As Israeli bombs fell on the Gaza Strip during its one-sided war between December 27, 2008 and January 18, 2009, millions around the world took to the streets in complete and uncompromising outrage. The level of barbarity in that war, especially as it was conducted against a poor, defenseless and physically trapped nation, united people of every color, race and religion. But among those who seemed utterly unmoved, unreservedly cold were some Palestinian officials in the West Bank.
Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas faced growing outrage at home on Sunday over his decision to withdraw support for a United Nations report that accused Israel of committing war crimes in last winter’s Gaza war.
Mr Abbas’s U-turn is the result of intense US pressure, Palestinian officials said.
The report, by respected South African judge Richard Goldstone, will now lie dormant for at least six months rather than be sent to the UN general assembly with possible recommendations for action.
Israel, which denies the war crimes allegations, has warned that dealing with the Goldstone report now would derail peace efforts.
By Gideon Levy, Haaretz Correspondent, Haaretz/Israel, Sep 24, 2009
It’s as if U.S. President Barack Obama did the least he had to. He “rebuked” Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas. That’s not how a president with star power acts. That is not how a superpower does things. America is again falling down on the job, and Obama is betraying his mission and the promise of his presidency.
True, it’s an anomaly that the United States wants a peace settlement more than the hawkish parties to the conflict, but the leader of the free world has a crucial role, and he is not fulfilling it. Nine months after Obama assumed the presidency, precious time has been totally wasted, in the Middle East at least, and suspicions are growing that the promise of his presidency is on the wane, even if the man is attractive and uproariously funny on David Letterman. Laugh, laugh, but ultimately, where are the results?
Beautiful speeches like the one last night at the UN General Assembly are no longer enough. Being America means enjoying numerous international privileges, but also involves a few obligations. One of them is to look after world peace. Just as it set off for war and occupation in Iraq and Afghanistan in the name of global goals, however dubious, and just as it is working to prevent a nuclear Iran, America is also obligated to act to settle the Middle East conflict. That is not its right but its obligation. Locals don’t want its services in either Iraq or Afghanistan, but America is shedding its own blood there nonetheless. Why? Because it believes this is essential to world security.
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When he was elected, President Obama declared that the Middle East conflict was endangering world peace. Nothing is more true. The potential danger between Jenin, Gaza and Jerusalem is no less serious than that in the killing fields of Kandahar and Mosul. But what is the president doing to eliminate the fuel that feeds international terrorism? Or at least to show that he is doing something? He ruins nine whole months over the issue of a construction freeze in the settlements, and even that pathetic goal was not achieved.
It has to be one way or the other: Either Obama thinks a solution to the conflict isn’t a worthy goal and so should get out of the picture and devote his energies elsewhere or he means what he said and must use all his power and act. Meanwhile, instead of change, we have gotten distressing continuity. Instead of “yes we can,” we have gotten “no we can’t.”
Obama needs to turn things upside-down and break with convention. That’s why he was elected. Two decisive steps would change things completely: an American effort to introduce Hamas into the negotiations and pressure on Israel to end the matter of the occupation. Simplistic? Perhaps, but the complex and gradual solutions haven’t gotten us anywhere up to now. Like it or not, without Hamas peace is not possible. The fact that Obama has put his trust only in Abbas’ Fatah has guaranteed failure, which was foreseeable. History has taught us that you make peace with your worst enemy, not with those who are seen as collaborators by their own people.
You also don’t make peace with half a people, in half of the territory. Obama didn’t even try to break this unnecessary spell and automatically went, unbelievably, down the path of his predecessor, George W. Bush. The president who was willing to engage North Korea and Iran and dares Venezuela and Cuba didn’t even think about entering negotiations with Hamas. Why is it okay to talk to Iran but not to Hamas? Obama, too, thinks Hamas is fit for negotiations only over the fate of a single soldier, Gilad Shalit, but not over the fate of two peoples.
The second step, which is no less essential, is applying pressure on Israel. Given Israel’s total dependence and in the face of its blindness to the price of the occupation, Obama’s friendship with Israel is actually to be judged by the steps he would seemingly take against Israel. As Israel’s isolation in the world only grows, and the danger of Iran threatens the country, Israel’s best friend must pressure its ally and save it from itself. Instead, we got another condemnation of the Goldstone Commission report, this time from the new American ambassador to the United Nations, Susan Rice, who had held the promise of major change.
It’s not too late. True, the initial momentum has been lost, but now, following this week’s “summit of rebukes,” America must hurry up and rebuke itself and mainly ponder how to get out of the booby trap to which it has succumbed. Now, too, only America can (and must) do it.
