Category Archives: Palestine

Palestinians skeptical about significance of U.N. vote

The Economist: With the triumphant arrival of Khalid Meshal, the leader of Hamas, the Islamist movement that runs Gaza, on December 7th, President Mahmoud Abbas could be forgiven for wondering who will remember his return from the United Nations armed with international recognition of Palestine as a non-member state.

“Jubilant Palestinians celebrate UN vote,” trumpeted Fox News, an American cable news channel. “Abbas returns to hero’s welcome,” cried Al Jazeera. But for all the international fanfare accompanying the overwhelming international support for Mr Abbas, at home the Palestinian public failed to rally with the exuberance Mr Abbas’s spokesmen and the international media claimed. Only a few hundred people—mostly civil servants, journalists and plain-clothes police in their tell-tale fur-lined jackets—filled the small space in front of a stage of Ramallah’s small central square where the Palestinian Authority relayed President Mahmoud Abbas’ speech. Elsewhere the streets seemed eerily quiet.

For Mr Abbas’s international backers, who hoped that the UN vote might bolster his domestic standing, the turnout was disappointing. Hours before the vote on November 29th, European diplomats predicted that tens of thousands would attend. While 138 countries voted for Mr Abbas’s resolution, his own population appeared agnostic at best. Orjwan, a raucous bar favoured by Ramallah’s moneyed elite had more clientele than PA-sponsored rallies in some Palestinian cities. Although two television screens relayed the UN vote in the packed bar, the volume was muted. Mr Abbas “epitomises the decades devoted to a fruitless peace process and trust in the international community,” says a Palestinian businesswoman, who stayed away from the rallies. “It doesn’t convince anyone.”

Many Palestinians are dubious that the vote will prompt outsiders to do anything to end Israel’s 45-year-long occupation. Twenty years of international grand-standing from the White House lawns to the UN podium have left Israel’s hold on the West Bank increasingly entrenched with three times more Jewish settlers occupying the territory than when the Oslo process began in 1993. Ironically, the strongest show of support for Mr Abbas’s UN bid took place in Hamas’s enclave of Gaza, where an estimated 7,000 took to the streets. Based in the Highlands of the West Bank, Mr Abbas has not visited Gaza since 2007, and has no control on the ground. [Continue reading…]

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Obama’s cynicism on Israel and Palestine

M.J. Rosenberg writes: The U.S. vote against raising the status of Palestine at the United Nations was a deeply cynical move. It was cynical because there is not a chance that President Obama believes that he did the right thing. It is also cynical because, in the name of friendship for Israel, Obama led Israel closer to the cliff.

The last thing a true friend of Israel would have done would be to stand by as Israel demonstrated its almost complete international isolation. Just eight countries backed the Israeli position – the US, Panama, Palau, Canada, Marshall Islands, Nauru, Czech Republic and Micronesia – while 138 voted with the Palestinians. Was this display helpful to Israel?

But Obama was not trying to be helpful. The administration enabled this “disaster” (from Israel’s point of view) because Obama seems to truly not care about Israelis or Palestinians.

Take the two most recent examples. The first was his absolute refusal to express a word of sympathy for the Palestinians killed in the Gaza war. Under previous administrations, certainly under every Democratic administration, sympathy was expressed for the dead and injured on both sides along with a call for an end to the fighting. But Obama would not do that. Even when asked directly his spokesperson at the State Department would only speak of Israel’s pain. (To her credit, Secretary of State Clinton did say that she felt for both sides.)

But not Obama. He is determined not only to demonstrate that there is “no daylight” separating the two countries but that no amount of darkness separates us either.

The argument that he has to behave this way because of the power of the lobby doesn’t hold up. I would be the last person in the world to deny that the lobby is a powerful force in the making of U.S. Middle East policy. But, unless there is some mysterious element to the lobby’s power that I am missing, its ability to intimidate ends when a president is re-elected. [Continue reading…]

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The heart of Israel leaves no room for Palestine

Just hours before the United Nations General Assembly voted overwhelmingly in favor of granting Palestine the status of a non-member state, Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu said: “As prime minister, I will not allow the growth of another Iranian terror base in Judea and Samaria – the heart of the country – just a kilometer outside of central Jerusalem.”

