The Secretary-General strongly condemns the killing today of at least 10 Palestinian civilians in shelling outside of an UNRWA school in Rafah providing shelter to thousands of civilians.  The attack is yet another gross violation of international humanitarian law, which clearly requires protection by both parties of Palestinian civilians, UN staff and UN premises, among other civilian facilities.

United Nations shelters must be safe zones not combat zones. The Israel Defence Forces have been repeatedly informed of the location of these sites.  This attack, along with other breaches of international law, must be swiftly investigated and those responsible held accountable. It is a moral outrage and a criminal act.

The Secretary-General is profoundly dismayed over the appalling escalation of violence and loss of hundreds of Palestinian civilian lives since the breach of the humanitarian ceasefire on 1 August. The resurgence in fighting has only exacerbated the man-made humanitarian and health crisis wreaking havoc in Gaza.  Restoring calm can be achieved through resumption of the ceasefire and negotiations by the parties in Cairo to address the underlying issues.

The Secretary-General repeats his demand to the parties to immediately end the fighting and return to the path of peace.  This madness must stop.

Link to statement: http://www.un.org/sg/statements/index.asp?nid=7904

The post Ban Ki-moon’s Statement on Gaza – 3 August 2014 appeared first on Sydney Peace Foundation.

One evening in Doha, in December: Sydney University’s Professor Stuart Rees is standing in the middle of a packed room, deep in conversation with the veteran Palestinian negotiator, Dr Saeb Erekat.

Famous figures in the Palestinian political landscape mill around them. Hamas chief Khalid Mish’al is there, along with Hamas’s head of international relations, Osama Hamdan. Rees is completely engrossed in his discussion with Erekat, a key figure in the latest round of peace talks brokered by the US secretary of state, John Kerry. But later on he’ll meet Mish’al, and will become part of a conversation between the Hamas chief and the UN’s special rapporteur on Palestinian human rights, Richard Falk. “He insists that the soft power of international public opinion is strategically far superior to any further use of violence,” says Rees of Falk. Meanwhile, Mish’al tells the two men that establishing common ground with Palestinians in the West Bank and in the diaspora is one of his key goals.

It was an extraordinary gathering in the Qatari capital, which went largely unreported in the western media. The Qatar-based Arab Centre for Research and Policy Studies had organised a three-day conference titled “the Palestinian cause and the future of the Palestinian national movement”.

Little did anyone there know that just over a month later, on 11 January 2014, the world would learn that the former Israeli general and prime minister Ariel Sharon was dead. The man known as “the sleeping giant”, who had been in a coma for eight years after suffering a stroke, was 85 when he died: still hated by most Palestinians.

Rees, the founder of Sydney University’s Centre for Peace and Conflict Studies and the Sydney Peace Foundation – he set up the annual Sydney Peace Prize, Australia’s only international peace award – and who was one of the speakers at the Doha conference, says the former Israeli PM should be regarded as “a military thug”.

“The fact that he died eight years ago but has officially only just died, indicates to me that his image as a military warrior was synonymous with the identity of Israel, and that they couldn’t afford to let him appear to die. It’s almost Kafkaesque that this should now be headline news with the mainstream media paying their respects to him,” he adds.

One can only speculate about the tenor of the speeches at the Doha conference if Sharon had died while it was still being held. More than 200 Palestinians attended the three days of talks, and the Palestinian journalist, Mohammed Daraghmeh, reported in Salon.com there was “an overwhelming sense of a national movement in crisis” – writing as well that it was a sign of the Palestinians’ political and territorial fragmentation that top decision-makers and thinkers had to travel to Doha to be in the same room.

However Rees believes the Doha conference could prove valuable in the long term, even while commenting that the Palestinians “have no cards to play” in the peace talks. “Saeb Erekat wouldn’t admit they’re powerless, but everyone knows they are because of the absurd claim that the Americans could be considered the honest broker,” he says, before adding that Erekat does believe Kerry is completely sincere in wanting to make the peace talks work.

“I said in Doha that the peace process over 20 years has been an appalling piece of game-playing on both sides. The Israelis didn’t take it seriously, ever, and the Palestinians were poorly represented by the Palestinian Authority which did not defend the human rights of its own people,’ he says

“But one of the things that may come out of [Doha] is a new force that will establish a coherence in the Palestinian point of view. The conversations I had with the Hamas people were really for that end. The rhetoric is division [between Hamas and Fatah], but when you see them together as I did: you had Saeb Erekat and Osama Hamdan embracing each other as blood brothers when they met informally.”