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Farouk Kaddoumi, a Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) official, has told Al Jazeera he stands by documents that he says show that Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian president, was involved in a conspiracy to assassinate Yasser Arafat, his predecessor.
Abbas’s Fatah party has dismissed Kaddoumi’s claim that Abbas had in a meeting with Ariel Sharon, the ex-Israeli prime minister, discussed Arafat’s killing.
Kaddoumi, the head of the political department of the PLO and the second-most senior leader of Fatah, first levelled the allegations on Tuesday.
On Wednesday, he defended his charge and said: “I have not made accusations against anyone, but I have meeting transcripts which accuse people … Transcripts of meetings between Sharon, Abu Mazen [Abbas], and [former Palestinian security adviser Yasser Arafat Mohammad] Dalan.
By Barak Ravid, Haaretz Correspondent and Haaretz Service (Israel), March 16, 2009
Palestinian Foreign Minister Riad Malki said Sunday that Israel is on the verge of forming an “anti-peace” government that will make future Middle East talks impossible.
“It is very clear from what we have heard, and from what we expect, that we are going to see a far-right Israeli government, an anti-peace government,” Malki said at the start of talks with European Union officials in Brussels.
“And if that is the case, all efforts and all expectations for the renewal of negotiations between Israel and Palestine will be totally wasted,” Malki said.
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The foreign minister called on the international community to pile diplomatic pressure on the next Israeli government, saying, “We have to declare that, sadly, there is no partner on the Israeli side to negotiate with.”
His comments came a day after Benjamin Netanyahu’s right-wing Likud party and Tzipi Livni’s centrist Kadima reopened talks on forming a coalition
government in the aftermath of the close result in the country’s
February 10 parliamentary elections.
Meanwhile, an aide to Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas on Sunday lambasted Prime Minister Ehud Olmert over his assertion that Israel had been prepared to sign a peace agreement, but was held up the Palestinians’ “weakness and lack of courage.”
“The fact that we haven’t reached [a peace agreement] so far is due to the weakness and lack of courage on the part of the Palestinian leaders,” Olmert told ministers during his last weekly cabinet meeting in Jerusalem. “Everything else is just excuses and efforts to derail the talks.”
“We were ready to sign a peace deal but the Palestinians unfortunately did not have the courage to do so,” he said.
Abbas’ aide Nabil Abu Rudeina told AFP that Olmert’s assertion was “completely false.”
“The proposals did not include conditions for the creation of an independent Palestinian state on all Palestinian territory occupied in 1967 with East Jerusalem as its capital,” he said. “Israel did not present a single map and not a single serious position that could lead to a real peace on the base of two states.”
Mere days before the end of his term, Olmert used the platform of the weekly cabinet meeting Sunday morning to present an overview of his administration’s achievements.
Addressing the peace process with the Palestinians, Olmert said that his government had “gone further in the peace negotiations than any previous government.”
He voiced hope that the decades long conflict between Israel and the Palestinians would be resolved in the near future, saying “I have no doubt that the negotiations I’ve held with the Palestinian Authority will result in a peace accord.”
“But we’ll have to make dramatic concessions in order to reach a point of signing an agreement,” he remarked.
Olmert also broke down the achievements of his administration to the cabinet ministers, mentioning “two well known military efforts” referring to the 2006 Second Lebanon War and the recent Operation Cast Lead in Gaza.
“The event in the north [Lebanon border] brought about an unprecedented achievement of quiet in that region of Israel,” the prime minister declared. “In regard to Gaza, we made an important effort that hasn’t been completed yet and we have yet to achieve the full list of goals that we set out to achieve, but we have brought back to the global awareness the might of the Israel Defense Forces and its power of deterrence.”
Analysis by Mel Frykberg | Inter Press Service
RAMALLAH, Feb 6 (IPS) – Despite intensive efforts by Israel, the international community and a number of Arab leaders to weaken and destroy Hamas through economic, punitive and military action, the Islamist organisation continues to be a force to reckon with.
Hamas won free and fair democratic elections in January 2006. The U.S. pushed for these elections, which were monitored by international observers including ex-U.S. president Jimmy Carter, and Israel permitted them to be held.
Hamas has since then been dominant, though it took effective control in June 2007, more than a year after its election victory. The Gaza Strip, which the resistance group controls, took a serious battering during Israel’s 22-day military assault, codenamed Operation Cast Lead.
The coastal territory has also been economically crippled by nearly two years of an Israeli embargo which has hermetically sealed Gaza off from the rest of the world, preventing the import of all but a tiny flow of humanitarian aid and goods.
