The UN High Commissioner for Human Rights: “I lend my full support to Justice Goldstone’s report and its recommendations. I fully agree with him that the prevailing impunity for human rights violations in the Middle East conflict must end.”
International Law
“The decision by the Spanish government to disqualify the Israeli researchers is unwarranted, biased and clearly discriminatory,” said Abraham H. Foxman, ADL National Director. “This unacceptable action introduces politics into an important scientific competition where politics has no place.”
IOA Editor: Despite its lofty motto, the ADL is not fighting for “justice and fair treatment to all.” It never protested the closure of Birzeit University or other Palestinian academic institutions, or rejected Israel’s closure of Gaza which prevented even pencils and paper from arriving at Gaza’s shattered schools in time for the current school year. Now, by joining Israel’s propaganda war against international law, the ADL is endorsing Israel’s occupation and settlement program.
The cases arise out of three incidents where the Israeli army entered Palestinian villages in the middle of the night and rounded up children en masse, accusing them of throwing stones at the Wall and settler by-pass roads in the West Bank.
Meanwhile, Israel has warned the Palestinian Authority that it would condition permission for a second cellular telephone provider to operate in the West Bank – an economic issue of critical importance to the PA leadership – on the Palestinians withdrawing their request at the International Court.
The report’s findings demand action by the international community, including the United States. The importance of U.S. action is elevated because the U.S. currently holds the Presidency of the U.N. Security Council, the U.N. body charged with enforcing the report’s conclusions.
‘We may be witnessing the beginning of the end of the era of impunity,’ Nadia Hijab, a senior fellow at the Washington-based Institute for Palestine Studies, was quoted by IPS in response to the findings of a 574-page report by a four-member United Nations Fact finding mission.
Following the release last week of the Goldstone commission findings which accused Israel of committing war crimes during its offensive in the Gaza Strip, [Israeli] diplomatic officials feared that the report would weigh heavily on the agenda of this week’s United Nations General Assembly meeting. Israel’s fears proved to have no basis in fact as the report was cited by just a few world leaders.
A senior prosecutor at the International Criminal Court in The Hague said Monday that he is considering opening an investigation into whether Lt. Col. David Benjamin, an Israel Defense Forces reserve officer, allowed war crimes to be committed during the IDF’s three-week offensive in the Gaza Strip this winter.
In their appeal filed Thursday the two civil parties argued that “there is no independent judicial system in Israel and that the current universal jurisdiction applies in the case of Gaza”.
“I was driven particularly because I thought the outcome might, in a small way, assist the peace process,” he told the Forward. “I really thought I was one person who could achieve an even-handed mission.”
Ever since the Gaza war the solidity of Jewish support for Israel has been fraying at the edges, and will likely now fray much further. More globally, a very robust boycott and divestment movement has been gaining momentum ever since the Gaza war, and the Goldstone report will clearly lend added support to such initiatives. There is a growing sense around the world that the only chance for the Palestinians to achieve some kind of just peace depends on shaping the outcome by way of the symbols of legitimacy, what I have called the legitimacy war. Increasingly, the Palestinians have been winning this second non-military war.
Israeli democracy functions for Jews, who are well represented, but has been denying any representation to 4 million people for 42 years. It allows itself to do whatever it wants with them in the name of the democratic “national consensus.” Who will protect them?
“My greatest frustration this year has been the Palestine situation,” he told the 192-nation assembly in his final address on 14 September… He found it “disgraceful” the way influential members of the UN Security Council had shown “passivity and apparent indifference” about the long and cruel Israeli blockade of Gaza.
IOA Editor: Thank you, Messrs Bush I, Clinton, Bush II, and our very own Mr. Obama.
I ACCEPTED with hesitation my United Nations mandate to investigate alleged violations of the laws of war and international human rights during Israel’s three-week war in Gaza last winter. The issue is deeply charged and politically loaded. I accepted because the mandate of the mission was to look at all parties: Israel; Hamas, which controls Gaza; and other armed Palestinian groups. I accepted because my fellow commissioners are professionals committed to an objective, fact-based investigation. But above all, I accepted because I believe deeply in the rule of law and the laws of war, and the principle that in armed conflict civilians should to the greatest extent possible be protected from harm.
