The Goldstone Report: Between Resolve and Secrets

●      Leaders of the Israeli occupation deny the occurrence of the Nakba in 1948, when mass massacres were committed against the Palestinians, hundreds of villages were destroyed, and hundreds of thousands of Palestinian refugees were displaced in 1948.. Denial of the existence of Palestinians on their land as its original owners was affirmed early by British Foreign Secretary Balfour in 1917, in the text of his promise to the Jews to establish a national home for them in Palestine (the Balfour Declaration), when he referred to the Palestinians...."the non-Jewish communities resident in Palestine"! ....Exactly, as former and current Zionist ministers denied the existence of the Palestinian people...such as Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, when he displayed a map of Israel in Paris, dated 20/3/2023... but with the addition of Jordan and the Palestinian territories, and commented: "There is no such thing as the Palestinian people, it is a fictional invention not more than 100 years old"!.... He called for burning their villages like the town of Hawara and others... As for Minister of National Security Itamar Ben-Gvir, he armed tens of thousands of settlers occupying Palestinian lands, whether in the West Bank or Jerusalem.. to assault Palestinians..and burn their homes (as happened in the town of Hawara), and their trees and crops, and kill them..and burn them in some cases, abuse them and expel them...!

●      As for what their Prime Minister Netanyahu did in his speech before the General Assembly on 23-9-2023.... in a step intended to bypass and erase the existence of the Palestinians, and to bypass all documented Palestinian narratives in the archives of the United Nations records, even before the establishment of Israel in 1948...!....when he delivered a speech before the United Nations General Assembly in its 78th session, that is before the war on Gaza on 7-10-2023)!, it focused on the prospects and effects of normalization, and peace with Arab countries, and its role in changing the map of the new Middle East, and included the map that Netanyahu showed, areas shaded dark green for the countries that have peace agreements with Israel, or are negotiating to conclude peace agreements with Israel, and the areas shaded green included the countries Egypt, Sudan, the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, and Jordan, and the map did not include any mention of the existence of a Palestinian state, where the blue color, which bears the word Israel, dominated the map of the entire occupied West Bank, including Gaza Strip.! And this statement by Netanyahu occurred before the outbreak of Israel’s recent war on the Gaza Strip, on the seventh day of October 2023 ..in which he announced the start of his war on the Gaza Strip, aimed at exterminating Hamas and its civilian incubator!

●      At the same time... Israeli politicians were demanding that the Palestinian negotiators in the peace talks change the curricula of all aspects of Palestinian educational life...and to stop Palestinians, whether civilians or officials, from repeating phrases that incite against Israelis!...while politicians and religious figures in Israel – the rabbis – constantly repeat statements such as "what Israel wants is what God wants".. and that "whoever stands against Israel stands against God"! Their military leaders and ministers also repeat that Palestinians are human animals..and thus they want to strip us of our humanity before the world in order to legitimize slaughter..!

●      How on earth, I ask you, will you make a real peace with these people!! who deny your existence as an original people and owners of the land.., who deny that they carried out mass massacres and ethnic extermination of the Palestinian people..and the destruction of hundreds of Palestinian villages and towns over the years spanning a hundred years.. and establish settlements on what remains of the land of Palestine.. while they slaughter Palestinians in Gaza Strip, the West Bank and Jerusalem...tens of thousands of children and women in these days and prior ones....in front of the lenses and cameras of global television, and under the view of the whole world live......!! And at the end of these years they call you a terrorist and say you must be exterminated..!

●      The roots of the conflict with the Israeli occupation, and the genocidal operations that the Israeli occupation army and the terrorist settlers committed and commit against the Palestinian people, certainly did not begin on the morning of the seventh of October this year.. as United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres said on Tuesday, 24-10-2023, before the Security Council, after he condemned Hamas’s operation on 7 October 2023, “It is also important to recognize that Hamas’s attacks did not happen out of a vacuum.”! He added saying: "The Palestinian people have been subject to 56 years of suffocating occupation. They have seen their lands steadily swallowed by settlements, suffered from violence; their economy choked. Their people were displaced, and their homes demolished. "Guterres said: Their hopes of reaching a political solution to their ordeal are fading."!, And the evidence also shows that the conflict with the occupation has existed for a century and not since the seventh of October 2023..!, what was agreed on the morning of this Wednesday, corresponding to 22-11-2023 of announcing a temporary humanitarian ceasefire..mediated by Qatar and Egypt...and supervised by the United States, which is expected to provide for the release of a number of Palestinian detainees among the women and children who were captured by the Israeli occupation army previously, as others were captured before them.. from all areas of Palestine, in the prisons of the Israeli occupation, before the start of the genocidal war being carried out by the Israeli occupation army.. the recent one, which has been ongoing since the seventh of October 2023!

