Sculpture of a key over a gate to the Aida refugee camp in Bethlehem symbolises the refugees' right to return to the homes that they fled in 1967. Richard Gray/Empics Entertainment. All rights reserved. Another month, another unprecedented UN report on Palestinian affairs
placing the responsibility on all UN member states for the worsening
trajectory in the multi-faceted Palestinian/Israeli drama. Decades of US
brokered talks between “the two parties” have produced only failure, acknowledged
as such by all but a handful of politicians who surely know better. It is time
for a new narrative, with new actors taking responsibilities which have been
evaded for too long. In the febrile atmosphere of today’s Middle East the world
cannot afford a new flashpoint.
Unlike the now notorious ESCWA report “Israeli Practices towards Palestinians and the Question of Apartheid”, withdrawn
under pressure from the US and Israel, but widely circulated on the internet,
and the subject of days of headlines, the latest report, from the UN Secretary
General himself, has been too little noticed. Mr Guterres’
report cites UNRWA’s
role in the "mitigation of extremism, its stabilising influence and its
contribution to peace and security”.
Last week Secretary General Antonio Guterres gave a highly unusual
glowing accolade to UNRWA, the cash-strapped UN agency for 5.3 million
Palestinian refugees, describing it as “indispensable”. UNRWA’s chronic and
deepening funding crisis nearly brought its schools and medical care across the
region to a standstill in 2015. Half a million Palestinian refugee children’s
education – in camps in Gaza, the West Bank, Syria, Lebanon and Jordan – was at
risk with incalculable impact on already fragile social fabric.
Those weeks of feared real drama sparked a consultation done across UN
member states by Switzerland and Turkey over several months. Mr Guterres’
report cites UNRWA’s role in the "mitigation of extremism, its
stabilising influence and its contribution to peace and security”. He puts responsibility firmly on all member
states to step up regular funding for UNRWA. (The top six donors are the US,
EU, UK, Saudi Arabia, Germany and Sweden.)
Voluntary bodies
Very boldly in the current western political climate, the report also
urges a long over-due role for international financial institutions such as the
World Bank and the Islamic Development Bank, “as well as continued and possibly
increased contributions from the UN's regular budget.”
It is a sensitive moment to raise such significant political and
financial demands. In two months (June) UNRWA’s mandate comes up for renewal at
the UN. The organisation has for 67 years been funded only by voluntary
contributions since it was set up by the UN in late 1948 as an emergency
response to the 700,000 Palestinians refugees expelled from their homes and
left destitute by the creation of Israel in 1948. No-one imagined that nearly
70 years later there would be over 5 million Palestinian refugees, many
existing in conditions of utter depravity and hopelessness, especially in
Lebanon, Syria and Jordan.
The ESCWA report hit a sensitive nerve as much for its methodology as
for its use of the word apartheid. It tackled the enormity of the problem head
on by linking the different realities of all these Palestinians under UNRWA’s
remit, plus Palestinians living in Israel.
It considers Israeli policies for all Palestinians, living in the
occupied West Bank and blockaded Gaza; in East Jerusalem where many
Palestinians live precariously as “permanent residents”; inside Israel, where Palestinians have citizenship
but not nationality and a system which blocks access to political power as they
are not Jewish; and in the refugee camps of Jordan, Lebanon and Syria, from
which there is a prohibition to return. The report’s analysis shows a “core purpose of racial domination”. The “strategic
fragmentation”, and the use of different
laws for these four geographic regions are devised with a “mission of preserving Israel as a jewish state.” The report’s analysis shows a “core purpose of
racial domination”.
The apartheid analogy
An apartheid analogy
has been made countless times before about Israeli actions – especially over
land issues where 93% of the land is state owned and managed by laws which
prohibit its use by non-Jews. In particular dozens of prominent South Africans
over the years have made an analogy. Decades back Israeli leaders such as
Israel’s first prime minister, David Ben-Gurion,
and later Yitzhak Rabin, twice prime minister of Israel, warned of the danger
of the country becoming “an apartheid state” if it did not “get rid of the Arab
population as soon as possible.” Michael Ben-Yair, a former Israeli attorney
general, concluded "we established an apartheid regime in the occupied
territories.” In 2006 the title of former US president Jimmy
Carter’s book ‘Palestine: Peace, Not Apartheid’ proved explosive, and in 2014
John Kerry warned that apartheid was taking shape, but quickly backed off and
apologised for using the word when he was roundly attacked by US politicians
and media.
The ESCWA report is
largely based on international law and the UN’s 1973 ‘International Convention on the Suppression
and Punishment of the Crime of Apartheid’ which
was applied to policies and practices ‘similar’ to those identified with the apartheid state of South
Africa.
After apartheid was
ended in South Africa, the ‘crime of apartheid’ was included as one of 11 recognised crimes against
humanity in the 2002 Rome Statute that established the International Criminal
Court. Apartheid was defined as “inhuman
acts committed in the context of an institutionalised regime of systematic
oppression and domination by one racial group over any other racial group or
groups and committed with the intention of maintaining that regime.” In the
fifty page report, two US academics, one of them Professor Richard Falk an
Emeritus Professor of Law, detail why and how that ‘regime’ applies to Israel. Their findings were reviewed not
only by ESCWA’s experienced staff, but
by three leading international legal experts, whose points were then
incorporated into the report.
Views of the wall of separation near the Aida refugee camp in Bethlehem.Richard Gray/EMPICS Entertainment. All rights reserved.Specific
recommendations from the report are to focus attention on its “principal
finding that Israel has imposed a regime of apartheid on the Palestinian people
as a whole”. Suggestions are made that the UN revive the Special Committee on
Apartheid; consider seeking an advisory opinion from the International Court of
Justice; while the International Criminal Court should investigate whether the
state, government or individuals are guilty of the crime of apartheid.
Brand new
settlements
New settlement news in late March underlined the report’s recommendations to the UN
and member states to stand by international law and take action when a state
flagrantly flouts it. Last December UN Resolution 2334 affirmed that “the
establishment by Israel of settlements in the Palestinian territory occupied
since 1967, including East Jerusalem, has no legal validity and constitutes a
flagrant violation under international law”. The Secretary-General was
instructed “to report to the Council every three months on the implementation
of the provisions of the present resolution.” He did, on March 24. The
Resolution was a decision by the international community that action must be
taken by them on this illegality.
As Hagai El-Ad, executive director of the human rights group B’Tselem wrote immediately
afterwards, the Resolution was a decision by the international community that
action must be taken by them on this illegality. But that March report of the
Secretary General, showed no action taken. Less than a week later Israel
announced the building of a brand new settlement in the West Bank between
Ramallah and Nablus.
Whatever the UN
leadership does or does not do with Mr Guterres’s UNRWA report or the withdrawn
ESCWA report in the short or long term, the clarity of the legal obligation of all
states to act on the Palestinians’ rights will not go away. Professor Falk’s
legal analysis will not go away either. It has brought discussion about the
Palestinian situation a long way from the mood of hopelessness around any one
single issue focus such as on Occupation, or stateless refugees, or child
prisoners in military courts, or the squeeze on East Jerusalem, or the
ever-growing West Bank settlements and their road network barred to
Palestinians.
Within the General Assembly today which countries will take up the
recommendations in the ESCWA report for further study by the ICJ and the ICC
and the reviving of the relevant UN Special Committee, or take the action Mr
El-Ad noted the UN had committed to last December? No-one believes the Security
Council will take the lead after so many decades in a cul de sac over
Palestine.