UPR 99 Steps --- or, the Gaza-Two-Step?

[webfusion]

http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1045083.html
Universal Periodic Review (UPR) of the UN Human Rights Council --- The HRC adopted its list of 99 recommendations for Israel.

Israel is to report back to the Geneva-based forum in March on how it plans to follow-up on the recommendations.

Richard Falk, the Council's special rapporteur on human rights in Palestinian territories occupied since 1967, said on Monday that Israel's blockade of the Gaza Strip amounted to a "crime against humanity" and should be investigated by the International Criminal Court (ICC).


I haven't read the details of the 99-steps outlined in the UNHRC report yet, but in the meantime, I found this article from the San Francisco Chronicle "Gaza Two-Step"
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2008/03/12/EDG0VIHHR.DTL
By Victor Davis Hanson, classicist and historian at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University.

Hanson's version is certainly more believable than the Richard Falk version.

 

[Darth Rotor]

Hansen makes an interesting comparison here. Granted, it may be slightly apples and oranges, but it points to some of the internal constraints on the Security Council.

And what a world it is that enables Gaza! The Russians have fought a dirty war against Muslim separatists in Chechnya. The Chinese have been hunting down Muslim separatist Uighurs who claim Xinjiang Province as their own. India wages bloody periodic wars against Muslim terrorists who claim Kashmir.

Imagine tomorrow that all of the above nations told the Gazans that their dispute is no more or less important to the world than similar land quarrels in Cyprus or Azerbaijan; that they are no more or less deserving of international money and sympathy than are the Chechnyans or Uighurs or the Muslims of Kashmir; or that the Israelis have as much right as the Chinese, Indians or Russians to retaliate and put down neighboring Islamist attacks. Then the crisis would shortly recede from the world's attention.

And Hamas in Gaza would either begin negotiating and building Palestinians' own civil society - or face the sort of typical Chinese, Russian or Indian retaliation that Israel is quite able to unleash.

One wonders at the vision of Ariel Sharon. Did he predict that once he got Israel out of Gaza he'd see the Pal factions commence with internal fighting, and thus gleefully gave them this Gazan petri dish in which to experiment? Given his stroke in 2007, we many never know what was going on in his head, strategy-wise.

ETA: "crime against humanity"

I suggest that the gent leveling that charge also charge the UN itself with three crimes against humanity: embargo/blockade agianst Haiti, 90's, OAS and UN sponsored, and UN trade embargo versus Iraq, 1991-2003, and while I am at it, the arms embargo against Yugoslavia, 1991-1996, which didn't stop the war.

Note the detail on this non binding resolution:

The 47-member Council adopted a resolution presented by Arab and Muslim states by a vote of 30 states in favor and one against with 15 abstentions, and one delegation absent.

http://www.ynet.co.il/english/articles/0,7340,L-3498351,00.html

Not quite sure if either of these documents is the report cited, I don't think they are.

http://lib.ohchr.org/HRBodies/UPR/Documents/Session3/IL/A_HRC_WG6_3_ISR_1_Israel_E.pdf
http://lib.ohchr.org/HRBodies/UPR/Documents/Session3/IL/A_HRC_WG6_3_ISR_2_Israel_E.pdf

Anybody have the actual 99 theses from the report?

Richard Falk, the Council's special rapporteur on human rights in Palestinian territories occupied since 1967, said on Monday that Israel's blockade of the Gaza Strip amounted to a "crime against humanity" and should be investigated by the International Criminal Court (ICC). Falk, an American Jew who is an international law professor, also said that an urgent effort should be launched at the U.N. itself to ensure protection of the people of Gaza

Charges against Falk as a self-hating Jew in 3, 2, 1 ...

DR