Tag: Cast Lead

EU lawyers draw up list of IDF officers suspected of Gaza war crimes

Anshel Pfeffer | Ha’aretz

27 October 2009

Human rights lawyers and pro-Palestinian activists in a number of European countries hold lists with names of Israel Defense Forces soldiers allegedly linked to war crimes committed during Operation Cast Lead in the Gaza Strip. Existing legislation enables arrest warrants to be issued against these officers if they enter those countries.

Lawyers in Britain and other European countries have been collecting testimonies of Palestinians and other data from Gaza since January, which they maintain proves that war crimes were committed by the IDF during the offensive. The evidence is linked to IDF officers holding ranks of battalion commander and higher, who were in command during various stages of Cast Lead.

The other nations who have lawyers collecting information on the matter include the Netherlands, Spain, Belgium and Norway, whose laws, as well as Britain’s, allow the issuance of arrest warrants against foreign citizens suspected of war crimes.

Attorney Daniel Makover from London is coordinating the efforts in Britain. One of his colleagues visited the Gaza Strip several weeks after the fighting in order to collect testimonies. Palestinians civilians also gave the legal assistant their approval, and asked that he file the suits in their name, in line with British law.

Speaking to Haaretz, Makover refused to offer details on the identity of the IDF officers or how many were listed, but said that much depends on the specific details of each case. Makover said that anyone who was involved in an incident may face criminal charges. The attorney added that there are officers who are obviously candidates for charges, and others who are less obvious, but emphasized that it depends on the facts collected on the ground.

Makover said that the Goldstone report on the fighting in the Gaza Strip will bolster the efforts of the activists, and said that some of the instances mentioned in the report were already known to the attorneys. Makover is part of an unofficial network of attorneys operating in various countries in Europe, exchanging and sharing information so that suspected officers may be arrested in those countries.

The information is often received from pro-Palestinian activists who follow Jewish or pro-Israel groups that invite IDF officers to deliver lectures. In some instances, this information is relayed to border controls. Makover said that a small number of names of IDF officers is already on a British police watch list, and that when they arrive in Britain the authorities will issue an arrest warrant that will lead to their possible detention.

A number of human rights groups are busy working to create an international organization that would enable closer surveillance of those they suspect of war crimes and torture, as well as seek warrants for their arrest.

The IDF did not wish to specify the instructions it has given to officers before they travel abroad. In practice, many of the officers who participated in the Gaza operation have been asked to consult with legal experts at the Foreign Ministry, where they are instructed how to behave abroad and where they need to lower the profile of their identity; in some cases they are advised not to visit certain countries.

The Foreign Ministry released a statement saying: “The ministry is aware of efforts undertaken by Palestinian groups and their supporters to harm IDF officers through legal and public relations means, and is working to prevent such efforts.”

California residents disrupt Olmert

Indy Bay

22 October 2009

Twenty-two activists were arrested at Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert’s speech to the World Affairs Council tonight between 6:30 and 7:30pm at the Westin St. Francis Hotel (Union Square). Inside the auditorium, activists began disrupting the event by placing Olmert under citizens arrest. Every couple of minutes, more activists disrupted his speech, barely allowing him to speak, by reading the names of the children killed in Gaza last winter, reading from the recently published Goldstone Report, and displaying banners that read “Lift the Siege on Gaza” and “War Crimes are Not Free Expression!” Activists were removed from the auditorium chanting “War Criminal!” and taken to the Tenderloin Police Station where they are being held for citation. Ten additional people participated in the action but were not arrested.

Olmert ordered Israel’s brutal attacks on Gaza beginning in late December 2008, codenamed Operation Cast Lead. Last week, the UN Human Rights Council passed a resolution endorsing the Goldstone Report, an independent investigation into the Gaza operation, which found that Israel violated international law and possibly committed crimes against humanity.

“Israel is an apartheid state guilty of war crimes and its leaders should not be welcome in San Francisco,” said Lisa Nessan, a Jewish resident of Oakland, who has traveled several times to Israel and Palestine, most recently in May. “For the past sixty years, under leadership like Olmert’s, Israel has denied Palestinians their basic human rights, built settlements on their lands, and killed civilians – all to force them from their homeland.”