The Israeli ambassador to the UN Ron Prosor repeated the same talking point in his speech before the General Assembly: “Israel remains committed to peace, but we will not establish another Iranian terror base in the heart of our country.”

The “heart of the country” both referred to is the West Bank — or Judea and Samaria as Zionists prefer to call it.

Netanyahu may claim to support a two-state solution, but even after what was billed as an historic declaration in his speech in 2009, Israel’s settlements have continued to expand “in the heart of the country” and that country is Greater Israel, not Palestine.

As the world — with the exception of a handful of countries bound by servile ties to Israel — spoke with one voice in support of the creation of a Palestinian state, Israel stuck up its middle finger in defiance and approved yet more settlements.

The New York Times reports: As the United Nations General Assembly voted overwhelmingly to upgrade the Palestinians’ status Thursday night, Israel took steps toward building housing in a controversial area of East Jerusalem known as E1, where Jewish settlements have long been seen as the death knell for a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

A senior Israeli official, speaking on the condition of anonymity, said on Friday that the decision was made late Thursday night to move forward on “preliminary zoning and planning preparations” for housing units in E1, which would connect the large settlement of Maale Adumim to Jerusalem and therefore make it impossible to connect the Palestinian cities of Ramallah and Bethlehem to Palestinian neighborhoods of East Jerusalem. Israel also authorized the construction of 3,000 housing units in other parts of East Jerusalem and the West Bank, the official said.

The prime minister’s office refused to comment on whether the settlement expansion — first reported on Twitter by a reporter for the Israeli daily Haaretz — was punishment for the Palestinians’ success in upgrading its status from nonmember observer entity to nonmember observer state at the United Nations, but it was widely seen as such. The United States, one of only eight countries that stood with Israel in voting against the Palestinians’ upgrade, has for two decades vigorously opposed construction in E1, a 3,000-acre expanse of hilly parkland where a police station was opened in 2008.

In Washington, a State Department official criticized the move. “We reiterate our longstanding opposition to settlements and East Jerusalem construction,” he said. “We believe it is counterproductive and makes it harder to resume direct negotiations and achieve a two-state outcome.”

Hagit Ofran, who runs the Settlement Watch project of Peace Now, called E1 a “deal breaker for the two-state solution” and denounced the decision as “disastrous.” [Continue reading…]

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U.S., Israel isolated in condemning Palestine vote

AFP reports: The United States and Israel downplayed Thursday the Palestinians’ new upgraded status at the UN, saying it changed nothing in actual practice and even made peace with the Jewish state a remoter prospect.

Palestinians rejoiced at the historic albeit largely symbolic vote at the UN General Assembly in New York, firing guns into the air in Ramallah in the occupied West Bank, shooting off fireworks and embracing each other with glee.

In between the two ends of the spectrum were major powers like Britain, which said it respected the vote but abstained on the grounds that the Palestinians had not unconditionally agreed to negotiations on a lasting two-state deal with Israel.

Britain pledged support for efforts to reach an elusive peace accord, as did France, which voted for the resolution but called on Israel and the Palestinians to resume peace talks without conditions and as soon as possible.

The Vatican welcomed the 138-9 vote, saying it reflected the majority sentiment of the international community and the Holy See had long encouraged more global involvement to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

“Peace needs courageous decisions,” it said in a statement.

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Britain must atone for its sins in Palestine

Nabeel Shaath writes: Over the past few weeks, British diplomats have stated that they are doing all they can to discourage Palestine’s bid for “observer state” status in the UN General Assembly. If this is an official British position, then it is reprehensible, yet not all that surprising.

Ninety-five years ago tomorrow, on November 2, 1917, British imperialism in Palestine began when Lord Balfour, the then British foreign secretary and former prime minister, sent a letter to Baron Rothschild, one of the leaders of the Zionist movement. This letter became known as the “Balfour Declaration”.

In that letter, Balfour promised British support for the Zionist programme of establishing a “national home for the Jewish people” in Palestine. This pledge of support was made without consulting the indigenous Christian and Muslim inhabitants of Palestine, the Palestinian people. And it was made before British troops had even conquered the land.

Balfour, on behalf of Britain, promised Palestine – over which Britain had no legal right – to a people who did not even live there (of the very small community of Palestinian Jews in Palestine in 1917, very few were Zionists). And he did so with the worst of intentions: to discourage Jewish immigration to Britain. No wonder Lord Montagu, the only Jewish member of the Cabinet, opposed the declaration.

