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What the grandchildren of Holocaust survivors do to Palestinians?
Showing posts with label Israeli War Criemes. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Israeli War Criemes. Show all posts
Monday, March 30, 2009
IDF in Gaza: Killing civilians, vandalism, and lax rules of engagement
Friday, March 27, 2009
'IDF troops used 11-year-old boy as human shield in Gaza'
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| By Natasha Mozgovaya, Haaretz Correspondent, and News Agencies | |||||
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Israel Defense Forces soldiers used an 11-year-old Palestinian boy as a human shield during the war against Hamas in the Gaza Strip, a group of UN human rights experts said Monday. IDF troops ordered the boy to walk in front of soldiers being fired on in the Gaza neighborhood of Tel al-Hawa and enter buildings before them, said the UN secretary-general's envoy for protecting children in armed conflict. Radhika Coomaraswamy said the incident on Jan. 15, after Israeli tanks had rolled into the neighborhood, was a violation of Israeli and international law.
Coomaraswamy accused Israeli soldiers of shooting Palestinian children, bulldozing a home with a woman and child still inside, and shelling a building they had ordered civilians into a day earlier. Israel's diplomatic mission in Geneva said it would respond to the allegations later Monday at a session of the UN Human Rights Council. There also have been allegations that the militant group Hamas used human shields, but UN human rights experts have yet to verify those, said Coomaraswamy. "Violations were reported on a daily basis, too numerous to list," said Coomaraswamy. Coomaraswamy, who visited Gaza and Israel for five days in February, said her list constituted "just a few examples of the hundreds of incidents that have been documented and verified" by UN officials who were in the territory. She was the only one of the nine UN experts who compiled the report that was allowed into Gaza following the war. The experts covered issues ranging from health and hunger to women's rights and arbitrary executions. The experts also noted reports that Hamas had committed other abuses. They said Hamas had been unwilling to investigate the allegations. The report called for Israel to end its blockade of the impoverished territory, where they said more than 90 percent of people are dependent on food aid; allow Palestinians to move between Gaza and the West Bank; and investigate human rights abuses that occurred during the conflict. Coomaraswamy has been a UN undersecretary-general since April 2006. She formerly headed the Sri Lanka Human Rights Commission and reported as a UN special investigator on violence against women. Coomaraswamy's comments formed part of a much longer report from nine UN investigators including specialists on the right to health, to food, to adequate housing and education and on summary executions and violence against women. All cited violations by Israel - and in some cases by the Hamas Islamic movement that controls Gaza - during the invasion from December 27 until January 17 which Israeli leaders say was launched to stop rocket attacks by Hamas from the territory. Palestinian officials say 1,434 people in Gaza - 960 of them civilians - were killed in the fighting, a figure Israel contests. The report from the nine gave the total as 1,440, saying of these 431 were children and 114 women. The overall report was criticized in the 47-nation Council by Israel's ambassador Aharon Leshno Yar, who said it "wilfully ignores and downplays the terrorist and other threats we face," and the use by Hamas of human shields. Leshno Yar said the 43-page document was part of a pattern of "demonizing Israel" in the Council - where an informal bloc of Islamic and African nations usually backed by Russia, China and Cuba has a built-in majority. Another report presented to the Council on Monday came from Robert Falk, a U.S. academic and the body's special rapporteur on human rights in the occupied Palestinian territories. Falk, whom Israel barred from entry last year after accusing him of bias and prejudice, said Israel had subjected civilians in Gaza to "an inhuman form of warfare that kills, maims and inflicts mental harm." His report, in which he called for an independent experts group to probe possible war crimes by Israel and Hamas and also suggested that the UN Security Council set up an ad hoc criminal tribunal, was issued late last week. State Department spokesman Robert Wood was asked whether the U.S. supports Falk's call for an independent inquiry into possible war crimes in Gaza by both Israel and Hamas. "We've expressed our concern many times about the special rapporteur's views on dealing with that question, and we've found the rapporteur's views to be anything but fair. We find them to be biased. We've made that very clear," said Wood. | |||||
Thursday, March 05, 2009
Israel boycott movement gains momentum
Mel Frykberg, The Electronic Intifada, 4 March 2009
RAMALLAH (IPS) - "Standing United with the People of Gaza" is the theme of this week's Israel Apartheid Week (IAW), which kicked off in Toronto and another 39 cities across the globe Sunday.
