Karl Schembri
When Barack Obama was declared the Nobel peace prize winner last week, perhaps nobody could take the news as a joke more than the Palestinians. After decades of hearing words and promises about a peace that never materialised, Palestinians watched the US president getting the world’s most prestigious peace award without having accomplished anything to deserve it.
Palestinians have already seen another Nobel Peace Prize awarded to Middle Eastern players with no ensuing peace, but at least when Yasser Arafat, Shimon Perez and Yitzhak Rabin received the prize jointly in 1994, Israel and Palestinians had just signed the Oslo Accords – a source of much criticism from Palestinian intellectuals but also inspiring much needed hope at the time.
Obama got his Nobel just as his grip on the situation in the Middle East was slipping spectacularly, not to mention the hopelessness in Iraq and Afghanistan. Israel refuses to commit to a settlement freeze while the Palestinian President, Mahmoud Abbas, has been left on his own to fight hopelessly for his survival.
Just as the Nobel prize was being announced, the US administration was pushing Abbas into a corner by forcing him to abandon the UN human rights report on the Gaza war, a move that exposed him to intense rage among his own people and forced him into a full U-turn in a couple of days.
The UN report, which is based on a fact-finding mission headed by the South African Jewish judge Richard Goldstone, documents cases upon cases of war crimes and possible crimes against humanity committed by Israel last January. It also accuses Hamas of war crimes for the thousands of rockets it launched into Israel and calls for International Criminal Court proceedings against individuals on both sides unless Israel and Hamas investigate the accusations thoroughly.
In pressing Abbas not to endorse the Goldstone report, the US administration put him in an impossible position without giving him anything in return. His own people were calling him a traitor, and in Gaza some Palestinians were throwing their shoes at photos of their president during Hamas rallies. In an ironic twist, Hamas has fully endorsed the Goldstone report even if it means that its own fighters might be summoned at The Hague as war criminals. Eventually, Abbas pushed forward the report at the UN Human Rights Council, but the damage was irreversible.
The US administration’s stand against the UN report echoes Israel’s rhetoric that there can be no peace process as long as Israeli army generals and officers can be charged as war criminals. But failure to pursue justice and accountability for Israel’s disproportionate offensive that left up to 1,400 Palestinians dead and thousands of houses demolished will also keep peace as elusive as ever.
Goldstone – respected by human rights movements but much reviled by Israel – accepts Israel’s premise for attacking Gaza, but denounces the type and extent of force used by Israel to “defend itself”. In other words, Goldstone accepts that one is entitled to attack his neighbour in self-defence, but that does not give one a right to destroy the entire neighbourhood.
In opposing the UN report, Obama, together with all the countries that voted against it, is not only denying Palestinians’ right for justice, but he is also weakening Abbas to the point of leaving him utterly powerless, both internally and as a party for peace. Added to that, the Obama administration is also undermining Egypt’s attempts at reconciling Hamas and Fatah – itself a Herculean task – by stating that it would not recognise national unity that would pave the way for general and presidential elections, except on its own terms.
A Fatah memo leaked last week spoke of Palestinians’ hopes in Obama having “evaporated”. Some may think that is premature, just nine months since Obama took office. Hopefully it’s a premature as his prize.
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