Tag: Israeli

UN Rights Chief: ‘Annexation is Illegal. Period.’

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On June 26, the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, Michelle Bachelet, released a statement denouncing Israeli annexation plans. Bachelet, the former president of Chile, voiced a strongly worded opinion on Israeli plans to use an unsigned peace deal as justification to annex 30% of the West Bank.

“Annexation is illegal. Period,” Bachelet stated. “Any annexation. Whether it is 30 percent of the West Bank, or 5 percent. I urge Israel to listen to its own former senior officials and generals, as well as to the multitude of voices around the world, warning it not to proceed along this dangerous path.” Annexation plans would not impact those living in the occupied territories alone, she emphasized.

Disastrous consequences

Bachelet said that “the precise consequences of annexation cannot be predicted, but they are likely to be disastrous for the Palestinians, for Israel itself, and for the wider region.” She recalled a June 23 statement by UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres who called any form of Israeli annexation “devastating.” Bachelet said, “The Secretary-General of the United Nations has called on the Israeli Government to abandon its annexation plans, and I back that call one hundred percent.”

As UN Commissioner on Human Rights, Bachelet has a mandate to prevent human rights violations and promote international cooperation to ensure respect of human rights. She sees opposing Israeli annexation as part of that mandate as Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s plan “is likely to entrench, perpetuate and further heighten serious human rights violations that have characterized the conflict for decades.”

Threat to human rights

Her statement, published by the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR), highlighted a likelihood that restrictions on Palestinian rights to freedom of movement would further deteriorate “as Palestinian population centers become enclaves.” The statement emphasized how annexation could ban locals from farming their land and reduce access to education and healthcare.

The OHCHR statement called Israel settlements in the occupied territories “a clear violation of international law” that would “almost certainly expand” should annexation proceed. Even a “modest” form of annexation would “grievously harm the prospect of a two-state solution,” undercut future negotiations, “and perpetuate the serious existing human rights and international humanitarian law violations we witness today.”

Bachelet’s office fears the annexation would lack any legal backing and would create an untenable position for Israeli diplomacy in the future. “The shockwaves of annexation will last for decades, and will be extremely damaging to Israel, as well as to the Palestinians,” Bachelet warned in her statement. “However there is still time to reverse this decision.”

Israeli Apartheid-Denier Can Deny No Longer

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In an interview with the Associated Press published on June 24, Benjamin Pogrund stated that Israeli annexation would turn Israel into an apartheid state. “There will be Israeli overlords in an occupied area. And the people over whom they will be ruling will not have basic rights,” Pogrund described the potential future of Israel.

Prolific denier

Benjamin Pogrund was born and raised in South Africa and witnessed its Apartheid-era atrocities firsthand. He became a renowned writer on the topic and fostered friendships with Nelson Mandela and Robert Sobukwe as he wrote on Black issues in the white-ruled South African state.

But while Pogrund strongly opposed Apartheid in South Africa until its fall in the 1990s, in 1997 he moved to Israel and became a prominent denier of the similarities between the two countries’ treatment of their native populations. Not counting those people living in the occupied territories as citizens, Pogrund denied their treatment as apartheid-like.

Like many Israel apologetics, he made the convenient distinction of not counting Israel’s atrocities and racism outside its walls and fences. He authored a 2007 New York Times op-ed highlighting several successful Arab Israeli citizens as evidence for an absence of racial discrimination, while ignoring the people in occupied territories under de-facto Israeli rule.

Cognitive dissonance

Pogrund would, in the same article, deny that Jews and Arabs receive different treatment while also arguing Palestinian refugees could not return because they would become a majority, destroying Israel’s “purpose” of being a Jewish state. Those who called for a boycott on Israel Pogrund would label as antisemitic, while interpreting Israeli acts as a “response to Palestinian terrorism.”

For decades Pogrund has ignored the obvious similarities between both apartheid regimes. He appears to have conveniently ignored that while South Africa was in its last stages of shaking off colonization, Israel is still actively colonizing native land.

He downplayed the wall seperating Israelis from the West Bank as “mainly a wire fence, except in populated areas” that was there “primarily to keep out would-be suicide bombers.” By Pogrund’s definition, if South African whites had chased away the country’s Black population and kept them in occupied areas as does Israel, there would not have been “apartheid.”