A lively protest also gathered across from the hotel in Union Square, where about 250 people carried signs bearing the names and pictures of children killed during Operation Cast Lead. Olmert is making several appearances in the US this month, and has been met with strong protests at locations including the University of Chicago and Tulane University in New Orleans. “We join with people around the world who believe that Israel and its leaders must be held accountable for their actions. Israel killed 1400 people during its attacks on Gaza last winter alone, and many more have died or suffered from the effects of siege, occupation, and apartheid on their daily lives,” said Monadel Herzallah, a Palestinian activist who lives in Fairfield and whose 21 year old cousin was killed in Gaza in January.

Organizers also expressed outrage that President Obama has ignored the findings of the Goldstone Report. The US has pledged more than $3 billion each year in unrestricted aid to Israel. “Israel’s use of US aid and military equipment violates our own laws,” said Rae Abileah, an organizer with CODEPINK whose father is Israeli. “Why are we giving aid to a country that is destroying people’s homes and attacking civilians, while our own nation is struggling with unemployment and underfunded social services?”

Eduardo Cohen of San Francisco sums up the sentiment: “The war crimes in the Goldstone Report are not an exception, but a reminder that Israel’s apartheid law is itself criminal. We must not only hold Olmert accountable, but all of Israel’s leaders, our own elected officials, and other companies and individuals that profit from these crimes. Only then can true justice be reached.”

The protest was sponsored by: Arab Resource & Organizing Center (AROC), Bay Area Campaign to End Israeli Apartheid (BACEIA), CODEPINK Women for Peace, Friends of Deiribzi’a, Northern California International Solidarity Movement, Middle East Children’s Alliance (MECA), South Bay Mobilization, Stop AIPAC, CAL Students for Justice in Palestine, US Palestine Communities Network (USPCN), Bay Area Women in Black.

Rebuilding Gaza’s infrastructure with mud

Eva Bartlett | Electronic Intifada

14 October 2009

SHEIKH ZAYED, occupied Gaza Strip (IPS) – On a searing summer morning, workers are adding layers to the mud-brick police station being constructed in Sheikh Zayed, northern Gaza.

“We started building on 20 June,” says Mohammed al-Sheikh Eid, a consultant engineer with Gaza’s Ministry of Interior. “Since this is the first time we’ve built something on this scale with mud bricks, we can’t estimate exactly how much longer it will take to complete. Maybe another two months or so.”

He is confident, however, that they will finish before the winter rains begin.

Since the war on Gaza ended, a number of houses have been built using mud to create simple, square, two or three-room homes. The new Sheikh Zayed police station is one of the larger and more ambitious projects.

An intricate series of thick-walled, deep-arched chambers form what is on the whole a much more artistic rendition of the former square, cement police station bombed during the attacks. When finished, the station will be 550 square meters, including seven 3.5m by 3.5m office rooms and eight long, arched-roofed chambers 3m wide and 8m long.

In contrast to Gaza’s basic new mud-brick homes, with their cracked-earth finish inside and rough, straw-flecked outer layer, the police station design replicates that of the elegant, traditional Palestinian stone or brick buildings: neatly-packed rows of brick frame windows and doorways in graceful arcs; with surprisingly smooth domes that top off vaulted rooms and corridors. The one-level station, with its multiple rooftop domes, resembles the architecture of Palestinian homes from Nablus to Jerusalem.

The site, just off the coastal road serving Beit Lahiya, is open and spacious, with a contrasting backdrop of cement block apartment buildings, built long before the Israeli siege on Gaza, when cement was accessible.

Engineer and site supervisor Sameh al-Khalout explains the small-scale and hand-crafted construction process.

“The mud bricks take between one and two weeks to cast and dry,” he says, gesturing at the rows of bricks drying in the sun. “Each brick costs roughly one shekel [a quarter of a dollar] to make.”