A movement to boycott Israeli goods, culture and academic institutions is gaining momentum as Geneva prepares to host the UN's Anti-Racism Conference, Durban II next month amidst swirling controversy.
Both Canada and the US are boycotting the Durban II conference in protest over what they perceive as a strongly anti-Israel agenda.
The first UN Anti-Racism conference, held in the South African city Durban in 2001, saw the Israeli and US delegates storm out of the conference, accusing other delegates of focusing too strongly on Israel.
United States and Canadian support might have offered some comfort for Israel. However, international criticism of Israel's three-week bloody offensive into Gaza, which left more than 1,300 Palestinians dead and thousands more wounded, most of them civilian, has breathed fresh life into a boycott, divest, sanctions (BDS) campaign.
The BDS campaign followed a 2005 appeal from more than 170 Palestinian civil society groups to launch a divestment campaign "as a way of bringing nonviolent pressure to bear on the state of Israel to end its violations of international law."
In the wake of the BDS campaign, critics of Israel have lashed out at what they see as parallels between South Africa's former apartheid system and Israeli racism.
They point to Israel's discriminatory treatment of ethnic Palestinians within Israel who hold Israeli passports, and the extensive human rights abuses against Palestinians in the occupied territories by Israeli security forces.
During the apartheid era, ties between Israel and South Africa were extremely strong, with Israel helping to train South Africa's security forces as well as supplying the regime in Pretoria with weapons.
Meanwhile, Toronto, where the Israel Apartheid Week movement was born, will hold forums, film shows, cultural events and street protests to mark IAW week. One of the guest speakers is former South African intelligence minister Ronnie Kasrils.
Kasrils is no stranger to controversy. His parents fled from Tzarist Russian pogroms carried out against Jews, and immigrated to South Africa at the beginning of the last century.
During white rule, as a member of the African National Congress (ANC), working both in exile and underground in South Africa, he was reviled by many white South Africans as a "terrorist."
He has also been labeled a self-hating Jew by many Israelis and South African Jews due to the strong stand he and the ANC have taken against Israel's policies.
Meanwhile, in New York, prominent IAW activist Nir Harel, a member of Israel's Anarchists Against the Wall, will also be courting controversy. His group regularly protests against Israel's separation barrier, which divides Israel proper from the Palestinian West Bank.
The barrier deviates significantly from the green line, the internationally-recognized boundary between Israel and the West Bank, into occupied Palestinian territory where it has swallowed huge amounts of land, dispossessing farmers from their agricultural crops.
Another Israeli activist, Matan Cohen, has been central in the first US college implementing a divestment campaign against Israel. Hampshire College in Massachusetts called for divestment from over 200 companies that the college says is responsible for violating its socially responsible investment policies in Israel.
The companies which provide the Israeli military with equipment and services in the occupied West Bank and Gaza include Caterpillar, United Technologies, General Electric, ITT Corporation, Motorola and Terex.
A Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) petition for divestment was supported by more than 800 students, professors and alumni at the college, that has only 1,350 students.
Hampshire College may be small but it has been big in social activism. It was also the first US educational institution to divest from South Africa, ten years before other universities and colleges followed suit.
US campus activism is spreading. The University of Rochester in New York and members of the community are also involved in boycott activities.
Students from Macalester College, a liberal arts college located in St. Paul, Minnesota, occupied the Minnesota Trade Office in January and then picketed there 6 February, demanding that the state end all trade with Israel. New York University students too began a divestment campaign.
