Lessons Learned or Mistakes Repeated?
The International Community and 52 Years
ofIsraeli-Palestinian Conflict
The end of every year
brings about a spate of anniversaries concerning the rights of the
Palestinian people and their relationship with the
international community. These dates include: 22 November (GA
Resolution 3236 - Self- Determination); 29 November (GA Resolution
181 - Partition Plan); 8 December (GA Resolution 302 - UNRWA); and,
11 December (GA Resolution 194 - UNCCP and the Right of Return),
not to mentioned the anniversary of the adoption of the Universal
Declaration of Human Rights and the establishment of the Office of
the UN High Commissioner for Refugees.
As in years past, these anniversaries coincide with the adoption of new UN resolutions that reaffirm the rights of the Palestinian people. Again, however, these resolutions fail to include mechanisms to facilitate implementation of those rights - including the right to self-determination and the right of return. The gaping distance between these recognized rights and their implementation is all the more obvious this year after nearly three months of a new Palestinian uprising following the failure of negotiations at Camp David in July.
The demand of the Palestinian people for a just solution to the historical Israeli-Palestinian conflict based on international law and UN resolutions has been met with massive Israeli military force, including live ammunition and sharpshooters, heavy machine guns, tanks, and helicopter gun-ships, much of it acquired from the "honest broker" - the United States. In less than three months, Israeli occupation forces have killed over 300 Palestinians (including 14 Palestinians inside Israel) and injured more than 10,000 others. The number of l m annual (4 issues) -
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IN THIS ISSUE
2 December 2000
Palestinians killed by Israeli occupying forces in the first two
and a half months of the al-Aqsa intifada was four times greater
than during thesame period of the intifada that began inDecember
1987 and equal to the number of Palestinians killed between
December 1987 and September 1988. The so-called "Green Line",
dividing Israel from the 1967 occupied territories seemed to matter
little to Palestinians who took to the streets in massive popular
protests against Israel's continuing denial of basic human rights
and the ongoing military occupation of the West Bank, eastern
Jerusalem, and the Gaza Strip.
Nor did the arbitrary border matter much to Israeli security forces who responded to Palestinian demonstrations inside Israel in much the same way - minus the helicopter gunships - shooting or beating to death 13 Palestinian citizens of Israel during the first week of October. Hundreds of others have been rounded up and detained. Israel's massive use of military force to quell the al-Aqsa intifada has also resulted in major damage to private and public property, the economic infrastructure and the ecological environment in the 1967 occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip. More than 400 alestinian homes,affecting some 3,000 individuals, have been damaged or completely destroyed by Israeli shelling, heavy machinegun fire, and helicopter launched missiles.
Many have been bulldozed in order to create wide swaths of open land adjacent to Israeli settlements and designated "security" roads. Public property, including PA administrative and police offices, radio stations/ towers, schools and hospitals have also been targeted by the Israeli military. Thousands of dunums of Palestinian agricultural land has been bulldozed resulting in the loss of tens of thousands of olive and fruit trees.
Since the end of September, the Israeli government has vacillated between heavy military bombardment and other measures more akin to low-intensity conflict, including economicsanctions, blockage of humanitarian aid, and extrajudicial execution of popular resistance leaders. The large number of Palestinian deaths and the heavy physical damage do not appear to hold significant weight in determining Israel's attempt to impose its political will upon the Palestinian people.
"If we thought that instead of 200 Palestinian fatalities, 2,000 dead would put an end to the fighting at a stroke," stated Israeli Prime Ehud Barak on Israel Radio in mid-October, "we would use much more force." Even in the case of US "criticism" of Israel's "excessive" use of force in Gaza on 20 November, Israeli officials quietly conceded that "Our job is to do what we did in Gaza." […] "Their job [the US administration] is to criticize us for using 'excessive force.'" Such comments are necessary, he said, for the US to retain its role as an "honest broker" between Israelis and Palestinians.
| UN Resolutions - December
2000 During the 55th plenary of the UN GeneralAssembly in December, 6 resolutions were adopted on the Palestine question and the situation in the Middle East. The resolutions reaffirmed theapplicability of international law and, in particular, UN Resolution 194 (right of return) as a framework for resolving the refugee issue. Of the six resolutions, the US voted against 5 and abstained from the other. The United States delegate explained his votes noting that issues dealt with in the resolutions were the subject of negotiations which would only be complicated by the "injection" of the General Assembly. The US further referred to the resolutions as unbalanced and outdated, stating, without consideration of international law, "The Assembly should focus on creating a positive atmosphere, one where the two parties were encouraged to return to the negotiations." "[The] resolutions could only complicate the efforts of the parties to achieve a settlement." GA/9838 1 December 2000 |
Rather, Israel's strategy has been guided by the cold logic of "effectiveness" and the threat of a public relations nightmare in the event of a military "mistake." It is these dynamics that explain, in part, the use of economic sanctions and extrajudical executions. More than a month into the uprising, Israeli military officials publicly acknowledged that there were few if any effective military targets to strike; the only solution to the conflict was a political solution.
Moreover, officials admitted that images of helicopter gun-ships and tanks besieging Palestinian communities, not to mention the widely-broadcast death of Mohammad ad-Durra - the 12-year-old refugee from Bureij camp gunned with his father in early October - harmed Israeli efforts to sell its version of events to the international community. "The world doesn't get very excited when it's told that peoples which live under conquest fail to honor agreement," stated Israel's Foreign Minister, Shlomo Ben Ami.
