[A-List] Paul Foot on Palestine, UN

["Michael Keaney" <michael.keaney@xxxxxx>]

...and check out the paragraph at the bottom with the beautiful rhetorical
question: "How can a deeply reactionary, privatising, xenophobic party
possibly hope to oppose a deeply reactionary, privatising, xenophobic
government?"


Still waiting for No 242

Paul Foot
Wednesday November 13, 2002
The Guardian

Triumphant photographs in the newspapers showing all 15 members of the UN
security council voting unanimously for the US-UK resolution on Iraq
reminded me of a similar picture that dominated my parents' home for a
decade. My father, Hugh Foot, later Lord Caradon, was for most of his life a
colonial servant. He helped to haul down the Union Jack in Nigeria, where he
was chief secretary, and in Jamaica and Cyprus, where he was governor. By
far his proudest achievement was as UK representative to the UN in 1967 when
he managed, after five months of delicate and dedicated negotiation, to
persuade all 15 members of the security council to vote for resolution 242.
He had the photograph of the vote framed, and it sat proudly on his desk
until he died in 1990.

Resolution 242 referred to the seizure and occupation in the 1967 six-day
war by Israeli military forces of lots of other countries' land inhabited in
the main by Palestinians. Resolution 242 called for the "withdrawal of
Israel's armed forces from territories occupied in the recent conflict". The
terms of the resolution have been hotly debated ever since. Clever
pro-Israeli lawyers observe that the word "all" does not appear in the text
before the words "territories occupied"; and that therefore the resolution
leaves it open to Israeli forces to withdraw only from "some", not all, of
the occupied territories. So I was very glad to read an article in last
month's International and Comparative Law Quarterly by the London solicitor
John McHugo. He meticulously and comprehensively demolishes what he calls
"the rightwing interpretation" of the resolution. He cites as an example a
notice in a park that "dogs must be kept on a lead", and asks whether this
could be taken to mean "some dogs must be kept on a lead", or whether it
means what it says - "all dogs must be kept on a lead". He interprets 242 in
the context of its preamble that emphasises the "inadmissibility of the
acquisition of territory by war". After an analysis of the contributions to
the UN debate on the resolution, including my father's, he concludes that
the resolution meant what it said: that Israeli forces should be withdrawn
from the territories they occupied in the six-day war: the West Bank of
Jordan, the Golan heights and a large part of Jerusalem.

How does the reaction to resolution 242 compare with the one passed last
week on Iraq? The Iraq resolution has been pursued with furious haste.
Weapons inspectors are expected in Iraq in a matter of days, and if there is
the slightest even momentary hesitation on behalf of the Iraqi government,
everyone assumes that war will follow. Resolution 242, on the other hand,
has been passed for 35 years. For all that time it has been contemptuously
ignored by the Israeli government. What conclusion can we draw from this
comparison?

Some international lawyers argue that the Iraq resolution is passed under
chapter VII of the UN charter and therefore requires prompt action, while
resolution 242 does not. But why not? Why is the demand for Israeli
withdrawal not backed up with a threat of force? As President Bush himself
put it in his speech to the UN general assembly on September 12: "Are
security council resolutions to be honoured or cast aside without
consequence?" The real argument behind the double standard seems to be this:
unanimous UN resolutions assisting US oil imperialism will be enforced with
the most ruthless military rigour, while unanimous UN resolutions directed
against states friendly to the US will be ignored. Whether that is what the
founders of the UN had in mind is not clear. What is clear is that whatever
happens in Iraq, Palestine is still the issue.

· I waded, astonished, through the mountains of media space devoted last
week to the crisis in the Conservative party. Almost all of it deals with
personalities - who would make the best Tory leader, poor wooden Iain Duncan
Smith, former wild man Michael Portillo or the tobacco king Ken Clarke?

Hardly anyone seems to have noticed the real reason for the Tory panic: the
fact that the party is the official opposition of what is now
indistinguishable from a Tory government. Hardly a day goes by without a
government minister borrowing, as though he or she had invented it, a former
Tory policy. Indeed, on a number of issues such as tuition fees for further
education students or the privatisation of the tube or air traffic control
or a new set of barracks for asylum seekers, New Labour ministers have gone
further than their Tory predecessors ever dared to tread. How can a deeply
reactionary, privatising, xenophobic party possibly hope to oppose a deeply
reactionary, privatising, xenophobic government?