Talk given at the Annual Solemn Meeting of the UN General Assembly Committee on the Inalienable Rights of the Palestinian People
PHYLLIS BENNIS
29 November 2002
New York -- Two months ago almost 400 people, representing civil society organizations from around the world, all committed to ending the Israeli occupation of Palestine, met here at the headquarters of the United Nations, to strengthen our international campaign to "End the Occupation!" On the occasion of this year's solemn commemoration of the International Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People, the peril facing Palestine and the Palestinians has never been greater.
I am very grateful to the Committee on the Exercise of the Inalienable Rights of the Palestinian People for providing me an opportunity to participate in today's meeting. It is, however, impossible for me to adequately represent the wide range of campaigns, of opinions, of priorities for the far-flung international NGO network on Palestine. Our organizations are working across Africa, in Latin America and Asia, throughout Europe, in North America, and on the ground in both Palestine and Israel. Our activists fight for the right of return, for economic and social rights for Palestinian refugees, against military aid to the Israeli occupation, for the implementation of United Nations resolutions and international law, and for a comprehensive and just peace. As an international movement, our priority is reflected in the theme of the September conference held here at the United Nations: to end the occupation. And our most urgent priority today, within that broad goal of ending the occupation, is our call for international protection for Palestinians living under Israeli military occupation.
In September we met at a moment of grave crisis; that crisis today has grown even greater. Our call to action noted the deterioration of humanitarian conditions in the occupied territories, and the escalation of repression against Palestinian civilians. We noted specifically Israel's "annexation and settlement, the reoccupation of Palestinian cities and blocking of roads between them; expulsions and targeted assassination of scores of Palestinians; attacks on ambulances and medical personnel; house demolitions; destruction of water storage facilities; uprooting of thousands of fruit and olive trees; 24-hour curfews; almost permanent closures of towns, villages and cities; and excessive use of force, including weapons of war such as F-16 bombers and helicopter gunships used against apartment houses, refugee camps and other civilian targets, causing the deaths of numerous Palestinians."
Two months later those horrifying realities have only increased; they receive less attention on the front pages of our newspapers only because their now routine horror is eclipsed by the threat of grave new horrors looming elsewhere in the region.
Our September call noted "we are appalled by the international community's failure, so far, to provide serious protection for Palestinian civilians living under military occupation." Now, months later, we are still appalled. We are still angry and we are still disappointed.
The United Nations is not simply a forum for the exchange of ideas. The United Nations as an institution has responsibilities and obligations; one such obligation is to ensure that protected people, as populations living under military occupation are defined under the Geneva Conventions, do in fact receive the protections required, simultaneously with ensuring an end to the occupation that necessitates protection. And when the Security Council is paralyzed, the General Assembly has the obligation, under the Uniting for Peace precedent, to act.
The occupation of Palestine is growing stronger. And its threat to Palestinians -- to Palestinian rights and to Palestinian lives -- grows stronger too. Israel's occupation today claims more uncritical support than ever from the world's sole superpower. Alongside its current military and economic subsidies from Washington, amounting to a quarter of the entire US foreign aid budget, Israel this week requested an additional $4 billion in military aid and $8 - 10 billion in loan guarantees from US taxpayers. That money, if granted, would help sustain Israel's illegal occupation.
As the occupying power gains ever more support from the world's sole superpower, the Palestinians' need for international protection grows ever greater as well. As the international NGO movement, our response to this escalating crisis is to strengthen our commitment to work for an end to Israeli occupation and for international protection for Palestinian civilians living under that military occupation.
While Palestinian civilians suffer under 24-hour-a-day shoot-to-kill curfews, Israeli settlement expansion continues. Nearly 45% of West Bank land has already been expropriated from Palestinians for settlement purposes. Much of that land grab has taken place during a "peace process" from which the United Nations was excluded. Arbitrary arrests, detention and harrassment continue, even of UN staff members. One such armed raid was carried out last week on the home of UNRWA field legal officer Allegra Pacheco by an IDF combat unit of 20-30 heavily armed troops who surrounded her home, confiscating her property and holding Ms. Pacheco at gunpoint while deliberately humiliating and then arresting her husband, all the while refusing to recognize her protected status as a UN staff member.