"Claims made by a well-established society about how an oppressed people is breaking rules to attain rights don't get much credence." Meanwhile, the Israeli Knesset hasadopted new draft legislation that further defies international law and UN resolutions. Draft bills against the Palestinian right of return and forbidding transfer of any powers, national or municipal, in Jerusalem into the hands of any organization or body that does not fall under the jurisdiction of the state of Israel without the approval of at least 61 MKs in the 120 seat Knesset have passed several readings over the course of the last few months. While the Israeli government has agreed to a state commission of inquiry concerning the violent repression of Palestinian demonstrations inside Israel, it has at the same time adopted measures to equip Jewish communities in Israel considered to be located in the vicinity of "hostile [Palestinian] populations" with firearms and communications equipment, fences, electric gates, and observation posts.
Excluding loss of life and damage to physical assets, Palestinian losses are estimated to be in the range of three-quarters of a million dollars as of the middle of December. The UN Special Coordinator's Office in the occupied territories noted in a late November report that two months of external and internal Israeli military closure had effectively wiped away any economic gains made during the previous three year period. The rise in unemployment from 11 percent to 40 percent, moreover, is beginning to have a serious impact on basic food security for a significant segment of the Palestinian population.
By the first of December, UNRWA was reporting that nearly 75 percent of all Palestinian refugee families had turned to the Agency for food and cash assistance, necessitating an emergency appeal to international donors. By contrast Israel's GDP for 2001 is expected to rise 4 percent in 2001 with a decline of only 1 or 2 percent due to the intifada.
|
"Whoever follows the history of the State of Israel and
its long list of investigation commissions, from Sabra and Shatila
where Sharon had his indirect responsibility underlined but was not
punished, to the Massacre of the Ibrahimi Mosque where nobody was
prosecuted, knows that there is nothing to be done: the Arabs
cannot change the racist policy of the executive and judicial
powers. The fact that the Government finally resorted to an
official investigation commission does not prove that it understood
the meaning of the popular pressure that backed this decision. The
Government is still looking for ways to get out from the deadlock
without compromising itself or its security forces." |
Underlying Causes of the Intifada
Ariel Sharon's provocative visit to the Al-AqsaMosque on 28
September 2000, and Israel's use of snipers against Palestinian
civilian protestors fall short of explaining the most recent
popular uprising in the 1967 occupied territories. Similarly,the
uprising that began 13 years ago this December could not simply be
explained by the death of several Palestinians in Gaza after being
run over by an Israeli truck driver. Nor could it be explained by
Ariel Sharon's decision that fall to move into the Muslim quarter
of the Old City.
The al-Aqsa intifada is once again a broad Palestinian outcry
against the deplorable situation of Palestinian human rights,
particularly among vulnerable and unprotected sectors of the
Palestinian people, such as refugees and internally displaced
persons as well as the Palestinian community in occupied and
unilaterally Israeli-annexed eastern Jerusalem. It is an expression
of the Palestinian demand for the implementation of the Palestinian
right to selfdetermination, freedom from occupation, and refugees'
right of return according to UN resolutions and international law.
It is an expression against Israel's continued violation of these
rights, as recorded and deplored by the United Nations since
1948.
Israeli non-compliance with UN resolutions and international humanitarian and human rights conventions has never been effectively challenged by the international community, in particular by the United Nations, since it decided, in 1947, to partition Palestine against the wish of its majority Arab population. Palestinians themselves lack effective domestic and international fora in which to pursue claims against the violation of their basic rights. Recommendations by the Commission on Human Rights for intervention under Chapter VII of theUN Charter to protect Palestinians and their rights remain unacted upon, despite findings by the Commission since the early 1970s that Israel's policies in the 1967 occupied territories rose to the level of war crimes, a view reiterated in Resolution E/CN.4/S-5/1, adopted during a special session of the Commission in mid-October 2000.
|
"The Palestinians learned that Israel only
understands force. The Palestinians believe that this is the only
way they can realize their political goals, the foremost of which
is to found a state. The things a Palestinian has to endure, simply
coming to work in the morning, is a long and continuous nightmare
that includes humiliation bordering on despair. But in the last
seven years he has discovered that there is another way. They
learned this from Hizbullah and from us. We have to decide soon
what kind of democracy we want here. The present model integrates
apartheid and is not commensurate with Judaism. All the decisions
necessary to continue the peace process between us and the
Palestinians go through those very decisions that must be made in
the debate over the essence of Israeli democracy." |
Abstention from rights-based intervention against Israeli violations of UN resolutions and international law standards became an explicit international policy after the signing of the Oslo agreements in 1993. Despite clarifications issued by the Commission on Human Rights concerning the danger of partial agreements and the importance of international law and UN resolutions as a framework for a comprehensive solution to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, international support for the "Middle East Peace Process" became synonymous with support for the results of regional power politics irrespective of their conformity with international human rights standards.
The 1993 Declaration of Principles and subsequent interim agreements exclude reference to key UN resolutions, such as Resolution 194, and unlike other regional agreements with Egypt and Jordan do not include any reference to international law. In nearly a decade of "peacemaking", including the last three months of the uprising, Israeli policies of land confiscation, house demolition, settlement construction, military closure, not to mention denial of the right of return, documented by local and international organizations as well as the United Nations, continued unabated. Despite hundreds of UN resolutions calling for an end to these policies, including those adopted this December, the international community has declined to take measures to facilitate their implementation.
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"I guess it must be destiny: We don't listen to the
Palestinians, to their analysis of the situation or to their
warnings, here in Israel. Instead, we listen to the warnings a d
hear the situation described as 'an occupation' - simple as that -
when voiced by the former chief of the Shin Bet security service,
Ami Ayalon. Anyone who has tried to report on the behavior of the
Israeli Defense Forces from the field, and not through the office
of the IDF spokesman, has been met with accusations and insults.
The Israeli peace camp, which defines itself as Zionist, has been
dumbstruck: It has also listened to the IDF spokesman and the
chiefs of staff more than it has heeded the Palestinians; and as a
result, its cry of moral alarm has come too late." |