For Rees, who has visited the Gaza strip twice, in 2006 and 2012, ending the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians is “the moral political priority because the failure to address justice for the Palestinians is the catalyst for so much other violence. All the time, extremists can say ‘Well, look how you behave towards the Palestinians.’ My formula is simple,” he adds. “Justice for the Palestinians equals security for the Israelis.”

Asked whether there was a single, startling moment during the three days in Doha, he replies, “The startling moment is something in a way that we know but should be constantly reminded of, which is that the lives of Palestinians are a catastrophe – and that there is a well developed cruelty as a policy, which governments like Australia’s collude with.”

Rees is a bluntly spoken, impassioned man whose life almost totally revolves around human rights and conflict resolution. The Palestinian issue has become bigger and bigger for him personally, he tells the Guardian, “even though it’s much further away from West Papua or Sri Lanka where I’ve also been and worked. Palestine is a priority for me emotionally, ideologically, because [of] the cruelty that is witnessed, for example, in the paddling of Gaza schoolchildren at this moment through sewerage to get to school because more than half of the power systems are down, which also means that intensive care units, dialysis machines, incubators, and operating theatres don’t work.”

The awarding of the 2003 Sydney peace prize to the prominent Palestinian academic and nationalist Dr Hanan Ashrawi generated considerable hostility towards Rees, who believes he was invited to the Doha conference because he’s regarded in the Arab academic world as someone who “sticks up for the Palestinians in general”.

The hostility came from some members of the Australian Jewish community – though not exclusively from them. And yet several international figures, including the former US secretary of state Madeleine Albright, praised the decision to give Ashwari the award.

The Israeli politician and peace activist Yael Dayan, daughter of the Israeli general Moshe Dayan, spoke favourably about the Palestinian winner (and on the day she left for Australia to collect her award, as Rees himself pointed out at the time, Ashrawi travelled from Ramallah through checkpoints to Jerusalem and on to Tel Aviv airport in the middle of an Israel-wide transport strike).

At the Doha conference, the Australian academic also talked about the controversial boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) campaign against Israel, which Rees supports. Inevitably, he has been labelled as anti-Semitic for this stance, although he may have confounded his critics last year when he revealed the 2013 Sydney peace prize was to have been awarded to Stéphane Hessel – a concentration camp survivor, resistance fighter and diplomat who helped draft the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and author of the 2009 bestseller, Time for Outrage – who died aged 95, shortly before the announcement could be made. (The Peace Foundation awarded Hessel a posthumous gold medal for human rights instead, which was presented to Hessel’s widow, Christiane Hessel-Chabry at a reception hosted in Paris by the Australian ambassador to France, Ric Wells).

Rees says most of the Doha conference delegates, “Arab and non-Arab, European and African,” knew about the landmark lawsuit launched recently by the Israeli legal group Shurat HaDin against fellow Sydney University academic Professor Jake Lynch, for supporting the BDS campaign. Lynch, the current director of the Centre for Peace and Conflict Studies, declined an application by the Israeli Professor Don Avnon for a fellowship to visit Sydney University, explaining that he could not support his request even though his research sounded interesting and worthwhile. Rees, in an On Line Opinion piece published last year, wrote that “however meritorious certain individual academics might be, the non-co-operation policy makes for no exceptions and some Israeli academics fully understand and accept that principle.”

The Israeli historian Professor Ilan Pappé, author of The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, who lives in self-imposed exile in the UK (“I have lost the right to work in Israel, not to live in it,” he tells the Guardian), also attended the Doha conference and met Rees. In his opinion, the lawsuit against Lynch hasn’t received enough international attention.

“I think the whole issue is tackled from the wrong angle,” he says. “Jake is like many decent persons around the world that for years look for ways of ‘doing’ something for the oppressed Palestinians. He engaged in what most of us, many among us Jews, found as the most moral, non-violent and affective way – the BDS option. He made the distinction between institutional BDS and a personal boycott and acted in the particular case under review, as most of us would. But the question [should be] different. Why do Jewish bodies, who are supposed to represent the affairs of the Jewish community and not that of Israel, become embassies of a state that in 2014 practises apartheid laws and policies and is engaged in the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians?”

