Posted by
Zion's Fourth Estate on Wednesday, March 19, 2008 12:23:47 PM
(Author's note: This was originally published in the March 14 edition of The Jewish State)
With
the new report by Special Rapporteur John Dugard, it can no longer
suffice to say that the United Nations has egg on its face, for egg has
simply become the world body's permanent visage.
Dugard
is due to present his new report "on the situation of human rights in
the Palestinian territories occupied since 1967" to the UN Human Rights
Council. In the section titled "Human rights in the West Bank and
Jerusalem," Dugard reveals "the instruments that most seriously violate
human rights" by Israel.
Among them, tellingly, is "the Judaization of Jerusalem."
Dugard,
a South African lawyer, is responsible for investigating only Israel's
potential human rights violations for the UNHRC, and has prepared his
verdict, in the form of a 25-page report, for the council's first
regular session of 2008.
The
report is replete with the same types of factual errors,
misrepresentations, alarmingly obvious bias, and preposterously
uneducated contentions that we have all come to expect from Dugard and
his employers, all written in a Narcissus-inspired third-person, with
Dugard only and always referring to himself as "the Special
Rapporteur."
But
the kind of venomous anti-Semitism jubilantly offered to us on page 13
reveals that Dugard has stooped so low he would need an elevator to
reach the Palestinians' weapons smuggling tunnels whose existence he so
dutifully ignores.
Dugard
was picked for this mission in part because of his South African
residence, making him a perfect choice to level "apartheid" charges at
the Jewish state. But that should be, for him, a double-edged sword; as
a white South African he should also understand the sensitivity
inherent in the way descriptions of race, religion, and nationality are
couched. Indeed, he probably does.
So
would Dugard dare call Zimbabwean dictator Robert Mugabe's policy of
confiscating land from white owners "the blackification of Zimbabwe"?
Would we hear him whine about the ongoing "Islamization" of Mecca or
London? How about "the Orientalizing" of public universities?
Of course not, with good reason; such terms are racist, hateful, hurtful, discriminatory, and wildly inappropriate.
And
"the Judaization" of anything belongs in that same category. As an
indication of the phrase's nefarious intent, it was used by Adolf
Hitler after he became Fuhrer of Germany's National Socialist Party.
"Internationalization
today means only Judaization," Hitler told an audience in September
1922. "We in Germany have come to this: that a 60-million people sees
its destiny to lie at the will of a few dozen Jewish bankers. This was
possible only because our civilization had first been Judaized....
Eisner said in 1918 that we had no right to demand the return of our
prisoners -- he was only saying openly what all Jews were thinking.
People who so think must feel how life tastes in a concentration camp."
Yasser Arafat used the term in 1998 as he threatened to launch what would soon be known as the Second Intifada.
"The
Palestinian Authority has taken steps to actively struggle against the
Israeli Judaization scheme.... The Palestinian Authority is ready to
restart the intifada in order to stop the assault on the Arab character
of Jerusalem," Arafat told the Algerian newspaper Sawt al-Ahrar on Aug.
1, 1998. A year earlier, Arafat had delivered a similar warning to
then-Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu.
The
term is also a favorite of Sheikh Ra'ad Salah, the leader of the
northern branch of the Islamic Movement, who routinely calls for
anti-Jewish riots in Israel and issues death threats to Israeli public
officials, as he did to then-Deputy Prime Minister Avigdor Lieberman in
November 2006. Salah also uses the term as a way to de-legitimize
Israel and the Jews: "The claims of the Jews are big lies and they have
no right to any speck of dust here," he said on March 10.
That's
quite a legacy; from Hitler's prewar rhetoric, to Arafat's pre-intifada
warning, to Sheikh Salah's death threats, to Dugard's rant. That means
that the newest member of this club is also a member of the United
Nations, which is something the world should watch very carefully.
Dugard's
treatment of terrorism is also characteristic. In the report, he uses
the word "terrorism" interchangeably with "terrorize," which enables
him to equate Israeli actions, such as "sonic booms," with actual
violence, like Palestinian "suicide bombs and Qassam rockets" -- all of
which "must be condemned."
And
although al-Qaeda and its Iranian associates have established
themselves in Gaza, Dugard goes to great lengths to insist that
Palestinian terrorism -- often enabled and sometimes carried out by
al-Qaeda -- is quite different from terrorism enabled or carried out
by, say, al-Qaeda.
"Common
sense, however, dictates that a distinction must be drawn between acts
of mindless terror, such as acts committed by al-Qaeda, and acts
committed in the course of a war of national liberation against
colonialism, apartheid, or military occupation," Dugard states in his
report. "While such acts cannot be justified, they must be understood
as being a painful but inevitable consequence of colonialism,
apartheid, or occupation."