Israel purportedly carried out the military operation to stop Palestinian rockets from hitting Israeli cities and towns bordering the Gaza Strip.
However, rocket fire on Israel had virtually ceased in the five months of ceasefire between Israel and Hamas which preceded an Israeli cross-border military operation into Gaza on Nov. 4. This operation provoked a barrage of retaliatory missiles on Israel.
Prior to Operation Cast Lead, a delegation of British parliamentarians met with Hamas leaders in Gaza. The parliamentarians were told that Hamas would be prepared to accept Israel’s existence, within the internationally recognised borders of 1967, provided the Jewish state legitimised the rights of Palestinians in return.
Despite the immense scale of death and destruction wrought by Operation Cast Lead, which left over 1,300 Palestinians, mostly civilians dead, rockets continue to be fired at Israel in spite of disproportionate responses from the Israeli Defence Forces (IDF).
Following the recent ceasefire most of Hamas’s leadership emerged from underground bunkers unscathed. The digging of smuggling tunnels for everyday necessities as well as arms has resumed.
Furthermore, there are also growing signs that the Europeans, some Israelis and previous Arab opponents are resigned to factoring Hamas into any political equation to address a resolution of the conflict.
Last week after several days of intensive diplomatic pressure, the Israeli government managed to stymie a French initiative to weaken the Jewish state’s stance on Hamas.
Following a meeting of EU foreign ministers in Brussels, France tried to change a pre-written closing statement released by the ministers regarding the ceasefire between Hamas and Israel.
Paris wanted the statement to say that the EU would be prepared to hold talks with a future Palestinian unity government which included Hamas as long as it agreed to honour the principles of the Israeli-Palestinian peace process.
Additionally, the French delegation to Brussels proposed opening Israeli border crossings into Gaza immediately without any conditions. A previous agreement between Israel and the Palestinian Authority (PA) in 2005 stipulated that the PA had to control the crossings.
However, following intervention by Israel, the Czech Republic – the current holder of the EU presidency – Germany, Italy and the Netherlands pushed the French initiative off the agenda.
Israel viewed the French move as an attempt to get the Quartet for Middle East peace – the UN, the U.S., Russia and the EU – to soften its conditions for international recognition of Hamas.
A senior Israeli official said that since the end of the Gaza operation, his country was concerned about a possible break in European support for the boycott of the Hamas government in Gaza.
U.S. President Barack Obama’s Mideast envoy, George Mitchell, met French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner in Paris recently.
During the meeting the Gaza ceasefire was discussed and Kouchner stressed the need for inter-Palestinian dialogue and for the border crossings into Gaza to be reopened.
Kouchner again suggested France was open to the idea of a unity government if Hamas softened its stance.
Meanwhile, Irish Foreign Minister Michael Martin told reporters in Damascus on Monday that some kind of engagement with Hamas may have to feature in future European Union policy.
Hamas’s erstwhile foe and bitter rival Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, who controls the West Bank, also discussed the issue with French President Nicholas Sarkozy in Paris on Monday.
Abbas too called for a unity Palestinian government and said Hamas’s inclusion was imperative as long as it recognised his supreme authority.
On Monday Sarkozy also met Qatar’s Prime Minister, Sheik Hamad bin Jassem Al-Thani, whose Persian Gulf country has emerged as a regional mediator since helping to resolve a political crisis in Lebanon last year. Al-Thani insisted Hamas should not be sidelined from peace efforts.
“We must work for a government of national unity between the Palestinians. There should not be efforts to delete or distance one of the Palestinian parties present on the ground,” Al-Thani told reporters.
Israeli columnist and analyst Akiva Elder noted in the daily Haaretz that Israel’s continual denial of the reality of Hamas as a legitimate political entity was short-sighted.
For 20 years Israel has tried to destroy the movement using carrots and sticks alternately. The only difference between the ruling Kadima party’s leader and minister of foreign affairs, Tzipi Livni, and the more right-wing opposition Likud party leader Binyamin Netanyahu is the size of the clubs to be used, argued Eldar.
“Precisely because of the many children killed in Gaza, Cast Lead has been assured a place of honour in the ethos of the struggle of the Palestinian David, armed with primitive Qassams, and the Israeli Goliath, with his F-16s,” said Eldar.
“When they hear the proud declarations of Israel’s leaders, to the effect that deterrence has been restored, Hamas’s leaders certainly laugh themselves to death, and not just because of the rockets that continue to fall on the people of Ashkelon.
“The threat of a few more bombs on Gaza deters them like the death penalty deters a suicide bomber on the way to carry out an attack,” said Eldar.