The need for the international community to provide serious protection to those living under Israeli occupation has never been clearer. We see that even staff members of the United Nations are themselves vulnerable to the violence of Israeli occupation. The NGO community internationally joins with the UN Secretariat in mourning our colleague Iain Hook, the UNRWA director shot and killed by IDF troops last week while overseeing the rebuilding of the Jenin refugee camp destroyed by Israeli forces in April.
There is clearly a need for the United Nations to function as the central actor in ending Israel's occupation. Only the UN itself holds the legitimacy and legal authority to act in the name of the world's peoples to defend the requirements of international law. But despite important efforts, so far our global organization has failed. The Security Council remains largely paralyzed. Earlier this year we watched with hope as the Council voted to send a serious fact-finding team to investigate the spring's lethal events in Jenin; we watched with anger as Israel reversed its claimed openness and rejected the team's arrival; we watched with outrage as Israel's patron in the Council did nothing to pressure Israel to accept the UN's legitimacy; and we watched with dismay as the UN team was quickly withdrawn.
We watched with hope when the United Nations secretary-general called for "robust international protection" under Chapter VII for Palestinians living under occupation; and we watched with dismay when that call was ignored.
And we watched with hope when the General Assembly took important steps in calling for a serious United Nations investigation of the events in Jenin despite Israel's recalcitrance. But we need and expect more. Palestinians languishing under military occupation deserve more. And international law and the legitimacy of the UN require more.
We continue our work to support the International Solidarity Movement, Grassroots International Protection for Palestinians, and the myriad of other organizations whose brave internationals, at great risk to their own safety, are working in the occupied territories with Palestinian NGOs to provide some protection and to act as the eyes and ears of the world's people to document and expose conditions of life under Israeli occupation. We commend their work and their bravery, and we extend to them our strongest solidarity.
But the need for their presence in Occupied Palestine still reflects the failure of the international community to provide the serious protection that a population living under military occupation requires. We see that failure as the failure of those member states who claim to support an end to occupation, the failure of the United Nations. Your failure, I'm sorry to say.
As NGOs, we continue our efforts in our own countries to press our governments to support United Nations-based efforts to provide real international protection for the Palestinians. We know those efforts have been and continued to be undermined by the use or threat of veto by the United States in the Security Council.
But I challenge you here today as members of the General Assembly, where the threat of a veto does not exist. I challenge you as leaders and members of the Committee on the Exercise of the Inalienable Rights of the Palestinian People. And I challenge you as those Member States of the General Assembly of the United Nations who take seriously the legitimacy, obligations and power of international law.
As the world stands on the precipice of a war that threatens shock waves across the Middle East, we must recognize the particular danger faced by Palestinians, and we must mobilize the international community, through the United Nations, to protect that vulnerable population.
The danger of war in Iraq holds out a specific serious danger for Palestinians -- the danger that the occupying power might, in response to such a war, carry out its current threat of transfer. Transfer is a polite Israeli euphemism for ethnic cleansing. Transfer, as currently understood, means forcible expulsion of Palestinians out of their homes in Israel and/or the occupied territories of Gaza, the West Bank and East Jerusalem, and into forced exile in Jordan or another Arab country. Some Israeli supporters of transfer perhaps have in mind only a few Palestinians; others may contemplate even large numbers of Palestinians being expelled. But the numbers do not change the clear reality that expulsion of any protected person from an occupied territory by the occupying power remains a violation of the Geneva Conventions -- a war crime. There is no exception. Transfer was once deemed too extreme to propose in polite company in Israel. But today transfer is part of mainstream Israeli political discourse.
The danger cannot be taken lightly, or dismissed as over-heated speculation. The political party that openly advocates transfer has a seat in the current Israeli government. The election of General Sharon, founder of the "Jordan is Palestine" campaign twenty years ago, as the more moderate centrist leader of his party, provides stark evidence of a continuing shift in Israeli public opinion -- towards greater support of its occupation and against any hope of a just peace. Just yesterday, the Israeli newspaper Ha'aretz documented General Sharon's refusal to reject "transfer" as a solution to what Israel considers its Palestine problem. Transfer is on the front page of the newspapers and it is the subject of academic seminars at respected Israeli universities.
