Accessories to Israel’s war crimes

THE UN Human Rights Council (UNHRC) adopted a resolution October 16 to forward a report documenting war crimes committed during Israel's three-week Gaza offensive in late 2008 and early 2009 to the UN Security Council--the first in several steps that could ultimately lead to war crimes tribunals against Israel.

Two weeks before, Palestinian representatives to the UNHRC had requested a delay of the vote in response to prodding from the U.S. and Israel, which tried to bury the Goldstone report--named for Richard Goldstone, the former South African Supreme Court justice who authored the 575-page report--because it meticulously documented Israeli war crimes.

The decision by the Palestinian Authority (PA) to assist the U.S. and Israel in this effort to suppress the truth about Gaza led to an outburst of anger from Palestinians--who saw the PA's participation in suppressing the report as an act of betrayal.

"Something is going to explode," said Aysam Zaid, a Fatah leader in Ramallah. "We are sick of them. The Palestinian street wants a divorce from the PA."

As criticism grew within Gaza and the West Bank, as well as in Arab countries throughout the region, Ghassan Khatib, director of the PA's media center, acknowledged that the decision about the report had damaged its legitimacy. "The level of public protest is unprecedented," he said. "I don't remember any situation before when the leadership was so unpopular."

The effect on Abbas' standing was swift, sending his already dismal approval rating even lower--from 18 percent in June to 12 percent today, according to an October poll conducted by the Jerusalem Media and Communications Center.

Realizing that he had made a dramatic miscalculation, Abbas announced that he was instructing the Palestinian UNHRC representative to call for adoption of the Goldstone report--and Abbas, in a move that fooled no one, said that he was forming a committee to investigate why the deferral of the vote took place.

"Somebody in the PA is going to be made a scapegoat and forced to pay a big price politically," said Samir Awad, an assistant professor of political science at Birzeit University. "It is clear that despite his denials, PA President Abbas was behind the decision to withdraw support for the report, but he will never admit to it."

THE BULK of the report focuses on war crimes committed by Israel during its Gaza offensive, such as shootings of civilians leaving their homes and waving white flags (in some cases, after they had been instructed to do so by Israeli troops) and military assaults on schools and mosques where civilians had sought refuge. In all, Israel's massacre killed some 1,400 Palestinians, the vast majority of them civilians, and wounded thousands more.

The report also concludes that "the destruction of food supply installations, water sanitation systems, concrete factories and residential houses was the result of a deliberate and systematic policy by the Israeli armed forces. It was not carried out because those objects presented a military threat or opportunity but to make the daily process of living, and dignified living, more difficult for the civilian population.

In sum, Israel's Gaza offensive was a "deliberately disproportionate attack designed to punish, humiliate and terrorize a civilian population, radically diminish its local economic capacity both to work and to provide for itself, and to force upon it an ever-increasing sense of dependency and vulnerability."

The report also contains significant concessions to Israel's version of events, such as acceptance of the idea that Israel's attack was a response to rockets fired into southern Israel from Gaza--even though Israel was the first to violate the ceasefire that had previously stopped the rocket fire. And the report accuses Hamas resistance fighters of war crimes for firing rockets that killed three Israeli civilians.

The report calls on both Israel and Hamas to bring the perpetrators to justice, and if they fail to do so, recommends that the matter be addressed by the UN Security Council, which has the power to establish war crimes tribunals. The report also encourages countries that are signatories to the Geneva Conventions to ''start criminal investigations in national courts using universal jurisdiction where there is sufficient evidence of the commission of grave breaches of the Geneva Conventions of 1949.''

Nevertheless, Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu was lashed out at the report, lobbing all manner of accusations at the report's findings, as well as its author. Netanyahu said if the report's recommendations were acted upon, it would "strike a severe blow to the war against terrorism." Paradoxically, Netanyahu also claimed that it would "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."

Judging from this reasoning and Netanyahu's already stated opposition to Palestinian statehood, it's clear what the "peace process" means for Netanyahu: unfettered bombing of Palestinians followed by complete surrender.

"For the life of me, I don't understand the reason for [Netanyahu's assertion that the report would derail the peace process]," said Goldstone. Goldstone is a former South African supreme court judge who also served as chief prosecutor for war crimes tribunals on Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia. What's more, Goldstone's daughter has described her father as a Zionist who loves Israel.

"Without some form of truth-telling, there cannot be an enduring peace," he said. "Truth-telling and acknowledgement to victims can be a very important assistance to peace."

IT'S EASY to understand Netanyahu's attempts to discredit the Goldstone report, but what about the decision of Abbas and the PA to collaborate with him? There are several elements to the explanation.

First, beyond the usual diplomatic arm-twisting, Israel threatened PA officials that it would break its commitment to allot radio frequencies to the start-up mobile phone company Wataniya, which was set to begin operations on October 15 in the West Bank, in a bid to rival the current mobile phone monopoly of PalTel.

