Richard Falk is an international law and international relations scholar who taught at Princeton University for forty years. In 2008 he was also appointed by the UN to serve a six-year term as the special rapporteur on Palestinian human rights.
While leading a mission to the West Bank and Gaza to draft a report on Israel's compliance with human rights standards and international humanitarian law, Richard Falk was detained upon arriving at Ben Gurion airport in Israel.
Professor Falk was separated from his UN companions- who were allowed to enter Israel-only to be taken to the airport detention facility. He was locked up in a tiny room that smelled of urine and filth. He spent the next 15 hours there with no facilities available for the UN representative rather than “dirty sheets, inedible food and lights that were too bright or darkness controlled from the guard office” before he was deported.
Richard Falk who continued serving as the UN special rapporteur on Palestinian Human Rights for a 6-year term, was interviewed by the English section of Khamenei.ir.
Khamenei.ir: What makes the U.N. ignore Israel’s blatant crimes or leave futile every attempt at the United Nations in support of Palestine?
It needs to be appreciated that the UN is essentially an organization that is neither better nor worse than the political will of its most powerful members. So long as Israel enjoys the unconditional support of the U.S. Government, the UN is restricted in what kind of response it can make to Israeli criminal conduct. It is able to assess whether the facts uphold charges of criminality as in relation to the major attacks on Gaza in 2008-09 and 2014, and on each occasion a distinguished commission of inquiry did conclude persuasively that the highest political leaders of the country should be prosecuted, but once that conclusion was reached in an official report, the policy recommendations calling for implementation were effectively blocked. This is the important conclusion—the UN can be very effective on a behavioral level when its efforts are aligned with geopolitical forces, especially the permanent five members of the Security Council, but when a consensus is not present then the UN’s initiatives will not be carried out. The UN has a certain autonomy with respect to pronouncing upon the legitimacy of claims and counter-claims, but it subject to the play of geopolitical forces when it comes to behavioral impact.
Khamenei.ir: What gives the Zionist regime the power to humiliate and threaten the Secretary General of the United Nations?
Once again, the UN is an organization that gives great deference to its members, and to the idea of sovereign states. To overcome this deference requires either a major mobilization of public opinion as occurred in the last stages of the anti-apartheid movement and led to the collapse of the racist regime in South Africa or a consensus among major states as occurred to some degree with respect to gaining support for the recent climate change agreement signed at Paris. Because Israel is a militarily powerful country that enjoys strong diplomatic backing from the United States and Europe, it has pretty much of a free hand in mounting an attack on the Secretary General of the UN. This recent response to Ban Ki-moon’s statement of concern about the failure of Israel to take steps to find a peaceful solution of its long struggle with Palestine generated a harsh personal attack by the highest officials in Israel. This is especially strange as Ban had over the course of his term in office as Secretary General has generally supported Israel, and even took inappropriate steps to deflect proposed actions at the UN that sought Israeli accountability for international wrongdoing.
Khamenei.ir: You said that the Israeli crimes in Palestine are even worse than the crimes of the Apartheid Regime in South Africa. The apartheid Regime in Africa collapsed, why then after 60 years, international organizations show no interest in putting an end to Israeli crimes?
This is an important question. As is well known, Israel enjoyed a great deal of world sympathy in its early years when awareness of the Holocaust was so vivid. It was also supported by Jews throughout the world who were influential minorities in many important countries. Israel managed to avoid being treated as an extension of European colonialism, and Jews did have some ethnic attachment by way of religion and history to Palestine. Despite Arab neighbors eager to liberate Israel on behalf of the Palestinians, the effort was defeated by Israel’s military victories, and its political and military support in the West, especially the United States. Unlike South Africa Israel has built upon important relationships with as many as 130 countries as suppliers of arms and military training, a network of relations that inhibits criticism and hostile relations that has been amply documented and explained in Jeff Halper’s excellent book War Against the People. Halper makes two crucial points: Israel has made itself extremely useful as a high quality niche arms supplier to many governments by specializing in weaponry that is useful in fighting against an internal enemy and Israel benefits from its claim of having field tested its weaponry over many years in counter-insurgency warfare directed at the Palestinian population. In the post-9/11 world this combination of manufacturing and tactical skill and battlefield experience has led many countries to seek Israeli assistance in training police, military, and intelligence units.
Khamenei.ir: As a special rapporteur for the United Nations, what obstacles did you face reporting to International Organizations and the people of the world on the reality of Israel crimes?
