Obstacle to Peace: The US Role in the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict by Jeremy R. Hammond

Author:Jeremy R. Hammond [Hammond, Jeremy R.]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: amazon
Published: 2020-05-01T02:16:04.879687+00:00

Obama’s ‘Diplomatic Bind’

In January 2011, UN Special Rapporteur Richard Falk, in a report on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories, criticized Israel for its pattern of refusing to cooperate with his mission, which was contrary to its obligations as a UN member state. Evidence that Israel was willing to credibly investigate itself and hold its soldiers and leaders accountable remained absent. The international community had woefully failed to implement the recommendations of numerous UN reports, which fostered the perception that Israel was able to violate international law with impunity.

Falk did not refrain from identifying the reason for this, which was the “unconditional support of the United States of America” that Israel enjoyed. US officials such as Hillary Clinton used language that did not reflect the facts on the ground, but obfuscated the truth. The Obama administration’s offers to provide Israel “with substantive benefits for temporarily and partially halting an unlawful activity” effectively rewarded Israel for its illegal settlements policy, which infringed on the rights of the Palestinians and raised “disturbing issues of principle and precedent.” Obama was attempting to restart “a negotiating process that incorporates an acceptance and legitimization of Israeli settlements”. Moreover, Netanyahu’s “freeze” was not at all serious. “In fact, the rate of settlement construction quadrupled compared to what it had been during the two years before the moratorium.”

Additionally, international aid “ostensibly aimed at improving the lives of Palestinians” was instead benefiting the occupying power. US financing for road construction in the West Bank, for example, served “to restrict Palestinian movement and access and, at the same time, to facilitate the movement of Israeli settlers.” This meant that American taxpayers, through USAID, were “financing, and thereby further entrenching, the Israeli de facto annexation of the West Bank.” This “could arguably result” in the US “being deemed complicit in the illegal occupation.”

Israel’s blockade was in violation of international law, and “action by humanitarian organizations to break an unlawful and cruel blockade of this sort is fully justified.” Israel also had a policy of opening fire on Palestinians attempting to access their own land in Gaza. It was “particularly appalling” when Israeli soldiers arbitrarily opened fire on Palestinian children. Seventeen children had been shot in such incidents since March 2010.

Israel also continually arrested and detained children, mostly on “suspicion of stone-throwing”. The children were often abused by their captors. Israel’s policy of prosecuting Palestinian children aged sixteen or older as adults under its military court system, while Israeli children were prosecuted in the civilian courts and not as adults until the age of eighteen, was one example of the “apartheid dimension” of the occupation. The facts were “rendered more disturbing when account is taken that almost all of these arrests of children are generated by their resistance to unlawful patterns of Israeli settlement building and expansion, along with the related ethnic-cleansing measures being applied at an accelerating rate in East Jerusalem.”

Falk renewed the call of his predecessor, John Dugard, to refer the situation to the ICJ for

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