Al-Khalout says the clay is brought from a nearby area of Beit Lahiya, and the straw comes from local farmers. “We will put plaster on the roof, to seal it and protect it from rain.”

Wood is temporarily used to buffer ceiling arches and windows until the clay mortar hardens. The wood is then removed and used elsewhere in the same manner.

Apart from these wood bracings, conventional and excessively expensive building materials are not used.

Cement smuggled in via the tunnels between Egypt and Gaza is as much as ten times the pre-siege price. A ton of cement costs 3,400 shekels ($850), compared to the 350 shekels it cost prior to June 2007.

Husam Toubil from the United Nations Development Programme says Gaza requires 50,000 tons of cement to rebuild destroyed homes, and 41,000 tons for public buildings.

Al-Khalout says problems extend beyond lack of availability of materials. “For most of our workers, this is their first experience building with mud bricks.”

“Since we have to bring in clay, straw and gravel, and mix the mud cement, make the bricks and then build the actual station, we require more workers than we would using cement.”

In an enclosed Strip where unemployment is near 50 percent and poverty has reached 90 percent, according to a recent UN Conference on Trade and Development (UNCATD) report, the workers will brave the heat for the chance to earn 40 shekels a day.

Since the siege on Gaza tightened in June 2007, almost no construction materials have entered Gaza, according to the OCHA report. This is in comparison to the pre-attacks, pre-siege import levels of 7,400 trucks per month, from January to May 2007.

According to the United Nations Relief Web news, 3,900 truckloads entered Gaza from January to May 2007. Over the same period this year, six trucks were allowed in. These carried material for water projects, greatly in need and long awaiting completion.

The Israeli authorities say the ban on building materials is to prevent Hamas from using so-called “dual use” items for military activities.

Yet, non-Hamas run agencies, schools, and healthcare centers are facing the same blanket restrictions on import of cement, gravel, wood, tiles, piping, paint, glass and steel bars, notes the OCHA report.

The mud brick technique, extended beyond the simple clay ovens prevalent in Gaza to the building of houses, potentially meets some of Gaza’s great construction needs.

East of Gaza city, in the al-Shejayia district, engineers have tackled the challenge of a multi-level clay-brick building: a three-story school for 600 disabled children is under construction, using a combination of mud brick and rubble from the remains of homes and buildings destroyed during the Israeli attacks.

According to a Guardian news report, engineer Maher al-Batroukh and university engineers experimented with clay to create strong bricks. When finished, the school will be roughly twice the size of the Sheikh Zayed police station, with similar domed ceilings and plaster coating.

Noting the success of clay building endeavors, the Hamas Ministry of Public Works is likewise pursuing the mud-brick alternative, with plans to build multi-story houses and re-build destroyed public buildings.

While some are finding means to get around the Israeli ban on nearly everything needed to re-build in Gaza, the on-going siege on the Strip continues to hit daily life to an extent that the latest UN report notes that closed borders and delays in allowing in goods are “devastating livelihoods” and causing gradual “de-development.”

The OCHA report further cites the damage to education, including overcrowding due to destroyed or damaged schools, and denied or delayed education materials.

In an August 2009 statement, Maxwell Gaylard, the UN Humanitarian Coordinator for the Occupied Palestinian Territory, noted that the “deterioration and breakdown of water and sanitation facilities in Gaza is compounding an already severe and protracted denial of human dignity in the Gaza Strip.”

Gaylard, along with the Association for International Development Agencies (AIDA), notes that the Israeli denial of entry of equipment and supplies needed for the construction, maintenance and operation of water and sanitation facilities since June 2007 has led to “the gradual deterioration of these essential services.”

Further citing destruction from the Israeli attacks, the statement says Gaza’s sanitation and water services are on the “brink of collapse,” noting that the sparse supplies allowed in have been “nowhere near enough to restore a fully functioning water and sanitation system.”

About 60 percent of the population does not have continuous access to water, the statement notes. Roughly 10,000 people in Gaza have no access to the water network at all. This, combined with the 50-80 million liters of untreated and partially treated wastewater that is being discharged daily since January 2008, compounds the water and sanitation crisis.

