Friday Reading

Amira Howeidy writes on the Goldstone Report in Al-Ahram Weekly:

Faced with the report's damning evidence -- the bulk of it against Israel -- and bold recommendations, the UN General Assembly shirked the opportunity to take any meaningful action in its emergency session on 5 November 2009. Instead, and after many deferrals, it appointed a committee of experts last June to decide whether Israel and the Palestinians had conducted domestic investigations that met with international standards. The committee submitted its report to the UNHRC on Monday. Because Israel had refused to cooperate with its experts, it said, it was not in a position to make any decision on the matter.

While such an outcome might reasonably be expected to have provoked protests from the Arab-Islamic bloc in the UNHRC, particularly the Palestinian Authority (PA), this does not appear to be the case.

According to Jeremy Smith, director of the Geneva branch of the Cairo Institute for Human Rights (CIHR) which has been lobbying with other NGOs in favour of the Goldstone recommendations to take Israel to the ICC, the PA is instead seeking to extend the mandate of the expert committee for another year.

"The problem here is that the PA's draft resolution is extremely weak and would seem to be burying the findings of the Goldstone Report," Smith told Al-Ahram Weekly in a telephone interview from Geneva on Tuesday.

Glenn Greenwald writes about the recent UNCHR report and laments the American media's failure to pay any attention to the story:

Needless to say, the Israeli Government -- as it virtually always does when confronted with well-documented, official findings of its severe human rights violations -- attacked the source, accusing the report of being "biased and distorted." The U.N. investigators interviewed 112 witnesses and consulted with numerous forensic and medical experts, while Israel refused to speak with its investigators (though Israeli officials are cooperating with a separate group investigating the attack). There's no reason to take the findings of this report as Gospel: like everything, it's subject to reasonable dispute, but it's clearly well-documented, consistent with documentary evidence and overwhelming witness tesitmony, and is entitled to be taken seriously.

To this day, I'm still amazed by how the American media and U.S. Government responded to this incident, given the fact that it was painfully obvious from the start that the Israelis' conduct was the behavior of a guilty party. The Israelis immediately seized all documentary evidence from the passengers showing what actually happened, blocked all media access to witnesses by detaining everyone on board (including journalists) for days, and then quickly released its own highly edited video -- spliced to begin well into the middle of the Israeli attack -- that was dutifully and unquestioningly shown over and over by the U.S. media to make it appear that the flotilla passengers were the first to become violent. That was a lie from the start, and it was an obvious lie.

Haaretz reports that the outrageous rewards the US wants to offer Netanyahu for a cessation in some settlement expansion for only 60 days is still not enough for Israel's Prime Minister:

The United States is reportedly incensed over Netanyahu's rejection of a draft letter that would have extended the freeze on West Bank settlement construction, formulated by advisers to the U.S. and Israeli leaders.

The letter, written by U.S. President Barack Obama's advisers and by Netanyahu's and Defense Minister Ehud Barak's adviser Isaac Molho, would have had Israel freezing construction in the settlements for another 60 days in exchange for unprecedented U.S. political and security assistance.

Senior American officials said they were frustrated by Netanyahu's conduct in the affair.

"We're not buying the excuse of political difficulties anymore," a senior U.S. official told his Israeli counterpart.

"The Americans said Netanyahu's conduct is humiliating the president," said a senior European diplomat who met with senior U.S. officials in New York last week.

Mike Hanna writes about Avigdor Lieberman's speech at the UNGA where he advocated his solution to the conflict:

But this is missing the point: whether intentionally or not, Avigdor Lieberman has thrown down a major challenge to his prime minister. Binyamin Netanyahu’s silence is not enough. If he does not take the strongest action against his foreign minister it will be interpreted that he does not disagree with what he says.

And to reiterate the essence of what Lieberman is saying: Arabs and other non-Jews living in Israel may not be stripped off their land, but they will be stripped off their citizenship.

Palestinian Citizens of Israel mark the 10 year anniversary of Black October. Arab48.com has an Arabic language article on the day's events while Maan News Reports:

The Palestinian Follow-up Committee in Israel announced a comprehensive strike on Friday that included all Palestinian towns and cities marking the 10th anniversary of the start of the Al-Aqsa Intifada.

On 1 October 2000, 13 Palestinians in Israel were killed while rallying in solidarity with the Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza, the incident sparked a wave of popular protests that became known as the Second Intifada.

Across Israel, Palestinians participated in ceremonies and demonstrations mourning the slain or celebrating the will to resist oppression and occupation.

Israeli police told the media on Friday morning that preparations had been made to quell clashes if they erupted.

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