At
the closing press conference of the New York Russell Tribunal on Palestine, 95-year-old
Stephane Hessel, last surviving co-author of the Universal Declaration of Human
Rights, exhorted the media to “BE BRAVE!”
So: were the media listening? Unfortunately, as far
as the mainstream newspapers are concerned, the response is a predictable
negative. The only mainstream “listener” was Sohrab
Amari, an assistant books editor at the Wall Street
Journal (if a paper so far to the right can truly be describes as
“mainstream”). However, he only turned up on the first day and clearly was
listening with only one ear.
Typically, even the headline of this article was
inaccurate: Israel on Trial in New York.
As far as the Tribunal is concerned, Israel was condemned according to due
process at the International
Court of Justice in The Hague in July 2004. It has not
been in the dock at any session of the RToP, which has concentrated on the
question of international complicity with Israel’s crimes. Hence Amari’s
whinges that “there was no one to speak for the defendant, the world’s sole
Jewish state” and that “the verdict was never in doubt” were deliberately
beside the point.
In fact it appears that jury member Roger Waters
informed Amari that the RToP “is a people’s tribunal and we do invite the other
side to attend.” Amari wonders parenthetically “Why would the Israelis have
declined such an invitation”? However, at the very start of the event Pierre
Galand informed the audience that not alone had Israel declined to attend, but
that neither of the actual defendants – the US government and the UN – had even
responded to the Tribunal’s invitation to send representatives.
According to the self-styled “news dissector” Danny
Schechter, who gives a largely fair account of the event, Amari
repeatedly complained to him that “‘It’s so one sided…’” Schechter comments:
“That was strange coming from a member of the Journal’s Opinion page that is
known for being… as one-sided as they come.”
Schechter himself, however, writing for the
informative but erratic website Global Research,
gave a rather misleading impression of the atmosphere at the Tribunal: “the
whole event tended to be passionless, academic and legalistic. There were long
lectures on legal precedents that the lawyers in the room might have
appreciated but put some people around me to sleep.”
Certainly I noticed nobody sleeping, and if anybody
was so inclined there was nothing to stop them from stepping into the foyer and
sampling some of the delicious and punch-packing Ethiopian coffee laid on
gratis for participants. And how could a legal tribunal, even a civil one, be
anything other than “academic and legalistic”? My own feeling, and one that was
shared by everyone whom I met, was that the atmosphere was enthusiastic and,
indeed, passionate.
However, Schechter dealt convincingly with an issue
that had puzzled (and, to be honest, disappointed) me: the total absence of
Zionist protestors outside the Cooper Union. Here’s Schechter’s take:
[At
the Capetown session of the RToP] South African supporters of Israel mounted an
angry protest that drew major media attention. Perhaps that’s why the
often vociferous pro-Israel lobby in New York stayed away this time, hoping the
Tribunal and its findings would be ignored…
Another considered account of the Tribunal that
nonetheless made what I consider to be unjust and rather gratuitous criticisms
came from Christopher
Federici, who contributed it to the Palestine Chronicle. Referring to the testimony from Vera
Gowlland-Debbas, former Rapporteur for the UNCHR,
Federici writes:
The sobering inference from this
testimony is that the existing international legal framework is insufficient in
addressing the Israeli occupation, as the establishment dominated by American
and European elite [sic] is clearly disinclined to act upon its own mandate. Mired in
cynicism, the entire mission of the Tribunal appeared futile with its strict
emphasis on discussing a power structure that most speakers acknowledged
provides little recourse for Palestinians.
Why “mired in cynicism”? Surely the cynicism is
elsewhere, and surely it was part of the brief for the RToP to ascertain the
insufficiency of the existing international legal framework and to establish
that it “provides little recourse for Palestinians”? But there’s more:
Ultimately, the Tribunal appeared
conflicted by stark contrasts between the desire to project a sense of
procedural legality and the inescapable underpinnings of activism that drove
the very desire to organize. This conflict, it could be argued, sullied the
effectiveness of either initiative.
Where is the conflict? That there is a complex dialectic
between the respective underpinnings of procedural legality on the one hand and
activism on the other is self-evident, not least to international lawyers and
activists, and is seen by most of them (in my opinion and experience) as a
productive factor. I met nobody in New York who felt "sullied", but then I didn't meet Mr Federici.
Similar language was used in a
still more damaging article by Abraham
Greenhouse, who blogs at the widely respected website Electronic Intifada to which I am myself
an occasional contributor.
While
the “witnesses” were mainly international law experts at home in the world of
inter-governmental bodies and narrowly-defined protocols for advancing an
action, the majority of attendees… were
oriented toward grassroots activism operating largely outside of such channels.
This particular contradiction resonated throughout the entire event.
Once again, where
Greenhouse sees a contradiction I see a dialectic. He seems to see “grassroots
activists” as brawny doers indifferent to theoretical refinements, as opposed
to narrow specialists with their heads in the law-books, thereby grossly caricaturing both. His claim that
the
very experts explaining the myriad ways in which the United Nations and all its
organs were so thoroughly broken had yet to relinquish the idea that these
remained the most viable mechanisms for achieving justice for Palestinians
bears no relation to
the strong critiques of the UN voiced by, among others, Vera Gowlland-Debbas,
Phyllis Bennis, or Peter Jansen. Furthermore, the Tribunal's conclusion that the UN is itself in violation of international law in its failure to implement its resolutions on Israel is surely radical and important. Greenhouse's huffy assertion that
Grassroots
Palestinian activists and their allies are no longer accustomed to such a
dismal view of their own agency
belies the fact that
no such “dismal view” was forthcoming (except perhaps from the increasingly
dismal Noam Chomsky), the vitality of civil society activism having been emphasised
by speaker after speaker.
In short the “futility of relying on [the] UN”
mentioned in the title of Greenhouse’s piece and posited by him as a critique
of the RToP could, on the contrary, have served as a subtitle for the Tribunal
itself. Greenhouse reserves his most pompous pronouncements for the end of his
article:
I’m less concerned about finding the perfect
descriptor[sic] for Israel’s ongoing assault on the lives and rights of
Palestinians than I am about fighting it. The terms that matter most to me
begin with B, D, and S.
By Jove, the man thinks he has invented the wheel! Greenhouse seems to be implying that none of
the speakers at the Cooper Union share his heroic desire to fight for
Palestinian rights. But not alone was BDS advocated by many these speakers, it was also at the heart of the three previous
sessions – I can well remember the collective intake of breath when it was
advocated, against all expectations, in the conclusions of the jury at the
end of the first (Barcelona) session. Indeed the advocacy of BDS by such a
venerable institution may be instanced as one of the many refutations of Norman
Finkelstein’s deplorable thesis that BDS is a “cult”!
Nobody would suggest that Palestinian rights activists
should refrain from critique of the Russell Tribunal out of some misplaced
sense of loyalty, and in the course of these blogs I’ve made one or two
criticisms of my own. Nonetheless, many of the criticisms in “progressive” outlets
are less than comradely; they give the impression that certain vain activists
feel that a bunch of toffee-nosed intellectuals is attempting to trespass on
their territory.
Ultimately, the RToP is simply another tool in the
struggle for Palestinian rights, which is simultaneously a struggle for a
better world order. We can never have too many such tools.
*
As I was writing this piece, I discovered that RToP
coordinator Frank Barat had published his
own response to some of these criticisms. I’m proud to end my own account
of the New York session with Frank’s words:
So
don't get me wrong, criticism is important, actually crucial. Receiving feedback
from activists about the tribunal's work is essential. No one is perfect. We
strive on constructive criticism. But please be fair.
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