Professors and university employees in Quebec, Canada, endorsed the Palestinian Federation of Unions of University Professors and Employees' call to boycott Israel.
SJP's actions at Hampshire College follow similar moves by the National Association of Teachers in Further and Higher Education in the UK.
In London, students held sit-ins at Goldsmith University and the London School of Economics, among other institutions. Similar protests have spread throughout the UK, with some winning concessions from university officials.
At Manchester University, about a thousand students joined a campaign equating Israel with apartheid-era South Africa, and called on the administration and student union to boycott Israeli companies and support Gaza and the BDS movement.
In Australia the University of Western Sydney's Student Association recently joined the international BDS campaign. International trade union support for political action against Israel has been seen from Spain to South Africa.
The South African Transport and Allied Workers Union, under directive of the Council of South African Trade Unions, refused recently to unload an Israeli ship which docked in Durban, despite threats and pressure from both management and the Israeli lobby.
The Irish Congress of Trade Unions, with 600,000 members in 55 unions, is preparing to start a boycott of Israeli goods.
Meanwhile, the biggest trade union in Canada's Ontario province, the Canadian Union of Public Employees (CUPE), was forced under pressure to moderate its call for a boycott of all academic institutions in Israel. Instead it called for a boycott of Israeli institutions engaged in research which aided the Israeli military.
RAMALLAH (IPS) - "Standing United with the People of Gaza" is the theme of this week's Israel Apartheid Week (IAW), which kicked off in Toronto and another 39 cities across the globe Sunday.
A movement to boycott Israeli goods, culture and academic institutions is gaining momentum as Geneva prepares to host the UN's Anti-Racism Conference, Durban II next month amidst swirling controversy.
Both Canada and the US are boycotting the Durban II conference in protest over what they perceive as a strongly anti-Israel agenda.
The first UN Anti-Racism conference, held in the South African city Durban in 2001, saw the Israeli and US delegates storm out of the conference, accusing other delegates of focusing too strongly on Israel.
United States and Canadian support might have offered some comfort for Israel. However, international criticism of Israel's three-week bloody offensive into Gaza, which left more than 1,300 Palestinians dead and thousands more wounded, most of them civilian, has breathed fresh life into a boycott, divest, sanctions (BDS) campaign.
The BDS campaign followed a 2005 appeal from more than 170 Palestinian civil society groups to launch a divestment campaign "as a way of bringing nonviolent pressure to bear on the state of Israel to end its violations of international law."
In the wake of the BDS campaign, critics of Israel have lashed out at what they see as parallels between South Africa's former apartheid system and Israeli racism.
They point to Israel's discriminatory treatment of ethnic Palestinians within Israel who hold Israeli passports, and the extensive human rights abuses against Palestinians in the occupied territories by Israeli security forces.
During the apartheid era, ties between Israel and South Africa were extremely strong, with Israel helping to train South Africa's security forces as well as supplying the regime in Pretoria with weapons.
Meanwhile, Toronto, where the Israel Apartheid Week movement was born, will hold forums, film shows, cultural events and street protests to mark IAW week. One of the guest speakers is former South African intelligence minister Ronnie Kasrils.
Kasrils is no stranger to controversy. His parents fled from Tzarist Russian pogroms carried out against Jews, and immigrated to South Africa at the beginning of the last century.
During white rule, as a member of the African National Congress (ANC), working both in exile and underground in South Africa, he was reviled by many white South Africans as a "terrorist."
He has also been labeled a self-hating Jew by many Israelis and South African Jews due to the strong stand he and the ANC have taken against Israel's policies.
Meanwhile, in New York, prominent IAW activist Nir Harel, a member of Israel's Anarchists Against the Wall, will also be courting controversy. His group regularly protests against Israel's separation barrier, which divides Israel proper from the Palestinian West Bank.
