Editor’s note: This Thursday night in New York we’re going to be holding an event with a smashing array of speakers, from Naomi Klein to Laura Flanders to Trudie Styler to Noura Erakat to Desmond Travers. (Click on the image above to go buy a ticket.) And also: our co-editor on the Goldstone Report book, Lizzy Ratner, whose genuineness and presence have stirred audiences during our book launch. Last Friday Ratner spoke about the Goldstone Report at the United Nations, to a gathering hosted by the Egyptian Mission and also by the Palestinian observer mission. Here are some of her remarks:
I want to thank the Permanent Observer Mission of Palestine for hosting us. We are so honored to be here today and I have to say that I look forward to the day with great anticipation when we are hosted in the Permanent Mission of Palestine, in your own home here at the United Nations. I can’t wait for that moment. And I want to thank the Egyptian mission. It’s an important reminder today– to remember, thanks to the people of Egypt, what is possible when so much seems impossible. When we talk about a situation that’s enormously challenging and depressing and distressing, it’s important to keep this vision of possibility in front of us.
And finally I want to just acknowledge what yesterday was. Israel celebrated it as its Independence Day. For the people of Palestine it marks the Nakba, a day marking 63 years of occupation and expulsion, 63 years of attempting to reclaim dignity and rights. As we talk about the Goldstone Report today, we have to keep that in mind, particularly since so many of the people who lost their homes 63 years ago wound up as refugees in Gaza, which of course was subject to terror and bombardment in 22 days in December 2008 and January of 2009. Many of those people were refugees from the creation of the state of Israel 63 years ago.
[Ratner then read the testimony of Khaled Abd Rabbo about the killings of his three daughters, described here at paragraphs 770 on.]
I read that testimony not to traumatize people and not to try to bludgeon people but to put the suffering of victims, of real people, at the foreground. Today we’re talking about a legal document but this document tells the story of and is based on the suffering of real people, people who do not have justice yet. And for me as a journalist the suffering of civilians during Operation Cast Lead, and the stories throughout the Goldstone Report–that is the reason that the Goldstone Report is so important and that we wanted to create this book and put it out there to the world.
And of course civilians, innocent people, are at the heart of international law, they’re protected under international law, they’re at the heart of the Goldstone Report, and I believe the protection of civilians, the rights of civilians are at the heart of the mission of the United Nations. It was really the horror of what happened to civilians, the extremity of the attack, the negligence, the lack of concern, the disproportionate and in some cases the intentional killing of civilians that made Operation Cast Lead so horrible and that makes the Goldstone Report so incredibly important. It was out of this slaughter that the Goldstone Report emerged….
The report also does a number of other things for us as readers that are incredibly important, to the ongoing struggle for justice for Palestine and Palestinians. The report offers a history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and it really maps out the power relations and the history of occupation, and how an event like Operation Cast Lead stems from 63 years of occupation and dispossession and a system of laws in place that puts one population, the Palestinian population, that holds them oppressed and very much unequal to the Israeli population.
It’s also a tragedy, a book that is a tragedy, and yet it is most important, I would say, as a manifesto for accountability. That’s really what is at the heart of the Goldstone Report. And this is what I say makes it a utopian document. There are lots of people out there right now who are saying this is an evil document, a dangerous document, it needs to be rescinded, it’s a flawed ocument. And I want to say very strongly today that it is actually a visionary document, a hopeful document, a utopian document, which posits a notion of the world where there are international laws that create the possibility of equality, accountability and justice, and these international laws say that perpetrators of gross violations of human rights and human dignity can be brought to justice and should be prosecuted, and through this prosecution you can create a deterrence to future violations of human rights, and you can possibly bring about some sort of reconciliation in the future and end the ongoing violation of people’s dignity.
And so I think this is the heart of what the United Nations is about, and accountability is not yet here. In the case of Khaled Abd Rabbo whose story I began with there’s been no prosecution. No one has been held to account for what was done to his family and to his daughters, and while the Goldstone Report holds forth the possibility of accountability and justice, its promise has not yet been lived up to and I think all of you sitting here who work for the United Nations, you have the ability to make the document live up to its promise, and I would just ask you and beg you to make the document hold up to its promise.