And yet, just two years earlier, Britain had committed herself to assisting the Arab nations in achieving their independence from the Ottoman Empire. Arab fighters all over the region, including thousands of Palestinians, fought for their freedom, allowing Britain to establish her mandate in Palestine.

From that moment, Palestine became the victim of colonial conspiracies. The Balfour Declaration helped to encourage Zionist immigration into Palestine and away from America and Western Europe. Concomitantly, Britain repressed Palestinian nationalism, which was exemplified by its crushing of the Arab revolt of 1936-1939 and the denial of the right of the Palestinian people to express their will through their own representation. In fact, Britain suppressed Palestinian political representation through a policy of systematic denial of Palestinian political rights.

The dying days of Britain’s rule in Palestine were marked by destruction, blood, and the start of the Palestinian exile, meaning the expulsion of the majority of the Palestinian people against the backdrop of Zionist terrorism. It was not the Palestinians who blew up the King David Hotel, who blew up the British Embassy in Rome, who tried to assassinate Ernest Bevin, Britain’s foreign secretary, and who succeeded in assassinating Lord Moyne, British minister of state in the Middle East. That was the Irgun, an ideological Right-wing group – and the predecessor to Israel’s ruling Likud Party. [Continue reading…]

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Israelis recognizing the Nakba

Rooftop view of Lydda and the Church of St George in the background, circa 1920.

Ruins of Lydda, 1948.

Raja Shehadeh writes: Last Friday, some 40 Israeli Jews and Arabs gathered in Lydda, a small mixed Arab-Israeli city less than 10 miles southeast of Tel Aviv, for “a study tour” featuring “Zionist testimonies from 1948.” It was part of the project Towards a Common Archive, sponsored by Zochrot (Hebrew for remembering), an Israeli organization that hopes to bring “awareness and recognition of the Nakba” to Jewish Israelis so that they can take “responsibility for this tragedy.”

The Nakba refers to the expulsion of the Palestinians from the newly minted state of Israel. On no issue do Israelis and Palestinians differ more. Israelis celebrate May 15, 1948, as their day of independence; for Palestinians, it marks the “catastrophe.” That an Israeli group like Zochrot should organize a trip to a city where some of the Nakba’s worst atrocities occurred is an important and necessary attempt to bridge this nagging gap in perceptions.

During three and a half hours we got a description — in both Arabic and Hebrew — of the Arab city as it existed before 1948. We visited the old town, the church and the mosque where some Arab inhabitants hid in July 1948 to avoid expulsion. We also visited the site of the ghetto where 5,000 of the town’s 50,000 residents (including refugees from neighboring villages) were confined for one year after the Nakba, surrounded by barbed wire and guarded by Israeli soldiers. (They eventually became Israeli citizens and were allowed to stay in Israel.)

The group listened in respectful silence as the Palestinian guide, Ziad Abu Hamad, a descendant of Lydda’s few remaining original residents, described what his parents had told him about their hardships. A woman in her late 60s and other Arab residents approached us, pointing to the buildings that had been their family homes and which they have had to rent or buy back from those who took them away.

Wherever we stopped, members of Zochrot put up commemorative signs describing in Arabic and Hebrew what had happened at the sites. When I asked how long the posts would remain, I was told: until nightfall at best, or until some Israeli right-winger destroys them.

Present-day Lydda (which Israelis call Lod) is known for being one of the most violent cities in Israel and a center of drug addiction, and I expected our group to be stopped or heckled. But we made it through the dark history of the city in the clear midday sun without a hitch.

At the end we wound up in the hall of an old stone building where we were shown videos of two Israeli fighters from the elite Jewish force, the Palmach, testifying about their role in the Nakba.

Yerachmiel Kahanovich described how he had dug a hole in the wall of the Dahmash Mosque in the center of Lydda, where more than 150 Palestinians had taken shelter, and shot an anti-tank shell through it. Asked what had happened to the Palestinians, he said they were all crushed against the walls by the pressure from the blast. [Continue reading…]

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The inexorable advance towards a Greater Israel

Patrick Seale writes: This past year has dealt a heavy blow — perhaps even a terminal one — to the project, long supported by the international community, of resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict on the basis of two states. When the United States itself proved unable to halt Israel’s relentless land grab, it seemed that nothing and nobody could rein in Israel’s iron-willed ambition to expand its borders towards a “Greater Israel.”

