http://salem-news.com/articles/october202009/goldstone_as.php
The First Step: Israel Into The Dock
By Dr. Alan Sabrosky
Salem News: October 20, 2009
The UN Human Rights Council (HRC) Resolution based on the Goldstone Report
is a damning condemnation of Israel. The original meaning of being "caught
red-handed" was literally being "caught bloody-handed," with the victim's
blood on one's own hands. In Gaza, Israel has been caught red-handed in that
literal sense, and for the first time in its history, is approaching the
dock in the international court of opinion and, hopefully, of justice as
well.
This case could be a watershed event. For Israel and its US Government (USG)
puppet-patron, the moment of truth in the UN is rapidly approaching. So let
us look at the key elements of the HRC special session that sent this
resolution to the UN General Assembly (UNGA).
Voting Patterns
Voting patterns on the HRC are important, as they provide insights into what
might happen later on the Security Council (UNSC) and in the General
Assembly:
1. Of the permanent members of the Security Council, Russia and China
supported the resolution, Britain and France did not vote (the equivalent of
hiding under the table!), only the US opposed it;
2. France and Norway did not vote for or against the resolution, but they
did support the conclusions of the Goldstone Report;
3. Both major Sub-Saharan African states (Nigeria and South Africa) voted
for it;
4. Two of the Asian "Big Three" (India and China) voted for it, the third
(Japan) just abstained;
5. Two of the usual US supporters in SW and SE Asia (Pakistan and the
Philippines) voted for it; and
6. Three of the four largest Latin American states (Argentina, Brazil,
Chile) voted for it, the fourth (Mexico) abstained.
What makes this significant -- since the US lobbied hard first to keep the
Goldstone Report from even reaching the HRC, and then for others to vote
against the HRC resolution -- is that many states who voted for it, or
abstained, would normally have been in the US corner. This is NOT a good
sign for the US and Israel of how the General Assembly will go, and perhaps
even the Security Council, which could easily have a majority of 10 or 11
supporting the resolution (in whatever form it reaches the them), with
France and Britain either abstaining or not voting. Very bad for the US, for
even though its veto would kill any punishment of Israel there, there would
be enough votes to ask the General Assembly officially to invoke the
"Uniting for Peace Resolution."
And several powerful states would not be at all unhappy to see the US
discomfited here. Russia would take great pleasure from being on the winning
side of a General Assembly vote that turned a US-inspired weapon against its
own creator. China would see it as an opportunity to reaffirm its own
growing prestige, as would India, which in addition has long been a strong
and active supporter of UN peacekeeping operations. Countries like Brazil
and Nigeria have little reason to support the US and none to support Israel,
while even Japan could easily surprise the US -- and take satisfaction from
doing so.
Reservations About the Resolution
US criticism of the HRC resolution should be disregarded, as Washington only
parrots Israel's wishes here. So can the odd criticism that the initial
report lacked an Israeli perspective, simply because Israel refused to
cooperate with Goldstone -- not surprisingly, since the report made it clear
that nothing Israel might have added would have exonerated it in any way.
But other reservations need to be addressed. One is that the resolution did
not mention Hamas. I agree it might have been better to have included
Goldstone's condemnation of Hamas offenses as well, but it is legitimate as
it stands for five reasons: (1) Israel committed the great majority of the
violations; (2) Israel had an overwhelming preponderance of military power;
(3) Palestinians suffered almost all of the death and destruction; (4)
Israel has a long, sordid history of ignoring UN commissions and
resolutions, and of attacking UN facilities and killing UN staff, as when
the clearly marked UNRWA facility in Gaza was bombed; and (5) the HRC focus
is properly on the actions of the oppressor (Israel) and not on those of the
oppressed (the Palestinians).
Another is that it did not accord Israel the right of self-defense. But
Israel's claim to self-defense in its savaging of Gaza is specious, because
Israel -- like all occupiers and oppressors -- has no inherent right of
self-defense against its victims. Who, for instance, would have accepted
Nazi Germany's assertion that its brutal reprisals against the Czechs for
their assassination of a Nazi commander named Reinhard Heydrich was an
exercise in self-defense? No one, and no one should accept Israel's claim,
either.
A third is that holding Israel accountable for its actions will somehow
endanger the Middle East peace process. But there is no peace process,
simply meaningless discussions to the dead end (for Palestinians and the
rest of the region) of Israeli hegemony, and under Netanyahu or any
electable government in Israel, there is not and cannot be one. There will
be an enforced peace imposed from outside of the Middle East, over the
objections and obstruction of Israel, or there will be none at all.
Prospects
Netanyahu's assertion that he will prolong the diplomatic battle over the
Goldstone Report and the subsequent HRC resolution is akin to a lawyer for a
serial murderer trying to delay the trial in the hope that the witnesses
will die of boredom or old age. It is also predictable. Since promises,
excuses and offers of aid no longer suffice, it is inevitable that bluster,
threats and blackmail will come to the forefront.
