The Unmaking of a Nation - Harper's Golden Spike
by C. L. Cook
Canada has again distinguished itself in the United Nations for a singular commitment to the destruction of the Palestinian people. Recall Canada, great paragon of democracy, in the days following the 2006 Hamas electoral victory in remnant Palestine, being first to charge the world stage and declare support for Israel's announced sanctions and divestment campaign against the nascent government.

 

Israel, also "in protest" of vile Hamas, refused to remit Israeli collected taxes owed the legally elected administration. A red-faced Harper then declared to the world, he would not have over "one red cent" of Canadian aid monies to Hamas.

 

Any suspicion Harper's premature coming to Israel's aid was a sign of the then-newly minted prime minister's over-eagerness to prove himself an international player must be dispelled by today's performance at the United Nation's Human Rights Council special meeting on a resolution drafted by the Organization of the Islamic Conference.

 

Canada alone today voted against a resolution calling on the end of the now two-year siege of Gaza and cessation of Israeli military operations.

 

The Strip, already one of the world's most miserable places to live, has recently witnessed some of the worst conditions in the decades-long citizen experience of military atrocity. These past weeks saw ramped up efforts on Israel's part; the results of those being at least 90 Palestinians killed in various IDF attacks.

 

The U.N. Human Rights Council issued condemnations of IDF actions in Gaza and the West Bank, calling for Israel to cease hostilities and allow deliveries of food and fuel. Those calls have been met with derision and veiled threats by Israel's Ambassador to the United Nations in Geneva Yitzhak Levanon, who called the proceedings a "farce," while cautioning cryptically the council could be making the mistakes its predecessor, the now defunct U.N. Human Rights Committee had made.

Gaza's only power plant depends on fuel oil brought in from Israel. Those supplies are too subject to embargo, so lack of electricity is now the single greatest threat to the public health of Gaza's estimated one and half million people. Without power, water, sewage and security suffer and needless death and disease is the distinctly probable outcome of cutting off the juice.

 

Israeli government officials admit, the fuel shipments will be blocked as long as rockets are fired into Israeli-occupied areas. Targeted assassinations, bombings, and rocket attacks against the refugee camps in Gaza are, says the IDF, retaliatory and justified. "Justification" for nightly IDF missions in the West Bank, from whence no rockets emanate is a little more nebulous.

But legally speaking it doesn't matter what Israel's rationale for doing what it does is, when what it does is unlawful. The same is true of any crime, and the motives of those firing rockets into civilian neighbourhoods does not allow that behaviour continue while we debate its case merits either.

 

Yes, there will be a time when arguments are heard and evidence presented; but the criminal activity cannot be allowed to continue in the meantime. Lawfully, "we," the world community has no right to condone its continuation. But Stephen Harper braves rush in and declare Canada will again leap to the aid of the mighty to better their domination.

The Summer of 2006. Lots of Lebanese-Canadians take their kids back to the old country over summer vacations. And that's what the El-Ahkras family of Montreal were doing when a kidnapping and border clash far away quickly escalated into a full aerial assault on the village of their forefathers that July.

 

They had been warned they had half-an-hour to get out before the destruction of the town, Guernica fashion. Great convoys of civilians, crammed in cars crammed with whatever they thought best to take away from an impending natural disaster, made out across the killing grounds. The convoys, driving along the narrow roadways out of the south were sitting ducks.

Watching the carnage in the aftermath, I recalled similar images of those damned Iraqis caught fleeing along the infamous "Highway of Death" at the close of Desert Storm; and I remembered the wreckage of Kosovar Albanian farmer's tractor convoys; women and kids destroyed by the U.S. Air Force.

 

In Lebanon the people were told to flee immediately, and were then cooly destroyed from the air. The entire El-Ahkras family were killed that way, and what did their prime minister, Stephen Harper have to say to Israel about it?

 

What did the United Nations do? More than a thousand dead, and an entire region of a country littered with millions of unexploded cluster bombs that continue killing and maiming indiscriminately, a country's infrastructure in ruin, and what reaction? Nothing? Next to it.

So, shall we now then watch the final extirpation of Palestine to starvation behind an Israeli wall none dare assail? Or, perhaps enjoin the howling against the victims as the corporate media/war complex does?

 

No, I doubt we'll see what's happening. Which is of course why the Canadian government representatives are so quick now to assert to Egypt's perennial president Mubarek it is his duty to "un-tear down the wall" so dramatically breached this week; we wouldn't want more pictures of the streaming hoards of desperate Palestinian housewives, clambering over twisted fencing while wrestling with bags of essentials unavailable at home. Canada's leader would have the lid put back in place, the sooner the better it seems.

Of the continuing blockade, Canada's representative to the Council, Terry Cormier expressed his concern about the Islamic Conference backed resolution, saying:

• "Unfortunately, neither this resolution nor the current session addressed the role of both parties. It was regretful that the current draft resolution did not condemn the rocket attacks on Israeli civilians."

I'm certain M. Cormier is aware of the immense asymmetry of the Israel/Palestine conflict. While it's true the Kassam and other rocket attacks have killed and wounded civilians and soldiers in Israel, dismissing the petition out of hand because it only addresses Israeli state crime does not dismiss the fact of Israel's continuing criminality.

 

The panel could, and likely has, condemned the actions of religious factions like al Qaida, and more organized non-state entities like Hezbollah, and Hamas irregulars; but they can't make effective resolutions to curb the activities of a cell of rocket makers in a basement somewhere in Gaza.

 

Maybe the council's motion was prioritizing the greater actor, before next addressing the lesser, who knows? But the crime is fact and must be stopped in any event. What M. Cormier and Canada's prime minister Harper are doing is abetting at best, and at worst it's a grotesque acquiescence to Real Politik that would allow a mass human catastrophe in Gaza.

At the end of the day; 30 of the 47 nation participants on the council voted in favour of releasing a statement calling on Israel to stop military operations in and over Gaza, and to open border checkpoints to allow food, fuel, and medicine.

 

Speaking for Israel, Ambassador Levanon called the council a "circus," while UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon was less than supportive, saying;

• "I appreciate that the council is looking in depth into this particular situation. And it is rightly doing so. I would also appreciate it if the council will be looking with the same level of attention and urgency at all other matters around the world. There are still many areas where human rights are abused and not properly protected."

And Canada staked out its position as the one and only country to vote "No" to allowing a starved and embattled people due process, and would deny them the relief from the entirely created disaster that is Gaza a doorway open to the world could provide.  

 


[Mike Whitney has an interesting take on the "spontaneous" breach in Egypt's border fence with Gaza here.]
 

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