The Trump administration's withdrawal from the UN Human Rights Council, and the plainly bogus pretext for it, tells us more about the US than the UN body.
Explicitly focusing on alleged anti-Israel bias, the U.S. withdrew from further participation in the UN Human Rights Council.
The only internationally credible basis for criticizing the HRC is its regrettable tendency to put some countries with the worst human rights records in leading roles, creating genuine issues of credibility and hypocrisy.
Of course, such a criticism would never be made by the U.S. as it could only embarrass Washington to admit that many of its closest allies in the Middle East, and elsewhere have lamentable human rights records, and, if fairly judged, the U.S. has itself reversed roles since the year 2000, itself slipping into the category of the most serious human rights offenders.
In this regard, its ‘withdrawal’ can be viewed as a self-imposed ‘suspension’ for falling short when it comes to the promotion and protection of human rights.
Undoubtedly, the U.S. was frustrated by its efforts to ‘reform’ the HRC according to its views of the UN agency should function, and blamed its traditional adversaries, Russia, China, Venezuela, Cuba, along with Egypt, with blocking its initiative.
It also must not have welcomed the HRC High Commissioner, Zeid Ra’ad al-Hussein, for describing the separation of children from their immigrant parents at the Mexican border as an “unconscionable” policy.
In evaluating this latest sign of American retreat from its prior role as global leader, there are several considerations that help us understand such a move that situates the United States in the same strange rejectionist corner it now shares with North Korea and Eritrea:
— The fact that the U.S. withdrawal from the HRC occurred immediately after the Israeli border massacre, insulated from Security Council censure and investigation by a U.S. veto, is certainly part of political foreground. This consideration was undoubtedly reinforced by the HRC approval of a fact-finding investigation of Israel’s behavior over prior weeks in responding to the Great Return March border demonstrations met with widespread lethal sniper violence.
— In evaluating the UN connection to Palestine, it needs to be recalled that the organized international community has a distinctive responsibility for Palestine that can be traced all the way back to the peace diplomacy after World War I when Britain was given the role of Mandatory, which according to the League of Nations Covenant should be carried out as a ‘sacred trust of civilization.’
This special relationship was extended and deepened when Britain gave up this role after World War II, transferring responsibility for the future of Palestine to the UN. This newly established world organization was given the task of finding a sustainable solution in the face of sharply contested claims between the majority Palestinian population and the Jewish, mainly settler population.
This UN role was started beneath and deeply influenced by the long shadow of grief and guilt cast by the Holocaust. The UN, borrowing from the British colonial playbook, proposed a division of Palestine between Jewish and Palestinian political communities, which eventuated in the UN partition plan contained in General Assembly Resolution 181.
This plan was developed and adopted without the participation of the majority resident population, 70% non-Jewish at the time, and was opposed by the independent countries in the Arab world. Such a plan seemed oblivious to the evolving anti-colonial mood of the time, failing to take any account of the guiding normative principle of self-determination. The Partition War that followed in 1947 did produce a de factor partition of Palestine more favorable to the Zionist Project than what was proposed, and rejected, in 181. One feature of the original plan was to internationalize the governance of the city of Jerusalem with both peoples given an equal status.
This proposed treatment of Jerusalem was never endorsed by Israel, and was formally, if indirectly, repudiated after the 1967 War when Israel declared (in violation of international law) that Jerusalem was the eternal capital of the Jewish people never to be divided or internationalized, and Israel has so administered Jerusalem with this intent operationalized in defiance of the UN.
What this sketch of the UN connection with Palestine clearly shows is that from the very beginning of Israeli state-building, the role of the international community was direct and the discharge of its responsibilities was not satisfactory in that it proved incapable of protecting Palestinian moral, legal, and political rights.
As a result, the majority of Palestinian people have been effectively excluded from their own country and as a people exist in a fragmented ethnic reality. This series of events constitutes one of the worst geopolitical crimes of the past century. Rather than do too much by way of criticizing the behavior of Israel, the UN has done far too little, not because of a failure of will, but as an expression of the behavioral primacy of geopolitics and naked militarism;
—The revealing stress of Ambassador Haley’s explanation of the U.S. withdrawal from the HRC makes no attempt whatsoever to refute the substantive allegations of Israeli wrongdoing, but instead gives almost total attention to quantitative factors such as the ‘disproportionate’ number of resolutions compared with those given to other human rights offenders.
