Date: October 2nd 2009

Abbas helps Israel bury its crimes in Gaza

By Ali Abunimah

The Electronic Intifada
2 October 2009

http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article10807.shtml

Just when it seemed that the Ramallah Palestinian
Authority (PA) and its leader Mahmoud Abbas could not sink
any lower in their complicity with Israel's occupation of
the West Bank and the murderous blockade of Gaza, Ramallah
has dealt a further stunning blow to the Palestinian
people.

The Abbas delegation to the United Nations in Geneva
(officially representing the moribund Palestine Liberation
Organization) abandoned a resolution requesting the Human
Rights Council to forward Judge Richard Goldstone's report
on war crimes in Gaza to the UN Security Council for
further action. Although the PA acted under US pressure,
there are strong indications that the commercial interests
of Palestinian and Gulf businessmen closely linked to
Abbas also played a part.

The 575-page Goldstone report documents evidence of
shocking Israeli war crimes and crimes against humanity
during last winter's assault on the Gaza Strip which
killed 1,400 Palestinians, the vast majority noncombatants
and hundreds of them children. The report also accuses the
Palestinian resistance movement Hamas of war crimes for
firing rockets into Israel that killed three civilians.

Goldstone's report was hailed by Palestinians and
supporters of the rule of law worldwide as a watershed; it
called for suspects to be held accountable before
international courts if Israel failed to prosecute them.
Israel has no history, ever, of holding its political and
military leaders judicially accountable for war crimes
against the Palestinians.

Israel was rightly terrified of the report, mobilizing all
its diplomatic and political resources to discredit it. In
recent days, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu claimed
that if the report were acted on, it would "strike a
severe blow to the war against terrorism," and "strike a
fatal blow to the peace process, because Israel will no
longer be able to take additional steps and take risks for
peace if its right to self-defense is denied."

Unsurprisingly, an early ally in the Israeli campaign for
impunity was the Obama Administration, whose UN
ambassador, Susan Rice, expressed "very serious concerns"
about the report and trashed Goldstone's mandate as
"unbalanced, one-sided and basically unacceptable." (Rice
was acting true to her word; in April she told the
newspaper Politico that one of the main reasons the Obama
Administration decided to join the UN Human Rights Council
was to fight what she called "the anti-Israel crap.")

Goldstone, whose daughter has publicly described her
father as a Zionist who loves Israel, is a former judge of
the South African Supreme Court, and a highly respected
international jurist. He was the chief prosecutor at UN
war crimes tribunals for Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia.

That the Goldstone report was a severe blow to Israel's
ability to commit future war crimes with impunity is not
in doubt; this week bolstered by the report, lawyers in
the UK asked a court to issue an arrest warrant for
visiting Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak. That action
did not succeed, but Israel's government has taken
extraordinary measures in recent months to try to shield
its officials from prosecution, fearing that successful
arrests are just a matter of time. Along with the growing
international campaign of boycott, divestment and
sanctions, the fear of ending up in The Hague seems to be
the only thing that causes the Israeli government and
society to reconsider their destructive path.

One would think, then, that the self-described
representatives of the Palestinian people would not
casually throw away this weapon. And yet, according to
Abbas ambassador Ibrahim Khraishi, the Ramallah PA shelved
its effort at the request of the Americans because "We
don't want to create an obstacle for them."

Khraishi's excuse that the resolution is merely being
deferred until the spring does not pass muster. Unless
action is taken now, the Goldstone report will be buried
by then and evidence of Israel's crimes -- necessary for
prosecutions -- may be harder to collect.

This latest surrender comes less than two weeks after
Abbas appeared at a summit in New York with US President
Barack Obama and Netanyahu despite Obama abandoning his
demand that Israel halt construction of Jewish-only
settlements on occupied Palestinian land. Also under US
pressure, the PA abandoned its pledge not to resume
negotiations unless settlement-building stopped, and
agreed to take part in US-mediated "peace talks" with
Israel in Washington this week. Israel, meanwhile,
announced plans for the largest ever West Bank settlement
since 1967.

What makes this even more galling, is the real possibility
that the PA is helping Israel wash its hands of the blood
it spilled in Gaza for something as base as the financial
gain of businessmen closely linked to Abbas.

The Independent (UK) reported on 1 October:

"Shalom Kital, an aide to defense minister Ehud Barak,
said today that Israel will not release a share of the
radio spectrum that has long been sought by the
Palestinian Authority to enable the launch of a second
mobile telecommunications company unless the PA drops its
efforts to put Israeli soldiers and officers in the dock
over the Israeli operation." ("Palestinians cry
'blackmail' over Israel phone service threat," The
Independent, 1 October).

Kital added that it was a "condition" that the PA
specifically drop its efforts to advance the Goldstone
report. The phone company, Wataniya, was described last
April by Reuters as an "Abbas-backed company" which is a
joint venture between Qatari and Kuwaiti investors and the
Palestinian Investment Fund with which one of Abbas' sons
is closely involved. Moreover, Reuters revealed that the
start-up company apparently had no shortage of capital due
to the Gulf investors receiving millions of dollars of "US
aid in the form of loan guarantees meant for Palestinian
farmers and other small to mid-sized businesses" (See "US
aid goes to Abbas-backed Palestinian phone venture,"
Reuters, 24 April 2009).

Just a day before the Abbas delegation pulled its
resolution in Geneva, Nabil Shaath, the PA "foreign
minister" denounced the Israeli threat over Wataniya as
"blackmail" and vowed that the Palestinians would never
back down.

The PA's betrayal of the Palestinian people over the
Goldstone report, as well as its continued "security
coordination" with Israel to suppress resistance and
political activity in the West Bank, should banish all
doubt that it is an active arm of the Israeli occupation
doing tangible and escalating harm to the Palestinian
people and their just cause.

Co-founder of The Electronic Intifada, Ali Abunimah is
author of One Country: A Bold Proposal to End the
Israeli-Palestinian Impasse.


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