Swedish dock workers have boycotted loading Israeli ships
Courtenay Barnett
I would like to share these thoughts. Let’s put events in chronological sequence.
ONE During and subsequent to 1948 some 700,000 Palestinians were forcibly expelled from what is today Israel. Viewed through the eyes of the law, one may consider this fact conjunctively with fact #2 right below.
TWO Subsequent to the recognition of the 1967 borders as Israel’s territorial area, Israel has continued with a policy of settling on lands outside that territorial area.
The law might be considered in light of the factual situation referred to in the two points above:
The Geneva Convention on the Protection of Civilian Persons in Time of War, known as the Fourth Geneva Convention. Article 49 states:
Individual or mass forcible transfers, as well as deportations of protected persons from occupied territory to the territory of the Occupying Power or to that of any other country, occupied or not, are prohibited, regardless of their motive. ... The Occupying Power shall not deport or transfer parts of its own civilian population into the territory it occupies.
The United Nations Charter, Article 51 reads:
Nothing in the present Charter shall impair the inherent right of individual or collective self-defence if an armed attack occurs against a Member of the United Nations, until the Security Council has taken measures necessary to maintain international peace and security. Measures taken by Members in the exercise of this right of self-defence shall be immediately reported to the Security Council and shall not in any way affect the authority and responsibility of the Security Council under the present Charter to take at any time such action as it deems necessary in order to maintain or restore international peace and security.
Comment
If one were to put the matter in basic human terms, forgetting the legality for a moment, maybe in the most humane way I might ask:
If you lived on a stretch of land for some ten generations, or more, and inherited your family home there, I assume that you would have some sense of belonging and ownership in respect of the home and the land upon which your home is built.
If someone forcibly expelled you, then in self-defence you would, I assume, retaliate. The sense of displacement, might, I also assume, lead to a sense of grievance, which if not fairly addressed would extend to violent acts at some stage.
Some personal reflections
As a student at London University, I saw posted one day, a discussion between a Palestinian Professor and a Jewish Professor. Young man that I was then, with dreams of one day being a lawyer, I learned a lesson about civil debate. Both men impressed me with the degree of civility and intellectual clarity with which they addressed the question of the Palestinian/ Israeli conflict.
In summary, both articulated two narratives of the histories of both people and their placement in Palestine/Israel.
I listened keenly, made notes, and reflected deeply on what both men said. At a later stage I read a book written by Abba Eban, and again, the clarity of thought and articulate expressions were impressive.
Having said all that, myself a lawyer, these many years later, with a multitude of cases behind me, I ask a fundamental question, noting both the Israeli – Yom Ha’atzmaut (Independence Day) And The Palestinain - Nakba Day ( "day of the catastrophe")
I ask the question – what does constitute justice for the Palestinian people if not the right of a homeland which they had before 1948?
The Palestinian intellectual, Edward Said, on a PBS interview in the US, made the observation that the only solution was a one state solution. He raised the issue of the demographics of the region. It seems that the state of Israel, based as it is on an assumption of conferred rights derived from ethnicity, must also transfer that de facto assumption into a de jure format, for the continued functioning of the Jewish state. How does one then give equal rights under the law to non-Jews, and over time maintain Jewish statehood if one does not discriminate as regards the electoral rights of those who are non-Jews in the Jewish state, if it is to be a Jewish majority that is to determine the character and nature of “the Jewish state”?
The action of extending occupation beyond the 1967 borders does not find support under international law.
I recall discussions with white South Africans, when the status quo of Apartheid was all they knew.
Resistance, peaceful at first, then of a military nature was the sequence that events unfolded in response to injustice. Any people faced with injustice will over time react. At first the articulation of concern about the wrong, then maybe legal representations about the injustice, then violent responses, then an escalation of the violence if the just redress is not forthcoming. This has been the cycle in the Palestinian/Israeli conflict.
So far as the future of any likely negotiated settlement on the Palestinian/Israeli conflict is concerned, the fact of the US giving blind partisan support to all Israeli actions, does not proffer well for any honest brokerage or for any just peace anytime soon. The recent official US response to the boarding by the IDF of the ships carrying humanitarian aid to Gaza, is sufficiently indicative of why the problem’s intractability is made all the more intractable.
The conscience of the world does speak, when the Swedish dock workers react in protest against the Israeli actions of inflicting collective punishment against the Palestinian people.
Might does not make right and an oppressed and disenfranchised people do have a right to resist injustice.
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This is Courtenay's web site: Global Justice ___________________________________________________________________________________
Photo: http://www.shipsandharbours.com/picture/number11252.asp