The barrier deviates significantly from the green line, the internationally-recognized boundary between Israel and the West Bank, into occupied Palestinian territory where it has swallowed huge amounts of land, dispossessing farmers from their agricultural crops.
Another Israeli activist, Matan Cohen, has been central in the first US college implementing a divestment campaign against Israel. Hampshire College in Massachusetts called for divestment from over 200 companies that the college says is responsible for violating its socially responsible investment policies in Israel.
The companies which provide the Israeli military with equipment and services in the occupied West Bank and Gaza include Caterpillar, United Technologies, General Electric, ITT Corporation, Motorola and Terex.
A Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) petition for divestment was supported by more than 800 students, professors and alumni at the college, that has only 1,350 students.
Hampshire College may be small but it has been big in social activism. It was also the first US educational institution to divest from South Africa, ten years before other universities and colleges followed suit.
US campus activism is spreading. The University of Rochester in New York and members of the community are also involved in boycott activities.
Students from Macalester College, a liberal arts college located in St. Paul, Minnesota, occupied the Minnesota Trade Office in January and then picketed there 6 February, demanding that the state end all trade with Israel. New York University students too began a divestment campaign.
Professors and university employees in Quebec, Canada, endorsed the Palestinian Federation of Unions of University Professors and Employees' call to boycott Israel.
SJP's actions at Hampshire College follow similar moves by the National Association of Teachers in Further and Higher Education in the UK.
In London, students held sit-ins at Goldsmith University and the London School of Economics, among other institutions. Similar protests have spread throughout the UK, with some winning concessions from university officials.
At Manchester University, about a thousand students joined a campaign equating Israel with apartheid-era South Africa, and called on the administration and student union to boycott Israeli companies and support Gaza and the BDS movement.
In Australia the University of Western Sydney's Student Association recently joined the international BDS campaign. International trade union support for political action against Israel has been seen from Spain to South Africa.
The South African Transport and Allied Workers Union, under directive of the Council of South African Trade Unions, refused recently to unload an Israeli ship which docked in Durban, despite threats and pressure from both management and the Israeli lobby.
The Irish Congress of Trade Unions, with 600,000 members in 55 unions, is preparing to start a boycott of Israeli goods.
Meanwhile, the biggest trade union in Canada's Ontario province, the Canadian Union of Public Employees (CUPE), was forced under pressure to moderate its call for a boycott of all academic institutions in Israel. Instead it called for a boycott of Israeli institutions engaged in research which aided the Israeli military.
Did Clinton sabotage a Palestinian reconciliation?
Hasan Abu Nimah and Ali Abunimah, The Electronic Intifada, 4 March 2009
Hillary Clinton speaks at a press conference at the International Conference in support of the Palestinian Economy and Reconstruction of Gaza, 2 March 2009. (Victoria Hazou/Sipa Press)
Still reeling from the Israeli massacres in the occupied Gaza Strip, Palestinians have lately had little to celebrate. So the strong start to intra-Palestinian reconciliation talks in Cairo last week provided a glimmer of hope.
An end to the schism between the resistance and the elected but internationally-boycotted Hamas government on the one hand, and the Western-backed Fatah faction on the other, seemed within reach. But the good feeling came to a sudden end after what looked like a coordinated assault by United States Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, European Union High Representative Javier Solana, and Fatah leader Mahmoud Abbas whose term as president of the Palestinian Authority (PA) expired on 9 January.
On Friday 27 February, the leaders of 13 Palestinian factions, principal among them Hamas and Fatah, announced they had set out a framework for reconciliation. In talks chaired by Egypt's powerful intelligence chief Omar Suleiman, the Palestinians established committees to discuss forming a "national unity government," reforming the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) to include all factions, legislative and presidential elections, reorganizing security forces on a nonpolitical basis, and a steering group comprised of all faction leaders. Amid a jubilant mood, the talks were adjourned until 10 March.