Ah,
"common sense." Something tells me Israelis won't sleep any better
knowing that the murderous rockets landing daily on Sderot, the recent
deadly suicide bombing attack in Dimona, and the March 6 massacre of
eight yeshiva students in Jerusalem weren't "mindless," but, rather,
"inevitable."
But Dugard clears the whole mess up when he divulges "the root cause of Palestinian violence -- the occupation."
It's
a Chico Marx "Who you gonna believe, me or your own eyes?" moment for
Dugard. Palestinian violence is taking place because of the Israeli
"occupation," which makes the Arabs in the West Bank and Gaza quite
prescient: the Arabs who massacred Jews in Hebron in 1929 did so
because they saw the "occupation" coming. Ditto for the 3,000 fedayeen
attacks in the year 1952 alone.
But
maybe Dugard is referring to acts of violence in the Negev, where
Sderot and Ashkelon are regular targets of Gaza-based terrorists. He
must be forgetting the March 1954 ambush by terrorists of a bus
traveling from Eilat to Tel Aviv, during which the terrorists shot
every passenger one by one.
Or a year later, when terrorists attacked a Jewish wedding in the Negev town of Patish.
The
list of those attacks is quite long, so perhaps Dugard is just
referring to attacks around the Gaza border area. But then he'd have to
exclude the 1957 murder of two Israeli civilians by Gazan terrorists at
Nir Yitzhak.
No,
that list is unfortunately too long to disregard as well, so he must be
referring only to towns that are regularly directly attacked by
Palestinians today. But that can't be, either, because then he'd have
to ignore the 1956 murder of a woman in Ashkelon who was killed when
terrorists threw hand grenades into her home.
Maybe
he means terrorist attacks that are simply self-defense measures on
Arab land. But then he'd have to explain why Arabs in Gaza killed or
wounded several Israeli civilians by planting landmines on the Israeli
side of the Gazan border in 1957.
I
wonder what he thinks about all the Fatah terrorist attacks --
explicitly "Palestinian," as part of the PLO -- that began in 1965, two
years before any "occupation."
Of
course this is just a sampling, but the point is that Dugard exposes
himself and the U.N. He decries the Road Map, because it forces
Palestinians to swear off violence -- something he doesn't think should
be a precondition for statehood. He claims Israel is still occupying
Gaza thanks to "technological developments."
He
blames Israel for conditions that "could produce chaos in the Gazan
monetary system"; for the fact that Gaza's schoolchildren "lag behind
refugee children elsewhere"; for a system of "road apartheid"; for
obstructing Palestinian freedom of movement with "earth mounds"; for
threatening "the social fabric of [Palestinian] society"; and for
creating an ominous-sounding "permit regime."
He
explains: "houses and structures may not be built without permits. The
bureaucratic procedures for obtaining permits are cumbersome and in
practice permits are rarely granted. As a result, Palestinians are
frequently compelled to build homes without permits."
He
complains that Israel's release of 779 prisoners was "such a small
number of prisoners" so as to render the gesture meaningless. He then,
inexplicably, mentions that there was a riot at Ketziot prison that
resulted in one death and 250 injuries -- presumably, by Dugard's
logic, a sure sign that these prisoners should be released into society.
All
this buildup would certainly put a substantial amount of pressure on
Dugard to provide a spectacular grand finale of his report. He does not
disappoint.
Most
American and European leaders, and certainly many Israelis and
Palestinians, would respond in similar fashion if asked what a final
status agreement would look like. They would probably describe it as
the creation of a Palestinian state in Gaza and the West Bank, with
territory swaps to include major Jewish enclaves in Israel and major
Arab enclaves in Palestine.
Such an agreement, however, would be illegal according to Dugard.
He
states: "any agreement between the Palestinian authorities and the
Israeli Government that recognizes settlements within the occupied
Palestinian territory, or accepts the annexation by Israel of
Palestinian land within the wall, will violate the Fourth Geneva
Convention."
So,
according to Dugard's interpretation of the Geneva Conventions, a
non-nation that's not a signatory to the Conventions is not at liberty
to enter into a formal agreement if its new borders would not conform
to Dugard's interpretation of an agreement it never entered into.
I
guess it's good for the Palestinians that, ironically, when the PLO
smugly tried to volunteer to follow some cherry-picked parts of the
Geneva Conventions in 1989, the PLO and the all the signatories
received a response from the Swiss Federal Council stating that it had
no idea what kind of relevance or legality the PLO's letter had, "due
to the uncertainty within the international community as to the
existence or non-existence of a State of Palestine."
I'm sure John Dugard would be happy to explain it to them.