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JESSICA DESVARIEUX: Welcome to The Real News Network. I'm Jessica Desvarieux in Baltimore.
This week was a big week for the United States and the UN. And here to discuss all this is
Vijay Prashad. Vijay Prashad is a professor of international studies at Trinity College
in Hartford, Connecticut. His latest books include Uncle Swami: South Asians in America
and Arab Spring, Libyan Winter. And he writes regularly for Frontline magazine and CounterPunch.
Thank you for joining us, Vijay.
VIJAY PRASHAD: Pleasure. Thanks a lot.
DESVARIEUX: So, Vijay, tell us a little bit about the Security Council meeting that happened
on November 14.
PRASHAD: Well, November 14, in the evening, the Moroccans and the Egyptians called for
an emergency Security Council meeting to discuss the Israeli attack on Gaza. I mean, you know,
the question of Gaza has been a simmering one. There've been a series of UN discussions
not only on Gaza but on Israel's settlement policy in the West Bank. Very recently, on
November 6, there was an important meeting where the UN cautioned Israel for what it
called a flagrant violation of the agriculture in the West Bank. You know, Israel had begun
this policy and really, you know, started again this policy of uprooting olive trees,
and this was at a time of the olive harvest. So the UN has been consistently trying to
raise questions about Israeli action in the occupied territories and Gaza.
You know, these areas are under Israeli occupation. There is no sovereign nation of Palestine.
There is no sovereign Gaza. So when the attack took place on Gaza, the attack did not take
place of one country fighting another; it was an occupying power using disproportionate
force against a place which it has held under occupation since 1967.
In that context, the Egyptians, Moroccans, and others called for an emergency session.
At the emergency session, the various countries, the 15 members of the council at this time,
all said that something must be done. The president of the council at this point is
the UN permanent representative from India, Hardeep Singh Puri, and after the meeting,
he said there was unanimity in the council, that something had to be done, that the situation
was atrocious.
The problem was that there was no, as it were, agreement on what should go forward, and therefore
the council was paralyzed. In other words, most of the 15 members of the council at this
time said that Israel should be condemned for the use of disproportionate force, not
only, you know, the extrajudicial assassination of Hamas members and suchlike, but also the
bombing of, say, water towers. You know, what does a water tower outside Khan Yunis have
to do with the firing of rockets from Gaza into Israel? Why was a water tower targeted?
So these were the kind of questions they raise.
But the United States blocked any attempt at crafting a resolution. And Ambassador Susan
Rice made it very clear that the real culprit here was not the Israeli government, but Hamas.
And this was a curious thing, because she spoke of the conflict as if it was a conflict
between two governments, two sovereign governments, and therefore the United Nations has to come
in and condemn both governments. You know, she wanted a kind of proportionality in condemnation,
even though the war is a fundamentally disproportionate war. And that's what the Egyptians had raised.
What Susan Rice was following is a doctrine laid out in 2002 which is called the Negroponte
doctrine. This is after the ambassador John Negroponte, who, when he was at the UN, made
it very clear that the United States will always block in the UN various forms of the
UN--the United States will always block any criticism of Israel. You know, that is known
as the Negroponte doctrine. And since 2002, in fact predating 2002, this has been precisely
what the United States has done.
Any time there has been an attempt to censure Israel, whether it was for the invasion of
Lebanon in 2006, Operation Cast Lead against Gaza in 2009, or on November 14 against the
so-called Operation Pillar of Defense or Pillar of Cloud, however you translate the Hebrew,
at each of these moments, it's been the United States that's blocked any attempt to have
a serious discussion about Israeli occupation of Palestinian lands and of the kind of violence
utilized, you know, the F-16s, Apache helicopters, you know, highly disproportionate violence,
because when they talk about Palestinian rockets, what they're talking about is cylindrical
tubes fired by fertilizer, where the actual bomb material is a combination of TNT and
urea, which is, again, fertilizer. This doesn't compare at all to the use of F-16 bombers,
you know, offshore naval crafts that bomb Gaza, and the use of Apache helicopters.
The essence of the UN Security Council meeting was that it was paralysis. One has to remember
that it was Ambassador Susan Rice who was highly moralistic when the Russians and the
Chinese blocked a resolution in February of this year against the Syrian government, and
she said that any blood that is spilled henceforth in Syria will be on the hands of the Chinese
and Russians. If we follow Susan Rice's own standard, one should then say that any blood
spilled in Gaza after November 4 is on the hands of the United States government. And
I think that is a very harsh indictment, using her own standard against herself.
DESVARIEUX: Vijay, what do you make of the media's portrayal of this Hamas leader? They're
calling him a military commander, Ahmed al-Jaabari. What are you hearing from other sources outside
of the United States?
PRASHAD: There is no question that Jaabari was the head of the military wing of Hamas.
That is without question. What was very interesting was on November 15 there was a frontpage story
in Haaretz newspaper, a liberal newspaper published in Israel, which suggested that
just a few hours before Mr. Jaabari was assassinated, he had received the most recent draft of a
negotiating document, you know, which suggests that Hamas and the Israeli government or sections
in the Israeli government had been conducting back-channel negotiations about a peace agreement.
You know, this is the first I had ever heard of such a back-channel negotiation, and indeed
it's quite a stunning, you know, development. If indeed Mr. Jaabari was in the middle of
conducting some kind of backdoor peace agreement and yet he was targeted by the Israeli state,
what does this tell us about the seriousness at this time of the Israeli government to
make a peace agreement with Hamas? It's also, I think, important to remember that in 2006,
when Hamas won the election in the Gaza section of the Palestinian territories, when they
won the election, the leader of Hamas wrote a letter to George W. Bush saying that he
would be ready to have a truce with Israel if Israel released itself, returned to the
1967 borders.
And also there was some other questions that he raised in that letter. That letter, which
was simply the opening of a negotiation, went unanswered. The Bush administration essentially
threw it in the bin and said Hamas is a terrorist organization. So these developments, that
unanswered letter from 2006, if indeed it was the case that Jaabari was involved in
some kind of negotiation, you know, the assassination of Jaabari, these put in serious doubt the
question of, you know, whether the United States, as a so-called honest broker, or Israel
are actually very much engaged with a kind of peace agenda. Or does this reveal to us
that they are not actually interested in a peace agreement with the Palestinian people,
but would like to continue this kind of occupation where they change the facts on the ground,
suffocate Gaza, and in the end somehow miraculously make the problem of the Palestinians disappear?
DESVARIEUX: We'll certainly be tracking this story here on The Real News. Thank you, Vijay,
for joining us.
PRASHAD: Thanks a lot.
DESVARIEUX: And thank you for joining us on The Real News Network.