16 - 22 May 2002
Issue No.586
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Al-Ahram Weekly Online 16 - 22 May 2002 Issue No.586 |
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What's good for Israel
International concern for Palestinian human rights has been shelved, writes Omar Barghouti*, because nowadays what's good for Israel is good for the world
There is something quite peculiar of late with the way that the world, the UN included, has been dealing with Israel's flagrant violations of human rights and international law. The most common concern being raised by international players is "Israel's best interests." In other words, if something is good for Israel, then the world should push for its implementation. If not, then no need.
The United States' threat of using its veto in the UN Security Council and its other relentless efforts to torpedo the UN's now-thwarted attempt to send fact-finders to Jenin can only be understood in light of its role as Israel's real "defensive shield." Less easy to explain away is the complicity of the UN chief and the European Union -- except if seen in the context of promoting what's "best for Israel."
After its brazen refusal to comply with UN Security Council resolutions, which called for its withdrawal from recently-occupied Palestinian territories, the Israeli government managed to outdo even itself when it arrogantly announced that unless "its conditions were satisfactorily met" by the UN, it would not allow the team to enter Jenin.
As a result, Kofi Annan tried to "convince" the Israeli prime minister to relax (not drop) those conditions. Bolstered by the boundless support of the US Congress, and to a slightly lesser extent that of the Bush administration, Sharon conducted his negotiations with the UN from a position of strength which allowed him to deal with Annan with little more respect than he usually gives to Arafat. Strikingly, he even extended his usual logic of dealing with the Palestinians to the UN -- the logic of dictates and evolving conditions often used with pathetic and disadvantaged Palestinian "negotiators."
Despite all that, Annan bent over backwards to accommodate several of the unusual Israeli terms. According to a report in the UK newspaper The Guardian, "The UN has already bowed to Israel's demand that the identity of soldiers who testify should remain secret, and that they will not have their evidence used against them." Furthermore, the very composition of the Jenin team was also modified to meet some of Israel's "legitimate concerns."
Even after all this unprecedented tolerance exhibited by the UN, Israeli Communications Minister Reuven Rivlin chastised the Jenin initiative. "This awful United Nations committee is out to get us, and is likely to smear Israel and to force us to do things which Israel is not prepared to even hear about, such as interrogating soldiers and officers who took part in the fighting," he said.
Dancing to much the same tune, the more "dovish" Shimon Peres insisted on Israel's "right" to decide who would testify, and superciliously declared that "Israel won't sit in the place of the accused. Israel will sit in the place of the accuser. This is an attempt to place baseless blame, almost a blood libel, on Israel."
To calm Israel's "understandable" fears, Annan argued that it was "best" for Israel to "put behind" all the rumours and to dispel "the long shadow which has been cast over Jenin." Otherwise it "will be with us for a while," he pleaded.
Annan's preoccupation with the "shadow" rather than the reality -- the hard evidence meticulously collected by human rights organisations, including the latest damning report by Human Rights Watch -- implied that the accusations levelled against Israel were grossly exaggerated or simply illusory. Consequently, he helped defuse some of the world's outrage at Israeli brutality.
Gentle assuagement of Israel's "PR crisis" therefore became the prevalent, and oft-repeated, justification for the investigation. The UN increasingly leaves out the fact that there was compelling evidence of horrific war crimes committed by Israel, the fact that real people were killed, or injured and left to die without medical attention, that real houses were demolished on top of their inhabitants and that real humans were used as shields by merciless Israeli soldiers. It obviously wasn't in "Israel's best interests" to focus on those real but marginal details.
Conforming to the same shameless theme, the European Union sheepishly deplored "the fact that... the [UN] team is unable to go to the region and begin its mission." They could not have invented a longer and safer detour! Even Cornelio Sommaruga, Israel's nemesis on the team and the former president of the International Committee of the Red Cross, said he "regretted" the cancellation of the mission only because it could have made "a contribution to a certain détente in the region." He also "felt" that Israel had "nothing to hide." Apparently, the condemning reports issued by the Red Cross on Jenin had not roused his interest.
Moreover, the senior military member of the team, General William Nash, gave what may be considered an authoritative preview to what that team could have concluded had it ever been given the chance to reach Jenin. Writing in the International Herald Tribune, he bizarrely claimed that "serious concerns about war crimes apply to both the armed Palestinians and the Israeli forces."
After declining to classify the majority of the Palestinian civilian residents of the camp as "true noncombatants" since they were "sympathetic to and supportive of the fighters," the retired general meekly stated: "On the Israeli side, there are questions as to the adequacy of warnings to the noncombatant population of Jenin..."
Echoing Mr Annan's implicit scepticism, Mr Nash then explained that what happened in Jenin needed to be "studied" mainly because "neither the Israelis nor the Palestinians need more unfounded charges added to their already heavy burden of history."
Adding insult to injury, the UN's special representative in the region Terje Larson, who originally fell out of favour with Israel in the aftermath of Israel's "Defensive Shield" for mildly describing the devastation he witnessed in Jenin, flew to Beirut to impress upon the Lebanese government the absolute sanctity of the UN- designated "blue line." In this, Larson was loyally emulating a previous visit by US Secretary of State Colin Powell just days before. The fact that Israel had just crossed all the "red lines" was apparently lost on the seasoned European diplomat. He also joined the chorus trying to convince Israel to accept the fact-finding mission, because it was "good for Israel."
Iraq, in comparison, has been suffering under more than eleven years of utterly inhumane sanctions due to its alleged non-compliance with certain aspects of UN resolutions. Hardly anyone at the UN bothered to ask where the Iraqis' "best interests" lay.
In Rwanda, Bosnia and Kosovo, among other places where international organisations conducted investigations into war crimes, what was "good" for those countries was emphatically decided by international bodies, independently of the wishes, the desires, or the "legitimate concerns" of the respective governments. After all, when a person or political entity is accused of committing war crimes or crimes against humanity, their preferences, not to mention their conditions for how the investigations ought to be conducted, should hardly be taken into consideration -- for the obvious reason that they have an inherent conflict of interest that prevents them from being sufficiently transparent or forthright.
It would be unfair, though, to put all the blame for this hypocrisy on the shoulders of the UN and the European diplomats, since Arab leaders, including the Palestinian chairman, have also made a habit of justifying their political ideas based on the "Israel's best interests" logic.
Mr Arafat's strongest argument against the Israeli siege of his headquarters was: how can I fight terror when you've confined me and destroyed most of my security apparatus? Several Arab leaders have presented similar arguments to the US, about the need to strengthen Arafat and the Palestinian Authority, since that was "the only assurance for Israel's security."
Indeed, most Palestinian and Arab leaders have striven in recent years to sell the idea of a Palestinian state as the "best security guarantee" for Israel. Such arguments were manifestly persuasive for Mr Bush, as well as several Israeli leaders, who have turned into strong advocates (even, in Bush's case, nagging ones) of a Palestinian "state."
Hence the birth of the creative and novel adjective, "viable," to describe the necessary requirements for such a state. If it were to die, the argument runs, so would Israel's security and along with it Israel's "best interests."
So what exactly would have satisfied Israel's "best interests" in the Jenin ordeal, from Israel's own perspective, and not how all the "concerned" others perceived it? Perhaps a clue can be found in the following confession in Ha'aretz (April 27, 2002): "One
[Israeli] official recalled this week that back when the UN committee was formed to evaluate compliance with the Grapes of Wrath understandings, Israeli-American coordination was so close that the investigation's main conclusions were agreed upon ahead of time."
* The writer is a Palestinian doctoral student of philosophy at Tel Aviv University. He lives in Ramallah, the West Bank.
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