The admission by at least one high-ranking member of the Palestine Authority that it made a mistake when it deferred endorsement of the Goldstone Report on Israel’s assault on Gaza has not stemmed the avalanche of vitriol and condemnation that has fallen on the PA and its President Mahmoud Abbas. The accusations range from treason to weakness, incompetence to powerlessness. The PA step or misstep in Geneva is being widely viewed as a huge betrayal of war victims and the entire people of the Gaza Strip.
Originally, the Palestinians had planned to present a draft resolution to the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva demanding that the Goldstone Report, which accuses Hamas but more pointedly Israel, of committing war crimes last winter, be submitted for discussion at the Security Council, which has the power to ask the International Criminal Court (ICC) to prosecute people for war crimes. Instead, however, the Palestinians inexplicably agreed to postpone a vote of support for the report until March 2010.
The report will now lie dormant while the UN decides what, if anything, to do with it.
It is still somewhat unclear why the PA embraced such an unpopular decision. Those defending say Palestinian diplomats needed more time to win international support for the document but others insist the US all but bullied Abbas to defer discussion of the report, arguing that ratification of the report at the UNHRC would embarrass Israel and seriously undermine American efforts to restart the stalled peace process. The Obama administration, it is also said, threatened to suspend its role as broker of Middle East peace efforts and freeze financial aid to the PA government if the latter didn’t heed the American “advice”.
However, the most likely reason for the PA decision may have to do with an alleged Israeli threat to release records of conversations between Israeli and PA officials showing the latter urging Israel to pursue the war on Gaza to the end in order to crush Hamas.
What is clear is that the latest scandal is likely to seriously undermine PA standing with the Palestinian public. It will shore up support for Hamas and weaken Fatah. There is furious debate over the future of Abbas who, if the reports are correct, is traitorously close to Israel in his attempts to defeat his Hamas opponents. A betrayal of trust cannot be forgiven; collaborating with the Israeli occupier is a crime. Palestinians are condemning the Goldstone debacle, equating it with a cover-up of the massacres against the Palestinian people in the Gaza Strip, a denial of more than 1,400 deaths and the suffering of thousands of families.
The Goldstone Report could have been the first step to the prosecution of Israeli officials. The PA’s alleged consent to defer ratification effectively denies the Palestinian people the right to justice. It also represents the triumph of politics over human rights. The right to justice for victims of the Israeli war on Gaza shouldn’t be subject to political maneuvering. These rights are universal.
Were the Palestinian leadership and its diplomats so weak that they could not stand up to political threats when their people have steadfastly opposed an inhumane occupation for six decades?
The Goldstone Report on the violence in Gaza is a shocking record of the inhumanity of mankind in wartime. It was assumed that Israel, the main target of its criticism, and its principal ally the United States would oppose the report. What was not expected is that the Palestinian leadership would do the same.
Stem cell research
Excerpts from an editorial that appeared in Saturday’s Washington Post:
The swirl of controversy that greeted President Barack Obama’s executive order lifting the ban on federal funding of stem cell research in March didn’t make a significant return when the final rules were released over the summer.
That’s because the National Institutes of Health successfully navigated a minefield of ethical and moral questions. To protect those regulations from politics and changes by another administration, Rep. Diana DeGette, D-Colo. soon will introduce the Stem Cell Research Enhancement Act of 2009. The legislation would codify Obama’s executive order permitting federal funding of such research within guidelines established by the NIH and would require that they be reviewed periodically.
Usually, couples who go to in vitro fertilization clinics create more embryos than will be implanted. The remainder are either destroyed or frozen. The NIH regulations and the bill would allow couples to donate their embryos for research as long as they are fully informed of their choices and they are not compensated for the embryos. The guidelines give donors the ability to change their minds “until the embryos were actually used.” Obama’s executive order overturned one issued by President George W. Bush in 2001 that allowed federal funding only for those stem cell lines already developed. Scientists ultimately found the number of approved lines too few and the utility of those lines limited.
The bill specifically outlaws human cloning, as do the NIH guidelines. And Congress already prohibits federal funding for collecting stem cell lines from human embryos, which are destroyed in the process. But the NIH rules make it clear that taxpayer money will not be used on lines from embryos created solely for research. The life-saving treatments and therapies that could result from stem cell research should not come from crossing this clear moral and ethical boundary.