What will the immediate future bring? In the continued absence of firm international intervention, the likeliest scenario is that Israel will seek to consolidate its hold over 40 percent of the West Bank, including the Jordan Valley, either by settlement expansion or outright annexation. The main centres of Arab population, such as Nablus, Jericho and Ramallah, would be fenced off, although Israel might allow them corridors to Jordan. This first stage of the project would, of course, be portrayed by Israel as a painful concession.

If Israel managed to get away with it, the next stage could be a good deal more radical, and could possibly involve the expulsion of large numbers of Palestinians, probably under the cover of war as occurred in 1948 and 1967, so as to complete the creation of a Greater Israel between the sea and the river.

After the experience of the past two years, no one should have the slightest doubt that Prime Minister Benyamin Netanyahu’s right-wing coalition is utterly determined to prevent the creation of a Palestinian state on the West Bank. Bantustans, for a while perhaps, but a Palestinian state, never! Netanyahu is known to be profoundly influenced by his father, the historian Benzion Natanyahu, now 101 years old, who was once the secretary of Ze’ev Jabotinsky – “the father of Revisionist Zionism” — and who remains a life-long passionate believer in a Greater Israel. He petitioned against the UN Partition Plan for Palestine of 29 November 1947 because he, and others like him, wanted the whole of Palestine for the Jews. That remains his dream.

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UNESCO funding cut by U.S. puts millions of lives at risk — NYT science blogger blames the rest of the world

At his Dot Earth blog in the New York Times, Andrew Revkin points out the devastating consequences which may follow budget cuts at UNESCO, now that U.S. funding has been severed due to the U.N. agency’s acceptance of Palestine as a full member.

Revkin relays a report from Oakley Brooks, author of Tsunami Alert: Beating Asia’s Next Big One, who writes:

There are plenty of things that the multi-tentacled Unesco does, in its slow and bloated way, which the world really needs. One indispensable and thankless Unesco task is organizing tsunami warnings systems and pushing for tsunami education on risky shores around the world.

I have serious reservations about relying on warning systems near fault lines — they tend to make people complacent between events and confused during. But these systems are undeniable saviors for long-distance tsunamis, such as the one that traveled trans-Pacific, from Japan to the U.S. West Coast, last March.

It’s frustrating to think that the ever-widening collateral damage from American Holy Land politics would reach — like its own long-distance tsunami — into the essential work on tsunami science.

Since UNESCO’s loss of funding is due to a law passed by the US Congress back in 1990, before the Oslo Accords and before anyone in Washington professed their support for the creation of a Palestinian state, Oakley correctly attributes the source of the damage to American Holy Land politics.

Revkin, however, wants to locate the problem elsewhere:

To my mind, the 107 nations that voted for Palestine’s membership knew what the financial result would be, and were willing to put the agency’s operations at risk for the sake of making a geopolitical point. That seems unwise. But that’s a personal, not professional view, on my part.

Since the bulk of Revkin’s writing covers environmental issues, whatever views he might have about Israel and Palestine are hard to glean. But he certainly doesn’t lack an interest in politics. In the mid-90s he reported on multiple ways the Bush administration was interfering with science.

Perhaps he sees the UNESCO issue as just another example of politics intruding on the work of scientists. Yet he seems to assign a law passed by Congress with something like the immutable status of a law of physics and think that the political points are only being made at the U.N..

As Ian Williams notes:

The actual legislation [PDF] the state department invokes is a 1990 prohibition on funding “the United Nations or any specialised agency thereof which accords the Palestine Liberation Organisation the same standing as a member state”, and another in 1994 banning payments to “any affiliated organisation of the United Nations which grants full membership as a state to any organisation or group that does not have the internationally recognised attributes of statehood”.

Any president, as we have seen, has ways to get around congressional mandates like this. For example, there are questions about which manifestation of Palestine is applying: the PLO or the Palestinian Authority. The congressional legislation was passed before the Oslo accords – and before the US began funding the Palestinians directly, so an executive decision could have declared that events had overtaken the intent of the law, and, what is more, that it was not the PLO but the Palestinian state that had been admitted.

