Missiles? What missiles? Israel and the UN Human Rights Council
The UN Human Rights Council met in emergency session on 11th August to consider a resolution sponsored by members of the Organisation of the Islamic Conference and the Arab League condemning Israel for the illegal bombing of innocent civilians in Lebanon.
There had been virtually no opportunity to negotiate the content of the resolution before its adoption. The resolution, which dealt only with Israeli aggression against Lebanon failed to mention Hezbollah or the rocket attacks on Israel. Peter Splinter, Amnesty International representative at the Human Rights Council, quoted in a press release, said: "It is deeply regrettable that the resolution failed to meet the principles of impartiality and objectivity expected of the Human Rights Council”
We are all appalled by the loss of innocent life. The people of Southern Lebanon live lives of double jeopardy. While the forces of Hezbollah have been able to construct deep shelters for themselves, the civilian population of Southern Lebanon have no such luxury, yet Hezbollah have launched missiles from residential areas including hospital grounds in a cynical attempt to increase civilian suffering from any retaliatory strikes, ratcheting up yet again hatred of Israel in the Muslim world.
By its failure in this resolution even to mention the hundreds of missiles launched indiscriminately against Israel by Hezbollah (the Army of Allah) the Human Rights Council has demonstrated exactly the selectivity and bias for which the old Human Rights Commission was condemned, and has justified the cynicism with which many Western observers greeted the creation of the Council.
During the debate, not one member state mentioned the avowed aim of Hezbollah and its sponsor, the Islamic Republic of Iran, to wipe Israel from the map. It was left to an NGO to remind the Human Rights Council of Hezbollah’s objectives, quoting Hassan Nasrallah, its Secretary General:
– “There is no solution to the conflict in this region except with the disappearance of Israel.”
– “Peace settlements will not change reality, which is that Israel is the enemy and that it will never be a neighbor or a nation.”
– “And on this last day of the century,[1999] I promise Israel that it will see more suicide attacks, for we will write our history with blood.”
– “I am against any reconciliation with Israel. I do not even recognize the presence of a state that is called "Israel." I consider its presence both unjust and unlawful.”
– “The Jews invented the legend of the Nazi atrocities...Anyone who reads the Koran and the holy writings of the monotheistic religions sees what they did to the prophets, and what acts of madness and slaughter the Jews carried out throughout history... Anyone who reads these texts cannot think of co-existence with them, of peace with them, or about accepting their presence, not only in Palestine of 1948 but even in a small village in Palestine, because they are a cancer which is liable to spread again at any moment.”
– “If we searched the entire world for a person more cowardly, despicable, weak and feeble in psyche, mind, ideology and religion, we would not find anyone like the Jew.”
– “If they [the Jews] all gather in Israel, it will save us the trouble of going after them worldwide.”
The statements by Nasrullah echo those made by the President of Iran on 26 October 2005, when he demanded that Israel be "wiped off the map," adding that "very soon, the stain of this disgrace [Israel] will be purged from the centre of the Islamic world." He menaced all peacemakers: "Anybody who recognizes Israel will burn in the fire of the Islamic nation’s fury." At the Islamic Summit in Mecca on 7-8 December 2005, President Ahmadinejad described how "the Islamic world faces many serious problems and challenges," but the major problem was "the presence of the Zionist occupation in the heart of the Islamic region." Its "judicious removal", he predicted, "will pave the way to the appearance of Islam’s power in the successful management of global [matters]."
It is common knowledge that the Islamic Republic of Iran supports this terrorist group financially and its sponsors have, in Narsrullah’s own words, provided Hezbollah with more that 12,000 rockets.
Whatever the rights and wrongs surrounding the creation of the State of Israel, surely the time has come for the Islamic world to recognize its right to exist. Of the original League of Nations mandate given to Britain, 78% of the territory was allocated to what is now Jordan (of which 2/3 of the population are Palestinian), 6% to the West Bank and Gaza and 16% to Israel. Some 600,000 Palestinians were dispossessed following the creation of Israel but little mention is made of the 900,000 Jews forced to leave the Arab states since then, many of whom have settled in Israel.
The radical Islamists who increasingly set the agenda in the Islamic world justify their claim to the territory of Israel on the grounds that it was, like a large part of Spain and Eastern Europe, once part of the Dar el Islam and must become so again. By this logic the United States should be returned to Native Americans and the Anglo-Saxons and Norman French expelled from Britain. The existence of Israel, like that of the United States, Britain and virtually every other modern state is a fait-accompli.
There are reportedly some 15 million Jews in the World and 1,200 million Muslims. The area occupied by the State of Israel, 8,000 sq miles, is less than 1% of the land area of Saudi Arabia. The Islamic world, with its untold oil wealth could, had it wished, easily have resettled the Palestinians dispossessed by Israel and provided them with homes, jobs and security.
The Israelis, Jews and Arabs alike, surely have the right to live in peace and security. It is the tragedy of our times that the Islamic world will not permit them to do so.
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The tragedy of our times
The IHEU is to be strongly commended for highlighting the selectivity of UN Human Rights Council in condemning only Israel for the bombing of innocent civilians in Lebanon. The statements quoted from Hezbollah's Hassan Nasrallah and Iranian President Ahmadinejad are a chilling reminder of the level of hatred directed against Israel and the Jewish people.
I am concerned, however, by the simplistic way in which the creation the State of Israel is characterised. The “rights and wrongs” of its creation should not be so easily dismissed considering that such matters are far from being resolved. It is simply not enough to refer to percentages of territory being "allocated" from the original League of Nations mandate given to Britain. One must question the legitimacy and justice of those 'allocations' and consider the rights of the people who found themselves subject to domination against their will by imperial powers. The following is a very brief -albeit I believe fair- consideration of how the British mandate and its management (particularily in relation to the Palestinian Arabs) was intrinsically unjust and has the profoundest bearing on the present situation.