In Doha, Pappé goes on, he had “uneasy conversations with some of the more dogmatic representatives of the competing ideologies in the Arab world”. But like Rees, he’s optimistic about what the conference achieved. “There was a wide basis for consensus and cooperation for the future,” he says.

Rees, meanwhile, recounts a tale Pappé told him.

The historian recently returned to Israel with a Palestinian refugee living in Denmark, who wanted to speak to Israeli students about his right to return. When they met him, the Israeli students had insisted, “You only want to kick us out.” The Palestinian replied, “I simply want to live with you.”

The Israeli students had not expected this response, and were stunned.

As so often happens, says Rees simply, such anecdotes – told privately – reveal more than any conference paper.

Nikki Barrowclough is a New Zealand-born journalist who worked full time as a writer with Good Weekend magazine and the Sydney Morning Herald from 1990 until 2012. She was nominated for a Walkley award in 2010 for an exclusive interview with Julian Assange. Her last story for Good Weekend was from Zimbabwe, where she profiled the politician Sekai Holland. She has spent time in France, Russia and Africa.

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The documentary (trailer and full film below) focuses on two former fighters, an Israeli and a Palestinian, both members of Combatants for Peace, a group of ex-combatants from both sides, working together for a non-violent solution to the conflict.

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The screening was followed by a Q&A forum discussing the documentary and implications for a peaceful resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Abe Quadan, Conflict resolution practitioner; member of CPACS Council; co-founder of Palestinian-Jewish Dialogue Group

Donna Jacobs Sife, Storyteller; Programs Director, Together for Humanity; co-founder, Jewish Voices for Peace and Justice

Dr Neven Bondokji, Researcher on Islamic movements, Islam and peace-building, and conflict resolution; Trainer in youth development

The post Within the Eye of the Storm: A Story of Hope in the Israeli/Palestinian Conflict appeared first on Sydney Peace Foundation.

“ANTI-SEMITE!” “Racist!” “Despicable values!” “Should be sacked!”

I received these comments and accusations following an article by Christian Kerr in The Australian on May 14. He correctly quoted me saying Liberal MP Christopher Pyne’s support for the London Declaration against anti-Semitism was “populist”.

Kerr may not have expected the subsequent vendetta against me, let alone the demands last Friday by former Speaker of the federal parliament Peter Slipper that, as an anti-Semite on a public payroll, I should be sacked.

My point was that the London Declaration against anti-Semitism is a consensus document. Politicians are applauded and often applaud themselves for signing it and take no risk in doing so. Pyne’s press release was a “pat myself on the back eulogy” and a gratuitous attack on the Palestinian-initiated Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions supporters whose campaign is seldom explained in mainstream media and easily depicted as controversial.

You can support both the London Declaration and the BDS campaign. However, that distinction is easily lost when individuals are demonised and Israel’s constant flouting of international law is deliberately diverted by discussion of other countries’ human rights abuses.

If attitudes to Israel and the BDS campaign are distorted, it can have serious repercussions. For that reason I’ll detail the events that prompted Kerr’s article, the accompanying editorial in The Australian and the subsequent abusive emails.

First, a woman I’d never heard of asked me to comment on Pyne’s support for the London Declaration and his manifestly nonsensical claim that university activists who support BDS undermine the right of Jewish people to live in their Jewish homeland. I naively assumed that a quick response was the end of the matter. It wasn’t. She wrote back saying the Prime Minister had also signed the declaration and asked if I had the same sentiments about her as about Pyne.

Somewhat impulsively I replied “of course”, meaning that signing the London Declaration as a sign of moral virtue was an easy decision. By contrast, Stephen Hawking’s support for the BDS campaign is a much more politically and intellectually demanding decision.

My exchange with this lady finished up on Kerr’s desk and led to a heading next day saying I had lashed out at the Prime Minister. Really?

Kerr’s article was accompanied by an editorial headed “Strange way to promote peace” with the subheading, “Critics of Israel should turn their attention to Iran”. This implied that by criticising Israeli policies I was siding with Iran’s supreme leader, who was quoted as saying “any deal that accepted the Jewish state’s existence would leave a `cancerous tumour forever”‘.

This technique of deflecting attention from the cruel and illegal policies of Israel depends on misinformation. It is implied that if you support BDS you must be anti-Semitic and are therefore no different from Israel’s religious fanatic opponents. Guilty by association. Positions polarised.

