The Riddle of the Sands and the Sound of Silence
- IAN WILLIAMS
- NORTH AFRICA
Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, January/February 2021, pp. 20-21
United Nations Report
By Ian Williams
PALESTINIANS AND THEIR FRIENDS have every reason to lament the sound of silence about the Palestinians, but even noise about them is not necessarily that productive. The “Annual Resolution Fest” has just finished with the General Assembly passing the “traditional” resolutions on Palestine and the even more often overlooked Golan Heights.
As always, it is geopolitically instructive to see who votes with the U.S. and Israel and thus against international law and previous U.N. decisions which their countries had originally supported. Even the abstentions are significant in their way, since in this context they usually mean “We agree with the resolution but we don’t want or don’t dare, annoy Israel and its big brother in Washington.” But lest we get too scornful of smaller weaker powers who bow to bullying, just remember that many U.S. congress people take a similar attitude when AIPAC’s lobbyists come calling!
It is a source of wry amusement and consolation for the Palestinians that the tiny cabal of states, which actually side with Israel are, well...tiny, either in size or moral standing in the world. The assorted Israeli-allied atolls of the Marshall Islands, Micronesia and Nauru are totally dependent on foreign aid, but this year they were not even joined by Palau, whose recent votes for Israel have always been a shocking fall from grace.
The U.S. denied Palau, a former U.S. “strategic trust territory,” even nominal sovereignty for ten years for its principled refusal to come under the U.S. nuclear umbrella. The Pacific Islands, all threatened by climate change and sea level rise are happy to vote with Trump, the president who denies them.
So it is perhaps not surprising that the other Trumpista states backing Israel form an “Axis of Intolerance” to immigrants and their own indigenous peoples: Australia, Brazil, Canada, Colombia, Czechia, Guatemala, Honduras, Hungary and Malawi whose tolerance for apartheid was always outstanding for an African country.
Since 2004, Canada has been the epitome of unprincipled invertebracy and Prime Minister Justin Trudeau continued the floppy spinelessness of Stephen Harper’s regime under pressure from its vociferous domestic Israel lobby. Although its official positions agree with the U.N. resolutions on issues like the illegality of settlements and the wall, its weaselly excuse was that the resolutions were “one-sided” and directed disproportionately at Israel. This lobby-engendered trope of “whataboutery” completely evades the actual irrefutable Israeli violation of international law by implying that it’s rude and repetitive to go on about it. So Canada and likeminded casuists do not defend Israeli behavior, but will not condemn it.
This year, on the core issue, Ottawa had a lucid moment and voted with the majority, which is, possibly, a belated rediscovery of its principles, but perhaps also because of its equally belated realization that its pro-Trump, pro-Israeli votes had again lost it a term on the Security Council.
To complete the cycle of unrighteousness, Nauru, a desolate island from which all the valuable avian excreta had been scraped, housed its own settlements of boat people dumped there by racist Australian governments. There is a pattern here.
While one could make the pragmatic case that there are too many Palestinian resolutions, the Israeli effort and lobbying against them suggest it is worth keeping up the pressure. And similarly, the rapture with which the pro-Israeli camp greets the defection of the Saudis, Emiratis and Bahrainis does strongly reinforce just how damaging their treachery is.
On the other hand, if people would remember, it was only a few years ago that part of the “whatabout” refrain from Israel lobbyists was the relative silence about the misogyny, cruelty and lack of democracy in the Gulf states. Fortunately, a vital pre-requisite for being an Israeli supporter is a conveniently short-term memory.
MOROCCO ALSO FLOUTS U.N., FOLLOWING THE ISRAELI EXAMPLE
On the other side of the Sahara, this publication is one of the few that has kept an eye on the plight of the Sahrawis and their Moroccan occupiers. Israelis just ignore U.N. resolutions and, in some cases, insist that their singular idiosyncratic interpretation holds against the unanimity of the rest of the world, while the Moroccans go the whole hog and claim, for example, that the International Court of Justice decision negating the Moroccan king’s claim means exactly the opposite, or that the Security Council has NOT repeatedly called for a referendum.
To refresh memories, while some Sahrawis live in refugee camps, many still live inside the Moroccan equivalent of the separation wall, “the Berm”, under extreme surveillance and political persecution. We know their views because occasionally they surface as political prisoners. We can also draw deductions from the refusal of Morocco to countenance holding the referendum there, even one including the Moroccan immigrants. Among the convenient memory lapses is, that when the Spanish withdrew, the Moroccans accepted and shared their claim to the territory with Mauretania to the south, and when the latter accepted defeat by Polisario, they blithely assumed the Mauritaian pretensions and claimed the lot.
The ceasefire line, the Berm, left a strip of territory on the Saharan side up to the Mauritania border at Guerguerat, which just happens to straddle the major land route between North and West Africa. Technically the strip is demilitarized but the Moroccans have been encroaching and Polisario has been countering.
It is a perfect combination of circumstances. MINURSO, the U.N. force which has for 30 years failed to fulfil its mandate to deliver the referendum, has been bribed, bullied and cajoled into quiescence by the Moroccans. It let the situation develop and watched Morocco launch an armed incursion into the territory without raising any alarm bells. It is probably significant that Morocco did this while the world was pre-occupied with the follies in Washington and assumed that it could get away with it.
But this time Polisario had had enough. They declared an end to the ceasefire and began shelling Moroccan bases. One cannot help but suspect that they chose empty ones to shell at this stage, but in any case the sound of silence is deafening.
Once again, it is about countries standing by countenancing illegality. There are clear decisions, accepted by everyone except Morocco: ICJ decisions, and General Assembly and Security Council resolutions, European Court decisions and more, all reaffirm the need for self-determination for the territory.
So while it is perhaps understandable that none of us want to pour blood and treasure into the Sahara, it is particularly pusillanimous that few (South Africa being an honorable example) will even mention that Morocco is breaking the law and burning through $50 million a year of the U.N. peacekeeping budget.
And of course the Gulf states, so busily courting Israel, express their solidarity with Morocco. But then the Palestinians would rather court Morocco than support their fraternal refugees. The U.N. might not make countries do the right thing, but in its own passive way, it sets firm standards that everyone can fail.
U.N. correspondent Ian Williams is the author of UNtold: the Real Story of the United Nations in Peace and War (available from Middle East Books and More).
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