Susan Rice: Investigate War Crimes

by Charles Lenchner · 2009-02-03 13:03:00 UTC
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Obama's envoy to the United Nations Susan Rice gave a major speech last week to the Security Council. Apparently, she expects Israel and the international community to pay serious attention to human rights:

"We expect Israel will meet its international obligations to investigate and we also call upon all members of the international community to refrain from politicizing these important issues," Ambassador Susan Rice said in her debut speech before the UN Security Council.

This is new. There are increasing calls from many directions aimed at highlighting the crimes Israel may have committed in Gaza during the recent invasion.

The International Criminal Court (ICC) prosecutor in The Hague has launched a "preliminary analysis" to establish whether Israel committed war crimes in its offensive in the Gaza Strip"

My contact with a certain Israeli human rights organization tells me that this is amazing. Progressives should be celebrating this radical shift in tone. Note the absence of any comparison between Hamas and al-Qaida, or any reference to the War on Terror (tm).

UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon announced that there would be an official investigation of Israeli attacks on UN schools and other buildings.

Over the next few weeks, we can expect a certain amount of noise caused by George Mitchell as he begins to mediate, with a background hum related to war crimes investigations by various parties. It will be helpful to Mitchell's mission if we can keep up that background hum, so as to keep both Israel AND Hamas on the defensive as perpetrators of crimes, while strengthening those parts of Israeli and Palestinian civil society willing to focus on civil rights and progress towards a peace settlement.

And so we might take a look at this recent effort by the Campaign for Peace and Democracy, No More Blank Check for Israel. It's a petition saying that:

No country should have to face rockets fired at its citizens, and we condemn Hamas's launching of rockets into Israeli civilian areas. But the solution is not raining bombs and missiles down on one of the most densely populated sites in the world, making massive civilian casualties inevitable, and which, apart from its immorality, guarantees only another generation of hatred towards Israel.

The solution -- as the Israeli peace movement, human rights groups, and the United Nations have urged -- is to lift the economic blockade imposed on Gaza and end the Occupation.

I agree. I think Susan Rice and Obama agree as well.

Charles Lenchner
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