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WEST BANK PROTEST
(Al Jazeera) – Hundreds of people in the West Bank city of Ramallah protested against the Palestinian Authority’s decision to support a delay to a UN vote on whether to endorse the findings of the report, which was authored by Richard Goldstone, a former South African judge. Protesters gathered waving placards saying the delay “insults the blood of the martyrs and wounds our people”.
“[The decision] was a knife in the backs and in the hearts of all the martyrs,” Jamal al-Jumaa, a protester, said.
Protests were also held in Jerusalem, where pro-Palestinian activists demanded an apology from Abbas.
“If the government had anything to do with the decision we want it to resign,” Muhammad Jadallah, the head of the Coalition for Jerusalem, said.
Thirty-two Palestinian groups in Europe also called on Abbas to immediately step down from office.
In a statement, the groups said “the step to delay the endorsement was not less dangerous than the atrocities committed by the Israeli occupation in Gaza”.
While everyone else is welcoming the hopeful signs from the nuclear negotiations with Iran — and I’m cautiously encouraged too –I’m going back to the less-than-hopeful news from elsewhere in the Middle East. According to the Associated Press, the Palestinian National Authority has agreed to defer its efforts to get the Goldstone Report on war crimes in the Gaza conflict referred out of the UN Human Rights Council to the Security Council or the General Assembly. This seems puzzling: given the findings of the report, and the fact that roughly 1,300 Palestinians were killed in the carnage (along with 13 Israelis), why would they decide to hold back? Simple: because the United States, principled defender of human rights, put a lot of pressure on them. Here’s the Associated Press’s explanation (my emphasis):
- “Senior U.S. and Palestinian officials in Washington and Ramallah, speaking on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the issue, said the Palestinian decision came after heavy U.S. pressure and a warning that going ahead with the resolution would harm the Middle East peace process.”
Many Palestinians have protested against the delay in endorsing the Goldstone report(AFP)
The UN today put off action on a report criticising Israel’s actions during the war in Gaza after Palestinian leaders suddenly dropped their support for a resolution, apparently under heavy US pressure.
The decision marked a surprising reversal in the Palestinian position which, until now, had backed the findings of the report by the South African judge Richard Goldstone.
That vote will now be delayed until the council meets next, in March next year.
Israel had strongly rejected the findings of the Goldstone report as biased, even though it also criticised the actions of Hamas.
The US administration said it had “very serious concerns” about Goldstone’s recommendations, which included a call for the UN security council to investigate and raised the possibility of investigation by the international criminal court and judges from individual countries.
The Palestinians do not have a seat on the 47-member UN Human Rights Council, but Arab and Muslim countries with council seats had been expected to push for the report to be endorsed.
The Palestinian reversal came after “intense diplomacy” by Washington, which told the Palestinians that going ahead with the vote would harm efforts to restart peace talks with the Israelis, according to diplomats quoted by news agencies.
“The Palestinians recognised that this was not the best time to go forward with this,” the official said.
However, Imad Zuhairi, the deputy Palestinian ambassador in Geneva, said the report “remains alive” and would be debated next spring. The delay “is not a victory for Israel”, he added.
It appeared that the Palestinian leadership was reluctant to lose the chance to return to peace negotiations with Israel and unwilling to try other steps to put pressure on Israel such as international legal action.
Robert Blecher, an analyst with the International Crisis Group, said a similar decision had been taken last week when the Palestinians agreed to meet the Israelis in New York despite Israel’s decision not to accept their call for a full halt to settlement construction.
“This is a further indication that the current Palestinian leadership is not considering any options except for negotiation and in that sense the climbdown, like the climbdown in the meeting in New York city, is not unexpected – just the speed with which it was taken,” he said.
Israel launched an intense diplomatic and public relations operation against his report, particularly after efforts this week in Britain to have an arrest warrant issued against Ehud Barak, the Israeli defence minister who oversaw the Gaza war.
Binyamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, said an endorsement of the Goldstone report would “strike a fatal blow against the peace process” and deny Israel’s “right to self-defence”.
Goldstone defended his work against Netanyahu’s criticism, saying: “I think he got wrong what our report is all about. He talked about Israel’s right to self-defence. That is not what the report was about.”
Obama and change: human rights delayed …
"But I will not let myself be reduced to silence."
