Many congratulations to Palestine on being recognised as a non-member state at the United Nations. There is a distinct irony that, apart from the unreconstructed climate change deniers in the United States, Canada and the Czech Republic, the supporters of Palestinian genocide could only muster votes from the tiniest island states threatened by climate change. Where is the much vaunted American Empire now?
Both the United States and Israel are incapable of introspection; instead they have reacted by saying the rest of the world is mad.
There was also a chilling admission of the United States support for extreme zionist land claims, from Hillary Clinton, who called for negotiation “Between Jerusalem and Ramallah”. Not Tel Aviv; Jerusalem.
I argued a year ago that Palestine could join the International Criminal Court without waiting for this vote. But this vote certainly removes all doubt on that score.
I was absolutely disgusted by William Hague’s offer of support form Palestine if Palestine agreed not to join, or take cases to, the International Criminal Court. It is yet another example of that theme to which my writing constantly returns, the abandonment by neo-con UK governments of the principle of international law in favour of a might is right approach. It was always UK policy to encourage dispute resolution by international courts. Now we are discouraging it.
There is a very important practical point here. As I also wrote a year ago:
There is an extremely crucial point here: if Palestine accedes to the Statute of Rome, under Article 12 of the Statute of Rome, the International Criminal Court would have jurisdiction over Israelis committing war crimes on Palestinian soil. Other states parties – including the UK – would be obliged by law to hand over indicted Israeli war criminals to the court at the Hague. This would be a massive blow to the Israeli propaganda and lobbying machine.
This explains why Hague was so keen to avert Palestinian membership of the ICC. Not only can Palestine indict Israeli war criminals (and they should start immediately with those behind Operation Cast Lead and the attack on the Mavi Marmara) but Britain will be obliged – as will all other European Union countries – to hand them over to the court.
Given that this disgraceful government had specifically enacted legislation to block other avenues for the indictment of Israeli war criminals in the United Kingdom, this is infuriating for our zionist sponsored politicians.
It also raises an interesting point. We have seen the entire political establishment enthusiastically promoting the automaticity of European arrest warrants in the case of Julian Assange. How will those same politicians react to the automaticity of arrest warrants for Israeli war criminals? I suspect that they will suddenly discover there is a need for political intervention in such cases.
http://www.jpost.com/DiplomacyAndPolitics/Article.aspx?id=294118
Israel approves building of 3,000 units in J’lem, W. Bank
Michal: ‘Congratulations on pointlessly ratcheting up the tensions.’
Who is doing the ratcheting? In my mind’s eye I can envisage a mechanism of a chain ratchet pulley with the locking device or pawl jammed hard against the teeth. The Western powers and Russia all taking turns on the chain to raise Israel’s power.
If you forced up the locking device or pawl, presumably it is Israel, not its supporters that would fall.
What we actually need is a block and tackle that will fall on the head of the Western powers who are ratcheting up Israel, while simultaneously dropping Israel. Have you checked the fixing of the pulley recently? Some of those Judaeo-Christian sky-hooks look like they might have metal fatigue. The Qur’an says that the Children of Israel will be gathered together at the end of time. For their benefit or their punishment, I wonder. Time will tell.
Didn’t take long for the ‘funding’ shoe to drop. How many billions do we send to Israel, each year?
“Senators Lindsey Olin Graham, John Barrasso, Charles (Chuck) Schumer and Bob Menendez stated that the Palestinian Authority should not sue Israel should they join the International Criminal Court, and that President Mahmoud Abbas must go back to the negotiation table with Israel, and if they sue Israel, the United States will block all funding.”
http://www.imemc.org/article/64664
‘The spring is coming’ says Munib Al Masri, richest Palestinian. He uses other comparisons as well for the next events that are bearing down on the ME. I feel a common bond with this moderate, we both do not like walls, whether its the past Berlin wall, walls keeping gated communities at bay, or the wall dividing Palestinians from their fields, olive groves and wells.
Today’s settlement announcements represent the nah na nanah na of a child that did not get its will and was told off for its bullying, thing is, in its pocket it carries a box of matches.
http://www.aljazeera.com/programmes/frostinterview/2012/11/2012111215181959306.html
Assange to RT: Entire nations intercepted online, key turned to totalitarian rule
30 November, 2012, 11:34
WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange says all the necessary physical infrastructure for absolute totalitarianism through the internet is ready. He told RT that the question now is whether the turnkey process that already started will go all the way.