Although some resourceful individuals have built homes despite the ban on cement, these various reports highlight that the manifold problems created by the ongoing siege and Israeli attacks on Gaza are too extensive to be solved by improvisation and mud alone.

The Palestinian Centre for Human Rights (PCHR) reports that 60 police stations were destroyed or damaged during the winter 2008-2009 Israeli attacks on Gaza.

The United Nations Office for Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) August 2009 report says more than 6,400 homes were destroyed or severely damaged, and over 52,000 suffered minor damage from bombing during Israel’s winter war on Gaza.

The OCHA report notes that the continued Israeli-led siege on Gaza has prevented reconstruction or repair of 13,900 homes, including approximately 2,700 homes damaged or destroyed in earlier Israeli military operations, and of 3,000 housing units intended to replace inadequate homes in crowded refugee camps.

Over 20,000 Palestinians remain displaced in Gaza, with approximately 100 families still living in emergency tents provided by aid agencies.

PCHR also reports that 215 factories and 700 private businesses, 17 universities or colleges, 15 hospitals and 43 health care centers, and 58 mosques were destroyed or damaged during the attacks. The United Nations says that 298 schools were destroyed or damaged.

They all await reconstruction, as does Gaza’s shattered economy.

Family who lost 29 members in Gaza war: We envy the dead

Amira Hass | Ha’aretz

18 October 2009

Richard Goldstone visited the Gaza City neighborhood of Zaytoun in late June to tour the compound of the extended Samouni family, the subject of coverage here in recent weeks (“‘I fed him like a baby bird,'” September 17; “Death in the Samouni compound,” September 25). Twenty-nine members of the family, all of them civilians, were killed in the Israel Defense Force’s winter assault – 21 during the shelling of a house where IDF soldiers had gathered some 100 members of the family a day earlier.

Salah Samouni and the owner of the house that was shelled – Wael Samouni – took Goldstone around the farming neighborhood, showing him its devastated homes and uprooted orchards. In a telephone conversation this week, Salah described how he had shown Goldstone a picture of his father, Talal, among the 21 killed in the house. He told the Jewish South African judge and head of the United Nations inquiry team into Operation Cast Lead, that his father “had been employed by Jews” for nearly 40 years and that whenever he was sick, “the employer would call, ask after his health, and forbid him to come to work before he had recovered.”

The Samounis were always confident that, in the event of any military invasions into Gaza, they could always manage to get along with the Israeli army. Until 2005, before Israel’s disengagement from the Strip, the Jewish settlement of Netzarim was located right next door, and several family members worked there from time to time. When the joint Israeli-Palestinian patrols were active, Israeli soldiers and Palestinian security officials sometimes asked the Samounis to “lend” them a tractor to flatten a patch of land or repair the Salah al-Din Road (for example, when a diplomatic convoy needed to pass through). While Samouni family members worked on their tractors, gathering sand, the soldiers would watch them.

“When the soldiers wanted us to leave, they would fire above our heads. That’s what experience taught me,” recalls Salah Samouni, who lost a 2-year-old daughter in the IDF attack, along with uncles and both of his parents. The older men of the family, among them his father and two uncles who were killed by IDF soldiers on January 4 and 5, worked in Israel until the 1990s in different localities, including Bat Yam, Moshav Asseret (near Gedera) and the “Glicksman Plant.” They all believed that the Hebrew they had learned would assist and if necessary save them during encounters with soldiers.

As was reported here last month – on January 4, under orders from the army, Salah Samouni and the rest of the family left their home, which had been turned into a military position, and moved to the other, the home of Wael, located on the southern side of the street. The fact that it was the soldiers who had relocated them, had seen the faces of the children and the older women, and the fact that the soldiers were positioned in locations surrounding the house just tens of meters away, instilled in the family a certain amount of confidence – despite the IDF fire from the air, from the sea and from the land, despite the hunger and the thirst.