After decades of witnessing and opposing South African Apartheid, he has spent the rest of his career making pro-Israeli arguments, similar to those of the South African regime that justified violence against Black citizens, as a logical government response to “violent terrorists.”

Changing definitions

Pogrund opposes annexation because it would undermine the cognitive dissonance that he and many others have applied to the Palestinian people living in the occupied territories. Annexing their land would result in them being considered to be some sort of Israeli citizen, and suddenly their treatment would indeed “count” as apartheid.

“At least it has been a military occupation. Now we are going to put other people under our control and not give them citizenship. That is apartheid. That is an exact mirror of what apartheid was,” Pogrund said.

Pogrund started to have doubts when, in 2018, the Israeli parliament enacted the “Nation State Law.” This defined Israel as the nation state of the Jewish people while downgrading the status of another ethnic group, Arab Israelis. Yet, he frames his opposition not as revulsion with the treatment of local Arabs, but instead fears that it would reduce safety and prosperity for local Jewish Israelis.

Annexation

The increasingly colonial attitude of the Netanyahu government appears to have posed something of an intellectual crisis for Pogrund as he has slowly learned of his own complicity in defending Israeli actions. News about the government’s annexation plans made him unable to write on the topic: “I couldn’t bring myself to do it,” Pogrund said, adding that “quite frankly, I just feel so bleak about it, that it is so stupid and ill-advised and arrogant.”

Pogrund has long been a critic of Israeli treatment of the Palestinians, describing the occupation of the West Bank as “tyrannical,” but has avoided using the word apartheid. He considers the term “a deadly word” that requires “intentionality” and “institutionalization.” That intentionality and institutionalization already exist in the occupied territories, and by annexing these areas, even deniers like Pogrund will no longer be able to refute the obvious.

“Come July 1, if we annex the Jordan Valley and the settlement areas, we are apartheid. Full stop. There’s no question about it,” Pogrund said.

Palestinian PM Calls for EU Sanctions on Israel

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On September 10, 2019 a Middle Eastern national leader promised voters he would commit a crime against one of the pillars of international law and break with the Charter of the United Nations. Since that date, that national leader has won reelection and has provided even more details of how and when they intend to commit these crimes against the international community and the rules that bind us together.

The announcements have been met with a deafening silence, occasionally interspersed with ineffective diplomatic rhetoric and posturing by the powerless.

One month left

With one month left until the date Israel has indicated it will invade Palestinian territory and claim the land and its resources for its own, no one has lifted a finger to force Israel to abandon its plans. The silence must sound like music in the ears of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

Israel’s head out state appears fully aware that as long as the United States backs him, he is free to commit crimes against international law.

It is in this strange paradigm that Palestinian Prime Minister Mohammad Shtayyeh is trying to find a way to stop the coming invasion. With all the UN’s rules and resolutions on his side, Shtayyeh’s government still stands powerless before the imminent annexation.

Palestinian statehood

In a desperate last plea for adherence to international law, Shtayyeh on June 9 made a statement to try to ensure “Israel does not get away with murder.” “We’re waiting and pushing for Israel not to annex, if Israel is going to annex after July 1st, we are going to go from the interim period of the Palestinian Authority into the manifestation of a state on the ground,” Shtayyeh stated.

If, or when, the state of Israel does choose to proceed with the annexation of vast swaths of the West Bank, Palestine will declare statehood on the basis of the borders established after the 1967 Six-Day War, Shtayyeh said. To prevent this, Shtayyeh is asking the international community to intervene and put genuine pressure on Israel to stop its plans.

The threat of EU sanctions and a possible preemptive recognition of Palestinian statehood would suffice, according to Shtayyeh.

Slow response

The question remains whether any nation will do so. Only the state of Jordan has so far offered a defensive alliance to Palestine, committing to war if an invasion occurs. The rest of the international community, including most Arab states, have simply mused over the “threat to the peace process,” as if any peace process could remain after a unilateral attack on Palestinian land.

“I think the British government and all European governments are really looking at this very seriously. The tone I have heard was very different, too,” Shtayyeh said of his conversations with European heads of state. How serious these governments will take it remains to be seen. Most countries as of yet appear reluctant to threaten sanctions, even over an obvious breach of a legislated world order.

The consequences for Palestine, and for the world, will likely unfold in June, when we will all be treated to the empty spectacle of “international outrage,” as politicians will too late decry Israeli violence and civilian casualties.

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