Video and transcript
https://rt.com/news/assange-internet-control-totalitarian-943/
Absolutely, Herbie. Thank, Nevermind.
Olmert realised years ago that these tactics of ethnic cleansing , settling and stealing of the land and property in the end are self defeating.It will make a 2 state solution impossible.
This means that it will have to become one state. Anathema to most Israeli’s.
Victory will mean defeat ! No matter which way you look at the problem and no matter how long it takes, the Zionists will lose their dream. The very state that has been trying to destroy the palestinians will have them as citizens.The zionists will drain away leaving the rest of them to get on with it.Once the Eretz Israel project ends, wonder what they will call the country of the Palestinian and the Jew ? Palestine maybe ?
To save the 2 state solution The United Nations needs to function and Israel be made to listen and follow. There was a partition in 47 and there was also agreement on 67 borders.It needs to be enforced.Israel will never listen to reason.
The Veto has to be taken away from the big powers.As long as they have it any small nation will be battered whenever the nuclear powers feel like it, and that goes for Israel too. A nuclear powwer and they weild the US veto whenever they feel like it.
Herbie, you’d asked about Egypt. I’m not sure about Egypt, I get different views from different Egyptians (as one might imagine). Some are afraid of an Islamist takeover, others reject that analysis. It’s not the same as Iran, 1979. Post-revolutionary ferment, though. Complex situation. Will take a while for a stable configuaration to emerge. Various forces contending. Stating the obvious, I know! Not much help, I know!
At the end, Assange brushes aside the last question about his health. “It’s not very interesting…”
Message from a friend.
WELL DONE TO the Premier League players’ call for Israel Euro 2013 boycott. How disgusting also for UK to abstain in UN VOTE. As soon as Hague (a Friend of Israel) stumbles and breaks his silly big round head like HUMPTY DUMPTY the better and may he be struck with impotence and severe incontinence and get stuck in a Portcullis House lift all weekend.
!!
As a one-state solution becomes more and more inevitable, I imagine that the Israelis will hope to ‘persuade’ the Palestinians to migrate abroad.
However, you might all be interested in a precedent in Jewish history. I was brought up as a Christian, but I had never heard of this shocking passage in the Hebrew Bible, which I found the other day after getting into a futile argument with a Zionist who absolutely insisted that Jerusalem had been founded by the Jews and had always been a Jewish city. I knew that it had been founded by the Jebusites and, searching for them in the Bible, stumbled across this:
1 Kings 9:20-22
“There were still people left [in what is now Israel/Palestine] from the Amorites, Hittites, Perizzites, Hivites and Jebusites (these peoples were not Israelites). Solomon conscripted the descendants of all these peoples remaining in the land – whom the Israelites could not exterminate – to serve as slave labour, as it is to this day. But Solomon did not make slaves of any of the Israelites; they were his fighting men, his government officials, his officers, his captains, and the commanders of his chariots and charioteers.”
Solomon’s Temple, at whose ruined western wall Jews pray today, was built by foreign slave labour – something I was never told in Sunday school.
How do these pro Israel supporters explain their hostility to the UN vote? What great evil do they claim is unleashed by this international decision that acknowledges Palestinian rights to aspire to and achieve statehood? We’ve heard them squawk about the vote not contributing to the peace process but we are yet to hear rational explanations of how it is a bad thing.
Is it really all about Palestinian access to the ICC or does it threaten the real scheme – ie Israel’s efforts to slowly, surely and inexorably dispossess the Palestinians of all their historical lands to give Israel a much larger contiguous land mass, longer coast line and access to more natural resources. And then present it as a fait accompli much as other dispossessions of land have been throughout history.
Just to support Michal’s case that “both” Palestinian states have war crimes and other breaches of the UNHCR (which I presume they should now be seeking to comply with?) to answer please find the link here to the Amnesty report
http://www.amnesty.org/en/region/palestinian-authority
It doesn’t make for pretty reading, but then neither does the report on Israel.
Perhaps if we can put both the Israeli and Palestinian governments in the dock they would be diverted from their other activities and peace might have a chance. But more seriously I’m afraid this is all a bit of a side show and does little to get a dialogue going between both sides which is really what is needed. Both sides have more than enough abuses by the other to point and more than enough of their own to ignore – and it is perhaps worth noting that progress to peace in Ireland and South Africa came about by a conscious decision not to prosecute and to forgive (and no I didn’t say forget).