On the morning of Monday, January 5, Salah Samouni walked out of the house and shouted in the direction of another house in the compound that he thought other family members were still in. He wanted them to join him, to be in a safer place, closer to the soldiers. Nothing prepared him for the three shells and the rockets the IDF fired a short time later.

“My daughter Azza, my only daughter, two and a half years old, was injured in the first hit on the house,” Salah told Haaretz. “She managed to say, ‘Daddy, it hurts.’ And then, in the second hit, she died. And I’m praying. Everything is dust and I can’t see anything. I thought I was dead. I found myself getting up, all bloody, and I found my mother sitting by the hall with her head tilted downward. I moved her face a little, and I found that the right half of her face was gone. I looked at my father, whose eye was gone. He was still breathing a little, and then he stopped.”

When they exited the house – injured, confused, dazed, fearing the fourth shell or rocket would soon land – determined to get themselves to Gaza despite the soldiers’ shouts from nearby positions to go back, they believed only corpses remained in the house. They did not know that under the dust and rubble in one large room, nine family members remained alive: the elderly matriarch and five of her grandchildren and great-grandchildren – the youngest of whom was three years old, the eldest 16 – along with another kinsman and his son. They had passed out, some of them beneath corpses.

When they regained consciousness, 16-year-old Ahmad Ibrahim and his 10-year-old brother Yakub saw the corpses of their mother, four of their brothers and their nephew. Mahmoud Tallal, 16, had lost his toes; bleeding, he saw that his parents – Tallal and Rahma – had been killed. Three-year-old Omar, Salah’s son, was buried unconscious under 24-year-old Saffa’s dead body, explaining why they hadn’t found him during the terrible moment of panic as they left the house. Ahmad Nafez, 15, recalled how when little Omar woke up and pulled himself out from under the corpse, he spotted his grandfather Tallal and started shaking him, crying: “Grandpa, Grandpa, wake up.”

The previous day Amal, a nine-year-old girl, had witnessed soldiers bursting into her home and killing her father, Atiyeh. She had taken shelter in her Uncle Tallal’s home and together with other family members was moved to Wael’s house. She did not know that her brother Ahmad was bleeding to death in his mother’s arms, in another house in the neighborhood.

The children found some scraps of food in the kitchen and ate. Later, Ahmad Nafez told his relatives how Ahmad Ibrahim had gone from corpse to corpse – his mother, his four brothers and his nephew among them – shaking them, hitting them, telling them to get up. Perhaps from the blows, Amal regained consciousness, her head bloody and her eyes rolling in their sockets. She kept crying out “water, water,” said she wanted her mother and father, and beat her head on the floor, her eyes rolling the whole time.

It is too dangerous to remove the shrapnel embedded in her head – that is even what the doctors at a Tel Aviv hospital say. Now everything hurts her and will continue to hurt her: when it’s cold, when it’s hot, when she’s in the sun. She will not be able to concentrate on her studies.

No one can reconstruct how the hours passed for them in Wael’s bombarded house; some remained in a state of exhaustion and apathy. The first to recover was actually Shiffa, the 71-year-old grandmother. On the morning of Tuesday, January 6, she realized that no one was coming to rescue them anytime soon. Not the soldiers positioned just meters away, not the Red Cross nor the Red Crescent nor other relatives. Perhaps they didn’t even know they were alive, she concluded. Her walker had been bent and buried in the house, but she managed to leave with two of her grandchildren – Mahmoud (his legs bleeding) and little Omar.

They hobbled out and started walking – along the silent street, among the vacated houses, realizing some were occupied by soldiers. “The Jews saw us from above and shouted to us to go into the house,” related Shiffa. That was when they were walking down the street and passed by her sister’s home. They went inside, but didn’t find a living soul. The soldiers – firing into the air – came in after them. “We begged them to let us go home. ‘Where is your home?'” they asked. She told them “over there” and pointed east, toward the home of one of her sons, Arafat, located closer to Salah al-Din Road. The soldiers let them continue on. “We saw people coming out of Arafat’s house and Hijjeh’s house. Everyone was a bit injured and the soldiers were shooting overhead.”

