Global
Powers Failing
Palestinians Once Again
By Jamal Juma
10 July, 2006
Countercurrents.org
This
year the 9th of July is a bitter day for Palestinians. The Occupation
Army besieges Gaza, massacres its people and attacks its infrastructure.
The ghettos of the West Bank take shape as the Apartheid Wall edges
closer to completion and the Palestinian exodus from Jerusalem has begun.
Over 9000 Palestinians sit in Israeli prison cells whilst Palestinians
who remain on their 1948 lands do so under the subjugation of the most
vicious and discriminatory Apartheid system.
The brief euphoria of two
years ago, following the ruling of the International Court of Justice
(ICJ) on the Wall, is a distant memory. Some hailed a victory for international
law in Palestine when the ICJ ruled the Wall illegal and condemned the
Occupation along with other Israeli crimes. It asked the international
community to enforce the IV Geneva convention and “not to render
any aid or assistance to the Wall and the associated regime”.
Two years later, as the Palestinian
people prepare to march to the UN offices, they know that nobody has
taken up this latest verdict to stop the escalation of the Occupation
in Palestine. The Apartheid Wall scythes through the landscape as it
nears completion, forming part of an intricate system of control with
the fortified settler-only roads to steal 48% of lands in the West Bank.
Palestinians in Gaza, 80% of whom are refugees from the lands they were
expelled from in 1948, are imprisoned behind two Walls. Cut-off from
the rest of the world, their privilege after the Israeli sham of “disengagement”
is to starve in the world’s largest open-air prison, subject to
continuous bombings, sonic booms and service cut-offs.
In front of these crimes,
at a time when Palestinians struggling for their freedom call for increased
ties of solidarity, the reaction of the international community and
member states of the UN is to show their disdain for Palestinian efforts
to shake off the shackles of Occupation. The global community pleads
for the release of one Israeli taken from a tank, stationed outside
the Gaza ghetto, whilst Palestinians are taken from their beds and killed
in the streets and half of their government and 1/3 of the Palestinian
Legislative Council are taken hostage. They beg for his return whilst
ignoring the 9000 Palestinians rotting in Israeli jails, over 400 of
whom are children.
Global agencies confine their
operations to fact-finding missions on the “Palestinian situation”
speculating endlessly on humanitarian issues as if Palestine were in
the throws of some natural disaster. Reeling off further UN humanitarian
reports are not asked for. Palestinians don’t need to be told
by the World Bank about their own poverty and they don’t need
the hollow rhetorical support of governments which fail to follow up
words with deeds. The facts on the ground in Palestine are there for
all to see. We need action. We need political pressure on the Occupation.
We need freedom.
The manner in which the international
community has dealt with the ICJ decision (and indeed with any other
UN resolution including the refugees’ right of return) shows the
UN as an impotent and discredited institution where the unity of the
powerful in the Security Council continues to oversee and comply with
the expulsion of our people.
The General Assembly resolution,
which endorsed the ICJ decision, only asked the General Secretary to
build up a registry for damages and losses from the Wall. The absurdity
of building a registry of the ever-rising damages, instead of preparing
concrete measures to pressure Israel to dismantle the Wall is evident.
Worse still, the General Secretary has refused to even visit the Wall,
preferring not to provoke his masters in Washington and New York who
pull the strings. And now, it would appear that registry might not complete
any evaluation of losses, effectively ensuring that no reparations will
ever be requisitioned from the Occupation. This ensures the criminal
doesn’t stop its war crimes, but moreover, that it will never
be held accountable.
While the silence of the
international community might be shocking, Palestinians and their supporters
are well aware of the deft machinations of global powers complicit with
their Occupation. Increasingly they have witnessed global government
abscond from the responsibilities of international law and pursue the
globalization of the Occupation. Now the international community, together
with Israel, places sanctions on the Palestinian people for having conducted
the democratic vote the world asked them for.
They aim to topple a Palestinian
leadership which refuses to be compliant with the wishes of the Occupation.
With that goal comes the vision of creating new mechanisms of control
to bypass the Palestinian Authority and any source of democratic accountability
to the Palestinian people. The result is the Temporary International
Mechanism (TIM), the new structure proselytised by the EU to ensure
political and economic control for the World Bank to rule and subjugate
the Palestinian people. The mechanism is apparently set out to destroy
the PA administrative structure (excluding the Presidential Office)
while international banks are to distribute money for the starving.
$40 million - roughly a third of the money made available to create
this International Mechanism of support for the Occupation - goes directly
to Apartheid Israel to pay its companies for fuel and other basic supplies.
This comes as the Occupation continues to steal some $75 million every
month of Palestinian tax money and from which such expenses were previously
covered.
While Israel controls us
militarily, confines us behind Walls and carves out our ghettos, powerful
global agencies take over the administrative and financial burdens of
the Occupation seeking minimum subsistence for the people imprisoned
in the Bantustans. Any glimmer of hope that the UN, the EU, the ICJ
or the “Free World” might work towards implementing Palestinian
rights appears more distant than ever. Latin America negotiates Free
Trade Agreements with the Occupation and Asian countries display overtures
of normalization with Apartheid Israel as our people are massacred in
the streets.
Our hopes thus rest with
the people themselves, to accelerate boycott, divestment and sanctions
(BDS) to isolate apartheid Israel and punish it for the war crimes it
pursues against us. It is our supporters, amongst the millions of justice
seeking people across the world that we look to in pushing forward solidarity
actions and restoring some dignity to international law.
We urge the implementation
of the ICJ, we urge the signatories of the Geneva Convention to fulfil
their commitments, and we call for immediate measures to ensure that
all UN resolutions are carried out, that the Occupation ends and our
refugees return home. While the World Bank, the United States and the
Occupation itself may be powerful, they will continue to find an unwilling
subject in the Palestinian people who stay steadfast to the greater
ideals of freedom, justice and liberation.
Jamal Juma’
is Coordinator of the Palestinian grassroots Anti-Apartheid Wall Campaign
– www.stopthewall.org