Then the blows began to strike the fragile Palestinian body politic. The first came from Clinton just before she boarded her plane to attend a summit in the Egyptian resort of Sharm al-Sheikh ostensibly about pledging billions in aid to rebuild Gaza.
Clinton was asked by Voice of America (VOA) whether she was encouraged by the Cairo unity talks. She responded that in any reconciliation or "move toward a unified [Palestinian] Authority," Hamas must be bound by "the conditions that have been set forth by the Quartet," the self-appointed group comprising representatives of the US, EU, UN and Russia. These conditions, Clinton stated, require that Hamas "must renounce violence, recognize Israel, and abide by previous commitments." Otherwise, the secretary warned, "I don't think it will result in the kind of positive step forward either for the Palestinian people or as a vehicle for a reinvigorated effort to obtain peace that leads to a Palestinian state."
The next strikes came from Ramallah. With the EU's top diplomat Solana standing next to him, Abbas insisted that any national unity government would have to adhere to the "two-state vision" and abide by "international conditions and signed agreements." He then demanded that Gaza reconstruction aid be channeled exclusively through the Western-backed, but financially bankrupt and politically depleted PA. Solana affirmed, "I would like to insist in agreement with [Abbas] that the mechanism used to deploy the money is the one that represents the Palestinian Authority." Solana fully endorsed the campaign waged by Abbas ever since the destruction of Gaza that the PA, plagued by endemic corruption, and which only pays salaries of workers deemed politically loyal, be in sole charge of the funds, rather than neutral international organizations as Hamas and others have suggested.
Was the Sharm al-Sheikh summit then really about helping the people of Gaza or was it about exploiting their suffering to continue the long war against Hamas by other means? Indeed, Clinton had already confirmed the politicization of reconstruction aid when she told VOA, "We want to strengthen a Palestinian partner willing to accept the conditions outlined by the Quartet," and, "our aid dollars will flow based on these principles."
Hamas warned that Clinton's and Abbas's statements set Palestinian reconciliation efforts back to square one. "Hamas will not recognize Israel or the Quartet's conditions," said one spokesman Ismail Radwan, while another, Ayman Taha, said Hamas would "reject any preconditions in the formation of the unity government." Khaled Meshal, head of the movement's political bureau, insisted that the basis for national unity must remain "protecting the resistance and the rights of the Palestinian people."
Such statements will of course be used to paint Hamas as extremist, intransigent and anti-peace. After all, what could be more reasonable than demanding that any party involved in a peace process commit itself to renouncing violence, recognizing its enemy, and abiding by pre-existing agreements? The problem is that the Quartet conditions are designed to eliminate the Palestinians' few bargaining chips and render them defenseless before continuous Israeli occupation, colonization, blockade and armed attacks.
None of the Western diplomats imposing conditions on Hamas have demanded that Israel renounce its aggressive violence. Indeed, as Amnesty International reported on 20 February, the weapons Israel used to kill, wound and incinerate 7,000 persons in Gaza, half of them women and children, were largely supplied by Western countries, mainly the US. In a vivid illustration, Amnesty reported that its field researchers "found fragments and components from munitions used by the Israeli army -- including many that are US-made -- littering school playgrounds, in hospitals and in people's homes."
For Palestinians to "renounce violence" under these conditions is to renounce the right to self-defense, something no occupied people can do. Palestinians will certainly note that while Abbas stands impotently by, neither the US nor the EU have rushed to the defense of the peaceful, unarmed Palestinians shot at daily by Israeli occupation forces as they try to protect their land from seizure in the West Bank. Nor has Abbas' renunciation of resistance helped the 1,500 residents in the East Jerusalem neighborhood of Silwan whose homes Israeli occupation authorities recently confirmed their intention to demolish in order to make way for a Jewish-themed park. A cessation of violence must be mutual, total and reciprocal -- something Hamas has repeatedly offered and Israel has stubbornly rejected.