●      Nevertheless, the roots of the conflict extend to before the Nakba of 1967 (56 years) to reach the Nakba of 1948 (75 years), and before that to 1917, the year of the British Balfour Declaration... that is more than 106 years, during which decisions, recommendations, laws, reports, fatwas, and projects were issued... from the United Nations and its various agencies and bodies...mostly in favor of the Palestinian cause.. yet none of them have been implemented. until now., such as the right of return resolution adopted by the United Nations General Assembly No. 194, and dozens of other international resolutions..!

● The Israeli occupation left the Gaza Strip in 2005 ostensibly; however, it imposed a full blockade on the Gaza Strip in 2006, after the Israeli occupation declared the Gaza Strip a hostile entity, after Hamas governed the Gaza Strip, which split politically from the West Bank (the bitter division)... This blockade, including the Rafah border crossing, under full Egyptian sovereignty, has continued to this day, for more than 18 years! During this period, the Israeli occupation army carried out multiple massacres and wars, in which the Israeli occupation army destroyed all aspects of life in the Strip.. as civilians were bombed, and homes, health centers, and shelters were destroyed, and water, food, and medicine were cut off from civilians.. The latest of these wars was a war in which the Israeli occupation army ... committed massacres and killed civilians, children, and women.. it is the war of October 7 of this year 2023... which is still raging, with its civilian victims in the tens of thousands!..... The Israeli occupation army is destroying the whole Gaza Strip, as more than 14 thousand civilians have been killed, the majority of them children and women.. and there are tens of thousands of wounded and missing—more than 35 thousand wounded.. and more than 8 thousand missing.. and homes demolished, with about half of the housing units in the Gaza Strip destroyed (hundreds of thousands of housing units).. and water and food cut off, and all aid prevented.. and the continued closure of the Rafah border crossing, on the Egyptian side, which argues that it cannot open the crossing due to Israel’s opposition! , !! in the face of the United Nations’ inability to stop these massacres or to achieve a ceasefire.!.

●      And since the Israeli occupation does not recognize the sanctity of killing civilians, or the bombing of hospitals, places of displacement, shelter, schools, mosques, churches, ambulances, cutting off water, electricity, communications, food, energy and communications, and the destruction of homes that contain under their rubble thousands of missing persons, because there is an old doctrine among them that civilians are the civilian wing that harbors the military wings of the Palestinian resistance.. and therefore they must be killed...!.And that harming Palestinian civilians is a political necessity, to pressure the military to stop firing and to achieve victory for them!. Accordingly, no child, nor woman, nor elderly person remained whose house or alley or housing complex was not demolished... on their heads.! .Their bodies were torn apart, in front of television station lenses and journalists’ cameras.. and these are scenes of tragic events... our naked eyes saw them, and there is no need to fabricate false narratives, which are quickly proven false..!.even by the Israeli occupation authorities themselves..or their newspapers such as the Haaretz newspaper..when the results of the investigation carried out by an Israeli committee regarding who was responsible for killing the celebrants and the concert hall of the Israeli settlers on the Gaza envelope on 7 October 2023, and which charge had been pinned on the Palestinians.. it was proven that the Israeli warplanes were the ones that bombed and killed all the celebrants.. the Israelis..and with them Palestinians.. which completely refuted the narrative of the Israeli occupation army..just like the case of bombing the hospitals and fabricating a false narrative about the existence of fighters’ bases under Al-Shifa Hospital..and Al-Ma'bdani Hospital..and many other conclusive examples of their habit of fabrication and lack of honesty...

●      That committing these massacres against Palestinian civilians by the Israeli occupation army... is not new. And the best evidence of that is the famous Goldstone report... in 2009...(as we indicated above)....where it is considered one of the most important documented references of the war of extermination carried out by the Israeli army in the Gaza Strip in 2009, referring to the documentation of the United Nations, human rights organizations, and the International Committee of the Red Cross.. the massacres and the genocide that resulted from the Israeli occupation army’s 23-day invasion of Gaza at the end of 2008 and the beginning of 2009, which Israel called “Operation "Cast Lead"”!

●      United Nations Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories, Richard Falk, wrote a long article on 21-3-2010 in which he commented on the report of South African judge Richard Goldstone regarding the Israeli war on Gaza (2008/2009), in which he referred to this report as having broken the sound barrier in the face of Israel..!  Rather, it provided services most notably: breaking the stick of obedience against the immunity of the strong........! The report, consisting of 575 pages, attracted great attention, and was prepared by a committee - formed at the request of the United Nations Human Rights Council - composed of four persons, headed by Judge Richard Goldstone, on a fact-finding mission based on the decision of the United Nations Human Rights Council on 12      January 2009.

·       Details of the Goldstone report and its controversy will follow in a later post!