This is not surprising as any attempt to justify Israeli policies and practices toward the Palestinian people would only expose the severity of Israel’s criminality and the acuteness of Palestinian victimization. The U.S. has also long struggled to be rid of so-called Item 7 of the Human Rights Council devoted to human rights violations of Israel associated with the occupation of Palestinian territories, which overlooks the prior main point that the UN is derelict in its failure to produce a just peace for the peoples inhabiting Mandate Palestine.
—Withdrawing from international institutional arrangements, especially those positively associated with peace, human rights, and environmental protection has become the hallmark of what be identified as the negative internationalism of the Trump presidency.
The most egregious instances, prior to this move with regard to the HRC, involved the repudiation of the Nuclear Program Agreement with Iran (also known as the JCPOA or P5 +1 Agreement) and the Paris Climate Change Agreement.
Unlike these other instances of negative internationalism this departure from the HRC is likely to hurt the U.S. more than the HRC, reinforcing its myopic willingness to do whatever it takes to please Netanyahu and the lead American Zionist donor to the Trump campaign, Sheldon Adelson.
Only the provocative announcement of the planned unilateral move of the American Embassy to Jerusalem last December was as explicitly responsive to Israel’s policy agenda as is this rejection of the HRC, both initiatives stand out as being contrary to a fair rendering of American national interests, and hence a show of deference to Israel’s preferences.
Despite this unabashed one-sidedness the Trump presidency still puts itself forward as a peacemaker, and promised to produce ‘the deal of the century’ at the proper moment, even enjoying the backing of Saudi Arabia, which seems to be telling the Palestinians to take what is offered or shut up forever.
Knowing the weakness and shallow ambitions of the Palestinian Authority, there is no telling what further catastrophe, this one of a diplomatic character, may further darken the Palestinian future. A diplomatic nakba might be the worst disaster of all for the Palestinian people and their century-long struggle for elemental rights.
— It should also be observed that the U.S. human rights record has been in steady decline, whether the focus is placed on the morally catastrophic present policies of separating families at the Mexican border or on the failure to achieve acceptable progress at home in the area of economic and social rights despite American affluence (as documented in the recent report of Philip Alston, UNHRC Special Rapporteur on Extreme Poverty) or in the various violations of human rights committed in the course of the War on Terror, including operation of black sites in foreign countries to carry on torture of terror suspects, or denials of the tenets of international humanitarian law (Geneva Conventions) in the administration of Guantanamo and other prison facilities.
— It is also worth noting that Israel’s defiance of international law and international institutions is pervasive, flagrant, and directly related to maintaining an oppressive regime of occupation that is complemented by apartheid structures victimizing Palestinian refugees, residents of Jerusalem, the Palestinian minority in Israel, and imprisoned population of Gaza.
Israel refused the authority of the International Court of Justice with respect to the ‘separation wall’ that back in 2004 declared by a near unanimous vote of 14-1 (U.S. as the lone dissent) that building the wall on occupied Palestinian territory was unlawful, that the wall should be dismantled, and Palestinians compensated for harm endured. There are many other instances concerning such issues as settlements, collective punishment, excessive force, prison conditions, and a variety of abuse of children.
In conclusion, by purporting to punish the Human Rights Council, the Trump presidency, representing the U.S. Government, is much more punishing itself, as well as the peoples of the world. We all benefit from a robust and legitimated institutional framework for the promotion and protection of vital human rights. The claim of an anti-Israeli bias in the HRC, or UN, is bogus, the daily violation of the most basis rights of the Palestinian people is a tragic reality. This is all we need to know.
This article was originally published at RichardFalk.WordPress.com on June 22, 2018.
It always makes my blood boil when I read about the situation of the Palestinian people and their subjugation under the boot of the Israeli administration.I often wonder if the world has gone completely mad to put up with this and more specifically the US administration that spurs it on.Nevertheless ,thank you Richard for trying to wake the sleeping masses.
