And so, after 13 days of extremely lethal and quite inhumane Israeli attacks on Gaza, the UN Security Council has finally passed a ceasefire resolution, resolution 1860.
The vote was 14 to zero, with the US abstaining. At least the US didn’t veto it. I guess we should be thankful for small mercies.
But it’s notable that it was not until today that the other powers in the Security Council– including the Europeans, Russia, China, and the Arabs (though they are less powerful)– became so highly motivated by the continually unfolding scenes of carnage in Gaza that they pushed this resolution through to a vote.
I’ve been looking for an authoritative text. The best I can find thus far is the AFP news report linked to above.
It says this:
- The text “stresses the urgency of and calls for an immediate, durable and fully respected ceasefire, leading to the full withdrawal of Israeli forces from Gaza.”
It “calls for the unimpeded provision and distribution throughout Gaza of humanitarian assistance, including of food, fuel and medical treatment” and welcomes initiatives aimed at “creating and opening humanitarian corridors and other mechanisms for the sustained delivery of humanitarian aid.”
Resolution 1860 also “condemns all violence and hostilities directed against civilians and all acts of terrorism” and urged member states to intensify efforts for arrangements and guarantees in Gaza “to sustain a durable ceasefire and calm, including to prevent illicit trafficking in arms and ammunition and to ensure the reopening of the crossing points (into Gaza).”
It “welcomes the Egyptian initiative (the three-point truce proposal unveiled by Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak Tuesday) and other regional and international efforts that are under way.”
Mubarak invited Israel and the Palestinians to Cairo for talks on conditions for a truce, on securing Gaza borders, reopening of its crossings and lifting the Israeli blockade on the Palestinian enclave.
This looks minimally acceptable, though it has six key shortcomings that I can see:
- 1. It doesn’t specify a time certain for the hostilities to cease. Great, if “immediate” means “immediate”. But if there’s no time certain specified, the end could drag on a long time.
2. It doesn’t seem to lay down a fixed timetable for the complete withdrawal of Israeli forces from Gaza, but indicates only that this should follow the cessation of active hostilities. Again, if they linger on inside the Strip, or undertake only a partial withdrawal, or undertake a ‘Scorched Earth’ withdrawal, or sow landmines or leave UXO in the locations they vacate, any such actions would make the ceasefire very fragile indeed.
3. This ceasefire needs a verification mechanism! I can’t stress this strongly enough. There needs to be some form of international monitoring presence along the border between Israel and Gaza that can monitor that neither side is aggressing or preparing to aggress against the other.
4. It is excellent– though of course, only a bare minimum of what international humanitarian law requires– that the resolution calls for full humanitarian access to Gaza. However, the Palestinians of Gaza do not want to be treated forever as dependent wards of the international community, entitled only to “humanitarian aid” or “emergency relief”. They, like all the other peoples of the world, have a right to all the dimensions of full social and economic development. That means their territory must be re-opened fully to free interaction with the international economy, whether via Egypt, the Mediterranean, or air communications. They will certainly refuse any return to a status-quo-ante in which their small strip of land would once again be completely encircled by a punitive and very damaging Israeli siege. The AP article says the Egyptians have already started to conduct indirect negotiations between the Israelis and Hamas on re-opening the crossings and other matters. Thes manner and mo0dality of the re-opening is a key issue.
5. I understand that Israelis have strong concerns about the possibility of Gazans repairing, restoring, or even perhaps upgrading their rocket arsenal and/or starting to develop other means of attacking Israel. There are two complementary ways to meet these concerns. One is by ensuring that Gazans are able to build a new status quo in which they have a valuable and growing community self-interest, that is, by allowing full and unfettered economic and social development in the Strip. The other is by instituting some form of control regime at the entry points between Gaza and the world economy– along the border with Egypt, along the Strip’s coast, and at its rebuilt airport– to ensure that weapons are not shipped in. A supplementary form of international– but certainly not Israeli!– monitoring mechanism might be helpful within Gaza, too. The EU had a role monitoring the Gaza-Egypt border in the failed 2005 withdrawal regime and has indicated a readiness to resume it. But Europeans and everyone else all need to understand that maintaining a policy of “all stick and no carrot” against Gazans is bound to fail. They desperately need an opportunity for real, Strip-wide development and reconnection with the outside world.
6. Finally, of course nothing can work just for Gaza unless it is linked to a vigorous effort to secure a comprehensive and final settlement of the Israeli-Palestinian– and preferably also Israeli-Syria– disputes. The Hamas leaders have given some signs they are willing to work with Abu Mazen on this (though his mandate as PA President runs out Friday.) It would have been great if Resolution 1860 could have said something about the need for the broader final peace.
Well, I imagine (and hope) there will be a rapid flurry of follow-up resolutions. The first thing is for all the guns, rockets, bomber airplanes, etc to fall completely silent, and the next thing is for the Israeli troops to pull out of the Strip and allow the humanitarian actors in to do their still-gruesome job in a situation of relevant calm.
Let’s all hope and pray that this peace holds. It is a cold winter down there in Gaza. Families are starving and dying and scores of thousands of them have had their homes wrecked.
The government of Israel, which gratuitously launched and fought this war of choice, and all those in Israel and far afield who cheered them on, should all be deeply ashamed. But there are numerous points of light within Israeli society. Some of them are the human-rights organizations that have geared up an excellent effort to document the suffering the war has caused as best they can. You can read the blog they are using to compile their findings, here.
