(Author's note: This was first published in the March 14 edition of The Jewish State.)
With the new report by Special Rapporteur John Dugard, it can no longer suffice to say that the United Nations has egg on its face, for egg has simply become the world body's permanent visage.
Dugard is due to present his new report "on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories occupied since 1967" to the UN Human Rights Council. In the section titled "Human rights in the West Bank and Jerusalem," Dugard reveals "the instruments that most seriously violate human rights" by Israel.
Among them, tellingly, is "the Judaization of Jerusalem."
Dugard, a South African lawyer, is responsible for investigating only Israel's potential human rights violations for the UNHRC, and has prepared his verdict, in the form of a 25-page report, for the council's first regular session of 2008.
The report is replete with the same types of factual errors, misrepresentations, alarmingly obvious bias, and preposterously uneducated contentions that we have all come to expect from Dugard and his employers, all written in a Narcissus-inspired third-person, with Dugard only and always referring to himself as "the Special Rapporteur."
But the kind of venomous anti-Semitism jubilantly offered to us on page 13 reveals that Dugard has stooped so low he would need an elevator to reach the Palestinians' weapons smuggling tunnels whose existence he so dutifully ignores.
Dugard was picked for this mission in part because of his South African residence, making him a perfect choice to level "apartheid" charges at the Jewish state. But that should be, for him, a double-edged sword; as a white South African he should also understand the sensitivity inherent in the way descriptions of race, religion, and nationality are couched. Indeed, he probably does.
So would Dugard dare call Zimbabwean dictator Robert Mugabe's policy of confiscating land from white owners "the blackification of Zimbabwe"? Would we hear him whine about the ongoing "Islamization" of Mecca or London? How about "the Orientalizing" of public universities?
Of course not, with good reason; such terms are racist, hateful, hurtful, discriminatory, and wildly inappropriate.
And "the Judaization" of anything belongs in that same category. As an indication of the phrase's nefarious intent, it was used by Adolf Hitler after he became Fuhrer of Germany's National Socialist Party.
"Internationalization today means only Judaization," Hitler told an audience in September 1922. "We in Germany have come to this: that a 60-million people sees its destiny to lie at the will of a few dozen Jewish bankers. This was possible only because our civilization had first been Judaized.... Eisner said in 1918 that we had no right to demand the return of our prisoners -- he was only saying openly what all Jews were thinking. People who so think must feel how life tastes in a concentration camp."
Yasser Arafat used the term in 1998 as he threatened to launch what would soon be known as the Second Intifada.
"The Palestinian Authority has taken steps to actively struggle against the Israeli Judaization scheme.... The Palestinian Authority is ready to restart the intifada in order to stop the assault on the Arab character of Jerusalem," Arafat told the Algerian newspaper Sawt al-Ahrar on Aug. 1, 1998. A year earlier, Arafat had delivered a similar warning to then-Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu.
The term is also a favorite of Sheikh Ra'ad Salah, the leader of the northern branch of the Islamic Movement, who routinely calls for anti-Jewish riots in Israel and issues death threats to Israeli public officials, as he did to then-Deputy Prime Minister Avigdor Lieberman in November 2006. Salah also uses the term as a way to de-legitimize Israel and the Jews: "The claims of the Jews are big lies and they have no right to any speck of dust here," he said on March 10.
That's quite a legacy; from Hitler's prewar rhetoric, to Arafat's pre-intifada warning, to Sheikh Salah's death threats, to Dugard's rant. That means that the newest member of this club is also a member of the United Nations, which is something the world should watch very carefully.
Dugard's treatment of terrorism is also characteristic. In the report, he uses the word "terrorism" interchangeably with "terrorize," which enables him to equate Israeli actions, such as "sonic booms," with actual violence, like Palestinian "suicide bombs and Qassam rockets" -- all of which "must be condemned."
And although al-Qaeda and its Iranian associates have established themselves in Gaza, Dugard goes to great lengths to insist that Palestinian terrorism -- often enabled and sometimes carried out by al-Qaeda -- is quite different from terrorism enabled or carried out by, say, al-Qaeda.
"Common sense, however, dictates that a distinction must be drawn between acts of mindless terror, such as acts committed by al-Qaeda, and acts committed in the course of a war of national liberation against colonialism, apartheid, or military occupation," Dugard states in his report. "While such acts cannot be justified, they must be understood as being a painful but inevitable consequence of colonialism, apartheid, or occupation."