What exactly makes you blood boil? That the Arabs were forced to go to school under Israel law and are now able to get college degrees, including women, or the fact that unemployment is lower than most other countries in the region due to the many jobs available under Fatah government of the PA and inside Israel? Or perhaps the wealth yearned due to the high technology offered to those Arabs who identify themselves as Palestinians and whose life expectancy is a full 10 years longer than any other ME country. Or perhaps it hurts you that the Arabs are able to be part of the government, judges, doctors, lawyers, accountants and teachers. Which part of this makes your blood curdle? The part that proves you are wrong even though you have learned propaganda for so many years and now know the truth?
Zionist apologists say the founding of Israel is no different than the founding of the U.S. A disingenuous argument. Just because the British of the American colonial era slaughtered the people they found on the land they wanted and drove them onto reserves, in many cases treaties were negotiated giving some North American Indians legal rights, necessities of life including food and guns, and a say in how their traditional lands were to be used and exploited by the British and their successors. No such niceties were offered to the Palestinians. The fact that colonial times were for the most part nasty is no reason for Israel to be permitted to be a late finisher in the colonial marathon. Let’s call the Israeli bluff about the “enlightened colonialism” they espouse – offer the Palestinians the same deal the British Crown gave to the Canadian Indians. I guarantee the Palestinians will not drink away their birthright.
Had there been ‘Palestinians’ when the Jewish nation started to return to Israel in the mid 19th century, perhaps you would have an argument, but the 300,000 people that lived in what today is Jordan and Israel identified themselves as Arabs, Druze, Bedouin, Circessian and Bahai and not Palestinian, a made up nation name that was adopted in 1964 by the Arabs whose parents moved to what was called the British Mandate of Palestine to help obtain a higher quality of life and whose grandparents where brought as slaves by the Turks at the turn of the 20th century. Not really what you would call a ‘nation’.
Absolute rubbish.
Take a quick look at all the Israeli Arabs and explain exactly how no niceties were offered to them? While there are issues with civil rights in Israel, as per any country, they have a far greater degree of opportunity, democracies and social involvement, upward mobility as well as basic things like access to health care, higher education, involvement in the policital system etc than they do in any other area in which Palestinians reside including Jordan, PA areas and Gaza.
Contrast this with the way the Arabs ethnically cleansed the Jews from East Jerusalem and all the remainder of the West Bank post 1948.
Are you looking for honest debate or are you looking for Israel bashing?
Massacre? Are you that naïve to call a violent attack on the sovereignty of Israel called a massacre? When armed terrorists physically break down a barrier between a sovereign country and that which is next door (Gaza in this instance), those being attacked have every right to protect it’s citizens. But when a regime gasses citizens they don’t like that IS a massacre. Perhaps English is not your native tongue.
Since the only ”Palestinians” prior to WWI were Jewish citizens in Great Syria under the Ottoman rule, it is unclear what you refer to when saying: “In evaluating the UN connection to Palestine, it needs to be recalled that the organized international community has a distinctive responsibility for Palestine”.
The so called ‘provocative’ move of the US Embassy to Israel’s capital was stated nearly 30 years ago, where was the uprising then? Just because the writer does not agree with President Trump keeping promises the US government has provided, does not mean it’s provocation, it only means keep promises — something other presidents of the US had trouble doing.
It should be noted that the UNHRC distinct lack of work dealing with the true human rights issues of the world has made it become an unnecessary organization that takes money from the member parties just to made false accusations based on disinformation, inaccuracies and lies provided by those with an agenda — against Israel. Israel, the only democracy in the ME with equal rights for all citizens, very little in actual human rights issues, which provides technologies and products to help make the world better — as opposed to countries with horrific human rights abuses such as Syria, Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan, Egypt, China, N. Korea, Cuba and a slew of other countries. Perhaps dealing with the actual problems is above and beyond the capabilities of the UNHRC, in which case the US did right. If they all they can do is look for a scapegoat for the wows of the world, good they pulled out — including the aid they provide.
I would be interesting to hear what the so called human rights abuses Israel is blamed for, because none of the resolutions actually lists something accurate.