Here’s a good compilation of the violations of the laws of war on the part of Israel. It has very good links to NGO reports and newspaper accounts.
http://heathlander.wordpress.com/2009/01/06/about-those-hamas-targets/
Meanwhile, on a subject which Helena has deemed of great importance, there is more “discourse suppression” going on with respect to this subject.
Specifically, in Norway, where pro-Israel supporters were demonstrating their support of Israel’s right to defend itself, a pro-Palestinian group PHYSICALLY ATTACKED the pro-Israel demonstrators.
http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-3653467,00.html
I know this is not as bad as, say, counterspeech which points out the antisemitism behind much of the anti-Israel rhetoric. But it should be highlighted and condemned at the very least.
Meanwhile, the NY Times Op-Ed page was filled with three columns all highly critical of Israel. The Good: It shows that there is, in fact, diversity of opinion allowed on this subject. The Bad: It deprives the anti-Israel crowd of their favorite weapon, claiming that things are not as they should be because their discourse is suppressed. (Of course, we all know that the argument will be recycled again anyway).
Joshua,
You getting paid or what?
Joshua is the local representative of Hasbara Central, perosnally appointed by Ehud Barak, or perhaps Bibi Netanyahu, to troll JWN.
Of course, it matters a great deal that the NY Times waited until Day 13 of the current Israeli “fishbowl” massacre in Gaza before allowing Palestinian points of view to be expressed on its editorial page. And then it restricted the Palestinian American professor Rashid Khalidi (the same Khalidi who was defamed by Joshua’s Hasbara crowd when it tried to portray Pres. Elect Barack Obama as a Muslim sleeper cell agent during the November 2008 election) to a 250-word limit. What is amazing is that Khalidi was able to address comprehensively the issues in Gaza in such a stingy column space.
It is also important to bear in mind that by Day 13 of the Gaza “fishbowl” massacre, the NY Times editorial board was already calling for an end to the massacre. Thus the Palestinian editorials were a bit late, if they were intended to offer balanced coverage in the face of the usual Hasbara propaganda that has a permanent place on the NY Times editorial page. The way these things ought to work, if we truly had a free press when it comes to coverage of the Israel-Palestine issue, is that the NY Times would cover Palestinian points of view continuously, so that the public would be informed in advance about Israel’s war crimes and abuses of humanitarian standards, and Israel’s obstruction of every chance for peace.
Instead, what we have, as a result of Hasbara Trolls like Joshua, is an American media and an American social system which is cowered by Israel lobbyists and pressure groups who scream their lines of propaganda pat the first sign of any criticism about Israel’s war crimes. Bill Keller, executive editor of the NY Times, said this was the case after the outbreak of the second Palestinian intifada in September 2000. Keller said that the Hasbara crowd started a boycott/divestment campaign against the leading US newspaper, threatening to have hundreds of thousands of people cancel their subscriptions to the “Times” due to the slightest appearance of Palestinian reporting on the newspaper pages in early October 2000.
The same kind of pressure was brought to bear on US television networks: read about the firing of a CNN reporter in the field in Palestinian territories in late 2000, and the trouble the MSNBC host Phil Donahue had during the run up to the invasion of Iraq. Joshua is merely a Hasbara propagadist, spouting Israel’s propaganda. He probably does it for free because he is that deranged in his support of Israel’s killing machine. What was exceptional recently in American media coverage was an exchange of views on MSNBC, Thursday evening, January 8, between a Hasbara official defending Israeli policies and Pat Buchanan, former conservative talk show host on CNN.
Buchanan did the best job yet of countering the usual Hasbara propaganda when he responded to the Hasbara official’s complaints about Hamas by saying “what do you expect any human beings to do when you cage them in, obstruct food, water, and electricity, and then begin to bomb them to death… they are going to join radical groups opposed to Israel.” When the Hasbara official begin to complain about the Hamas rockets falling on Israeli towns near Gaza, Buchanan said “you know those towns were once Palestinian, and the Palestinians in Gaza were driven from their homes inside Israel more than 60 years ago… they are refugees living in a prison under bomb fire.”
The Hasbara official was beginning to stammer by this point and did not know quite what to say, so he blustered his way through the usual Hasbara propaganda, at which point Buchanan called “a spade a spade,” pointing out that Israel is committing war crimes. Comparatively, what the NY Times allowed on its editorial page is the minimal requirement for fair exchange of views and points of analysis. The US media will gradually begin to move much further in its criticism of ISrael in Middle East affairs, especially as the economic problems of the country grow further, and Americans begin to realize that ISrael (which receives all these billions of dollars in US aid) remains a powerful state, both economically and militarily on the world stage, which still hungers for more war.
One wonders what will be the long-term fallout in world politics of Israel’s war fury, Bernie Madoff’s Ponzi scheme, the international shuffling of bank assets, America’s Depression Part II. What do you think, Joshua? Do you really think Americans are going to continue standing with the Israeli bully, when the American constituency which Hasbaristas rely on most (the Christian Fundie crowd) becomes disillusioned with the Disneyesque millennial fantsasies produced in Israel?
The reality, Joshua, is that you and other propagandists and apologists for Israel have been complicit, over the last six decades, in the worst war crimes, and crimes against humanity, since perhaps Pol Pot in Cambodia, if not World War II.