“I deny that completely,” Judge Richard Goldstone said… “I was completely independent, nobody dictated any outcome, and the outcome was a result of the independent inquiries that our mission made,” he said.
Netanyahu’s message is that the Goldstone Commission report hinders the United States’ war on terror. The Foreign Ministry decided Wednesday to focus their efforts to combat the report’s accusations on the United States, Russia and a few other members of the United Nations Security Council and the Human Rights Council that are involved in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
IOA Editor: The Israeli propaganda machine is going full blast. To protect democracy from terrorism, the UN report deserves every possible rejection, naturally.
See also Norman Finkelstein’s interview and Gideon Levy’s commentary on the UN report.
There’s a name on every bullet, and there’s someone responsible for every crime. The Teflon cloak Israel has wrapped around itself since Operation Cast Lead has been ripped off, once and for all, and now the difficult questions must be faced. It has become superfluous to ask whether war crimes were committed in Gaza, because authoritative and clear-cut answers have already been given. So the follow-up question has to be addressed: Who’s to blame? If war crimes were committed in Gaza, it follows that there are war criminals at large among us. They must be held accountable and punished. This is the harsh conclusion to be drawn from the detailed United Nations report.
IOA Editor: The time to “avert disgrace” was a year ago, before launching the Gaza attack. The Hague is the proper place for states that behave criminally – deservedly, to use Levy’s own language.
There is only thing worse than denial – the admission that the IDF indeed acted as has been described, but that these actions are both normal and appropriate.
The main limitation of the report is it’s all cast in the language of violations of the laws of war. And the fundamental fact about what happened in Gaza is it wasn’t a war. There was no war in Gaza. That’s the main misunderstanding about what happened there.
Had Richard Goldstone not served as the head of the UN inquiry into the Gaza war, the accusations against Israel would have been harsher, Goldstone’s daughter, Nicole, said in an interview conducted in Hebrew with Army Radio on Wednesday.
Israel “punished and terrorised” civilians in Gaza in a disproportionate attack in its three-week war on the territory earlier this year, a United Nations report has found. Judge Richard Goldstone, who led the inquiry, said he found evidence Israel targeted civilians and used excessive force in the assault, which was launched on December 27. “The mission concluded that actions amounting to war crimes, and possibly in some respects crimes against humanity, were committed by the Israel Defence Force,” Goldstone, a former South African justice, said. More than 1,400 Palestinians – about a third of them women and children – were killed in the war. Thirteen Israelis died.
Israel’s three-week war in Gaza brought a wave of international criticism. About 1,400 people died and accusations of possible war crimes have been levelled against both the Israeli military and the Palestinian militant groups in Gaza, notably Hamas. The latest and most prominent inquiry, led by Richard Goldstone, a respected South African judge, was conducted for the UN human rights council.
Read UN report and access many information resources via The Guardian’s article.
Although Lieberman declared he would reactivate Israeli foreign policy in certain African states, past experience has shown that the Defense Ministry and arms manufacturers’ lobby have hijacked Israeli foreign policy in recent decades and subordinated it to their needs, Israeli sources said. No deals were signed on this trip. But Foreign Ministry officials estimate Africa’s business potential at some $1 billion, in addition to the $3 billion of merchandise and services Israel currently exports to the continent.
The Norwegian government has decided to pull all of its investments from Israeli arms firm Elbit as a result of it involvement in the construction of the West Bank separation fence, the Norwegian Finance Minister announced on Thursday… Norway’s pension fund is invested in 41 different Israeli companies… A research project by the Coalition of Women for Peace called “Who profits from the occupation?” found that almost two thirds of those firms are involved in West Bank construction and development.
From the most senior military judge down to the lowest private at a checkpoint, hundreds of thousands of perfectly normal Israelis who are not violent at home are partners in the mission of administering, demarcating, restricting and taming the other society while cumulatively damaging its rights, welfare and well-being. This is the norm that is not taken into account here in the statistics on violence and the violent.