While Israeli violence is tolerated or applauded, Israel's leaders are not held to any political preconditions. Prime minister-designate Benjamin Netanyahu emphatically rejects a sovereign Palestinian state and -- like his predecessors -- rejects all other Palestinian rights enshrined in international law and UN resolutions. When told to stop building illegal settlements on occupied land, Israel responds simply that this is a matter for negotiation and to prove the point it revealed plans in February to add thousands of Jewish-only homes to its West Bank colonies.
Yet Quartet envoy Tony Blair, asked by Al-Jazeera International on 1 March how his masters would deal with a rejectionist Israeli government, said, "We have to work with whoever the Israeli people elect, let's test it out not just assume it won't work." Unless Palestinians are considered an inferior race, the same logic ought to apply to their elected leaders, but they were never given a chance.
It is ludicrous to demand that the stateless Palestinian people unconditionally recognize the legitimacy of the entity that dispossessed them and occupies them, that itself has no declared borders and that continues to violently expand its territory at their expense. If Palestinians are ever to recognize Israel in any form, that can only be an outcome of negotiations in which Palestinian rights are fully recognized, not a precondition for them.
During last year's US election campaign, Clinton claimed she helped bring peace to Northern Ireland during her husband's administration. Yet the conditions she now imposes on Hamas are exactly like those that the British long imposed on the Irish nationalist party Sinn Fein, thereby blocking peace negotiations. President Bill Clinton -- against strenuous British objections -- helped overturn these obstacles by among other things granting a US visa to Sinn Fein president Gerry Adams, whose party the British once demonized as Israel now demonizes Hamas. Like Tony Blair, who as British prime minister first authorized public talks with Sinn Fein, Hillary Clinton knows that the negotiations in Ireland could not have succeeded if any party had been forced to submit to the political preconditions of its adversaries.
Former British and Irish peace negotiators including Nobel Peace Prize winner John Hume, and former Israeli foreign minister Shlomo Ben-Ami made similar points in a 26 February letter they co-signed in The Times of London. "Whether we like it or not," the letter states, "Hamas will not go away. Since its victory in democratic elections in 2006, Hamas has sustained its support in Palestinian society despite attempts to destroy it through economic blockades, political boycotts and military incursions." The signatories called for engagement with the movement, affirming that "The Quartet conditions imposed on Hamas set an unworkable threshold from which to commence negotiations."
Those who claim to be peacemakers should heed this advice. They should allow Palestinians to form a national consensus without external interference and blackmail. They should respect democratic mandates. They should stop imposing grossly unfair conditions on the weaker side while cowering in fear of offending the strong, and they should stop the cynical exploitation of humanitarian aid for political manipulation and subversion.
There are many in the region who were encouraged by US President Barack Obama's appointment of former Northern Ireland mediator Senator George Mitchell as Middle East envoy. But in all other respects the new president has continued the Bush administration's disastrous policies. It is not too late to change course, for persisting in these errors will guarantee only more failure and bloodshed.
Hasan Abu Nimah is the former permanent representative of Jordan at the United Nations.
Co-founder of The Electronic Intifada, Ali Abunimah is author of One Country: A Bold Proposal to End the Israeli-Palestinian Impasse (Metropolitan Books, 2006).
Hillary Clinton speaks at a press conference at the International Conference in support of the Palestinian Economy and Reconstruction of Gaza, 2 March 2009. (Victoria Hazou/Sipa Press)
Still reeling from the Israeli massacres in the occupied Gaza Strip, Palestinians have lately had little to celebrate. So the strong start to intra-Palestinian reconciliation talks in Cairo last week provided a glimmer of hope.
An end to the schism between the resistance and the elected but internationally-boycotted Hamas government on the one hand, and the Western-backed Fatah faction on the other, seemed within reach. But the good feeling came to a sudden end after what looked like a coordinated assault by United States Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, European Union High Representative Javier Solana, and Fatah leader Mahmoud Abbas whose term as president of the Palestinian Authority (PA) expired on 9 January.