But Netanyahu knows that AIPAC has too much money for anyone else to
outspend it within America, and the US (if it uses it) has too much muscle
to be ignored by many of the smaller UN members. Give the US six months to
lobby for votes, and this whole thing could fail. If that happens, a unique
opportunity will be lost.
So rather than attempt to evade the certain US veto on the Security Council
and its intransigence throughout this process, confront it head on as soon
as possible in the General Assembly, where there are no vetoes. Explore all
ways of invoking the "Uniting for Peace Resolution" (UNGA 377A) -- this is
the instrument of choice, and its time is now.
Done properly, this could be the start of a real diplomatic revolution on
the path to an enforced peace in Palestine and an end to Israeli oppression
of the Palestinians. But if those countries supporting justice for Palestine
do not act now, while attention is focused and the momentum is building, it
will all have been for nothing. They will have no one to blame for their
failure except themselves.
Alan Sabrosky (Ph.D, University of Michigan) is a ten-year US Marine Corps
veteran and a graduate of the US Army War College. He can be contacted at
docbrosk@comcast.net
***
http://hades.mg.co.za/article/2009-10-23-the-real-outrage-should-be-ours
The real outrage should be ours
NICOLE FRITZ - Executive Eirector of the Southern Africa Litigation
Centre;
Mail & Guardian Online Oct 23 2009 14:55
In the weeks since the publication of the report of the UN fact-finding
mission on the Gaza conflict, headed by Justice Richard Goldstone, a
firestorm of controversy has broken around the report and its authors.
Goldstone, in particular, has come in for vicious criticism -- individuals
like RW Johnson using the occasion to peddle bitter distortions of
Goldstone's past for public consumption (as evidenced last week in the
London Sunday Times).
But that South Africa's Chief Rabbi, Warren Goldstein, writing in South
African and Israeli newspapers last week, would use his position as
spiritual leader of South Africa's Jewish community -- a community in which
Goldstone counts himself -- to allege that Goldstone acted without integrity
and care and that his work represents a disgrace to basic notions of
justice, equality and the rule of law, represents a new level in the attack.
The arguments made by Goldstein against the Goldstone report are by now
well-rehearsed and are to be found in almost every attack on the report:
that the UN's Human Rights Council is biased and that the inclusion of
Christine Chinkin in the mission indicates that the mission itself was
biased. Goldstein does add his own unique perspective: telling us that a
judicial inquiry would have required a far greater time-period, ignoring
that this was explicitly a fact-finding mission, of the type most recently
conducted in Darfur.
These central criticisms have been addressed countless times over. We have
no intention of repeating them here because to do so diverts attention from
the substance of the report which would appear the very object of the
attacks.
We want to be clear: the report documents and condemns in unequivocal terms
the rocket-fire by Hamas and other Palestinian armed groups into Israel, and
no sensible reader of the report can honestly believe that its authors make
common cause with entities they so categorically denounce.
But the report also makes undeniably plain, and thus elicits so much
spurious and distracting criticism, that Israel with its almost unparalleled
firepower, waging war in built-up civilian areas of Gaza, conducted its
operations in a way that can only be understood as a "deliberately
disproportionate attack designed to punish, humiliate and terrorize a
civilian population".
How else to explain the destruction of water treatment facilities, the only
flour-mill in Gaza, egg-producing chicken farms? How to fathom Israeli
soldiers threatening to shoot a wife and her children as they sought to help
her husband, who lay, handcuffed and bleeding to death from a gunshot wounds
already inflicted by Israeli soldiers? How to make sense of the death of 22
family members in a house precision-targeted by Israel, which Israel
explained it had mistaken for a munitions factory next door? Yet in the
remaining twelve days of the siege Israel never sought to target what it
claimed was the real munitions depot.
The outrage of Israeli officials, and their supporters such as Goldstein, is
disingenuous when Israel's own military officials have gone on record
declaring their strategy of disproportionate force -- one General explaining
the decision to inflict great damage and destruction on villages on the
grounds that "from our standpoint, these are not civilian villages, they are
military bases".
The real outrage should be ours -- ordinary civilians the world over. When a
state, with unparalleled firepower consciously blurs the line between
soldier and civilian, none of us is safe. And it is that development, and
not as Rabbi Goldstein alleges of the Goldstone report, that is the real
"disgrace to the most basic notions of justice, equality and the rule of
law".
We wouldn't presume to tell Goldstein about the Jewish faith and its law,
even as he lectures us on his understanding of secular law, but he would do
well to ask that Israel heed the words of that esteemed Israeli philosopher,
Avishai Margalit, writing together with Michael Walzer.
"Conduct your war in the presence of non-combatants on the other side with
the same care as if your citizens were the non-combatants. A guideline like
that should not seem strange to people who are guided by the counterfactual
line from the Passover Haggadah, 'In every generation, a man must regard
himself as if he had come out of Egypt.'"
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