Joint PHROC Statement: UN Resolution on Settlements--Another Missed Opportunity

[Crop of image of East Jerusalem. Image by Mikhail Valkov.] [Crop of image of East Jerusalem. Image by Mikhail Valkov.]

Joint PHROC Statement: UN Resolution on Settlements--Another Missed Opportunity

By : Jadaliyya Reports

[The following statement was issued on 25 March 2013 by the Palestinian Human Rights Organisations Council.]

 

Occupied Ramallah, 25 March 2013 - On Friday, 22 March, the United Nations (UN) Human Rights Council (the Council) adopted a resolution, tabled by the State of Palestine, the Organisation of Islamic Conference, and the Arab Group, on the report of the International Independent Fact-Finding Mission on Israeli Settlements in the Occupied Palestinian Territory (OPT), including East Jerusalem.

This report outlined the extensive violations of international human rights and humanitarian law integral to Israel’s settlement enterprise and the systematic nature in which it has implemented since 1967. The Mission concluded that settlements, including all related activities that help to sustain, promote, and expand them, are resulting in the fragmentation and annexation of occupied territory while undermining the right to self-determination of the Palestinian people. Given the impunity with which Israel has been operating for 46 years, the relentless rate of construction and expansion of settlements, and the resulting denial of the right to self-determination of the Palestinian people, there is an urgent need for States to take definitive measures to reverse these illegal policies.

Though the recommendations in the report were neither detailed nor extensive, the Fact-Finding Mission recognised the need for concrete action by calling on individual Member States of the UN to comply with their obligations stemming from Israel’s breaches of peremptory norms of international law by, inter alia, ceasing any form of recognition of the unlawful situation.

The Palestinian Human Rights Organisations Council (PHROC) expressed to the Council the importance of ensuring that the recommendations of the report are implemented through effective measures aimed at advancing the rights of the Palestinian people. To that end, PHROC urged the Council to adopt a strong resolution fully endorsing the report of the Fact-Finding Mission. PHROC requested a further report by the UN Secretary-General specifying the means by which States could fulfil their obligations to cease recognition, aid or assistance to Israel’s settlement enterprise and to cooperate to bring the unlawful situation to an end.

Today, PHROC expresses its disappointment that the resolution adopted by the Council merely welcomed, rather than endorsed, the report. While the resolution “requests that all parties concerned, including United Nations bodies, implement and ensure the implementation of the recommendations” of the report, the absence of any clear indication of how parties must implement such broad recommendations allows continued inaction by the international community.

Repeated political accessions have prevented the implementation of the 2009 UN Fact-Finding Mission on the Gaza Conflict and, indeed, a 1979 UN Security Council commission on settlements which came to similar findings to those of this most recent Mission. These decisions threaten to undermine the credibility and perceived efficacy of such UN mechanisms, and the prioritisation of political considerations over the rights of the Palestinian people has only provided  time for Israel’s settlement enterprise to expand.

PHROC deeply regrets the influence of European States in dictating that a stronger, more detailed resolution would not have received consensus support at the Council and that, without this support, the resolution risked stalling due to a lack of political impetus. The adoption of such a weakly-worded resolution nevertheless demonstrates the existing lack of political will within the Council and signifies a missed opportunity by the Palestinian leadership to compel meaningful action by the international community. We take this opportunity once again to remind the Palestinian leadership that the fundamental rights of the Palestinian people are matters of binding international law. They must not be left to short-term political calculations, but rather established as the foundation of any diplomatic process.

Despite repeated calls by Palestinian civil society to the UN and its Member States to uphold their obligations stemming from Israel’s continuous violations of international law, the rights of the Palestinian people have once again been sidelined in favour of political expediency. We therefore urge the international community, including individual Third States, to take effective action that will halt Israel’s violations of Palestinian rights, including through the adoption of restrictive measures on trade involving settlements. 

*The Palestinian Human Rights Organizations Council (PHROC):

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Past is Present: Settler Colonialism Matters!

On 5-6 March 2011, the Palestine Society at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in London will hold its seventh annual conference, "Past is Present: Settler Colonialism in Palestine." This year`s conference aims to understand Zionism as a settler colonial project which has, for more than a century, subjected Palestine and Palestinians to a structural and violent form of destruction, dispossession, land appropriation and erasure in the pursuit of a new Jewish Israeli society. By organizing this conference, we hope to reclaim and revive the settler colonial paradigm and to outline its potential to inform and guide political strategy and mobilization.

