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| Al-Awda New York, The Palestine Right to Return Coalition | |
The
Centre for Strategic and International
Studies (CSIS) is an influential think-tank
based in a
Washington DC. Recently the CSIS published
a report entitled "Peace and War: Israel versus the Palestinians
A Second Intifada ?", in which the author, Anthony H Cordesman ( Cordesman's report can be found at: http://www.csis.org/stratassessment/reports/IsraelPalestine.pdf. The report was criticized in an article by Robert Fisk in Gaza written for the Independent on 6 November 2000. Robert Fisk's article can be found at: http://www.independent.co.uk/news/World/Middle_East/2000-11/ruthless061100.shtml.
The following is an email sent by Afaf Shawwa to the author of the report on November 13, 2000. Mr. Cordesman, You may have already seen Robert Fisk's article about your report "Peace and War: Israel versus the Palestinians A Second Intifada?". The Palestinian Authority has already lost much of its credibility in the international arena because of its corruption and human rights violations. And yet you explicitly call for increased disregard of the very laws which the US claims to uphold. You also recommend that Israel continue taking measures (collective punishment vis-a-vis closures, etc) which gravely breach the Geneva Convention Relative to the Protection of Civilian Persons in Time of War (Fourth Geneva Convention). I am curious to know whether you are aware of the criticism that your recommendations have generated. How do you hope for these recommendations to be viewed as legitimate in the eyes of human rights and international legal organizations -- including the UN -- who oppose these very practices ? CSIS claims to be non-partisan, and yet already some groups are arguing that the policy your report promotes would further empower a very dangerous occupation force; ie. it is hardly non-partisan. I would be interested in your response. Regards,
This is a sample letter written to Cordesman, the ABC advisor on military issues, by Arjan El Fassed, on Dec 04, 2000. We should all follow the example of this letter, send one copy to ABC and a second copy to Cordesman himself. This is a terrible report that cant be ignored; read the following letter for ideas of how to approach, and please write to Cordesman, and especially ABC. Dear Mr. Cordesman, Your paper "Peace and War: Israel verus the Palestinians" (9/11/2000), published on the CSIS website, you unjustifiably legitimises occupation and even find a way to enforce that occupation. Such an analysis misses any objective, neutral or balanced approach. Moreover, your analysis completely contravenes international law, principles and well-established facts. In 1967 Israeli armed forces occupied the West Bank (including the eastern part of Jerusalem) and Gaza, along with the Sinai and the Golan Heights. Although Israel claims it is not a belligerent occupier both the United Nations and the United States consider Israel to be a belligerent occupant of the West Bank and Gaza and hold the position that he Fourth Geneva Convention applies to Israel's occupation of the territories captured by force in the June 1967 war. According to the laws of belligerent occupation, the occupying state must preserve the laws which were previously in force in the area occupied. Article 23 (g) of the Hague Regulations forbids the occupying power "to destrot or seize enemy property, unless such destruction or seizure be imperatively demanded by the necessities of war". Article 49 of the Fourth Geneva Convention declares that "the occupying power shall not deport or transfer parts of its civilian population into the territory it occupies". Israel continues to systematically violate significant provisions of the Fourth Geneva Convention. These violations have been directed against Palestinians in the Occupied Territories and civilians in the Golan Heights. The Israeli violations of the Fourth Geneva Convention include, in part, the following:
With regard to the Palestinian Authority and its limited self-rule, the occupying power is bound by the provisions of the convention "for the duration of the occupation, to the extent that such power exercises the functions of government in such territory". Additionally, "protected persons who are in occupied territory shall not be deprived, in any case or in any manner whatsoever, of the benefits of the present convention by any change introduced, as a result of the occupation of a territory, into the institutions or government of the said territory, nor by any agreement concluded between the authorities of the occupied territories and the occupying power, nor by any annexation by the latter of the whole or part of the occupied territory". Moreover, Israel has violated most basic human rights articles as stated in the UDHR, the ICCPR, and other treaty bodies and violated the Oslo Agreements which state that "Israel and the Palestinians shall exercise their powers and responsibilities...with due regard to internationally accepted norms and principles of human rights and the rule of law" (Art 14 Gaza-Jericho Accord; Art 19 Interim Agreement "Oslo II"). Palestinians who have lived under occupation for 33 years are being denied sovereignty and meaningful control over their own lives in a state of their own. Under the Oslo process Palestinian human rights have been sacrified to Israel's security concerns. During the 33-year-long occupation, Israel has refused to implement the provisions of the Fourth Geneva Convention, UN Security Council resolutions, and various Covenants and Protocols of International Law. Israel's reliance