Bernard Kouchner, French Minister of Foreign Affairs, called on France to establish a special body to investigate and eventually prosecute international war crimes, crimes against humanity, etc.

According to Le Monde (26 May 2008), the French Minister of Foreign Affairs, Bernard Kouchner, suggested that France establish a special body to investigate and eventually prosecute international war crimes, crimes against humanity, etc. Unlike Belgium, for example, French law doesn’t include “universal competence” and French courts can judge only crimes that are either committed in France or if the victims are French. 

The concept of “universal competence” assumes that the whole international community bears responsibility for war crimes and crimes against humanity, and no state can claim “it is none of my business, it was committed elsewhere.” One of the lessons from the Fascist barbarism is the mutual responsibility of the Human community in protecting basic human rights over the whole planet. These rights were formalized during the 1950s, ’60s and ’70s, in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the Geneva Conventions and a long series of United Nations resolutions that gradually extended the concepts of Right and rights to a growing number of communities (women, national minorities, cultural minorities, children, etc.). 

One can claim that most of these rights remained on the paper, and were not seriously implemented by the community of nations. However, the very fact that these rights have been formally stated is not without significance: a society with norms of behavior—even when they are not implemented—is what distinguishes the beginning of civilization from the jungle, for in the jungle it is only might that makes right, though we will be able to claim that we live in a truly civilized human society only when these rights are universally put into practice and not merely normative declarations.

Palestinian refugees getting on boats in 1948.

Ten years ago, when the State of Israel was celebrating its fiftieth anniversary, our main duty was to explain that the creation of Israel was also the Palestinian Nakba, and often people asked "what does Nakba mean?" In most of the cases, the question was the result of ignorance. Today, whoever is asking "what does Nakba mean?" is not an ignorant, but rather a Nakba-denier, a kind of cousin of the Shoah-denier who is asking "what does Shoah mean?” The concept of Nakba and the reality of the Palestinian catastrophe have become public knowledge. 

Moreover: all over the world, and not only in the progressive media, any mention of Israel's sixtieth anniversary has been followed by the mention of the Palestinian Nakba, including by those—and they are the majority—for whom the creation of Israel is an event that deserves feasts and celebrations.

No doubt that this recognition is a big victory for the Palestinian people, whose tragic history has been denied for decades: the battle over history has finally be won, and the Zionist narrative concerning "a land without people for a people without land" and Palestinian refugees who either have never existed (sic) or have been forced to flee by their own leadership, are lying today in the garbage heap of old-propaganda lies. In its great majority, international public opinion recognizes that the price for the creation of a Jewish State was the destruction of Palestine and the creation of hundreds of thousands of refugees.

Logo of the 2001 World Conference against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related Intolerance, held in Durban, South Africa.

There is no doubt that the first Durban conference was an anti-Israeli platform: these were the days of murderous oppression in the Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPT), in which every day young Palestinians were killed by Israeli soldiers and Border Police officers, and the international media was full of horrific acts against a helpless civilian population. Together with the United States, Israel was accused of war crimes and for violating the UN General Assembly Resolution against Racism and the International Convention against Apartheid; moreover, South Africans know very well to identify a regime built on racial, ethnic or national discrimination, even if use of the concept of apartheid in the Israeli-Palestinian context is partial, there exist more than a few points of comparison between the former apartheid regime and current Israeli oppression of the Palestinian people in the OPT and within Israel.  

Indeed, the Durban Conference was not infected by anti-Semitism, and this accusation was a planned part of a cynical counter-attack by Israel and its allies throughout the world, in order to avoid providing a response to the serious accusations of racism. The head of the Jewish community in France at the time, Roger Cukierman, announced in an interview to the Israeli press that to confront the serious international criticism in light of the destruction and murder in the OPT (what was later dubbed “Operation Defensive Shield”), there existed a need to shift the debate, to move the accusation to the other side: what is easier than the accusation of anti-Semitism, half a century after the genocide of European Jewry by the Nazis?

Palestinians fleeing the fighting in 1948. Following the ceasefire, they the newly formed Israeli government disallowed them to return to their homes and properties.

“As a solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, I prefer one state over two states!” How many times do I hear such a statement in my public meetings abroad?!  And the more I hear it, the more upset I get: who cares what you prefer, and it also does not matter what I prefer. Did you ask the Palestinians what THEY want, what are THEY fighting for?

No doubt, the Palestinian people have the legitimate right to demand and to fight for national sovereignty on their historical homeland, i.e. the land of Palestine, from the sea to the river, a homeland from which they have been dispossessed by the Zionist colonial enterprise. And the role of progressive forces throughout the world is, indeed, to support them in this legitimate and extremely difficult struggle.

In 1988 the PLO, at its National Council in Algeria and under the leadership of Yasser Arafat, adopted its “historical compromise,” which was based on an equation composed of two elements: a solution to the conflict with Israel and the time factor. What is better, asked the President of the PLO, the full realization of the national rights of the Palestinian people in a century, or a small independent state now? The opinion of the President and, after a tough political discussion, of the great majority of the PNC, was to spare decades of suffering, death and destruction for the next Palestinian generations at the price of a painful and unjust compromise with Israel, in which the Palestinian people renounce implementation of their legitimate rights on more than three-quarters of their land.