If the Wataniya deal fails to go through, it could cost the PA hundreds of millions of dollars in penalties and the creation of 2,500 new jobs. What's more, Wataniya is a joint venture of Qatari and Kuwaiti investors and the Palestinian Investment Fund, in which one of Abbas' sons is involved.

"Trading off Palestinian rights and the fundamental duty to protect the Palestinians under occupation for personal gains is the textbook definition of collaboration and betrayal," wrote Omar Barghouti, a West Bank leader of the Palestinian movement for a boycott, divestment and sanctions movement against Israel.

Second, some news outlets have reported that Israeli officials threatened PA leaders that damaging audio and video recordings made during the Gaza offensive--in which high-level PA officials urged Israel's leaders to escalate the attack on Gaza as a way to exact revenge on their Hamas rivals--would be released to the media.

Such allegations strike a chord with many Palestinians who were furious with the PA's deafening silence about the Gaza massacre as it was taking place. Ever since Hamas won the January 2006 Palestinian Legislative Council elections, the U.S., Israel and the PA have made common cause in trying to isolate the Hamas government.

Third, Abbas' collaboration with the U.S. and Israel is the culmination of a years-long strategy of relying on negotiations instead of resistance to win Palestinian national rights.

The PA leadership has thus participated in the charade that the U.S. intends to act as an "honest broker" of a just peace between Israel and the Palestinians--even as the U.S. gives billions of dollars in military and economic aid to Israel annually and helps to run diplomatic interference every time Israel's violations of international law threaten to land Israel in trouble of one sort or another.

This continues under the Obama administration. For example, Susan Rice, Obama's ambassador to the UN, criticized the Goldstone report's recommendation that Israelis and Palestinians suspected of war crimes be tried before the International Criminal Court. "Our view is that we need to be focused on the future," she argued, indicating that she worried that war crimes charges could serve as obstacles to the "peace process."

But just a few months ago at a UN debate about Darfur, Rice argued that war crimes charges should never be sacrificed for political reasons.

Meanwhile, the PA has bargained away an ever-greater share of Palestinian national rights--with nothing to show in return.

The PA's unwillingness to confront the failure of its strategy is leading to growing calls for the dissolution of the PA and the pretense that Palestinians have anything approaching a state and a government, in favor of a return to the strategy of waging a national liberation struggle.

As Osamah Khalil, a frequent contributor to Electronic Intifada, writes:

[T]he same supporters of the Abbas...government who never tired of hailing every banal utterance by Bush and former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, regardless of how destructive their policies were to Palestinian rights and aspirations, have now sought to champion the meager efforts of the Obama administration. Once again, Palestinians are told that yet another American president is paying "attention" to their situation and is "focused" on the "peace process."

We have heard this all before, and unless Palestinians reclaim their national movement, we will hear it again and again. Palestinians and those sympathetic to their cause must recognize that Abbas and his clique will abandon any advantage and undermine any initiative that threatens the position, privileges and wealth they have accrued while in power. The PA will not dissolve itself, but it will disrupt and impede any progress or effort that threatens to truly challenge the occupation and Israel's system of apartheid of which they are an essential component and direct beneficiaries.

No matter what success activists across the globe have against Israeli apartheid and the occupation, the PA will scuttle those gains. Tales of corruption, graft and incompetence at the highest levels of the PA are neither new nor shocking. What is, however, is that Palestinians have allowed this situation to persist. As a result, Abbas' government has grown more strident and obvious in its collaboration with the occupation, a fact fully realized [by its decision to scuttle the Goldstone report].

As the credibility crisis facing the PA deepens, Hamas has also been forced to confront the limitations of its strategy. Hamas has asked Egypt to postpone a conference scheduled for later this month that was aimed at forging some sort of unity between Hamas and the PA.

Hamas has sought to wrap itself in the trappings of government and gain a seat at the negotiating table as an equal partner. But continuing to pursue this approach--at a moment when increasing numbers of Palestinians are calling for the dissolution of the PA--could be political suicide.

As Palestinian author and activist Ali Abunimah writes:

Hamas now cannot have it both ways: it cannot talk about "unity" and "reconciliation" with people that it--and many Palestinians--view as "traitors." To seek unity with such people is in effect to say that Hamas wishes to join a government of traitors...

The political collapse underway offers all Palestinians--including Hamas--a new opportunity: to build a broad-based, internationally legitimate popular resistance movement that mobilizes all of Palestinian society as the first Intifada did, and to reconnect with Palestinians inside Israel who face an existential threat from escalating Israeli racism. This movement must work with and enhance the global solidarity campaign to put maximum pressure on Israel--and its collaborators--to end their repression, racism and violence, and hasten the emancipation of all the people of Palestine.