I was a target of defamatory criticism by representatives of Israel, Canada, and the United States, which made it more difficult for my reports to get a proper treatment in the media. Also, pro-Israeli NGOs mounted a continuous attack on my effort to report truthfully on Israel’s crimes and violations of international law, and to depict the suffering of the Palestinian people that this behavior produced. Because of the political atmosphere created by these pressures some UN officials, including even the Secretary General, Ban Ki-moon, joined in these attacks making my work even more difficult to do effectively. At the same time there was an understanding within the UN and throughout most of the membership that this defamatory campaign was trying to divert attention from Israel’s wrongdoing and criminality. Despite the obstructions I believe I was successful in conveying the realities of the Israeli occupation of Palestine, including its policies of ethnic cleansing, annexation of territories it was supposed to be temporarily administering, imposition of an apartheid structure based on systematic discrimination, and multiple forms of collective punishment. These policies and practices were in violation of the Geneva Convention and international humanitarian law, and the UN was itself complicit due to its failure to take steps to protect the Palestinian people.
Khamenei.ir: How did the Zionist regime treat you as a representative of the United Nations? Did you also experience the Israeli racism?
I had the experience of being expelled from Israel and detained at a prison facility near the Ben Gurion Airport in December 2008 shortly after my UN appointment. This action was taken by the order of the Israeli Foreign Ministry and violated Israel’s obligation as a member of the UN to cooperate with the Organization in relation to its official functions. I was detained while traveling on a mission to Occupied Palestine on behalf of the UN Human Rights Council. My accompanying assistants were allowed to enter Israel.
The Israeli Government lied to the media about the incident, saying that I had warned not to try to enter Israel to reach Palestine. In fact, the opposite was true. My two assistants had been given visas with Israel’s full awareness that they were part of my mission, and we had taken the extra precaution of submitting in advance our propose itinerary while in Palestine to Israel’s Mission in Geneva, which indicated no intention to block my entry.
Aside from this incident, and a pattern of denunciation and defamation, I had no additional personal experience with Israeli racism.
Khamenei.ir: Do you have any hopes for the issue of Palestine to be solved through the United Nations or other international organizations or do you think peace talks won’t help Palestinians?
At this stage I think international diplomacy has reached a dead end with respect to finding a solution that satisfies both sides. The whole weight of diplomacy has been placed on realizing a two-state solution, which has been pursued for more than 20 years within the Oslo Framework of Principles, and was flawed from its inception. It was not proper to make the U.S. Government the mediating third party considering its partisan support of Israel. Also, discrimination against the Palestinians living as a minority in Israel was ignored. Finally, Palestine was put under pressure not to assert its grievances under international law during the negotiating process as that would allegedly be an obstruction, preventing progress. Israel, in contrast, was allowed to continue with its unlawful settlement project, any objections being deferred until final status arrangements were discussed, a period never reached. The net result was to facilitate Israel’s expansionist goals and to shrink the prospect of a viable Palestinian state.
The present situation is particularly resistant to international diplomacy: Israel has encroached so deeply on what remains of Palestine in the West Bank and Jerusalem as to create a situation that seems irreversible if the objective is to have the state of Palestine that is roughly co-terminus with the 1967 borders, the so-called ‘green line.’ It should be appreciated that formal Palestinian acceptance of this goal, already in 1988, meant confining their territorial ambitions to 22% of historic Palestine, and less than half of what the Palestinians were offered in the 1947 UN partition proposals, and was then rejected as unfair. It is also relevant to point out that the current government in Israel is opposed to the establishment of a Palestinian state, and many influential voices in Israel currently envision a solution brought about by unilateral Israeli action, an Israel one-state. The Palestinian Authority also seems finally tired of futile negotiations, and is demanding an end to settlement activity as a precondition to resumed negotiations.
Khamenei.ir: What is the solution you suggest for the Palestinian people to be freed from the crisis they are facing?
There is no easy solution that can be realized in the near future. The best Palestinian hope is by way of civil society activism that is building a growing global solidarity movement that has given an increasing role to the BDS Campaign. With diplomacy currently futile, the best approach is to isolate Israel internationally and increase pressure to produce a climate of opinion internationally that is more conducive to a genuine peace process based on the equality of the parties. Also, civil society, as guided by Palestinians, is currently in the best position to formulate a vision of a solution to the conflict that is sensitive to the collapse of the diplomatic approach and the international two-state solution.
Khamenei.ir: Considering the current situation, what do you think the future holds for the issue of Palestine and the Zionist regime?
It all depends on the gathering momentum of civil society activism that creates a new global situation in which a sustainable and just peace can be achieved that is based on equality and responsive to the legitimate grievances of the Palestinian people. If this does not happen, the most likely prospect is continued Palestinian resistance and Israeli efforts to impose their will by unilateral actions. There are bound to be changes in the regional setting that will work for or against prospects for real peace, and are difficult to foretell, given the turmoil throughout the Middle East at the present time.