The Responsibility to Protect Israel's Citizens

by C. L. Cook
In the winter of 2001, while the ruins of the World Trade Center still smoldered in New York City, the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty, adjunct to the United Nations and chaired by Canada, issued a controversial position paper that came to be known as 'The Responsibility to Protect.'

 

The R2P is a doctrine that seeks to "justify" third party interventions within sovereign states that are deemed "failed," that is to say the national government no longer possesses either the will or ability to safeguard the basic rights of the citizenry.

In the post-9/11 world, R2P as a philosophy has been embraced by the United States and its allies as a conveniently placed stepping-stone towards the "regime change" brought to Iraq in 2003, and later attempted by the Israeli Defense Force in Lebanon in 2006. It has also been suggested as a necessary means to protect the citizenry of Zimbabwe and the Sudan, and might be, in a stretch, used to legitimize the ongoing U.S.-assisted overthrow of the Islamic Courts in Somalia.

 

In fact, in its short life on the diplomatic radar screen R2P has exclusively referred to the rescue of "developing" state nationals, but as crises follow crises in "first" world nations, it may be time to challenge its limited definition of "failure" and what it means to successfully protect the rights and safety of a nation's polity.

Next month Israel will celebrate its 60th anniversary as a declared state. The nation born of blood and tears from the first is today, despite having grown, (thanks to massive financial and technological assistance by America) the fourth largest military establishment in the world, still unable to guarantee the safety of its citizens.

 

Despite killing and imprisoning thousands of native Palestinians, despite having defended and launched wars against all its neighbours, and despite having erected walls, making of Gaza the world's largest internment camp for its 1.5 million people, rockets are still launched into Israeli-claimed territory threatening the life and limb of the citizens there. The only conclusion possible is: Israel's sixty years of governance is a procession of failure, with no success in sight.

 

Determined almost entirely to a military solution to Palestinian resistance to dispossession, and Hizbullah's stubborn refusal to allow expansion of Israeli control into the southern reaches of Lebanon, the Israeli's have failed to achieve security; this much is obvious to any impartial observer.

 

But what of Israel's other national failings? 

 
Israel's "right to exist" is a red-button issue. It's often used as a rhetorical device to deflect attacks by opponents of Israeli government abuses of human rights in Palestine. What's never asked is:

• "Can Israel exist within the accepted definition of what a nation is? Can Israel responsibly protect its citizens? Can Israel manage the neighbourliness expected, and obligatory to every nation, (the U. S. A. naturally excepted)?"

 

Israel is an exceptional country in a number of ways: It has no defined borders; controls the largest, and only nuclear armed military in the Middle East; enjoys magnificent largess from the United States, amounting to billions of dollars in aid and military assistance; and, is protected diplomatically by the strength of U.S. dominance at the United Nations.

 

While Egypt and Colombia too rake in billions annually from the U.S. treasury, only Israel can claim American aegis in the Security Council, repeatedly blunting resolutions against its systemic criminality, as practiced against the Palestinian people and other neighbours.

Questioning the viability of both the Israeli and American states, former Reagan assistant secretary of the treasury, Paul Craig Roberts concludes Israel is indeed a failed state, observing:

• "Israel allegedly is a democracy, but it is controlled by a minority of Zionist zealots who commit atrocities against Palestinians in order to provoke terrorist acts that are then used to perpetuate the right-wing's hold on political power. Israel has perfected blowback as a tool of political control. The Israeli state relies entirely on coercion and has no diplomacy. It stands isolated in the world except for the US, which sustains Israel's existence with money, military weapons, and the US veto in the United Nations. Israel survives on life support from the US. A state that cannot exist without outside support is a failed state."

In the age of globalization, where interdependencies have been fostered through both diplomacy and the bayonet, Roberts' assertion of complete independence as benchmark for a nation's "success" may be putting too fine a point on an otherwise cogent argument: Are Israel's serial failures, when it comes to: the Palestinian right to exist; achieving peaceful coexistence with its neighbours; and, security for Israel's citizens "failures" by design?

If Roberts is right, Israel's succession of governments has never had the intention to "succeed" at nationhood as normally understood and that situation is unchanged, then it must be assumed Israel will never succeed in either protecting the security of its citizens, or guaranteeing the human rights of Palestinians, or making a lasting peace with its neighbours.

 

Israel will be a failed state, immutable and bringing death and suffering to all in its sphere, forever.

When the commissioners at the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty (ICISS) laid out their findings on "The Responsibility to Protect" they acknowledged their findings were sure to be controversial, but the need for humanitarian action must take precedence over sovereign claims by rights abusers. In conclusion, they write:

 

• "The report which we now present has been unanimously agreed by the twelve Commissioners. Its central theme, reflected in the title, is "The Responsibility to Protect", the idea that sovereign states have a responsibility to protect their own citizens from avoidable catastrophe - from mass murder and rape, from starvation - but that when they are unwilling or unable to do so, that responsibility must be borne by the broader community of states. The nature and dimensions of that responsibility are argued out, as are all the questions that must be answered about who should exercise it, under whose authority, and when, where and how. We hope very much that the report will break new ground in a way that helps generate a new international consensus on these issues. It is desperately needed."

Today, Palestinians will continue to suffer in Gaza, and more will die at the hands of the Israeli Defense Force. Tomorrow, rockets will be fired and Israelis will be put at risk.

 

The latest Israeli policy, one that must fail if humanity is to endure, would starve Gazans of food, medicine, and the fuel needed to run vehicles and the single surviving electrical generating facility for a million and a half Palestinians.

 

It is an "avoidable catastrophe," but will the U.N. heed the ICISS report and move to take from failed Israel the responsibility to protect both its citizens and the others the regime daily victimizes?
 

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