upon its "security" is an attempt to equate a political aspiration with a legal right. "Security" may be a political bargaining counter, but it is not a legal basis for Israel's continued presence in the occupied territories. Israel's arguments stands logic on its head: it was after all Israel's own refusal to withdraw from the occupied territories that led to the 1973 war. Secondly, the more settlements established on occupied territory, the more land is needed to provide "security". There then can never be, under this logic, any withdrawal or trading land for peace. Israel's concern with "security" is a camouflage for the expansion of its borders and increasing colonisation. Real security for Israel would be more likely found in recognising the Palestinians' right to exist and by implementing various UN resolutions. Israel's refusal to make the withdrawal from the territories occupied, envisaged by UNSC 242, as one of the main requisites for peace in the region, purports to be based upon Israeli security. Israel's claim that it is exercising its inherent right of self-defence by its continued presence in the Westbank and Gaza does not correspond with the facts of the present situation. the continued occupation by Israel is not proportionate to the threat to it. The response of Israel is excessive and the threat not immediate. As long as the Palestinian population's resentment of what it perceives to be the theft of its land is compounded with genuine fear and distrust of Israeli soldiers and settlers, security will never be a viable concept for either side of the dispute. If the Israeli government is sincere about its wish to see the end of such clashes, it must stop using the word "security" as justification for the innumerable human rights violations and antagonistic actions of its forces. In the case of crowd control when confronted by Palestinian unrest or demonstrations, the Israeli security forces have often been criticised by human rights organisations for their heavy-handed methods, which have frequently proved to aggravate such situations rather than contain them. Time and again, these methods have resulted in unnecessary death and widespread injury by increasing the friction and intensity of the events. In the current confrontations between the Israeli occupying forces and mostly unarmed Palestinian civilians, there is hospital evidence to prove that Israeli soldiers had fired live ammunition at unarmed Palestinian demonstrators. The Israeli army also made use of helicopter gunships, which gives rise to the suspicion that their intention was to kill and injure, rather than to subdue or contain the protests. Guns had been aimed at the heads and chests of the majority of those who died. The use of these types of warfare and weapons were not only inflammatory, but also unjustifiable. IDF open-fire regulations categorically state that "it is absolutely forbidden to fire rubber ammunition at a range of less than 40m. Firing a rubber ammunition projectile will be at a specific target and will be aimed only at the legs of a person who has been identified as a rioter or stone-thrower." In other words, bullets should not be fired indiscriminately into a crowd. Popular uprisings are the inevitable result of the physical and psychological pressure induced by heavy military and settler presence in Palestinian population centres. The Palestinians' desire to protest en masse under such circumstances is not a sign of their lawlessness and savagery, as Israeli mythology would have us believe, but rather a classic human reaction to oppression. At these times, the concentrated presence of soldiers with guns, who become symbols of that oppression, can only serve to exacerbate such a situation, resulting in chaos and disorder that could not be contained by any police force and certainly not by the under-resourced Palestinian police force. Assaults on Palestinians by Israeli security forces are not confined to the confusion and heat of mass uprisings. There have been several reports of unnecessary violence towards unarmed civilians, sometimes resulting in death, at checkpoints and other places where confrontation takes place between Israeli soldiers and Palestinians. Unfortunately, such attacks generally go unpunished by the Israeli authorities. As a result, some soldiers, who may hold extremist views and a loathing of Palestinians, sometimes feel inclined to vent their fury against people they encounter, secure in the knowledge that the legal repercussions of their actions will be slight. Even those who do face charges are usually released on bail. As the occupying authority in the region, the Israeli government has a responsibility to protect the Palestinian population of the Occupied Territories. However, there have been no concrete steps taken to prevent or intervene in violent or illegal acts against Palestinians perpetrated by Israeli settlers. With the attitude of so many soldiers towards Palestinians being, at best, one of indifference, at worst of racism and hatred, the situation seems hopeless. In the event of attack by settlers, Palestinians have little or no recourse to justice, nor can they hope for protection or security from the Israeli army or police force. Incidents in which a complaint is not filed are not investigated, even when there is evidence to suggest that a crime has taken place; the Israeli police often refuse to accept complaints from Palestinians, or actively obstruct their efforts to file them. In light of all this, it is no wonder that extremist and racist settlers feel that they are acting with the protection and support of the Israeli authorities and security