Campaign Statement, November 11, 2011
On November 5, 2011 the third international session of the Russell Tribunal convened in Cape Town, South Africa to examine the question: “Are Israel’s practices against the Palestinian people a breach of the prohibition on Apartheid under International Law?” The Tribunal is needed, claims its informational material, because “condemnations [of Israel’s violations of human rights and international law by the international community] have not been accompanied by sanctions of any kind [and therefore] Israel enjoys the tacit support of the international community.” The Russell Tribunal, while having no ability to force compliance with its rulings, is an educational tool seeking “to mobilize international public opinion so the UN and member states can be persuaded to act to end Israel’s impunity and build a lasting just peace.”
In advance of the convening of the Russell Tribunal, Richard J. Goldstone, who had chaired a UN commission to investigate potential war crimes and crimes against humanity committed during the Israeli incursion into Gaza in December 2008 – January 2009, wrote an op-ed in the New York Times entitled “Israel and the Apartheid Slander.”
After months of relentless pressure from Israel and Zionists in his native South Africa, including nearly being prevented from attending his grandson’s bar mitzvah, Goldstone issued a repudiation of parts of the report that his commission had written (Report of the United Nations Fact-Finding Mission on the Gaza Conflict, nicknamed the Goldstone Report). Several analysts have determined that no new information led to the repudiation of the original report (see, for example, Norman Finkelstein’s analysis) and that the original conclusions of the report stood. Importantly, none of the other members of the UN Commission repudiated any part of the report.
Apparently the pressure on Goldstone continues, because in his November 1 editorial he claims that Israel’s system of racially-based laws privileging Jews over non-Jews, restricting Palestinians’ movements, subjecting the Palestinians to cruel and degrading treatment at checkpoints, encircling Palestinian villages into ever smaller ghettos, denying them water, education, health services, and arbitrarily arresting them, is somehow not as cruel as South Africa’s Apartheid. He also made disparaging remarks about the quality of the experts at the Tribunal. The jury includes Stéphane Hessel, a Resistance fighter during WWII and survivor of the Nazi concentration camps who also played an important role in writing the Universal Declaration of Human Rights; Gisèle Halimi, a French-Tunisian lawyer, feminist, and writer; Ronald Kasrils, a South African writer, politician, and activist; Marraid Corrigan Maguire, Nobel Peace Prize laureate from Northern Ireland, and Alice Walker, a writer and human rights activist from the U.S. These and the rest of the jurors are exceptional human rights and international law experts, any of whom Judge Goldstone would have been proud to work with in an earlier time.
Minnesota Break the Bonds Campaign (MN BBC) takes the position that the Israeli system of legalized discrimination is apartheid, as was concluded by the Human Rights Research Council of South Africa, and therefore its perpetrators are punishable under the UN Convention on the Suppression and Punishment of the Crime of Apartheid. Further, MN BBC believes the work of the Russell Tribunal is essential and we welcome its findings. MN BBC rejects Richard Goldstone’s actions and words which result in no elucidation of the conflict or its causes, and we will continue to work tirelessly for human rights in Palestine.
Photo: electronicintifada.net