Richard Falk, UN Special Rapporteur for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories and professor emeritus of international law at Princeton University, has issued a statement on the Israeli airstrikes in Gaza. Falk calls the strikes severe violations of international humanitarian law as defined in the Geneva Conventions.
Here is the full text of Falk’s December 27 official statement for the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights:
The Israeli airstrikes on the Gaza Strip represent s evere and massive violations of international humanitarian law as defined in the Geneva Conventions, both in regard to the obligations of an Occupying Power and in the requirements of the laws of war. Those violations include:
Collective punishment – the entire 1.5 million people who live in the crowded Gaza Strip are being punished for the actions of a few militants.
Targeting civilians – the airstrikes were aimed at civilian areas in one of the most crowded stretches of land in the world, certainly the most densely populated area of the Middle East.
Disproportionate military response – the airstrikes have not only destroyed every police and security office of Gaza’s elected government, but have killed and injured hundreds of civilians; at least one strike reportedly hit groups of students attempting to find transportation home from the university.
Earlier Israeli actions, specifically the complete sealing off of entry and exit to and from the Gaza Strip, have led to severe shortages of medicine and fuel (as well as food), resulting in the inability of ambulances to respond to the injured, the inability of hospitals to adequately provide medicine or necessary equipment for the injured, and the inability of Gaza’s besieged doctors and other medical workers to sufficiently treat the victims.
Certainly the rocket attacks against civilian targets in Israel are unlawful. But that illegality does not give rise to any Israeli right, neither as the Occupying Power nor as a sovereign state, to violate international humanitarian law and commit war crimes or crimes against humanity in its response. I note that Israel’s escalating military assaults have not made Israeli civilians safer; to the contrary, the one Israeli killed today after the upsurge of Israeli violence is the first in over a year.
The Israeli airstrikes today, and the catastrophic human toll that they caused, challenge those countries that have been and remain complicit, either directly or indirectly, in Israel’s violations of international law. That complicity includes those countries knowingly providing the military equipment including warplanes and missiles used in these illegal attacks, as well as those countries who have supported and participated in the siege of Gaza that itself has caused a humanitarian catastrophe.
I remind all member states of the United Nations that the UN continues to be bound to an independent obligation to protect any civilian population facing massive violations of international humanitarian law – regardless of what country may be responsible for those violations. I call on all Member States, as well as officials and every relevant organ of the United Nations system, to move on an emergency basis not only to condemn Israel’s serious violations, but to develop new approaches to providing real protection for the Palestinian people.
Falk has been an outstanding analyst of US foreign policy, basing his critique on international law. He’s written extensively on the illegality of the last fifty years of US policy, with an emphasis on the cases of Iraq and Israel/Palestine. (See the i.c. review of this work: Friel and Falk: The Record of the Paper). He was appointed to the UNHRC in March, 2008. The diplomatic response at the time was largely predictable:
- Israel: “The mandate of the Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian Territories was hopelessly unbalanced. This mandate was redundant at best and malicious at worst. It was impossible to believe that out of a list of 184 potential candidates, the eminently wise members of the Consultative Group honestly had made the best possible choice for this post. [...] The Human Rights Council was rapidly moving away from its raison d’être.”
- US: “expressed its concern on the mandate holder selected for the task of assessing the human rights situation in the Occupied Palestinian Territories. This had long since been a particularly sensitive mandate and he hoped that it would not be conducted with bias and partiality. That being said, he wished the other new mandate holders the best of luck in their new appointments.”
- Canada: “based on the writings of one of the candidates, the nominee for the mandate on the situation in the Occupied Palestinian Territories, Canada expressed serious concern about whether the high standards established by the Council would be met by this individual. Therefore, Canada dissociated itself from any Council decision to approve the full slate.”
- Palestine: “it was ironic that Israel which claimed to be representing Jews everywhere was campaigning against a Jewish professor who had been nominated for the post of Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Occupied Palestinian Territory. The candidate was the author of 54 books on international law. Palestine doubted that those who had campaigned against him had read that many books. The candidate’s nomination was a victory for good sense and human rights, as he was a highly qualified rapporteur. If Israel was concerned about human rights it would have ended its prolonged occupation.”