forces when they commit acts of violence against Palestinian people. The common reaction to any form of trouble or unrest perceived to have been started by Palestinians is to increase "security" measures, or to restrict the free and safe passage of Palestinians beyond their checkpoints. Whole towns have been placed under siege by the Israeli security forces, as was the case after the 1996 uprisings. There have been many occasions when Palestinians have not been permitted to leave their towns or villages to go to work, pray or visit relatives, even in the case of extreme emergency. The number of Palestinians killed in the five years since the Oslo agreement highlights an urgent need to improve Palestinian security. In order to be fair and effective, any agreement between Israel and the Palestinians must contain a commitment by the Israeli government to guarantee the security of Palestinian civilians. The Israeli government insists that the security of Israeli citizens is of paramount importance and that until the PA can guarantee to enforce that security, there can be no further progress towards peace. However, such measures as described above seem actively to destroy the chances of security for the Israelis as well as the Palestinians. Violations of human rights do not improve security. Instead, they backfire, reinforcing feelings of resentment and hatred. As one looks at the sources you've used which stems from mainly Israeli (ICT) or pro-Israeli sources (the AIPAC-associated WINEP), and the way you have used Israeli ideological terminology, mostly used by the Israeli settler-movement, such as the terms "Judea" and "Samaria" indicating the occupied West Bank, it is not surprising you come to the one-sided analysis presented in your paper. Moreover, having a former director of the Mossad, Shabtai Shavit, and former director of Israel's foreign affairs division Aharon Scherf in CSIS' board of directors shows who is really funding the CSIS besides the 230 corporations that remain unknown. Most
disturbingly, you dismisses completely the inalienable right of Palestinian refugees
to return home. You not only miscount the number of refugees (there are now more
than 3.6 million UNRWA-registered refugees, not 1.5 million as you wrongly mentioned
in your paper) but you also distort the fact that doubt whether these Palestinians
fled "because of Israeli military action and persecution, on their own, or
because Arab leaders encouraged them to do so". Perhaps you were not aware
of an Israeli Intelligence report that states that the Palestinian refugees fled You should know that according to international human rights law, in no case may a person be arbitrarily deprived of the right to return. This applies legally to all State action, legislative, administrative and judicial; it guarantees that even interference provided for by law should be in accordance with the provisions, aims and objectives of the Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, of which Israel is a State Party. A State party must not, by stripping a person of nationality or by expelling an individual to a third country, arbitrarily prevent this person from returning to his or her own country. The scope of this provision is not limited to nationality in a formal sense, that is, nationality acquired at birth or by conferral; it embraces, at the very least, an individual who, because of his or her special ties to or claims in relation to a given country, cannot be considered to be a mere alien. This would be the case, for example, of nationals of a country who have there been stripped of their nationality in violation of international law, and of individuals whose country of nationality has been incorporated in or transferred to another national entity, whose nationality is being denied them. Almost every major peace agreement that has been concluded in the last two decades has included provisions related to the return of displaced populations. The Dayton Accords strongly support the right of return and restitution of property for Bosnian refugees. More recently, the international community used massive force to oppose ethnic cleansing in Kosovo and implement refugee repatriation. You clearly dehumanises Palestinians and you support systematic torture and political repression of Palestinians on a massive scale. You propose an agenda that Milosovic has executed in Kosovo and Bosnia, including "reoccupation" and "expulsion". You propose an agenda for ethnic cleansing, something that the international community made strong opposition to, including NATO bombardments on Serbia. You also propose measures that contravene humanitarian law, constitute war crimes and crimes against humanity, such as collective punishment, home demolitions, deportation, torture and inhuman treatment and deadly force. People of conscience might expect such measures from tyrans, dictators and rough states. Israel's 33 year occupation of East Jerusalem, the West Bank and Gaza is the all-encompassing violent reality that forms the backdrop to the current conflict. Israel has refused to live up to its obligations under UNSCR 242 and withdraw to its 1967 borders, even though its right to live in peace and in secure borders has been recognized by the Palestinians. An end to this violence will come when Israel fulfills its legal obligations according to UN resolutions 194, 242, and 338, or when the international community, including you, Mr. Cordesman, wakes up and enforces and end to this insanity. Cordially, Arjan
El Fassed CC. Richard Fairbanks, Judith Kipper, Alexander T.J. Lennon, Erik R. Peterson | ||||
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