand out.

“I am for compulsory transfer; I do not see anything immoral in it” Ben Gurion in 1938 pg. xi

And here on the eve of achieving statehood:

“There are 40% non-Jews in the area allocated to the Jewish state. This composition is not a solid basis for a Jewish state. And we have to face this new reality with all its severity and distinctness. Such a demographic balance questions our ability to maintain Jewish sovereignty… only a state with at least 80% Jews is a viable and stable state” Ben Gurion on December 3, 1947 pg. 48

In the next part of the book Pappe uses Israeli archives from the military, the IDF, minutes of political meetings, public statements, and also diaries of David Ben Gurion and other memoirs from the period. What these documents show is that while the political leadership didn’t have to articulate a master plan of ethnic cleansing in its instructions, the overall objective was understood.

“…most of the troops engaged in ethnic cleansing do not need direct orders; they know what is expected of them. Pg. 3

What follows is a most powerful, and riveting narrative. It is the detailed account, almost day by day of the events from December 1947 through 1948, the period when the ethnic cleansing began. Pappe does not hold back in graphically recounting the systematic, brutally cruel expulsion of the Palestinians from over 500 tiny villages that dotted the landscape of old Palestine. Nothing less than acts of pure terrorism were employed, mostly by the Irgun and the Stern gang operating under the auspices of the Hagana which earlier was the militant Zionist underground dating back to the 1920s and officially designated a terrorist organization by the British. The campaign to “cleanse” Palestine of its indigenous population included bombings, assassinations, demolitions, arson, pillage, rape, and two cases of poisoning the water supply with typhoid; one succeeded the other failed. The most famous case is the massacre at Deir Yassin in which up to 100 men, women, and children were murdered in cold blood. Because international reporters happened to be on the scene it aroused a round of international outrage at the time. But spreading fear in the Palestinians so that they would flee in terror was also part of the strategy of the Hagana.

It should be noted that Pappe has been accused of fabricating massacres. He deals with this charge in the book in reference to a particular case of a libel suit in Israel against a University student. Most of the scholarship on this period has relied on Israeli sources and either ignores or gives little credence to oral histories by Palestinians or other Arab sources. Pappe insists that a complete picture of what happened is not possible unless all testimonies are included for scholarly consideration.

The last part of the book deals with the “memoricide of the Nakba” and “Nakba Denial”. The expulsion and dispossession of the Palestinians in 1948 constituted a gross physical abuse. What followed has been a profound psychological abuse far deeper and no less painful. This has been the systematic bulldozing and destruction of almost all of the small Palestinian villages so that there remains no trace that they ever existed. Over these ruins are built Jewish homes, roads, recreation parks, Kibbutzim and even historic sites all renamed with Hebrew names, modern or ancient to reflect the resurrection of ancient Israel, destroy the memory of a Palestinian culture and community, and support the myth of a “land without a people, for a people without a land”.

Ilan Pappe has argued that the time for a two state solution has passed and that the only just solution to this conflict, and the only way that both Jews and Arabs can find the peace and security they yearn for, is in a one state democracy in which all Palestinian refugees are finally granted their right of return as expressed in UN Resolution 194. Of course, the demographics of such a solution would make Jews a minority and thus the exclusively Jewish character of the state, which has been the Zionist dream, would disappear"

http://www.aria-aperta.org/AriaAperta/BookReviews/ApartheidEthnicdoublereview.html

[David R. Evans]

As to the claim that Palestinians were never acknowledged as a people unto themselves, consider the following regarding the British Mandate of Palestine:

The preamble of the mandate declared:

Whereas the Principal Allied Powers have also agreed that the Mandatory should be responsible for putting into effect the declaration originally made on November 2nd, 1917, by the Government of His Britannic Majesty, and adopted by the said Powers, in favor of the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, it being clearly understood that nothing should be done which might prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine, or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country.

The formal objective of the League of Nations Mandate system was to administer parts of the defunct Ottoman Empire, which had been in control of the Middle East since the 16th century, "until such time as they are able to stand alone."

" Recent genetic evidence has demonstrated that Palestinians as an ethnic group represent modern "descendants of a core population that lived in the area since prehistoric times,"[13][14] largely predating the Arabian Muslim conquest that resulted in their acculturation and established Arabic as the lingua franca, which eventually became the sole vernacular of the locals, most of whom would over time also convert to Islam from various prior faiths.

The first widespread use of "Palestinian" as an endonym to refer to the nationalist concept of a Palestinian people by the local Arabic-speaking population of Palestine began prior to the outbreak of World War I,[15] and the first demand for national independence was issued by the Syrian-Palestinian Congress on 21 September 1921.[16] After the creation of Israel, the exodus of 1948, and more so after the exodus of 1967, the term came to signify not only a place of origin, but the sense of a shared past and future in the form of a Palestinian nation-state." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palestinian_people

My point is that Palestinians have existed as a distinct People for millennia. The promise made to Zionists by the Balfour Declaration of 1917 forever prevented Palestinians from attaining an autonomous State, as their fellow-Arabs were able to attain. This was not any fault of Palestinians. They were wrongfully denied statehood, as their land (a land that they had inhabited for as long Jews, and in far greater numbers than Jews) was promised by Lord Balfour and the Brit empire, to the Zionists.

I don't care how one spinsit, this act was a gross injustice, and the subsequent invasion in 1947-'48 of heavily-armed Zionist forces that massacred and drove almost 800,000 Palestinians from their homes was wrong. All current violence is a result of this historical truth.