The 1920 British mandate from the League of Nations to administer Palestine and Mesopotamia and French mandate to administer Syria and Lebanon was essentially an affirmation of the infamous Sykes/Picot agreement arrived at by both parties in 1916. In 1922 the League of Nations confirmed the British mandate for Palestine and in 1923 Britian divided the Palestine mandate area into 'Palestine' and 'Transjordan' (now Jordan) west and east of the Jordan river respectively.
This 1922 confirmation incorporated the Balfour Declaration -written in 1917 to the British Zionist leadership by the then foreign secretary- which stated British support for “the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people”. This was not a mandate for a Jewish state, especially considering that the Declaration specified that “nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine". It did, however, underwrite the Jewish colonisation of Palestine which was encouraged by the British until the pressure of Jewish immigration -massively increased by Nazi persecution of Jews in Europe- culminated in the failed Palestinian Arab Revolt of 1936-39. Additionally, with the outbreak of World War II, British interests in the region required placating the Arabs.
By the end of the war, the Jewish institutions and armed forces were in the ascendant in Palestine and an unprecedented level of Jewish immigration followed from the Nazi Holocaust. Under diplomatic pressure from other states and terrorist tactics from Jewish groups such as Irgun and the Stern Gang, the British handed the problem over to the newly formed United Nations. Palestine (west of the river) was then the subject of the 1947 U.N. General Assembly Resolution 181 which endorsed a disproportionate partition of that area; 55% was to become a Jewish state and 45% an Arab state. There were 1,269,000 Arabs and 678,000 Jews in Palestine (1946 figures) and at that time Jewish ownership of the land was at most only 8%.
That Jewish people wished for a state of their own is understandable to say the least, but unfortunately the state of Israel was created at the expense of the Palestinian Arabs. It was they who were made to pay for the catastrophic crimes of Europe against it's own Jewish population. As is well known, the Arabs rejected the U.N. partition plan but were not in a strong position to prevent it's execution. Indeed, in fighting the emerging Israeli state, they made matters worse for themselves -at the final armistice of the 1948 war, Israel controlled one-fifth more territory than Resolution 181 had specified, and up to 750,000 (some estimates are much higher) Palestinians were 'ethnically cleansed' by Israeli forces.
Thus we have the beginnings of the modern Arab/Israeli conflict. A recent comment by former Israeli Foreign Minister, Shlomo Ben-Ami is relevant here: “Israel, as a society, also suppressed the memory of its war against the local Palestinians, because it couldn't really come to terms with the fact that it expelled Arabs, committed atrocities against them, dispossessed them. This was like admitting that the noble Jewish dream of statehood was stained forever by a major injustice committed against the Palestinians and that the Jewish state was born in sin" (Democracy Now! debate with Norman Finkelstein http://democracynow.org/finkelstein-benami.shtml).
I must also criticize the author's usage of the phrase 'The Islamic world'; suggesting some kind of monolithic entity devoid of diversity of thought and attitude. It is unclear what is meant here by the phrase -does it refer to every Muslim (all "1,200 million" of them) or does it refer to countries with a predominantly Muslim population? The comment that "The Islamic world, with its untold oil wealth could, had it wished, easily have resettled the Palestinians" is glib in the extreme and the author fails to see the essential problem: These people were traumatically dispossessed of their homes for which they had the deepest attachment and wished to return.
To condemn the radical Islamists claim to the territory of Israel on the fanatical grounds of it being part of the 'Dar el Islam' is certainly appropriate, but are not the radical theological Zionists motivated by similar claims to the territory?
I wholeheartedly agree that "The Israelis, Jews and Arabs alike, surely have the right to live in peace and security" but do not the Palestinians also have that right?
Contrary to the author's comment that the "Islamic world" will not permit the Israelis peace and security I'd like to mention Yassir Arafat's historic 1988 declaration that the Palestinians were ready to recognize Israel and renounce PLO terrorism provided they obtained a state in the West Bank and Gaza strip. From then the basis of subsequent Palestinian negotiations was the 1967 U.N. Resolution 242, which if used as a foundation of an agreement would have had a recognized Israeli state within at least the armistice lines of 1948. That Israel didn't seize this opportunity and continued to colonize the West Bank and Gaza is the essential component of what the author has called "the tragedy of our times". Now, in 2006, things are much worse for everybody concerned.
Exclusive Right to Invade
By following the essence of foreign policy pursued by the United States invading a second nation in order to shift the world's attention from the awful crises in one country after that was captured, Tel Aviv has cleverly switched back to attack on Palestine now, brutally injuring some. Annoyed by the mild domestic criticism of Tel Aviv's war in Lebanon killing both a few Israelis and nearly 1900 Lebanese, Israeli forces have reverted back to Gaza for the resumption of fighting the Palestinians for allegedly kidnapping 2 Israelis. It seems Israel is keen to keep alive anti-Muslim sentiments among its population for domestic political reason.It looks funny, but brutally killing the innocent people in a neighboring country for keeping domestic criticism under check, or for any other domestic political reason, has become the order of the day with the Pentagon's invasion of Afghanistan, Iraq and its move to enter Iran. As there have been mounting domestic political pressure in countries like India to invade its neighbors, unless this highly dangerous trend has to be checked immediately, many nations stronger than their neighbors could invade the next country at will and send the forces in the direction the military or political leadership feels fit.However, unfortunately no power could do any thing about it efficiently, including the United Nations.And the UNSC having ulterior motives in sustaining regional conflicts, cannot be expected to do any worthwhile exercise in this regard so that weak countries could also co-exist peacefully alongside the powerful ones possessing enormous weapons arsenals including nuclear.