And transfer is not simply an academic subject. It has happened before. During the war of 1947-48 and again in 1967, hundreds of thousands of Palestinians were forced from their homes. The more than four million Palestinians still in exile around the world, including the millions of refugees under the protection of the United Nations because they have been denied their right to return home, were first made refugees through a process of ethnic cleansing. As recently as 1994, Israeli troops rounded up a group of 415 Palestinians, forced them onto helicopters and ferried them across Israel's border to the snow-covered mountains of south Lebanon. There, in clear violation of international law and the Geneva Conventions, they were unceremoniously dumped, without residency permits or protection from the elements, and there they remained, in tents on the freezing mountainside, for more than a year. UN condemnation was swift, but Israeli accountability for its violations remained elusive.
Over 100 Israeli academics have signed a letter condemning the talk of transfer, and rejecting even consideration of such an attack on Palestinians. Those Israelis, along with others in the Israeli peace movement, understand that transfer, like other tools of repression in the arsenal of military occupation, will not lead to an end to attacks against Israeli civilians. Such attacks, by suicide bombers or others, remain in violation of international law, and must be condemned. But if we are serious about ending such attacks on Israeli civilians, we must be serious about ending the conditions that give rise to those attacks: that is, by ending the occupation. The Israeli peace organization Gush Shalom had it right, after the first of the suicide bombings that killed a large number of civilians, particularly children and young people, two summers ago. "The occupation is killing all of us," they said. "It's killing Palestinians and it's killing Israeli Jews." They were right.
The United Nations has condemned, appropriately, attacks on civilians. Is it not appropriate for the United Nations to consider now, today, an explicit condemnation and rejection of any policy of "transfer," precisely in the hopes of preventing such a severe human rights violation from ever taking place?
There is already a similar campaign underway to warn preemptively of the consequences of war crimes, this one carried out by Israeli peace activists. They caution military officers of the Israel Defense Forces that certain future actions they may be ordered to take in the maintenance of Israel's military occupation could constitute war crimes that might be eligible for prosecution under the Rome Treaty by the International Criminal Court. Would it not be appropriate for the United Nations, through its human rights and other bodies, to issue such a warning as well?
We know that the Israel-Palestine conflict is one consistently vulnerable to distortion and misstatements of fact. And even beyond distortion and misstatement, differences in history and vantage point bring about different assessments of the same set of events. If we look, for example, at the events that took place in Jenin last spring, we know those events meant different things to different people. For the Israeli military, Jenin was a battle against "terrorism" and the 28 dead civilians were simply collateral damage. For the United States, Jenin provides the model on which Israeli training of US commandos preparing for urban warfare in Iraq is based. For Palestinians, Jenin was part of the human price paid by an occupied population under military occupation. For human rights organizations, the events at Jenin included at least ten violations of the Geneva Conventions -- war crimes.
And for the United Nations? The General Assembly's mandate for a report on Jenin was an important step, but only a first step. Much more is needed. Much more is required of the international community under the obligations of the Geneva Convention to protect people living under occupation.
There has never been a greater need for United Nations centrality in dealing with the current crisis. A real quartet would be fine -- but a solo act with three back-up singers limited to joining in on the chorus isn't the same thing.
I extend a challenge to you today. A challenge to the Committee on the Exercise of the Inalienable Rights of the Palestinian People whose role must be to lead the General Assembly to take seriously its obligations to the Palestinians. A challenge to the Non-Aligned Movement whose own history is bound up with the struggle against colonialism and occupation. A challenge to the European Union whose commitment to human rights shapes their primary identity. A challenge to those Member States of the General Assembly who take seriously the world community's obligations to implement and enforce UN resolutions and international law. I challenge you all to make real the UN's expressed commitment to providing international protection to Palestinians living under occupation. I challenge you to defy the veto-driven paralysis of the Security Council and reclaim for the General Assembly the right to prepare, mandate, fund, recruit and deploy an international protection force for the Palestinians living under occupation and for Israelis threatened by the consequences of occupation. I challenge you to refuse the bribes, threats and punishments routinely meted out by one powerful country, in order to make good on the global obligations of the United Nations. I challenge you to reject President Bush's claim that the relevance of the United Nations is defined by UN acquiescence to Washington's policies.
President Bush said something else, in a far different context. He asked whether United Nations "resolutions [are] to be honored and enforced, or cast aside without consequence." We in the NGO movement know the answer to that question. Our challenge to you, the United Nations, is to join us in a global effort to honor and enforce UN resolutions -- ALL the UN resolutions. Those resolutions are consistent. They require an end to Israeli occupation of Palestine, and protection for the Palestinian people. And they place that obligation squarely on the United Nations. We look to you, again, with hope.
Thank you.