On Friday 27 February, the leaders of 13 Palestinian factions, principal among them Hamas and Fatah, announced they had set out a framework for reconciliation. In talks chaired by Egypt's powerful intelligence chief Omar Suleiman, the Palestinians established committees to discuss forming a "national unity government," reforming the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) to include all factions, legislative and presidential elections, reorganizing security forces on a nonpolitical basis, and a steering group comprised of all faction leaders. Amid a jubilant mood, the talks were adjourned until 10 March.
Then the blows began to strike the fragile Palestinian body politic. The first came from Clinton just before she boarded her plane to attend a summit in the Egyptian resort of Sharm al-Sheikh ostensibly about pledging billions in aid to rebuild Gaza.
Clinton was asked by Voice of America (VOA) whether she was encouraged by the Cairo unity talks. She responded that in any reconciliation or "move toward a unified [Palestinian] Authority," Hamas must be bound by "the conditions that have been set forth by the Quartet," the self-appointed group comprising representatives of the US, EU, UN and Russia. These conditions, Clinton stated, require that Hamas "must renounce violence, recognize Israel, and abide by previous commitments." Otherwise, the secretary warned, "I don't think it will result in the kind of positive step forward either for the Palestinian people or as a vehicle for a reinvigorated effort to obtain peace that leads to a Palestinian state."
The next strikes came from Ramallah. With the EU's top diplomat Solana standing next to him, Abbas insisted that any national unity government would have to adhere to the "two-state vision" and abide by "international conditions and signed agreements." He then demanded that Gaza reconstruction aid be channeled exclusively through the Western-backed, but financially bankrupt and politically depleted PA. Solana affirmed, "I would like to insist in agreement with [Abbas] that the mechanism used to deploy the money is the one that represents the Palestinian Authority." Solana fully endorsed the campaign waged by Abbas ever since the destruction of Gaza that the PA, plagued by endemic corruption, and which only pays salaries of workers deemed politically loyal, be in sole charge of the funds, rather than neutral international organizations as Hamas and others have suggested.
Was the Sharm al-Sheikh summit then really about helping the people of Gaza or was it about exploiting their suffering to continue the long war against Hamas by other means? Indeed, Clinton had already confirmed the politicization of reconstruction aid when she told VOA, "We want to strengthen a Palestinian partner willing to accept the conditions outlined by the Quartet," and, "our aid dollars will flow based on these principles."
Hamas warned that Clinton's and Abbas's statements set Palestinian reconciliation efforts back to square one. "Hamas will not recognize Israel or the Quartet's conditions," said one spokesman Ismail Radwan, while another, Ayman Taha, said Hamas would "reject any preconditions in the formation of the unity government." Khaled Meshal, head of the movement's political bureau, insisted that the basis for national unity must remain "protecting the resistance and the rights of the Palestinian people."
Such statements will of course be used to paint Hamas as extremist, intransigent and anti-peace. After all, what could be more reasonable than demanding that any party involved in a peace process commit itself to renouncing violence, recognizing its enemy, and abiding by pre-existing agreements? The problem is that the Quartet conditions are designed to eliminate the Palestinians' few bargaining chips and render them defenseless before continuous Israeli occupation, colonization, blockade and armed attacks.
None of the Western diplomats imposing conditions on Hamas have demanded that Israel renounce its aggressive violence. Indeed, as Amnesty International reported on 20 February, the weapons Israel used to kill, wound and incinerate 7,000 persons in Gaza, half of them women and children, were largely supplied by Western countries, mainly the US. In a vivid illustration, Amnesty reported that its field researchers "found fragments and components from munitions used by the Israeli army -- including many that are US-made -- littering school playgrounds, in hospitals and in people's homes."