Projects run by the Sydney Peace Foundation and the University of Sydney’s Centre for Peace and Conflict Studies include support for the struggle of indigenous West Papuans, advocacy for the vulnerable Tamils in Sri Lanka and criticism of capital punishment in Iran and Saudi Arabia. The centre also provides English classes for refugees on temporary protection visas.

It is false to suggest, as in The Australian’s editorial subheading, that we pay attention only to Israel. I have just returned from Paris, where the Sydney Peace Foundation honoured the widow of the late Stephane Hessel, a Jew, a survivor of the Holocaust, an architect of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, author of the bestseller Time for Outrage, a hero of the French Republic and an enthusiastic supporter of the BDS campaign.

Hessel wrote: “When governments cannot be relied upon to defend humanity it is the role of us, the people, to lead the struggle for justice.”

The BDS campaign is grounded in international law and has nothing to do with anti-Semitism or delegitimising Israel. Israeli professor Ilan Pappe contends that it is a sacred duty to end Israel’s oppressive occupation as soon as we can and that the best means for this is a sustained BDS campaign.

There are other reasons for turning to BDS. Negotiation and diplomacy have produced nothing but the enlargement of settlements, the continued siege of Gaza and the absurd claim that a two-state solution is possible when the two sides are so imbalanced, economically, militarily and politically.

The peace process is a sham. Politicians play a cruel game if they do not recognise this but it requires vision and courage to say so.

As for Slipper’s demand that it was outrageous that I was paid public money to explain and support BDS and that I should therefore be sacked, for the past 13 years I have been a volunteer at the centre and foundation.

I have not been paid any salary, nor claimed any expenses. I have worked in diverse campaigns, often in dangerous places, and have been committed to raising funds for students from the poorest countries.

Such activities are fuelled by the values that The Australian said, albeit delicately, were strangely skewed but that Slipper described as despicable.

This article was first published in The Australian, on 21 May 2013. 

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Publicity surrounding the mystery of Australian Ben Zygier – Prisoner X – and the death on Sunday of the allegedly tortured prisoner Arafat Jaradat has provoked Palestinians to protest the treatment of thousands of other prisoners in Israeli jails, including men on a hunger strike who are near to death.

Although the treatment of prisoners by Israel denies them their civil rights and breaches international humanitarian law, the essence of Israel’s behaviour is best described as the use of cruelty as policy.

Cruelty means ‘disposed to inflict suffering’, or ‘taking pleasure in inflicting pain’. A culture of revenge drives the operation of Israeli military law, I believe. Palestinians detained under administrative detention are not charged, do not know what they are supposed to argue against, or when they will be released.

A recent editorial in Haaretz said, “Even if the arrests (of those in administrative detention) are legal according to military decree, they are draconian and reek of cruelty and abuse.”

About 180 Palestinian children are in custody, most for the offence of throwing stones at military vehicles, with less than half of them sentenced, and most of them detained until the end of legal proceedings.

Last year’s investigation by Harriet Sherwood of The Guardian showed that arrested Palestinian children were locked in solitary confinement for days or even weeks, released only when they appeared in an interrogation room, where they were shackled by hands and feet to a chair while being questioned.

The non-government organisation Defence For Children International – Palestine Section (DCI-Palestine) identified practices of blindfolding, physical abuse and threats, and confirmed that imprisoned Palestinian children were rarely questioned in front of a parent and rarely saw a lawyer.

Although The Guardian had seen audio visual recordings of such interrogations, the Israeli military maintained that it “acted in accordance with the law and the unequivocal guidelines which forbid such practices”.

Israeli human rights campaigners insist that effective pressure to end cruel practices and to advance Palestinians’ rights to self-determination cannot come from within Israel.

Only outside influence – such as that effected by the worldwide Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) campaign – will chip away at the Israeli government’s indifference to the rules of international law, let alone to UN resolutions.

At first sight, the international community’s response to the abuse of Palestinian prisoners and to the near death plight of the hunger strikers seems encouraging. European Union policy chief Catherine Ashton and Quartet on the Middle East envoy Tony Blair have called on Israel to respect the human rights of Palestinian prisoners.

But given Israel’s indifference to outsiders’ appeals, Aston’s and Blair’s words will hurt like a slap with a feather.

Israel’s military acts with impunity. Israel’s leaders remain unaccountable and in the name of security, take any action they wish.

Besides, Israel’s critics will be told, ‘Iran is the threat’, ‘Look at Syria’, ‘Australia, put your own house in order’, ‘We are defending our very existence’, ‘You are talking about Palestinians, so who cares?’

