It may be inferred from the statements given by the spokesman for the U.S State Department that Washington will not allow the Goldstone report to be presented before the UN Security Council, and that in case this report made its way there, the United States will use its veto power to nix any possible resolution endorsing the report’s recommendations.
Such a stance and behaviour that are being portended are nothing but a continuation of an approach to which the subsequent U.S administrations have been addicted, at least since 1967. This approach has at its core a blind bias towards the Israeli side, and one that the administration under Barack Obama- as someone listening to the latter’s speech at the University of Cairo last June would conclude- has discovered it to have caused the United States many prohibitive damages in both politics and security-related issues.
Meanwhile, it is valid to say that there somehow is a harmony between the position of the U.S State Department and that of Judge Richard Goldstone, the man who crafted the report: In fact, Goldstone criticized the UN Human Rights Council’s (UNHRC) decision to forward his report to the UN Security Council after excluding any condemnation against Hamas, and other Palestinian factions for their involvement in the rocket attacks against Israeli civilian areas, and their insistence on terrorizing the population of southern Israel by continuously shelling non-military targets.
Moreover, there were statements attributed to Goldstone and in which he voiced his opposition against the “bias” of the [UNHRC’s] recommendations, which he deemed to be one-sided. This was in fact almost exactly what the American spokesman had mentioned while threatening to block both the recommendations and the report from being deliberated at the UN Security Council.
In contrast, one can also talk here about the irony of how Israel sees the bigger picture behind the American approach to the report. To Israel, this approach is an effort to punish Benjamin Netanyahu's government for failing to respond to the demands that President Obama himself frankly expressed, regarding the paramount importance of stopping the construction of Israeli settlements in the West Bank, as a prerequisite to resurrect the Palestinian-Israeli negotiations. On the other hand, the United States does not seem to want the report to become a standalone issue that diverts the attention away from the efforts to entice the two parties to the conflict into returning to the negotiation table. In other words, Washington is only seeking to narrowly capitalize on the Goldstone report to put pressure on the Israeli government, without getting to the point where an unrestrained political exploitation of this report would take place.
Nonetheless, there is a great risk being taken by the Americans in walking down this path through treacherous grounds. On one hand, the Obama administration, in case it should resort to vetoing the report or the recommendations at the UN Security council, risks being rebranded with parts of the same image that stuck with the previous administrations, in particular the administration of George W. Bush. This latter had given Israel a blank check to liquidate the Palestinian cause, which Bush and his ilk only saw from the angle of their global war on terror. On the other hand, the thwarting of Arab and international efforts to bring those responsible for the war crimes and Israeli atrocities in Gaza to justice, will not only boost the “culture of impunity”, but will also encourage the Netanyahu government, and all subsequent Israeli governments, to continue their disregard for Palestinian rights, and to continue adopting violence, murder and destruction as indispensable methods in dealing with the Palestinians and other Arabs. This is regardless of Netanyahu’s statement that the peace process and the Goldstone report cannot go hand in hand. In any case, the fact of the matter is that neither the peace process nor the Goldstone report will go anywhere in light of the current Israeli policies.
Accordingly, the U.S administration – whose President won the Nobel Peace prize a few days ago, bears a tremendous ethical and political responsibility in what regards the need to send out the right message, and which would compliment Obama’s speech at the Cairo University. Such a message would be addressed not only to the Arab and Muslim peoples- who are plagued with the impunity of their executioners-, but also to the peoples and governments in the world at large that there is a real change taking place in the climate of international relations, in particular in what regards the relations between the strong and the weaker nations.
Anything that does not rise up to this level is meaningless, and is like scum upon the banks.
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