“Assange to RT: Entire nations intercepted online, key turned to totalitarian rule”
I bet that isn’t rebroadcast for domestic consumption in Russia – or in China where the key has already been turned.
BTW could I recommend Masha Gessen’s book on Putin as an antidote for fans of RT here – its strange how all those journalists/TV and radio channels that propose something different to Putin just keep disappearing.
“unreconstructed climate change deniers”???
craig, this is the very tactic used by those behind what was originally called “catastrophic manmade global warming” but which, since Climategate, can only be called “climate change”. tell me the last time you heard western MSM use the original phrase?
there are NO sceptics nor, indeed, any people anywhere who deny “climate change”. there are debates about the degree of such changes, especially given the adjustments made to the raw temperature data, (only computer models of the close-knit team exposed in Climategate are used to claim it’s catastrophic) and about the bankers’/pollies so-called remedy of trading derivatives of carbon dioxide. even Matt Taibbi at Rolling Stone has documented that carbon trading is the hoped-for Next Big Bubble for the banksters/traders, a Bubble that would do untold damage to poorer countries.
couldn’t we just celebrate with the Palestinians without such name-calling.
Resident Dissident
I don’t think you understand the meaning of war crime or the purpose of the UN. Human rights abuses committed by the government of a country against it’s own people do not count as war crimes. The UN is not there to interfere in the internal affairs of member states. People are executed in places like Saudi Arabia and America too, many of us are against it as are Amnesty International but they do not count as war crimes and they do not come under the remit of the United Nations.
‘But more seriously I’m afraid this is all a bit of a side show and does little to get a dialogue going between both sides which is really what is needed.’
The real ‘side show’ for about a decade now (roughly since the Saudi peace plan was treated like a fart in a lift by Israel & the US ) has been the US led ‘peace process’, which ‘Resident Dissident’ here is extolling.
Solomon’s temple? a few rocks piled on top of each other, in a, if I may say this, amateurish fashion compared to what the Egyptian dynasties next door had mastered, do not proof that there was a temple at all.
Just as the evidence of the events at Masada could barely be evidenced, or the exodus, the badly cut and hewn stones of the wailing wall being living proof of the latter being a myth, otherwise the wailing wall would have been much more perfect.
I think it should be taken down carefully, exposing the inside of the so called temple walls, not rough, like the outside, but smooth and elaborately decorated, as one would expect from a temple, and then, when it is proven to be another hoax of history, they can get a stonemason and reface the stones and make them fit properly.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jehoash_Inscription
RT Crosstalk. Norman Finkelstein gets Gissin frothing at the mouth.
Now that the Palestinians have had their international legal status upgraded at the UN, what difference will it make? What will now happen with the so-called “peace process”? Will we see an end to the illegal occupation of Palestinian lands any time soon? And, how will this UN resolution make Israel more isolated? CrossTalking with Norman Finkelstein, Raanan Gissin and Rami Almenghari.
http://rt.com/programs/crosstalk/palestine-un-gissin-finkelstein/
RT The only place where you can watch debates on this subject. Nothing like this on ZBC, Ch 4 or ITV of course.
Fred
I understand war crimes and human rights abuses against a states own people are different and that is why I distinguished them (see the word “other”). You do not understand the purpose of the UN – its members are required to sign up to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and members of the pledge themselves to take joint and separate action in co-operation with the Organization to take action against governments that are in violation (see Articles 55 and 56). The Charter also gives the power to the General Council to kick out persistent offenders. The UN’s powers may not be used or abused – but if you think that the UN was set up with the purpose of allowing countries to get away of abusing human rights domestically providing that they didn’t do externally then you really have no understanding as to why it was created. Go and read the Charter.
One of the problems with much of current political discourse is that has little to say about how the UN can be made to operate effectively to achieve its objectives where it has failed somewhat pathetically in recent years.
Naturally, as with the MSM in the West, dissident views in enemy countries wil be promoted – just think of the Cold War, and of Lord Palmerston, for a moment. So we will get MSM in the West extolling Russian dissidents and MSM in Russia extolling Western dissidents/dissident views. It’s all part of the usual information war.
I agree though that in Putin’s Russia, dissident journalists and editors tend to end up six feet under. Before we get too complacent, though, our mandarins can afford to allow for a certain amount of dissent in their home countries; if it goes too far, they have other – more skilled, more subtle – ways of marginalising dissent. And among ‘our’ allies – those whom we prop up – there are many regimes as bad, or worse, than that of Putin’s Russia. None of this is new. ‘We have no friends and enemies, we have only interests’.
