United Nations Report
Although Left Off List of Offenders, Israeli Crimes Against Children Detailed in Report
By Ian Williams
In the preceding article, Jonathan Cook details some of the issues surrounding the intense American pressure on U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon to drop mention of Israel from the report on Children and Armed Conflict. It was all the more appalling since the agent for the pressure was Samantha Power, who previously had enjoyed a good reputation for her concerns for international humanitarian law.
Although Israel was excised from the list of offenders in the front of the report—ironically along with Hamas, as a trade off—the U.N. Human Rights officers made sure that it was mentioned copiously in the body of evidence presented, reducing Ron Prosor, Israel’s ambassador to the U.N., to paroxysms of percentages. Interestingly, he did not even try to rebut any of the allegations specifically, but rather resorted to abstract statistics—Israel got 11 percent of the report’s attention while Syria only had 6 percent. Prosor attacked the U.N. special representative, Leila Zerrougui, for “widespread, systematic and institutionalized biased conduct against Israel.”
The battle over the excision of Israel from the list seemed to be denting Ban’s usually well-deserved reputation for integrity, even though his spokesman Stephane Dujarric was at pains to point out to press that the specific incidents of Israeli harm to children were still detailed in the body of the report.
Indeed the report is quite explicit. It reports, along with many detailed incidents from last summer’s conflict, that:
“87. On average, between 8 July and 26 August, more than 10 children were killed daily in Gaza. More than 80 percent of the children were killed between 17 July and 5 August during the ground incursion by the Israeli security forces. At least 13 children in Gaza were reportedly killed as a result of rockets fired by Palestinian armed groups towards Israel that fell inside Gaza.
“88. At least 2,955 Palestinian children were injured in Gaza. Preliminary estimates indicate that up to 1,000 of them will be permanently disabled. Apart from the July-August Israeli military operation, another 76 children were injured.”
However, on the day of the report, Ban redeemed himself when he told told press: “I am aware of the controversy surrounding the report. I want to express once again my full support for my Special Representative, Ms. Leila Zerrougui, and the excellent work that she and her team have done.”
And at the introduction of the report to the Security Council he specifically singled out Israel, stating, “I am also deeply alarmed at the suffering of so many children as a result of Israeli military operations in Gaza last year.
“I urge Israel to take concrete and immediate steps, including by reviewing existing policies and practices, to protect and prevent the killing and maiming of children, and to respect the special protections afforded to schools and hospitals.”
The net result of Ambassador Power’s hypersensitivity on behalf of Israel was that the country she was intending to protect was singled out more than ever! Part of the package that Washington urged on Ban and the U.N. was that the U.S. needed to get Israel taken off the list in order to ease the passage of any agreement on Iran though Congress. Ban, under attack from both sides, is in an invidious position. He needs the cooperation of the U.S. to achieve many of the objectives he wants for the U.N., and he wants the deal on Iran.
The Israeli Spoke
In yet another example of Israel being the spoke in the wheel of diplomacy, the U.N.’s regular review conference on the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty was even more inconclusive than before. With Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu making so much noise about Iran’s alleged nuclear effort, it takes a lot of chutzpah for congressmen ganging up on Tehran to support the one country in the Middle East which has not signed the NPT and which scarcely makes a secret of its possession of a large nuclear arsenal.
The signatory members of the NPT met this summer at the U.N. to denounce the official nuclear powers—Britain, China, France, Russia and the U.S.—for not taking the steps toward disarmament that they promised at the time they persuaded the rest of the world to renounce nuclear weapons. It’s their hypocrisy that India, Pakistan and North Korea cited when they went nuclear. Israel keeps quiet about it, of course, officially neither confirming nor denying its nuclear arsenal, but making sure that everyone knows about it.
In 1995, the NPT was scheduled to expire unless it was renewed, and members extracted some promises from the nuclear powers in return for extending it indefinitely. One of the concessions was the call for “the establishment of an effectively verifiable Middle East zone free of weapons of mass destruction, nuclear, chemical and biological, and their delivery systems.”
Egypt had been asking for this since 1990, and it was an expansion of the proposal that had been passed annually by the U.N. General Assembly since 1980 for a Nuclear Weapons Free Zone in the Middle East. At the 2010 NPT Review Conference the countries agreed to start implementing the Middle East Conference, and Britain, Russia and the U.S. agreed to work with the U.N. secretary-general to hold a regional conference on it in 2012.
When 2012 came around, however, the U.S. just postponed the conference, blaming “conditions in the Middle East” and vaguely suggesting there was lack of agreement on “acceptable conditions” by the would-be attendees. Of course, there was one state, unnamed, that would only agree to a nuclear-free region if it were the sole state excluded from the conclusions. In fact, Israel is not a signatory of the NPT—but Iran is.
Even the current unappetizing Egyptian regime maintains some principles. It reintroduced its call for a conference on a Nuclear Free Middle East into the preparations for this year’s NPT Review conference. This is, of course, an entirely laudable principle. After all, if everyone in the region eschews nuclear weaponry, then there is really no excuse for any country in the region to have them.
In the classic way of global governance, diplomats worked around the clock to obscure the issues, but Cairo persevered and secured the language in the draft document for this year’s conference that called for the secretary-general to convene a conference on a WMD-free zone by March 2016. That would have avoided the implicit veto of having the U.S., Britain and Russia as convenors.
The United States, Britain and Canada decided not to support the draft final document from the NPT review conference because of the deadline. Speaking at the conference, Washington said it objected because the plan to set an agenda and hold a conference was not based on “consensus and equality,” and that the document proposed “unworkable conditions” and “arbitrary deadlines.” Canada, in its new role as being more pro-Israel even than the U.S., wanted Israel to be included in the negotiations for the nuclear-free zone even though Tel Aviv is not even a signatory to the NPT, so hardly in a legal or ethical position to demand a place at the table.
It seems eminently reasonable of the members attending to put a deadline on a process that the U.S. has repeatedly postponed.
As always, however, there is one law for Israel and one for everybody else.
The hypocrisy is stunning. To summarize: the permanent five, who all possess nuclear weapons, feign commitment to disarming—while modernizing their nuclear weapons systems. They continue to maintain sanctions on Iran for allegedly taking tentative steps toward refining nuclear fuel that could be used for weaponry. But Britain and the U.S. effectively vetoed a conference that sought to set up a nuclearfree zone in the region because Israel, which is a non-signatory to the NPT and has nuclear weapons, did not want them to. If there is any ethical principle there, it is very well hidden indeed.
All of the parties concerned know that Israel has nuclear weapons. They know that the whole purpose of the procrastination and obfuscation is to avoid Israel having to admit that. It is somehow perplexing that Egypt, despite massive military aid from the U.S., has the chutzpah to be independent on such issues, while the U.S., despite its massive military aid to Israel, does exactly what Israel orders.
Welcome to the Wonderland of international diplomacy. ❑
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