At Hijjeh’s house she found everyone crying, each with his own story of those dead or wounded. “I told them what had happened to us, how everyone had fallen on everyone else, in heaps, the dead and the wounded.” She remained there with the rest of the injured for another night. Omar remembers this house fondly: He was given chocolate there.

Only on Wednesday, January 7, did the IDF allow Red Cross and Red Crescent crews to enter the neighborhood. They attest that they’d been asking to enter since January 4, but the IDF would not let them – whether by shooting in the direction of the ambulances that tried to get closer or by refusing to approve coordination. The medical teams, which were allowed to go in on foot and had to leave the ambulances a kilometer or a kilometer and a half away, thought they were going to rescue the injured from Hijjeh’s house. But then the grandmother told them about the wounded children who remained behind, among the dead, in Wael’s house. The medical team set out to rescue them, totally unprepared for the sight they found.

On January 18, after the IDF left the Gaza Strip, the rescue teams returned to the neighborhood. Wael’s house was found in ruins: IDF bulldozers had demolished it entirely – with the corpses inside.

In a general reply to questions from Haaretz regarding the behavior of the military forces in the Samouni family’s neighborhood, the IDF Spokesman said that all of the claims have been examined. “Upon completion of the examination, the findings will be taken to the military advocate general, who will decide about the need to take additional steps,” the spokesman said.

Salah Samouni, during the telephone conversation, said: “I asked [Richard] Goldstone to find out just one thing: Why did the army do this to us? Why did they take us out of the house one at a time, and the officer who spoke Hebrew with my father verified that we were all civilians – [so] why did they then shell us, kill us? This is what we want to know.”

He feels that Goldstone, in his report, lent the victims a voice. He did not expound on his frustration upon learning that the debate on the report had been postponed, but sought a way to describe how he feels nine months after the fact. “We feel [we are] in an exile, even though we are in our homeland, on our land. We sit and envy the dead. They are the ones who are at rest.”

UN must immediately adopt and act on Goldstone report

Omar Barghouti | ZNet

5 October 2009

Palestinian civil society has strongly and almost unanimously condemned the Palestinian Authority’s latest decision to delay adoption by the UN Human Rights Council of the report prepared by the UN Fact-Finding Mission, headed by justice Richard Goldstone, into the recent Israeli war of aggression against the Palestinian people in the occupied Gaza Strip. A common demand in almost all Palestinian statements issued in this respect was for the UN to adopt the report and act without undue delay on its recommendations in order to bring an end to Israel’s criminal impunity and to hold it accountable before international law for its war crimes and crimes against humanity committed in Gaza and, indeed, all over the occupied Palestinian territory.

Succumbing to US pressures and unabashed Israeli blackmail, the president of the PA himself reportedly was himself responsible for the decision to defer discussion at the Council of the Goldstone report, dashing the hopes of Palestinians everywhere as well as of international human rights organizations and solidarity movements that Israel will finally face a long overdue process of legal accountability and that its victims will have a measure of justice. This decision by the PA, which in effect delays adoption of the report at least until March 2010, giving Israel a golden opportunity to bury it with US, European, Arab and now Palestinian complicity, constitutes the most blatant case yet of PA betrayal of Palestinian rights and surrender to Israeli dictates.

This is not the first time, though, that the PA has acted under orders from Washington and threats from Tel Aviv against the express interests of the Palestinian people. The historic advisory opinion of the International Court of Justice in July 2004 that found Israel’s Wall and colonies built on occupied Palestinian territory illegal had presented a rare diplomatic, political and legal opportunity that could have been used to isolate Israel as apartheid South Africa was after a similar ICJ decision in 1971 against its occupation of Namibia. Alas, the PA squandered it and systematically — quite suspiciously, actually — failed to even call on world governments to comply with their obligations stated in the advisory opinion.