Right now, Israel – in essence, a giant US military base – is occupying Palestinian land – that is the international and UN position, it is very clear. That is the primary illegality, the core injustice. The USA and Israel have absolutely no interest in achieving a settlement that involves anything less than total victory by Israel, a victory which comprises permanent annexation of the West Bank and the likely gradual marginalisation of the Palestinian population with the probability of mass expulsions as the iron fences close in ever more tightly. That has always been the relentless aim. What else would one expect? That is what will happen. Saudi Arabia does not want a Palestinian state; their rhetoric is just rhetoric. They are an ally of Israel-USA. It’s not about morality; it is simply about power. Mao was correct. He was not good, but he was right: The barrel of a gun.
Old Mark
I am extolling any peace process – I don’t really care where it comes from and I don’t see much of one from the US or anywhere else at the present. Might I suggest that you put your if you are not with us you are against us mentality away.
Looking forward to the prosecutions of those who incarcerate children, hold up pregnant women at roadblocks and who deliberately shoot children, aiming at the core of the family and community, the civilian society.
Also looking forward to resolve the issues of occupied Syrian and Lebanese territories, not to speak of the Apartheid shown towards Arab Israeli’s and the restrictions on housing they are subjected to.
Israels internal problems will bear down on hard liners, the growing rift between Likud Kadima and those who are fed up with wars, talk of war or the lack of any relationship with its neighbours, will ensure that Israel eats itself from within, the eternal hate it instils in its people will destroy the future for its children.
I’m with Avi Shlaim on this issue, there is only one Palestine for all of its people, and in the absence of any initiatives, the international community, the UN, who granted the rights of statehood to those who fled the Holocaust, will now have to be strong and ensure that these two people who have lived together for hundreds/thousands of years, have to be made to live together, or wither away, annihilating each other with hate.
And to the tune of Quantanamera, we sing
‘One Palestinia, there’s only one Palestinia…’
Suhayl
In all honesty I don’t think you are right – I think most US diplomats would like to see a two state solution, with the states at peace with each other, if they could wave a magic wand. That isn’t to say that there isn’t a voluble and influential minority within the US who still somehow think that the Palestinians can somehow be made to disappear.
Take that fucking wall down and start schooling your children together, you did it once, before you allowed that mass murderer Sharon to lead your country, Israel. Cast away the yoch of Zionists who have failed to lead the nation for the sake of fascism.
Donny Darko: “Olmert realised years ago that these tactics of ethnic cleansing , settling and stealing of the land and property in the end are self defeating.”
But they are only self-defeating if enough pressure is exerted that they are not taken to their logical conclusion. If they are – if Israel is able litrally to make life impossible for the W. Bank Palestinians – then extreme Zionism wins: Israel has the whole of historic Palestine minus the Palestinians. Israel today announced 3,000 new housing units on Palestinian land – up to 30,000 more settlers, and not a squeak from Britain or Europe.
Ethnic cleansing is a real danger here.
Whatever US politician’s would like to see is not relevant, its what the people of Palestine, lets call it by its real name, say and want is relevant, despite the dependencies that exist.
Obama has no excuse, he has no more election to win or diaspora’s to suck up to, he has shown his real face on this issue, no excuses, this is the real Obomber and he has no compulsion or interest in peace, another bought stooge for the military industrialist con/mplex.
‘I think most US diplomats would like to see a two state solution, with the states at peace with each other’
RD- The only senior US diplomat in recent years to whom this description could truthfully be applied would be George Mitchell. The others, such as Dennis Ross & Martin Indyk, envisage instead a Palestinian ‘state’ along the lines of that proposed by Yigal Allon shortly after the 1967 war. No wonder Mitchell (who detested Ross)resigned as Special Envoy 18 months ago.
‘Israel today announced 3,000 new housing units on Palestinian land – up to 30,000 more settlers, and not a squeak from Britain or Europe.’
Precisely. The ‘Quartet’, with T. Blair in the driving seat, scarcely pretend they are ‘honest brokers’ any more.
I’m inclined to forgive many of the abstentions and votes against from very small countries – who make up most of the no votes and a lot of the abstainers. Very small countries are very vulnerable to sanctions or aid cuts from very large countries such as the US.
Understandable also in the case of a lot of the former Soviet states, especially ones bordering Russia – they (justifiably) fear Russia and so follow the US lead in foreign policy to have a powerful ally to protect them.