A Military Police investigation into a soldier’s killing of a Palestinian near Hebron in January has been going on for seven and a half months, and there is still no end in sight. Yet the sector commander has been giving briefings for the past few months based on his own inquiry into the incident, which he describes as “a serious failure in moral and professional terms.”
About 7,700 Palestinians are imprisoned in Israel, including about 450 without the benefit of a trial. Most of them are not murderers, although they are all automatically labeled as such here. The demonstrators at Megiddo would do well to realize this. Some of the prisoners are political detainees in the full sense of the word, from members of the Palestinian parliament imprisoned without trial, which is a scandal in and of itself, to those behind bars because of their “affiliation.” Innocent people are among them as well as political activists and nonviolent protesters.
IOA Editor: In this Israeli-centric commentary, Levy calls attention to the status of Palestinian prisoners held by Israel.
“They are breaking their silence about the only democracy in the Middle East that has an independent legal system and an investigative press that does not cease dealing with these issues,” Netanyahu told reporters…
IOA Editor: Again, the “Only-Democracy-in-the-Middle-East” cannot deal substantively with challenges to its violent Occupation and Gaza war crimes, such as those coming from the UN, HRW, and other international human-rights organizations. Instead, it tries to silence critical organizations and choke their international NGO funding.
[Joe] Stork wrote to Haaretz that rather than deal with the content of the report, Yemini chose to “shoot the messenger… The quotes he attributes to me are more than 30 years old. Most of them I do not recognize, and they are contrary to the views I have been expounding for decades now.” Stork wrote. “I have dedicated much of my adult life to the protection of human rights for all and to fighting the idea that civilians can be attacked for political reasons.”
IOA Editor: Israel Harel is a right-wing Israeli commentator, as is Ben Dror Yemini. Joe Stork is the deputy director of Human Rights Watch’s Middle East and North Africa division. This attack on HRW and its dedicated staff reflects the opinions of many Israelis who reject any outside criticism of IDF behavior and Israeli actions in the occupied territories.
See IOA coverage of the HRW report.
Israel has recently been putting up more obstacles for foreign nationals who enter [Israel] if they have family, work, business or academic ties in the West Bank. It now restricts their movements to “the Palestinian Authority only.” The people concerned are citizens of countries that have diplomatic ties with Israel, mainly Western countries.
“These actions are contrary to the provisions of the Geneva Conventions related to occupied territory. They also contravene the united calls of the international community, including the Quartet’s, which in its recent statement urged the Government of Israel to refrain from provocative actions in East Jerusalem, including house demolitions and evictions. The UN rejects Israeli claims that this is a local matter dealt with by the courts.”
Club-wielding Israeli riot police evicted two Palestinian families from their homes in occupied east Jerusalem on Sunday, defying international protests over Jewish settlement activity in the area. Clashes erupted after police moved in at dawn around the homes in the upmarket Arab district of Sheikh Jarrah following an Israeli court decision ordering the eviction of the 53 Palestinians, including 19 minors.
Israel’s offensive against Hamas in Gaza at the beginning of the year was a “proportional response” to attacks by the Islamist group, the Foreign Ministry said in a defense brief on Operation Cast Lead released Thursday.
Far-right activists distributed fliers to fresh draftees at the Israel Defense Forces induction center in Tel Hashomer on Tuesday urging them not to confide in their commanders and to refrain from cooperating with investigators if they physically abuse Palestinians in the territories.
The US administration has issued a stiff warning to Israel not to build in the area known as E-1, which lies between Jerusalem and the West Bank settlement of Ma’aleh Adumim. Any change in the status quo in E-1 would be “extremely damaging,” even “corrosive,” the message said.
IOA Editor: As the seeming confrontation between the Obama Administration and the Israeli government is presented in a crisis-like light, it is worth noting that, so far, no actions were taken by the US to restrain Israel’s on-going colonization efforts on the West Bank. Clearly, the Administration understands how crucial Israeli development of Area E1 would be to a future Palestinian state – essentially, making it no longer viable. Now, the responsibility for preventing such development from happening falls squarely on the White House.