Only a long-term ceasefire, it seems, accompanied by a real diplomatic context, can pull the rug of popular support out from under Hamas and restore it to its natural proportions.
| Al Jazeera, Sep 27, 2008 |
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The Palestinian president and Arab countries have criticised Israel over its settlement expansion policy in the West Bank during debates at the United Nations. In a speech to the General Assembly on Friday, Mahmoud Abbas deplored as “racial terrorism” what he said were daily attacks by Israeli settlers on Palestinian civilians, and urged the international community to take action. “[The settlements] will not allow for the emergence of a viable Palestinian state because they divide the West Bank into at least four cantons,” he said. Prince Saud al-Faisal, the Saudi foreign minister, whose country formally called for the debate, said Israel must halt settlement activity and obey international law. “Settlement makes the creation of a viable Palestinian state impossible,” he said. “The only path to Israel’s security is peace and it is time for Israel to understand that it cannot continue to exempt itself from behaving in accordance to international law,” Prince Saud said. The Palestinian Authority, Saudi Arabia and the Arab League urged the UN Security Council to encourage the faltering peace process by demanding an end to Jewish settlements on Palestinian land. In August, Israel approved the construction of 400 new homes in a Jewish neighbourhood in east Jerusalem and invited bids for the construction of another 416 settler homes in the occupied West Bank. The Middle East diplomatic Quartet on Friday pressed Israel and the Palestinians to seal a peace deal this year, but also expressed “deep concern” over continuing settlement expansion in the West Bank. A ministerial session of Quartet members, the US, Russia, the European Union and the UN, ended with a call on the parties “to make every effort to conclude an agreement before the end of 2008”. Quartet members “expressed deep concern about increasing [Israeli] settlement activity, which has a damaging impact on the negotiating environment and is an impediment to economic recovery and called on Israel to freeze all settlement activity.” They also reiterated that the parties “must avoid actions that undermine confidence and could prejudice the outcome of the negotiations”. In Annapolis, Maryland last November, Israel and the Palestinians revived negotiations toward resolving core problems such as the status of Jerusalem, the borders of a future Palestinian state and refugees, by the end of 2008. Settlement expansion Settlement expansion has nearly doubled since 2007, despite Israel’s pledge to freeze such activities, Peace Now, the Israeli watchdog, said last month. “The situation necessitates a serious stand by the international community and a clear call upon Israel to begin withdrawing its settlers and dismantling its settlements,” Abbas said.
“It was recognised [in Annapolis] that this was a prerequisite for allowing negotiations towards ending the conflict to progress,” he said.But Gabriela Shalev, Israel’s UN Ambassador, told council members that while the settlements are a “delicate issue,” they “are not an obstacle to peace”. “They have been used here as another instrument to bash Israel instead of addressing the realities on the ground,” she said. “There is much that those in the region can do to support that peace process, but it is not about more UN meetings. “It is, first and foremost, about commitment to prepare the people of the region for the price of peace, to accept the true meaning of peace,” Shalev said. The West Bank has been under military occupation by Israel since 1967 and at least 400,000 Israelis have been settled in the territory, including East Jerusalem. The settlements are illegal under international law, although Israel disputes this. Bernard Kouchner, the French foreign minister, whose country currently chairs the European Union, restated the EU view that Israeli settlements, “wherever in the occupied Palestinian territories, are illegal under international law.” He added that settlement “harms the credibility of the process started in Annapolis and affects the viability of the future Palestinian state.” Reaching out Condoleezza Rice, the US secretary of state, shifted the focus of the debate away from settlements, instead urging Arab countries to “consider ways they might reach out to Israel”. She said the Arab world needed to fully understand that: “Israel belongs to the Middle East and will remain” in the Middle East. Meanwhile, a group of 21 leading aid agencies said on Thursday that the Middle East Quartet was “losing its grip” on the peace process and must radically revise its approach. The aid agencies said the Quartet has failed to hold Israel to account for expanding settlements in the West Bank. |
Peace and Justice Post 
Accessories to Israel’s war crimes
October 23, 2009Eric Ruder looks at the Goldstone report documentation of war crimes committed during Israel’s Gaza offensive–and the criticism unleashed by PA President Mahmoud Abbas’ willingness to help Israel suppress the report.
Socialist Worker, October 22, 2009
Families returned to what was left of their homes in Jabalia, Gaza
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.
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Tags:Eric Ruder, Goldstone report, Israel's Gaza offensive, Palestinian Authority's complicity, President Mahmoud Abbas, war crimes
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