Ah, "common sense." Something tells me Israelis won't sleep any better knowing that the murderous rockets landing daily on Sderot, the recent deadly suicide bombing attack in Dimona, and the March 6 massacre of eight yeshiva students in Jerusalem weren't "mindless," but, rather, "inevitable."
But Dugard clears the whole mess up when he divulges "the root cause of Palestinian violence -- the occupation."
It's a Chico Marx "Who you gonna believe, me or your own eyes?" moment for Dugard. Palestinian violence is taking place because of the Israeli "occupation," which makes the Arabs in the West Bank and Gaza quite prescient: the Arabs who massacred Jews in Hebron in 1929 did so because they saw the "occupation" coming. Ditto for the 3,000 fedayeen attacks in the year 1952 alone.
But maybe Dugard is referring to acts of violence in the Negev, where Sderot and Ashkelon are regular targets of Gaza-based terrorists. He must be forgetting the March 1954 ambush by terrorists of a bus traveling from Eilat to Tel Aviv, during which the terrorists shot every passenger one by one.
Or a year later, when terrorists attacked a Jewish wedding in the Negev town of Patish.
The list of those attacks is quite long, so perhaps Dugard is just referring to attacks around the Gaza border area. But then he'd have to exclude the 1957 murder of two Israeli civilians by Gazan terrorists at Nir Yitzhak.
No, that list is unfortunately too long to disregard as well, so he must be referring only to towns that are regularly directly attacked by Palestinians today. But that can't be, either, because then he'd have to ignore the 1956 murder of a woman in Ashkelon who was killed when terrorists threw hand grenades into her home.
Maybe he means terrorist attacks that are simply self-defense measures on Arab land. But then he'd have to explain why Arabs in Gaza killed or wounded several Israeli civilians by planting landmines on the Israeli side of the Gazan border in 1957.
I wonder what he thinks about all the Fatah terrorist attacks -- explicitly "Palestinian," as part of the PLO -- that began in 1965, two years before any "occupation."
Of course this is just a sampling, but the point is that Dugard exposes himself and the U.N. He decries the Road Map, because it forces Palestinians to swear off violence -- something he doesn't think should be a precondition for statehood. He claims Israel is still occupying Gaza thanks to "technological developments."
He blames Israel for conditions that "could produce chaos in the Gazan monetary system"; for the fact that Gaza's schoolchildren "lag behind refugee children elsewhere"; for a system of "road apartheid"; for obstructing Palestinian freedom of movement with "earth mounds"; for threatening "the social fabric of [Palestinian] society"; and for creating an ominous-sounding "permit regime."
He explains: "houses and structures may not be built without permits. The bureaucratic procedures for obtaining permits are cumbersome and in practice permits are rarely granted. As a result, Palestinians are frequently compelled to build homes without permits."
He complains that Israel's release of 779 prisoners was "such a small number of prisoners" so as to render the gesture meaningless. He then, inexplicably, mentions that there was a riot at Ketziot prison that resulted in one death and 250 injuries -- presumably, by Dugard's logic, a sure sign that these prisoners should be released into society.
All this buildup would certainly put a substantial amount of pressure on Dugard to provide a spectacular grand finale of his report. He does not disappoint.
Most American and European leaders, and certainly many Israelis and Palestinians, would respond in similar fashion if asked what a final status agreement would look like. They would probably describe it as the creation of a Palestinian state in Gaza and the West Bank, with territory swaps to include major Jewish enclaves in Israel and major Arab enclaves in Palestine.
Such an agreement, however, would be illegal according to Dugard.
He states: "any agreement between the Palestinian authorities and the Israeli Government that recognizes settlements within the occupied Palestinian territory, or accepts the annexation by Israel of Palestinian land within the wall, will violate the Fourth Geneva Convention."
So, according to Dugard's interpretation of the Geneva Conventions, a non-nation that's not a signatory to the Conventions is not at liberty to enter into a formal agreement if its new borders would not conform to Dugard's interpretation of an agreement it never entered into.
I guess it's good for the Palestinians that, ironically, when the PLO smugly tried to volunteer to follow some cherry-picked parts of the Geneva Conventions in 1989, the PLO and the all the signatories received a response from the Swiss Federal Council stating that it had no idea what kind of relevance or legality the PLO's letter had, "due to the uncertainty within the international community as to the existence or non-existence of a State of Palestine."
I'm sure John Dugard would be happy to explain it to them.