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is often described as unique and exceptional with little resemblance to other historical or ongoing colonial conflicts. Yet, for Zionism, like other settler colonial projects such as the British colonization of Ireland or European settlement of North America, South Africa or Australia, the imperative is to control the land and its resources -- and to displace the original inhabitants. Indeed, as conference keynote speaker Patrick Wolfe, one of the foremost scholars on settler colonialism and professor at La Trobe University in Victoria, Australia, argues, "the logic of this project, a sustained institutional tendency to eliminate the Indigenous population, informs a range of historical practices that might otherwise appear distinct--invasion is a structure not an event."[i]

Therefore, the classification of the Zionist movement as a settler colonial project, and the Israeli state as its manifestation, is not merely intended as a statement on the historical origins of Israel, nor as a rhetorical or polemical device. Rather, the aim is to highlight Zionism`s structural continuities and the ideology which informs Israeli policies and practices in Palestine and toward Palestinians everywhere. Thus, the Nakba -- whether viewed as a spontaneous, violent episode in war, or the implementation of a preconceived master plan -- should be understood as both the precondition for the creation of Israel and the logical outcome of Zionist settlement in Palestine.

Moreover, it is this same logic that sustains the continuation of the Nakba today. As remarked by Benny Morris, “had he [David Ben Gurion] carried out full expulsion--rather than partial--he would have stabilised the State of Israel for generations.”[ii] Yet, plagued by an “instability”--defined by the very existence of the Palestinian nation--Israel continues its daily state practices in its quest to fulfill Zionism’s logic to maximize the amount of land under its control with the minimum number of Palestinians on it. These practices take a painful array of manifestations: aerial and maritime bombardment, massacre and invasion, house demolitions, land theft, identity card confiscation, racist laws and loyalty tests, the wall, the siege on Gaza, cultural appropriation, and the dependence on willing (or unwilling) native collaboration and security arrangements, all with the continued support and backing of imperial power. 

Despite these enduring practices however, the settler colonial paradigm has largely fallen into disuse. As a paradigm, it once served as a primary ideological and political framework for all Palestinian political factions and trends, and informed the intellectual work of committed academics and revolutionary scholars, both Palestinians and Jews.

The conference thus asks where and why the settler colonial paradigm was lost, both in scholarship on Palestine and in politics; how do current analyses and theoretical trends that have arisen in its place address present and historical realities? While acknowledging the creativity of these new interpretations, we must nonetheless ask: when exactly did Palestinian natives find themselves in a "post-colonial" condition? When did the ongoing struggle over land become a "post-conflict" situation? When did Israel become a "post-Zionist" society? And when did the fortification of Palestinian ghettos and reservations become "state-building"?

In outlining settler colonialism as a central paradigm from which to understand Palestine, this conference re-invigorates it as a tool by which to analyze the present situation. In doing so, it contests solutions which accommodate Zionism, and more significantly, builds settler colonialism as a political analysis that can embolden and inform a strategy of active, mutual, and principled Palestinian alignment with the Arab struggle for self-determination, and indigenous struggles in the US, Latin America, Oceania, and elsewhere.

Such an alignment would expand the tools available to Palestinians and their solidarity movement, and reconnect the struggle to its own history of anti-colonial internationalism. At its core, this internationalism asserts that the Palestinian struggle against Zionist settler colonialism can only be won when it is embedded within, and empowered by, the broader Arab movement for emancipation and the indigenous, anti-racist and anti-colonial movement--from Arizona to Auckland.

SOAS Palestine Society invites everyone to join us at what promises to be a significant intervention in Palestine activism and scholarship.

For over 30 years, SOAS Palestine Society has heightened awareness and understanding of the Palestinian people, their rights, culture, and struggle for self-determination, amongst students, faculty, staff, and the broader public. SOAS Palestine society aims to continuously push the frontiers of discourse in an effort to make provocative arguments and to stimulate debate and organizing for justice in Palestine through relevant conferences, and events ranging from the intellectual and political impact of Edward Said`s life and work (2004), international law and the Palestine question (2005), the economy of Palestine and its occupation (2006), the one state (2007), 60 Years of Nakba, 60 Years of Resistance (2009), and most recently, the Left in Palestine (2010).

For more information on the SOAS Palestine Society 7th annual conference, Past is Present: Settler Colonialism in Palestine: www.soaspalsoc.org

SOAS Palestine Society Organizing Collective is a group of committed students that has undertaken to organize annual academic conferences on Palestine since 2003.

 


[i] Patrick Wolfe, Settler Colonialism and the Transformation of Anthropology: The Politics and Poetics of an Ethnographic Event, Cassell, London, p. 163

[ii] Interview with Benny Morris, Survival of the Fittest, Haaretz, 9. January 2004, http://cosmos.ucc.ie/cs1064/jabowen/IPSC/php/art.php?aid=5412