The whole clause on Israel and Palestinian rights that was to be discussed at the recent UN Durban Review Conference in Geneva was dropped after the Palestinian representative gave his green light. Efforts by non-aligned nations and the former UN General Assembly president, Father Miguel d’Escoto Brockmann, to push for a UN resolution condemning Israel’s war crimes in Gaza and establishing an international tribunal were thwarted mainly by the Palestinian ambassador to the UN, causing several prominent diplomats and international law experts to wonder which side the official Palestinian representative was on.

The Mercosur-Israel Free Trade Agreement was almost ratified by Brazil this last September after the Palestinian ambassador there expressed approval, only urging Brazil to exclude Israeli settlement products from the Agreement. With prompt action by Palestinian and Brazilian civil society organizations and eventually by the PLO’s Executive Committee, this ratification was averted and the Brazilian parliamentary committee in charge of this file recommended that the government refrain from approving the FTA until Israel complies with international law.

In all these cases and many similar ones, the instructions to the Palestinian representatives came from Ramallah, where the PA government has illegally appropriated the PLO powers to lead Palestinian diplomacy and set foreign policy, conceding Palestinian rights and acting against the Palestinian national interests, without worrying about accountability to any elected representatives of the Palestinian people.

This latest forthright collusion of the PA in Israel’s campaign to whitewash its crimes and undermine the application of international law to punish these crimes came a few days after the far-right Israeli government publicly blackmailed the PA, demanding that it withdraw its support for adopting the Goldstone report in return for “permitting” a second mobile communications provider to operate in the occupied Palestinian territory. It therefore undermines the great efforts by human rights organizations and many activists to bring justice to the Palestinian victims of Israel’s latest massacre in Gaza: the more than 1400 killed (predominantly civilians); the thousands injured; the 1.5 million who are still suffering from the wanton destruction of infrastructure, educational and health institutions, factories, farm lands, power plants, and other critical facilities, and from the long criminal Israeli siege against them.

It is nothing short of a betrayal of Palestinian civil society’s effective Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) campaign against Israel, with all its recent, remarkable growth and achievements in mainstream western societies and among leading unions.

It is also betrayal of the global solidarity movement that has worked tirelessly and creatively, mainly within the framework of the fast spreading BDS campaign, to end Israel’s impunity and to uphold universal human rights.

It is crucial to remember that the PA does not have any legal or democratic mandate to speak on behalf of the people of Palestine or to represent the Palestinians at the UN or any of its agencies and institutions. The current PA government has never won the necessary constitutional approval of the democratically elected Palestinian Legislative Council. Even if it had such a mandate, at best it would only represent the Palestinians living under Israel’s military occupation in the West Bank and Gaza, excluding the great majority of the people of Palestine, particularly the refugees.

Only the Palestine Liberation Organization, the PLO, can theoretically claim to represent the entirety of the Palestinian people: inside historic Palestine and in exile. For such a claim to be substantiated and universally accepted by Palestinians everywhere, though, the PLO would need to be revived from the grassroots upwards, in a transparent, democratic and inclusive process that involves Palestinians everywhere and encompasses all the political parties that are outside the PLO structures today. In parallel with this democratic reclamation or popular take-back of the PLO by the people and their representative unions and institutions, the PA must beresponsibly and gradually dismantled, with its current powers, particularly the representation seats at the UN and other regional and international institutions, returned to where they belong, to the real representative of all the people of Palestine, the revived and democratized PLO. This dissolution of the PA, however, must at all times avoid creating a legal and political vacuum, as history shows that hegemonic powers are often the most likely to fill such a vacuum to the detriment of the oppressed.

The fact is the PA has been gradually and irreversibly transformed since its establishment 15 years ago from a mere — often powerless, obsequious and coerced — sub-contractor of the Israeli occupation regime, relieving it of its most cumbersome civil duties, like the provision of services and tax collection, and, most crucially, very effectively helping it safeguard the security of its occupation army and colonial settlers, into a willingcollaborator that constitutes Israel’s most important strategic weapon in countering its growing isolation and loss of legitimacy on the world stage as a colonial and apartheid state. Israel’s hundreds of nuclear weapons and its fourth largest army in the world proved impotent or at least irrelevant before the growing BDS movement, particularly after Israel’s acts of genocide in Gaza. The almost unlimited diplomatic, political, economic and scientific support Israel receives from the US and European governments and its unparalleled impunity have also failed to protect it from the gloomy fate of apartheid South Africa.