Is it possible that other evidence of cruelty could prompt even hardline Zionists to reflect and find sufficient humility to think about the notion of a common humanity?

They might consider the issue of pregnant Palestinian women forced to give birth at Israeli checkpoints because they have been barred from travelling. The UN has reported that between 2000 and 2007, of the 67 Palestinian mothers who gave birth at Israeli checkpoints, 36 of the babies and five of the mothers died.

In 2009, Israeli soldiers commissioned t-shirts depicting a pregnant Palestinian with a target over her belly and the caption, One shot, two kills.

Those examples may be ignored because they occurred years ago. Yet today, even the seriously ill are prevented from obtaining the necessary medical attention.

Gaza resident Sabreen Okal, a 27-year-old mother of five has a malignant tumour on her arm and needs radiation treatment in a Jerusalem hospital. Israeli authorities refused her entry on December 20 and again on January 21. They say they are still looking into her file.

Prima facie, the examples of the treatment of prisoners, children, women in labour and the seriously ill confirm the notion of cruelty as policy.

My contentions may be discussed by individuals who have had a privileged upbringing, an encouraging education, perhaps fulfilling employment and who return each evening to comfortable homes. It is also likely that they have never been to Gaza, seldom to the West Bank, and have never seen life in the refugee camps of Lebanon, have never witnessed Israeli justice or visited Israeli prisons.

Such citizens could at least ponder whether a proportion of the attention given to Prisoner X should be diverted to insist on the human rights of all Palestinian prisoners. Instead of modest pleas of the Ashton/Blair variety, a few politicians could say they are outraged by cruelty and will immediately insist that unless prisoners in administrative detention are convicted of terrorist offences, they should be released immediately.

In the run-up to an election in Australia, there’s a huge opportunity for policy change. Who wants to outlaw cruelty? Who really cares about the human rights of Palestinians?

This article was first published by ABC The Drum ONLINE on 27 February 2013: http://www.abc.net.au/unleashed/4541018.html

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In international relations, exceptionalism refers to a flouting of the treaties and resolutions to which all countries are expected to adhere.

The contagious political disease – exceptionalism – infects many countries, in particular Israel when faced with UN resolutions to promote Palestinian independence. In it’s attitude to that issue, Israeli policy  has been supported by US politicians as though the two countries are one and the same. In a speech in Jerusalem on July 31^st, Republican candidate for the US Presidency Mitt Romney said, ‘We serve the same cause and we provoke the same hatreds in the same enemies.’

Critics of Israel’s exceptionalism  are often derided  as anti Semites, a charge which has been accompanied by  accusations, ‘What about Australian Aborigines ?’. ‘Put your own house in order’ , ‘You sound like an Iran supporter ‘,  ‘Turn your attention to the brutality in Syria.’

Taking Critics Seriously

The gist of such comments is contained in the remark,  ‘You can’t criticize me unless you criticize others first’. That remark sounds like the last refuge of the scoundrel but I’ll try to take it seriously, starting with a look at the recent human rights record of Israel’s closest ally the United States.

America likes to claim that it has been the leading defender of liberty yet former President Jimmy Carter has argued why his country is no longer entitled to that accolade. US citizens’ rights to privacy can be violated by warrantless wiretapping and government mining of electronic communications. Alleged enemies, including US citizens, can be targeted for assassination. Half of the 169 prisoners left in Guantanamo Bay have been cleared for release  yet have almost no chance of ever retaining their freedom. A handful of the few being tried in military courts have been tortured by water boarding more than 100 times yet such torture cannot be used as self defence because it’s conducted in order to protect ‘national security’.

In the same vein which prompts derision against anyone who criticizes Israel, critics of US government policies can be dismissed as ‘anti- American’ or, if they happen to be US citizens, un American , unpatriotic or even as traitors. In defence of America, such critics compare the US human rights record with that of China whose 1984 Tiananmen Square slaughter of students has been succeeded by suppressing any citizen who challenges the State. On July 1^st almost half a million Hong Kong citizens heckled the visiting Chinese President  Hu Jintao and demanded an end to one party rule. A popular internet video says that the Communist Party is ‘brainwashing  Hong Kong’.

