A powerful indictment of Israel’s war vs Palestine

As Israel continues its deadly attacks on Gaza, with civilian deaths nearing 9,000, mostly children and women in over 11,000 targets, the United Nations top human rights body has warned that the “disproportionate attacks… could amount to war crimes.”

Earlier, UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres had sounded out such warning. In response, Israel authorities said they would deny visas to UN officials seeking entry into Gaza.

(One can’t help noting that the “tokhang” drug war in the Philippines killed at least 8,000 civilians as admitted by the police. And that our government similarly replied to international criticism by announcing that visas would be denied to probers from the International Criminal Court.)

In a powerful indictment, the director of the New York office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) wants a stronger stance: “We are seeing a genocide unfolding before our eyes, and the organization that we serve appears powerless to stop it.”

“As someone who has investigated human rights in Palestine since the l980s, lived in Gaza as a human rights advisor in the l990s and carried out several human rights missions to the country before and since, this is deeply personal to me,” wrote Craig Mokhiber to OHCHR chief Volker Turk, published online on Oct. 31.

Recalling the previous genocides against the Tutsis (Rwanda), Bosnian Muslims, the Yazidis (Syria) and the Rohingya (Myanmar), Mokhiber noted that in each case the OHCHR failed in its duty “to meet the imperatives of prevention of mass atrocities, protection of the vulnerable and accountability for the perpetrators.”

“And so it has been with successive waves of murder and persecution against the Palestinians throughout the entire life of the UN,” he wrote lamenting, “High Commissioner, we are failing again.”

The current “wholesale slaughter of the Palestinian people,  rooted in an ethno-nationalist settler colonial ideology,” Mokhiber wrote, follows “decades of their systematic persecution and purging, based entirely upon their identity as Arabs, and coupled with explicit statements of intent by leaders of the Israeli government and military.”

Saying there’s no room for doubt or debate on the issue, he cited the following instances:

• In Gaza, homes, schools, churches, mosques and medical institutions are “wantonly attacked as thousands of civilians are murdered.” In the West Bank… “homes are seized and reassigned based entirely on race,” as violent settler pogroms are occupied by Israeli’s military units. “Across the land, apartheid rules.”

• A “textbook case of genocide,” the European, ethno-nationalist settler colonial project of Palestine has entered its final phase, “toward the expedited destruction of the last remnants of indigenous Palestinian life in Palestine.”

• The governments of the US, the UK and much of Europe are “already complicit in the horrific assault.” Not only are these governments refusing to meet their treaty obligations “to ensure respect” for the Geneva Conventions, but they are in fact “actively arming the assault, providing economic and intelligence support and giving political and diplomatic cover for Israeli atrocities.”

• Corporate media are violating the International Convention on Civil and Political Rights by “continuously dehumanizing Palestinians.” He pointed out that broadcasting propaganda for war and advocacies of national, racial or religious hatred… “constitutes incitement to discrimination, hostility and violence.”

• US-based social media companies are “suppressing the voice of the human rights defenders (HRDs) while amplifying pro-Israel propaganda.” Israeli-lobby online trolls are smearing HRDs, and western universities and employers are collaborating with them to “punish those who dare to speak out against the atrocities….There must be an accounting for these actions as well.”

Under these circumstances, the demand on the OHCHR for “principled and effective actions are greater than ever… but we have not met the challenge.” He cited certain factors.

For one, the protective enforcement power of the UN Security Council “has again been blocked by US intransigence.” For another, the Secretary General is “under assault for the mildest of protestation” and the UN human rights mechanisms are under “sustained slanderous attacks by an organized online impunity network.”

Decades of distortion by the “illusory” promises of Oslo’s “two-state solution” to the Israel-Palestine conflict, Mokhiber noted, have diverted the OHCHR from its core duties to defend international law, international human rights and the UN charter itself.

The two-state solution “has become an open joke in the corridors of the UN both for its utter impossibility… and… its total failure to account for the inalienable human rights of the Palestinian people,” he said. And the US-scripted deference to “agreements between the parties themselves” rather than to international law, he added, was “designed to reinforce the power of Israel over the  rights of the occupied and dispossessed Palestinians.”

In recent decades, “key parts of the UN have surrendered to the power of the US and to fear of the Israeli lobby to abandon these principles, and to retreat from international law itself,” Mokhiber, an American, wrote.

Because of the UN failures, the Palestinian people have sustained the biggest losses.

“It is a stunning historic irony that the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was adopted in the same year [1948] that the Nakba massacre was perpetrated against the Palestinian people,” Mokhiber recalled.

Reminiscing how he became part of the OHCHR in the 1980s, he found in it a principled, norm-based institution that was “squarely on the side of human rights, including in cases where the powerful US, UK and Europe were not on our side.”

“While my own government… and much of US media were still supporting or justifying South Africa’s apartheid, Israeli repression and Central America’s death squads, the UN was standing up for the oppressed peoples of those lands,” he wrote. “We had international law … human rights… and principle on our side. Our authority was rooted in our integrity. But no more.”

There’s much to atone for. “But the path to atonement is clear,” he emphasized, pointing to the principled stance taken by masses of people around the world, demonstrating their stand against the continuing attacks on the Palestinian people.