Talk given at the Annual Solemn Meeting of the UN General Assembly Committee on the Inalienable Rights of the Palestinian People

Talk given at the Annual Solemn Meeting of the UN General Assembly Committee on the Inalienable Rights of the Palestinian People
Phyllis Bennis
TNI Website, 29 November 2002

United Nations General Assembly
Committee on the Exercise of the Inalienable Rights of the Palestinian People
Solemn Commemoration of the International Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People
Trusteeship Council Chamber
United Nations, New York
29 November 2002

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.