Palestine: Actions by Israeli governments may amount to international crimes-Independent Commission

These Israelis in the audience are there to protest the topic of Palestine. Period. Something personal for me..Israelis look stupid, sound stupid and ask rhetorical questions to waste time and disrupt the meeting.

Speakers: Ms. Navanethem Pillay (Chair), along with members, Mr. Miloon Kothari and Mr. Chris Sidoti.

After presenting the report of the Independent Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem ad in Israel to the General Assembly today (27 Oct), the Chair of the Commission, Navanethem Pillay, told reporters in New York that “the policies and actions by Israeli governments may amount international crimes.”

Pillay, a former UN High Commissioner for Human Rights said these crimes include “transferring, directly or indirectly, part of one’s own civilian population into the occupied territory, and the crime against humanity, of deportation and forcible transfer.”

She said, “some of Israel’s policies and actions in the West Bank are only cosmetically intended to address the so called security concerns, and that security is often used as a pretext by Israel to justify territorial expansion.”

Asked about statements made by Israel’s Ambassador Gilad Erdan, Pillay said, “I am not antisemitic, let me make that clear.

And then to add insult to injury, they said that the report is also antisemitic.

Now, there isn’t a word in this report that can even be interpreted as antisemitic.

So, of course, it’s not new to us that this is always raised as diversion.”

Asked about including apartheid into the scope of the Commission’s investigations, the Chair said, “in this report, we are focusing on the root cause as we see it, which is the occupation.

And of course, part of it is lies in the apartheid and discrimination.

We will be coming to that.

That’s the beauty of this open ended mandate.

It gives us a scope to go in depth on too many issues and apartheid would be one of them.”

Miloon Kothari, a member of the Commission of Inquiry, said, “there’s a number of immediate steps that could be taken,” but added that “in fact, in our report, we say clearly that there are no sign of the occupation, being, you know, either slowed down or reversed, if anything, Israel has taken the decision that it’s that’s how it’s going to be, it’s going to be permanent.”

Responding to a journalist, another member of the Commission, Chris Sidoti, said, “our report in June did refer to the Hamas rocket attacks.

Indiscriminate firing of rockets into civilian population areas is a war crime.

We said that.

And there is no doubt about that, as a fact.

The obligations under international humanitarian law and international human rights law, bind all those exercising some form of state authority in Israel, the West Bank, including East Jerusalem and Gaza, and we will deal with it.”

Earlier today, in her address to the General Assembly’s Third Committee, Pillay said, “after 55 years, Israel is treating the occupation as a permanent fixture, and has for all intents and purposes annexed part of the West Bank, while seeking to hide behind a fiction of temporariness.

This permanence and annexation, including the purported de jure annexation, of East Jerusalem, and the Golan Heights have led this permission to conclude that Israel’s occupation is now unlawful.”

Before her interventions, Erdan gave a statement outside the Security Council referred to the Commission of Inquiry’s report as “a vicious compilation of lies, bashing the only liberal democracy in the Middle East” He said, “this time the UN and its bodies have hit a new low.

The Commission of Inquiry Report being presented is a one-sided, terror-whitewashing, and morally bankrupt document that does nothing, nothing remotely productive for the Palestinians or the region.

In fact, it only makes matters worse, he chose the terrorists of Hamas and Islamic Jihad, the true oppressors of the Palestinian people, that terror pays off.”

Erdan said, “the sole purpose of this report, its authors and the very commission itself is to demonize and delegitimize the one and only Jewish state. You know, there is a word for the racist hatred of Jews, antisemitism.”