Roadmap without rights
Empty spaces abound in the US-sponsored roadmap. Jamil Dakwar* finds human rights conspicuous only by their absence
In recent days, international news reports have focussed on Israel's endorsement of the roadmap and the promise to create a Palestinian state by the year 2005. Far less attention has been paid to the plan's lack of any serious substance, and in particular the absence of any human rights components, or related monitoring mechanisms. Such mechanisms have served as the cornerstone of many peace plans and reconciliation processes over the last decade. In this regard, the roadmap seems destined simply to repeat the mistake made by the Oslo accords.
While the declared goal of the plan is to put an end to the longest occupation in modern history, the detail looks more like an assemblage of interim security arrangements that may facilitate the management of the crisis, but cannot provide the solution to the underlying conflict. Excessive emphasis on security arrangements combined with further delay in ending Israeli occupation and illegal settlement expansion -- the phenomena in which the cycle of violence has its roots -- are a guaranteed recipe for more occupation. While that occupation may take a different form under the roadmap, the same human rights abuses will be able to continue: endless closures and movement restrictions; indiscriminate use of force and collective punishment; mass illegal arrests and torture; and an ongoing policy of assassinations and destruction of Palestinian property. (According to a recent UNRWA report, during the first three months of 2003 total and partial house demolitions averaged 74 a month, with 12,737 people having seen their homes pulled down since September 2000).
The roadmap reinforces the role bestowed on the Palestinian Authority by the Oslo process, under which the PA provided policing and security enforcement measures designed to disarm the Palestinian militant groups and end all armed Palestinian resistance. Indeed, these were the first demands made on the newly created Palestinian prime minister, and are supposed to be achieved during the first phase of the roadmap. Israel wants to see the Palestinian resistance completely eliminated before it withdraws its forces -- and then, not to the 1967 borders, but to the September 2000 lines. Yet it is quite obvious that the Palestinian militant groups will not agree to be disarmed as long as Palestinian land remains occupied. The roadmap will thus inevitably perpetuate violence, since it will either lead to a Palestinian civil war, or to an escalation of the Israeli occupation, and of violent responses from Palestinian militant groups.
The roadmap seems to offer only semantic and rhetorical changes, rather than concrete actions. It does not impose any new commitments or obligations on Israel. The promise to create a Palestinian state by 2005 can already be found in an old UN resolution -- the 1947 partition plan for Palestine, which granted the indigenous Palestinian population only 47 per cent of the land, despite the fact that they comprised over two-thirds of the population. Under the roadmap, a future Palestinian state would occupy less than 20 per cent of the historical Palestinian homeland.
None of the three phases which make up the roadmap adds anything to Israel's existing duty under existing international human rights and humanitarian law to cease all settlement activity (defined as a war crime by the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court) along with other illegal practices. In fact, not only does the roadmap repeat the mistakes of Oslo by failing to provide an explicit and detailed human rights framework, but it undermines international humanitarian and human rights law by legitimising a certain degree of human rights abuse. For example, the first phase of the roadmap states that "the Government of Israel takes no actions undermining trust, including deportations, attacks on civilians; confiscation and/or demolition of Palestinian homes and property, as punitive measures or to facilitate Israeli construction." In other words, Israel has to stop attacking civilians not because it is absolutely prohibited from doing so under international law, but just for the sake of not "undermining trust". In addition, Israel is effectively left free to continue its long-standing policy of confiscating land and/or demolishing Palestinian homes and property, since in the vast majority of cases it will simply claim that these actions are committed as deterrent measures and for security reasons, not as punitive measures.
Ironically, the Palestinian leadership has decided to endorse the roadmap with almost no reservations. They even began to implement the plan by appointing a Palestinian prime minister before it had been officially published. Israel, on the other hand, has continued its outrageous policies in the occupied territories and even escalated them in response to attacks on Israeli civilians by individual suicide bombers. It has not only entered 14 reservations to the roadmap, but has merely agreed "to accept the steps set out in the roadmap" (my emphasis), not the plan itself. And even this begrudging move was only made after it had first reserved its cherished right to continue denying the Palestinian refugees' internationally recognised right of return. Apparently, Israel does not want to be seen as a state that rejects a "peace plan" -- particularly when that plan has been introduced by the US as part of its overall policy to stabilise the Middle East and redraw the geopolitical map of the region.
In all these ways, the roadmap differs from the approaches taken to solve many other national and territorial conflicts involving military occupation (for example, the 25-year Indonesian occupation of East Timor, or British rule in Northern Ireland). Instead of an effective and clear international monitoring mechanism, it outlines an informal monitoring process to be carried out by representatives of the Quartet (US, Russia, EU and the UN) based on "existing mechanisms and on-the-ground-resources". The establishment of a formal monitoring mechanism and its implementation is postponed to some unspecified later date. As a result, implementation of the plan can only be highly fragile and uncertain, paving the way for endless disputes. Unsurprisingly, Israel immediately voiced its rejection of any monitoring mechanism that might be staffed and directed by non-Americans.
The Israeli government's continuing denial of the existence of the military occupation, taken together with Sharon's statement that it is "undesirable" to rule over a Palestinian population, makes clear some of the intentions behind the roadmap. By creating a Palestinian state, the burden of ruling over 3.5 million Palestinians can be shifted from the Israeli occupiers to a Palestinian prime minister empowered for this purpose. Yet wasn't that precisely the premise of Oslo, when the Palestinian Authority under Yasser Arafat was set to rule over the maximum number of Palestinians on the minimum number of fragments of Palestinian land? The lack of genuine Israeli political will and the incapability of the Palestinian Authority security apparatus make it very unlikely that the parties will be able to fulfill their obligations under the roadmap. As Oslo showed, the result will be very painful for both parties, but it will hurt the Palestinians most, as it is they who will continue to face Israeli occupation, albeit in a new form.
After 36 years of Israeli occupation, the roadmap offers the Palestinian people very little hope. The plan falls short of providing the minimal protection and security for the Palestinian population from any future Israeli attacks and atrocities, and in that sense it leaves both civilian populations -- Palestinian and Israeli alike -- vulnerable and targeted. Israel today is in the midst of military campaign to stop any form of international monitoring activity. Recently, and almost without international attention or opposition, the Israeli occupying forces have imposed increased restrictions on movement around and access to the occupied territories for international humanitarian activists and foreign aid workers, human rights researchers, government officials, journalists, and peace and solidarity activists. Despite their possession of valid visas, a number of such persons have recently been killed, wounded, arrested or deported.
The roadmap is presented as an international peace plan, but it fails to meet even basic principles of international law. It also fails to provide for an international intervention such as a permanent multi-national peace and monitoring force; yet this is the least that is needed if the lost hope of the Palestinian people is to be restored. More than ever, an international force acting under UN resolutions and supervision and with a clear human rights mandate is needed now for a transitional period, until such time as Palestinian political and civil society is revived and ready to take control. This is not to say that such an interim solution is perfect, or to ignore its inevitable fragility, particularly when the resolution of the crucial issues -- namely the Palestinian refugees' right of return, dismantling Israeli settlements and agreeing on permanent borders, Jerusalem and natural resources -- have been postponed sine die. However, at least this form of power transfer from the Israeli occupying army to UN peace keeping forces would represent a new approach, and might prove more effective than all those which have proven faulty and unrealistic in the past.
* The writer is a Palestinian lawyer and Israeli citizen, who is currently a research fellow at the Centre for Economic & Social Rights, New York.
