NEW YORK (25 October 2021) ¨C A new ¡°imaginative and brave¡± playbook is needed to achieve the globally agreed goal to end the 54-year-old Israeli occupation and secure Palestine¡¯s self-determination, a Ä¢¹½ÊÓÆµ human rights expert told the General Assembly today.
¡°Yesterday¡¯s playbook ¡ has only led to repeated diplomatic?cul-de-sacs, while enabling the patterns of human rights abuses and an endless occupation to continue largely unimpeded,¡± said Michael Lynk, the Ä¢¹½ÊÓÆµ Special Rapporteur for the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territory occupied since 1967. ¡°This has been a political failure of the first order.¡±
Lynk¡¯s annual report to the General Assembly focused on the effectiveness of four of the influential international actors involved in the Middle East process and the supervision of the Israeli occupation: the United States, the European Union, the World Bank and the Quartet (Ä¢¹½ÊÓÆµ, EU, USA and Russia).
¡°By not imposing a meaningful cost on Israel for its endless occupation, the policies of these four actors ¨C inadvertently or not ¨C have been contributing to the consolidation of Israeli control over the occupied Palestinian territory,¡± Lynk said.
¡°The occupation is more embedded than ever. The living conditions of the Palestinians, let alone their political future, have become even more precarious. Israel¡¯s defiance has gone almost completely unchecked. The peace process is moribund, if not comatose, and there is no serious talk about reviving it. We are witnessing not a Palestinian state-in-the-making, but the strengthening of a one state reality of unequal rights.
¡°Recent trends on the ground are getting worse, not better,¡± Lynk warned. ¡°The Israeli settlement population is approaching 700,000 settlers. The network of roads and utilities connecting the settlements to Israel and each other is expanding. Settler attacks against Palestinians are sustaining a coercive environment. Gaza remains under a tight blockade, which deepens its impoverishment and distress. And the amount of violence required by Israel to maintain the occupation contains to rise.¡±
Ending the longest occupation in the modern word, enabling Palestinian self-determination and providing peace, security and a prosperous and shared future for both Israelis and Palestinians requires the international community to adopt the following five principles to achieving the international community¡¯s goals of peace, security and justice:
- Because of the vast asymmetry in power between Israel and the Palestinians, active international intervention is indispensable;
- The framework for fully ending the occupation must employ a rights-based approach, anchored in international law and human rights;
- The end goal must be the realization of Palestinian self-determination;
- Israel has been a bad-faith occupier; and
- The occupation must end with all deliberate speed.
Lynk called on the international community, and its leading actors, to enforce its own rules and resolutions respecting the Israeli occupation. ¡°We cannot continue to tolerate the intolerable: the imposition of a colonial reality in Palestine in the 21st century,¡± the Ä¢¹½ÊÓÆµ expert said.
¡°We need a rights-based approach, but we also need imaginative and brave diplomacy that is willing to ask the honest questions as to how this five-decade-old occupation has turned into a?de facto?annexation, and worse.¡±
ENDS
Country: Israel
Subject: Human rights and international humanitarian law, Occupation, Peace proposals and efforts
Publication Date: 25/10/2021
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