But despite the fracas, Falk’s positions are representative of the larger consensus. His assessment of Gaza was more or less affirmed by Navi Pillay, UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, who called on Israel’s leaders to uphold international humanitarian law principles, especially those relating to proportionality in the use of military force and the prevention of collective punishment and the targeting of civilians. The Palestinian human rights community said in a collective statement, “grave breaches of the Fourth Geneva Convention amounting to war crimes, have been committed, including, wilful killing and the extensive destruction of property not justified by military necessity and carried out unlawfully and wantonly.”
Falk was recently deported from Israel after being detained at Tel Aviv’s Ben Gurion Airport for twenty hours, denied entry because of what Israel called his “highly politicized views.” He describes the experience in a December 29 editorial in the Houston Chronicle, in which he wrote:
Two weeks prior to this carnage, I arrived at Ben Gurion Airport in Israel in my capacity as the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Palestinian Territories. I planned to visit Gaza, meet with Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas and tour the West Bank. Israeli officials had been given an advance itinerary for my trip.
I was, however, taken from the passport line by Israeli authorities. I was driven a mile from the airport, placed in a filthy detention facility, which smelled of urine, for 20 hours and deported.
Pillay called Israel’s treatment of the human rights reporter “unprecedented and deeply regrettable”. In a December 17 Democracy Now! interview on the topic, Falk said:
Israel has been pursuing what I call a politics of opaqueness, trying to make the realities of the occupation as obscure as possible and as speculative as possible. They’ve kept those who are knowledgeable inside Gaza from leaving to attend international conferences—Raji Sourani, for instance, the head of the Human Rights Centre, who had previously been allowed to attend international conferences and is a distinguished recipient of the Kennedy Center’s Human Rights Award. So they’ve tried to keep people in who know something about the reality of the occupation and then try to keep people out, such as myself, who could report credibly on what is happening inside, and shifting that argument then to my qualifications.
The New York Times engaged in a shameful show of this in their December 15 report on the incident, U.N. Rights Investigator Expelled by Israel, whose fourth paragraph reads:
He has compared Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians to Nazi atrocities and has called for more serious examination of the conspiracy theories surrounding the Sept. 11 attacks. Pointing to discrepancies between the official version of events and other versions, he recently wrote that “only willful ignorance can maintain that the 9/11 narrative should be treated as a closed book.”
The Times, which had to issue an embarrassing editorial note afterward stating “Mr. Falk could not be reached before publication to defend himself”, is essentially plagiarizing the April 4 talking points of CAMERA, a Boston-based hard-line, pro-Israel propaganda group (Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America). [In May, five Wikipedia editors involved in a secret CAMERA campaign to edit Wikipedia were sanctioned by Wikipedia administrators.] CAMERA’s main case against Falk was a July 2007 article he wrote, which CAMERA characterizes by saying “Falk likened Israelis to Nazis”.
But if you actually read the article, instead you’ll find he evaluates the question: “Is it an irresponsible overstatement to associate the treatment of Palestinians with this criminalized Nazi record of collective atrocity?” Falk then goes on to argue about the criminality of Israel’s policies toward Palestinians. The substance of the article has little to do with Nazis:
To ground these allegations, it is necessary to consider the background of the current situation. For over four decades, ever since 1967, Gaza has been occupied by Israel in a manner that turned this crowded area into a cauldron of pain and suffering for the entire population on a daily basis, with more than half of Gazans living in miserable refugees camps and even more dependent on humanitarian relief to satisfy basic human needs. With great fanfare, under Sharon’s leadership, Israel supposedly ended its military occupation and dismantled its settlements in 2005. The process was largely a sham as Israel maintained full control over borders, air space, offshore seas, as well as asserted its military control of Gaza, engaging in violent incursions, sending missiles to Gaza at will on assassination missions that themselves violate international humanitarian law, and managing to kill more than 300 Gazan civilians since its supposed physical departure.