As for the second part, US diplomats will have fun explaining why the US maintains membership of the World Bank and IMF – which have admitted Kosovo, whose disputed territory and statehood, rightly or wrongly, has far less general recognition than Palestine’s.

Are there any other indications that Revkin may be subject to his own non-scientific slant when it comes to issues involving the Middle East?

Back in early February, when the Egyptian revolution was in full swing, Revkin was among those helping promote a fear that a wave of uprisings across the region might cause trouble for the United States if oil supplies were disrupted. At that moment, he and his interlocutor, Gal Luft, saw a beacon of hope being raised in Israel by Benjamin Netanyahu with an initiative aimed at ending global dependence on oil.

Revkin also sought council from leading neoconservative, James Woolsey. The former CIA director saw in Revkin’s inquiry an opportunity to preach about the fount of all peril: Iran.

The point is that this Iranian government will use any tool it can – religious and otherwise – to spread its influence. If we see demonstrations in Saudi Arabia or the Gulf States it will be highly likely that more is going on, with an Iranian hand behind it, than just impressionable folks watching television and imitating what they see. It will be about Iran moving to build its ability to call the shots.

Does all of this imply that Revkin has his own Middle East agenda? Kind of, but I don’t think it necessarily has anything to do with supporting Israel. It sounds more like a strain of environmentalist populism that wants to harness America’s isolationist and xenophobic trends as a means to break our dependence on oil.

The problem with reinforcing prejudice for the sake of a good cause is that the prejudice may end up being served better than the cause.

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OWS, welcome to the War on Terror

Ayesha Kazmi writes: Supporters of Occupy who are pushing the Palestine issue are not doing so because they want to highjack the Occupy agenda. Rather, it is because those who are pushing Palestine are doing so because they’re connecting the issues.

Palestine should not be the focal point of Occupy. However, when you talk about the crimes of the American 1%, then talk about all of their crimes. It is correct to point out that Palestine is not the soul external issue to Occupy – but it is the most glaring.

If Occupy wants to talk about the bad behaviours of billionaire Americans, one need not look much further than Sheldon Adelson from Boston, Massachusetts. Currently, Adelson is 8th wealthiest American and 16th wealthiest person in the world and has a reported net worth of approximately $21.5 billion through various casino enterprises and is perhaps best known for his less than palatable business practices and various controversies.

Never heard of him? Try dropping his name in Israel and one might have better luck. Adelson is one of Birthright Israel’s largest donors contributing $25 million annually. Adelson is also one of the major figures responsible for the attack on the Islamic Society of Boston Cultural Centre attempting, unsuccessfully, to shut down the building of the mosque.

This connection is just the tip of the iceberg.

It is worth knowing that the heavy “less-lethal” artillery raining down on Occupy protesters in parts of the United States carry the very same labels as the ones that rain down on Palestinians in the West Bank. The corporations who are selling these “less-lethal” products are certainly making a “killing” in profits these days.

The 1% have haven’t merely secured their wealth domestically over the past 10 years, there has been an entire global campaign functioning simultaneously. Simply put, our fiscal insecurities have resulted from the deaths of people all over the globe.

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Palestinians may push for U.N. vote they expect to lose

The Guardian reports: The Palestinians are resigned to losing their battle for majority backing within the United Nations security council for their application for full UN membership but may still press for a vote next week in an attempt to discomfort countries who abstain or vote against.

The security council is to meet in New York on Friday to consider a report on the Palestinian bid. However, the Palestinians have failed to muster the required two-thirds majority among its 15 members, thus sparing the US the need to use its veto to prevent the application being approved.

The Palestinians will also officially receive the report on Friday and the leadership will meet to decide future steps, according to a Palestinian official. “There will definitely be no vote [at the security council] tomorrow,” he said.

One of the options for the Palestinians to consider is to demand a vote next week, knowing they will lose. “Let these countries publicly justify why they will not support a Palestinian state,” said the official. The British foreign secretary, William Hague, looked “deeply uncomfortable” in the House of Commons this week when explaining Britain’s decision to abstain in any vote, he added.

Another option is to take their case to the UN general assembly without a security council vote. The Palestinians are expected to win the support of more than two-thirds of the UN’s 193 countries, but the general assembly can only approve upgraded observer status rather than full membership.