Even before Israel’s war on Gaza, many unions around the world had joined the BDS campaign, from Canada to South Africa, and from the UK and Norway to Brazil. After Gaza, though, the four years of preparing the ground and spreading BDS, the international shock at the sight of Israel’s white phosphorus showers of death visited upon the children of Gaza cowered in UN shelters, and the universal feeling that the international order has failed to hold Israel to account or to even end its slaughter of civilians, not to mention its ongoing ethnic cleansing campaign in the occupied West Bank, particularly in East Jerusalem, BDS leaped into a new, advanced phase. It finally reached the mainstream.

In February, weeks after the end of Israel’s bloodbath in Gaza, the South African Transport and Allied Workers Union (SATAWU) made history when it refused to offload an Israeli ship in Durban. In April, the Scottish Trade Union Congress followed the lead of the South African trade union federation, COSATU, and the Irish Congress of Trade Unions in adopting BDS against Israel to bring about its compliance with international law. In May, the University and College Union (UCU), representing some 120,000 British academics, reiterated its annual support for the logic of boycott against Israel, calling for organizing an inter-union BDS conference later this year to discuss effective strategies for implementing the boycott.

Most recently, this last September, the Norwegian government’s pension fund, the third largest in the world, divested from an Israeli military contractor supplying equipment to the illegal Wall in violation of the ICJ ruling. Shortly after that, a Spanish ministry excluded an Israeli academic team representing a college illegally built on occupied Palestinian land from participating in an academic competition. Also in September, the British Trades Union Congress, representing over 6.5 million workers, adopted the boycott, ushering in a new chapter in the spread of BDS that reminds observers of the beginning of the end of the apartheid regime in South Africa. According to concrete, persistent and mounting indicators, Palestinians are witnessing the arrival of their “South Africa moment.”

Amidst all this comes the Goldstone report, quite surprisingly — given the judge’s strong connections with Israel and Zionism — providing the straw that may well break the camel’s back: irrefutable evidence, meticulously researched and documented, of Israel’s deliberate commission of war crimes and crimes against humanity. Despite its clear shortcoming, this report presented Israel with the daunting and not entirely improbable prospect of standing trial at an international tribunal, a development that would effectively end Israel’s impunity and open the possibility of finally applying international justice to its crimes and persistent violations of international law. In this dire context for Israel, only one strategic weapon in its arsenal could be used to fend off the foretold crushing legal and political defeat: the PA. And it did use it indeed at the right time, in a fatal way, almost killing the Goldstone report.

Ultimately, the failure of the UN Human Rights Council to adopt the Goldstone report is another proof, if any is needed, that Palestinians cannot hope at the current historical moment to obtain justice from the US-controlled so-called “international community.” Only through intensified, sustainable and context-sensitive civil society campaigns of boycott and divestment can there be any hope that Israel will one day be compelled to end its lawlessness and criminal disregard of human rights and recognize the inalienable Palestinian right to self determination. This right, as expressed by the great majority of the Palestinian people, comprises ending the occupation, ending the legalized and institutionalized system of racial discrimination, or apartheid, and recognizing the fundamental, UN-sanctioned right of the Palestine refugees to return to their homes of origin, like all other refugees around the world, including Jewish refugees of World War II.

We simply cannot afford to give up on the UN, though. Human rights organizations and international civil society must continue to help the Palestinian struggle to pressure the UN, at least its General Assembly, to adopt and act upon the recommendations of the Goldstone report at all levels. If the UN fails to do so it will send an unambiguous message to Israel that its impunity remains intact and that the international community will stand by apathetically the next time it commits even more egregious crimes against the indigenous people of Palestine. This would gravely undermine the rule of law and promote in its stead the law of the jungle, where no one will be protected from total chaos and boundless carnage.

Omar Barghouti is a founding member of the BDS movement (www.BDSmovement.net)