As unacceptable as is this earlier part of the story, a dramatic turn for the worse occurred when Hamas prevailed in the January 2006 national legislative elections. It is a bitter irony that Hamas was encouraged, especially by Washington, to participate in the elections to show its commitment to a political process (as an alternative to violence) and then was badly punished for having the temerity to succeed. These elections were internationally monitored under the leadership of the former American president, Jimmy Carter, and pronounced as completely fair. Carter has recently termed this Israeli/American refusal to accept the outcome of such a democratic verdict as itself ‘criminal.’ It is also deeply discrediting of the campaign of the Bush presidency to promote democracy in the region, an effort already under a dark shadow in view of the policy failure in Iraq.
After winning the Palestinian elections, Hamas was castigated as a terrorist organization that had not renounced violence against Israel and had refused to recognize the Jewish state as a legitimate political entity. In fact, the behavior and outlook of Hamas is quite different. From the outset of its political Hamas was ready to work with other Palestinian groups, especially Fatah and Mahmoud Abbas, to establish a ‘unity’ government. More than this, their leadership revealed a willingness to move toward an acceptance of Israel’s existence if Israel would in turn agree to move back to its 1967 borders, implementing finally unanimous Security Council Resolutions 242 and 338.
Even more dramatically, Hamas proposed a ten-year truce with Israel, and went so far as to put in place a unilateral ceasefire that lasted for eighteen months, and was broken only to engage in rather pathetic strikes mainly taking place in response to Israeli violent provocations in Gaza. As Efraim Halevi, former head of Israel’s Mossad was reported to have said, ‘What Isreal needs from Hamas is an end to violence, not diplomatic recognition.’ And this is precisely what Hamas offered and what Israel rejected.
As he said in the DN! interview:
I merely tried to characterize the facts as I understood them to involve this kind of massive collective punishment of every man, woman and child, regardless of their activities, as being victimized by a set of policies summarized as a siege or blockade, where some of the effects are now very well established.
Falk writes in the Houston Chronicle editorial:
Israel’s treatment of Gaza is largely unseen by the outside world. I am not the only observer to be denied entry into Gaza by Israeli authorities. Numerous humanitarian aide workers, along with reporters and photographers, have been barred from Gaza to keep witnesses from reporting to the outside world on the tragic human cost of the siege.
Even before Israel’s strike, the statistics we did have from Gaza were deeply disturbing. A recent study reports that 46 percent of all Gazan children suffer from acute anemia. There are reports that the sonic booms associated with Israeli overflights have caused widespread deafness, especially among children. Malnutrition is extremely high and affects, in varying degrees, 75 percent of Gazans.
Gaza typically spends at least 12 hours a day without power. Basic drugs and medicine are no longer available. The generators for hospitals, vital to keep seriously ill patients alive, lack fuel and often do not function. Medical staff cannot control the temperature of incubators for newborns. Those who need specialized care, including cancer patients and those in need of kidney dialysis, often cannot leave Gaza for care. There were an estimated 230 Gazans believed to have died last year because they were denied proper medical care. Several of these patients spent their last hours at Israeli crossing points where they were refused entry into Israel.
The magnitude of Palestinian suffering and the deliberate violations of international humanitarian law by Israel are indefensible. They should be addressed forcefully by the international community.
The Israeli authorities who carry out this draconian policy must be held accountable. We cannot build a world that respects human rights and the rule of law unless we judge everyone, including those who are our allies, by the same impartial standard.
Falk could not be more on point by drawing attention to the issues of legality surrounding the longest on-going military occupation—a subject that is simply unmentionable in US discourse—and I don’t think it can be overemphasized that US and Israeli policy toward Gaza has been one of collective punishment for Palestinians “voting the wrong way” in their free and open elections. This is very much a war against democracy—one more in a long, continuous, and well-documented, but ultimately unspoken of, series of wars against democracy perpetrated by the US and its allies.