Until  the revolution which overthrew President Mubarak, Egypt remained a beneficiary of US financial and military support and was an ally of Israel.  But an unwritten condition of that US-Egypt -Israel alliance was to ignore the Egyptian governments’ police state practices – arbitrary arrests, torture, the rendition of prisoners from overseas and  the banning of opposition parties. Following the June 2012 election of an Islamic Brotherhood President, albeit under continued military control, nothing much seems to have changed. Egyptians are said to be concerned about their economic rights but not to care about free speech, under age marriage or female genital mutilation. British television journalist Tim Sebastian recently interviewed a young woman in Cairo. She explained, ‘I do not fear the Muslim Brotherhood. I do not fear the army. I fear my own people – their mentality. They will not defend my rights.’

‘But it’s not just America, Egypt and China ‘ the critics might say. What about Russia whose latest oppression includes the imprisonment and subsequent trial of the gutsy young women from the band Pussy Riot who sang in a Moscow cathedral calling on the Virgin Mary to ‘throw Putin out.’ ?

Russia’s former satellite – Ukraine – has been imitating Big Brother. The former Ukrainian Prime Minister Julia Tymoshenko is serving a seven year prison sentence on charges generally viewed as politically motivated. Musician Elton John played in Kiev prior to the final of the European Soccer Cup in June and in the middle of his performance he pleaded  with Ukrainians to stop beating up gay people. In a May speech to Germany’s lower house of Parliament Chancellor Angela Merkel likened Ukraine to its authoritarian neighbor Belarus. ‘In Ukraine and Belarus, people are still suffering under dictatorship and repression.’

Not Only Israel and America

This  list has ignored well known human rights abusers, the Burmese military junta, Mugabe’s Zimbabwe and the Sri Lanka Singhalese government. At risk of appearing to ignore the demands to ‘pay attention to your own back yard’, admission also needs to be made about human rights in Australia.

The UN’s Human Rights Commission says that the Australian government’s 2007 Intervention in the Northern Territory and its subsequent Stronger Futures legislation has undermined the key principles of self determination contained in the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous peoples, which Australia endorsed in 2004.  The persistence of Australia’s mandatory detention for refugees is accompanied by legislation which exempts the secret service ASIO from appraisal of its practices, including the entitlement to keep secret the grounds on which certain refugees are deemed a ‘security risk’. Exceptionalism also infects Australia.

As each day passes, the details of human rights abuses accumulate and attentive observers  will have recognized my failure to mention Palestinians’ violence towards Israelis let alone the brutalities dispensed by Middle East neighbours Saudi Arabia and the repressive, Sunni dominated Bahrein.

This acknowledgment about omissions from the list of exceptional abusers shows how unrealistic is the demand that advocacy of the rights of Palestinians must be preceded by an inventory of others’ indifference to international law. But such a demand remains a convenient means of deflecting attention from Israel, or the USA, and permanently postponing justice for the Palestinians.

If Palestinian independence is to be realized, the political and diplomatic dam which protects Israeli  governments’ assumptions that they are exceptional, will have to be broken.  Many Israelis do not like particular groups, such as students involved in Talmudic studies, being entitled to exemptions to military service.  In consequence, Prime Minister Netanyahu said he would cease the entitlement of  ultra Orthodox Jews and Arab citizens not to serve in the Israeli military.  ‘We are citizens of one state,’ he said, ‘and we must all participate in bearing the burden of service to the state.’  At that point the right wing religious parties protested, Netanyahu gave way and a small chance of lessening exceptionalism within Israel disappeared.

Many countries disregard the principles of self determination and when criticized they make the cornered schoolboy’s plea, ‘Others are as bad or worse, so why pick on me ?’ If that plea is accepted,  dangerous consequences  follow: the powerful stay unaccountable, destruction is claimed to be a form of freedom, principles of humanity are depicted as only for the faint hearted and human rights are ignored.

Challenging the American Government’s collusion with Israel’s exceptionalism  may provoke the usual derision from those who say ‘anti Semite, clean up your own act, they’ve suffered more than others so that entitles them to special treatment.’ Such time worn remarks may follow this article, or, maybe, the derision will be less than the last time I wrote about Israeli killings, stealing of land and water and the well practiced thumbing a nose at international law or UN resolutions.

An exceptional child, scientist, musician or athlete might merit special treatment but arguments about individual entitlement are different from those principles which stress State responsibility and accountability.  In an interdependent world where international law sets standards, countries  should not be able to claim to be exceptional.

Published on ON LINE  opinion  – Australia’s e-journal of social and political debate – on Thursday, 9 August 2012: http://www.onlineopinion.com.au/view.asp?article=13966

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