For Palestinians to "renounce violence" under these conditions is to renounce the right to self-defense, something no occupied people can do. Palestinians will certainly note that while Abbas stands impotently by, neither the US nor the EU have rushed to the defense of the peaceful, unarmed Palestinians shot at daily by Israeli occupation forces as they try to protect their land from seizure in the West Bank. Nor has Abbas' renunciation of resistance helped the 1,500 residents in the East Jerusalem neighborhood of Silwan whose homes Israeli occupation authorities recently confirmed their intention to demolish in order to make way for a Jewish-themed park. A cessation of violence must be mutual, total and reciprocal -- something Hamas has repeatedly offered and Israel has stubbornly rejected.
While Israeli violence is tolerated or applauded, Israel's leaders are not held to any political preconditions. Prime minister-designate Benjamin Netanyahu emphatically rejects a sovereign Palestinian state and -- like his predecessors -- rejects all other Palestinian rights enshrined in international law and UN resolutions. When told to stop building illegal settlements on occupied land, Israel responds simply that this is a matter for negotiation and to prove the point it revealed plans in February to add thousands of Jewish-only homes to its West Bank colonies.
Yet Quartet envoy Tony Blair, asked by Al-Jazeera International on 1 March how his masters would deal with a rejectionist Israeli government, said, "We have to work with whoever the Israeli people elect, let's test it out not just assume it won't work." Unless Palestinians are considered an inferior race, the same logic ought to apply to their elected leaders, but they were never given a chance.
It is ludicrous to demand that the stateless Palestinian people unconditionally recognize the legitimacy of the entity that dispossessed them and occupies them, that itself has no declared borders and that continues to violently expand its territory at their expense. If Palestinians are ever to recognize Israel in any form, that can only be an outcome of negotiations in which Palestinian rights are fully recognized, not a precondition for them.
During last year's US election campaign, Clinton claimed she helped bring peace to Northern Ireland during her husband's administration. Yet the conditions she now imposes on Hamas are exactly like those that the British long imposed on the Irish nationalist party Sinn Fein, thereby blocking peace negotiations. President Bill Clinton -- against strenuous British objections -- helped overturn these obstacles by among other things granting a US visa to Sinn Fein president Gerry Adams, whose party the British once demonized as Israel now demonizes Hamas. Like Tony Blair, who as British prime minister first authorized public talks with Sinn Fein, Hillary Clinton knows that the negotiations in Ireland could not have succeeded if any party had been forced to submit to the political preconditions of its adversaries.
Former British and Irish peace negotiators including Nobel Peace Prize winner John Hume, and former Israeli foreign minister Shlomo Ben-Ami made similar points in a 26 February letter they co-signed in The Times of London. "Whether we like it or not," the letter states, "Hamas will not go away. Since its victory in democratic elections in 2006, Hamas has sustained its support in Palestinian society despite attempts to destroy it through economic blockades, political boycotts and military incursions." The signatories called for engagement with the movement, affirming that "The Quartet conditions imposed on Hamas set an unworkable threshold from which to commence negotiations."
Those who claim to be peacemakers should heed this advice. They should allow Palestinians to form a national consensus without external interference and blackmail. They should respect democratic mandates. They should stop imposing grossly unfair conditions on the weaker side while cowering in fear of offending the strong, and they should stop the cynical exploitation of humanitarian aid for political manipulation and subversion.
There are many in the region who were encouraged by US President Barack Obama's appointment of former Northern Ireland mediator Senator George Mitchell as Middle East envoy. But in all other respects the new president has continued the Bush administration's disastrous policies. It is not too late to change course, for persisting in these errors will guarantee only more failure and bloodshed.
Hasan Abu Nimah is the former permanent representative of Jordan at the United Nations.
Co-founder of The Electronic Intifada, Ali Abunimah is author of One Country: A Bold Proposal to End the Israeli-Palestinian Impasse (Metropolitan Books, 2006).
Friday, February 20, 2009
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