Gaza by Norman Finkelstein

Author:Norman Finkelstein
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780520295711
Publisher: University of California Press

THIRTEEN

Betrayal II

UN HUMAN RIGHTS COUNCIL

IN AUGUST 2014, THE UN HUMAN RIGHTS COUNCIL APPOINTED a fact-finding mission “to investigate purported violations of international humanitarian and human rights law” during Operation Protective Edge (2014).1 William Schabas, a respected international jurist, was named chair of the mission. Israel immediately jumped into high gear to oust him, as he had previously uttered sacrileges such as, “Why are we going after the president of Sudan [at the International Criminal Court] for Darfur and not the president of Israel for Gaza?” Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman weirdly analogized Schabas’s recruitment to “appointing Cain to investigate who killed Abel.” Unable to withstand the juggernaut, Schabas duly “resigned” and was replaced as chair by a US judge, Mary McGowan Davis, who hailed from New York State.2 The outcome at this point was as predictable as when UN secretary-general Ban Ki-moon appointed Álvaro Uribe vice-chair of the Panel of Inquiry after Israel’s assault on the Mavi Marmara.3 The betrayal had begun.

In June 2015, the UN Human Rights Council (UNHRC) mission released its report.4 It predictably accused Hamas5 of having committed war crimes. But a close reading of the UN Report could not have pleased Israel either. In its discrete analyses of numerous incidents during the assault, the Report’s factual findings repeatedly suggested that Israel might also have committed war crimes. A reader unfamiliar with the facts would perhaps be impressed at the Report’s evenhanded presentation, whereas a reader familiar with them would probably recoil in outrage at this spurious balance. The odd thing about the Report was that it did chronicle, often in harrowing detail, the horrors that Israel inflicted on Gaza. However, it then proceeded to render legal analyses that methodically and, in many instances, comically buffered the gravity of Israel’s crimes. In other words, it precisely replicated the apologetic modus operandi of the Amnesty International reports on Protective Edge.6 The upshot was that the UN Report conveyed a wholly misleading, distorted picture of what happened in Gaza. Whereas it suggested that Protective Edge was a legitimate military campaign lamentably marred by sundry excesses, in fact the assault was a terror campaign designed, if not to break, then at any rate to temper Gaza’s will to resist. In order to convincingly demonstrate the Report’s bias, there’s no alternative except to sift through its findings piecemeal fashion. It is to be hoped that by the time readers complete this chapter, they will be persuaded that if this writer has reached a harsh conclusion, it springs neither from malice nor prejudice but was arrived at only after scrupulously parsing the evidence, albeit also amid his mounting feelings of despair commingled with indignation that even at this late date, when a seemingly endless river of blood has passed under the bridge in the course of Israel’s numberless “operations” targeting the martyred people of Gaza, a document bearing the imprimatur of the Human Rights Council should still so want in courage and integrity.

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