However, enhanced “non-member state” status may allow the Palestinians access to international bodies such as the international criminal court.

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Thwarted at the U.N., is Palestinian leader Abbas headed off into the sunset?

Tony Karon writes: President Mahmoud Abbas’ attempt to persuade the U.N. Security Council to admit a state of Palestine as a full member of the international body has, all too predictably, hit a wall. The technical U.N. committee to which the issue was referred , not surprisingly, failed to reach a consensus (because there’s no consensus among Council members). Even if a vote was held despite that disagreement, it’s unlikely that the Palestinians would achieve the nine ayes that would prompt the U.S. to kill the measure with a veto. Abbas’ aides have been forced to concede defeat.

Most of the international community supports the principle of Palestinian statehood on the 1967 lines — even the U.S. government supports it, although Abbas would be ill-advised to hold his breath waiting, as he has done for two decades, for Washington to deliver that outcome. And even many of those countries that continue — at Washington’s insistence — to mouth the mantra that the only way to get there is in talks with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu don’t believe that Israel will voluntarily yield to the international consensus on terms for a two-state solution. But it’s naive to imagine that governments cast their votes at the U.N. on the basis of moral choices; more often than not, U.N. votes reflect the balance of power. As long as the U.S. was willing to campaign aggressively against them (it was, with Netanyahu marveling that President Obama “deserved a medal” for his speech scolding the Palestinians) and other key players saw no compelling reason to engage in a sustained diplomatic confrontation with Washington on the issue (none did), predicting the outcome didn’t exactly require clairvoyant powers.

France’s position is instructive: President Nicolas Sarkozy, whose mistrust of Netanyahu is now a matter of public record, warned that France would have to abstain at the Security Council, but promised support for a Palestinian move in the General Assembly to upgrade their status to that of observer state. Germany’s Chancellor Angela Merkel who has twice clashed publicly with the Israeli leader over his settlement policy (and voted against the U.S. last February’s Security Council condemnation of ongoing settlements) also made clear from the get-go that it would vote against admitting Palestine as a U.N. member state.

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Apartheid and the occupation of Palestine

John Dugard writes: This week, the Russell Tribunal on Palestine will consider the question of whether Israel’s practices in the occupied Palestinian territory (OPT) constitute the crime of apartheid within the meaning of the 1973 International Convention on the Suppression and Punishment of the Crime of Apartheid. This Convention, which has been incorporated into the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, is not confined to apartheid in South Africa. Instead it criminalises, under international law, practices that resemble apartheid.

The Russell Tribunal was initiated in the 1960s by the philosopher Bertrand Russell to examine war crimes committed during the Vietnam War. It has now been revived to consider Israel’s violations of international law. It is not a judicial tribunal, but a tribunal comprising reputable jurors from different countries, that seeks to examine whether Israel has violated international criminal law and should be held accountable.

In essence, the Russell Tribunal is a court of international public opinion. It will hear evidence in Cape Town on the scope of the 1973 Apartheid Convention, on apartheid as practiced in South Africa, on Israeli practices in the OPT, particularly the West Bank, and on the question whether these practices so closely resemble those of apartheid as to bring them within the prohibitions of the 1973 Apartheid Convention. The Israeli government has been invited to testify before the tribunal, but, at this stage, has not replied to the invitation. Most of the evidence will inevitably, therefore, be critical of Israel.

Israel cannot be held accountable for its actions by any international tribunal as it refuses to accept the jurisdiction of either the International Court of Justice or the International Criminal Court. The Russell Tribunal seeks to remedy this weakness in the international system of justice by providing for accountability by a court of international opinion. It does not seek to obstruct the peace process. On the contrary, it wishes to promote it. But there can be no peace without justice.

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‘New setback’ for Palestinian hopes on U.N. membership

BBC News reports: A UN diplomat says the UK, France and Colombia have told Security Council members they would abstain in any vote on Palestinian membership.

None of these countries have officially confirmed this yet.

But their decision is a setback for the Palestinians, who have been trying to win support from European states.

A Council committee is considering a Palestinian application to become a UN member state and is expected to present its report next week.

The UN diplomat said Britain, France and Colombia stated their positions in a private meeting of the Security Council committee dealing with the Palestinian application.

The diplomat said Germany also declared it could not support the Palestinian bid, without clarifying whether it would abstain or vote against.

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