The Question of Palestine Conference ends with more anti-Israel remarks
The Question of Palestine Conference ended with a session of anti-israel NGO representatives, many of whom are funded by the EU and European governments.
Raji Sourani, Director of the Palestinian Center for Human Rights, did not attend the meeting in person but issued a written statement. PCHR is noted for its lawfare campaigns harassing Israeli officials in courts around the world over the targeted killing of Hamas military leader, Salah Shehade. The organization was the logistical coordinator for the Arab League Fact Finding Mission to Gaza. And its casualty statistics, widely quoted by NGOs and the media, grossly overstate the number of civilian casualties by listing many Hamas fighters as civilians or blaming the IDF for Hamas executions of Fatah members.
In his statement, Sourani leveled accusations for collective punishment and illegal siege and claims Israel acts with impunity. Sourani fails to mention the hundreds of thousands of tons of humanitarian aid that Israel delivers to Gaza on a monthly basis. He asks, why are Palestinians subject to the law of the jungle, but only attributes blame to Israel. Hamas gets a free pass. And according to PCHR, rocket attacks on Israeli civilians are not a war crime, but resistance. Sourani called for more universal jurisdiction cases against Israelis even though every one of its cases has been dismissed as being without merit.
Next to speak was Daphna Golan-Agnon, a senior researcher at the Minerva Center and founder of BTselem. Golan-Agnon was also a consultant to a pseudo-academic study organized by John Dugard (see earlier posts) claiming Israel is an apartheid state. Golan claimed that Israel uses international law to claim it is a democratic state when according to her, it is not. She alleged that Gaza is an artificial, invented zone controlled by Israel and falsely claimed that Israel controls the population registry and legal system in Gaza even though Hamas has complete control over the Gaza strip. She ended her talk advocating for a binational state, or in other words, the end of Israel as a Jewish state.
Fatmeh El Ajou of the EU and European-funded Adalah spoke about the work of her organization following the war. She claimed the war in Gaza was illegitimate because it was intended to get rid of the democratically-elected Hamas. She claimed that Palestinians have no remedy in the Israeli justice system despite the fact that the Israeli Supreme Court has heard hundreds of cases related to Palestinian rights and have issued remedies where they have been warranted. During the Q&A, she endorsed a binational state.
Chairman of the European Coordination of Committees and Associations for Palestine, Pierre Galand, gave a fiery address full of anti-Western and post-colonial rhetoric. He claimed to have been influenced by Algerian National Liberation Front and Nasser. He claimed Israel was part of the Wests colonial and imperialist ideology and that Israel like France and the UK, continually lies. He closed the speech noting that he, John Dugard and Sourani would be holding a Russell III Tribunal against Israel. The first two tribunals found the US guilty of war crimes during the Vietnam War, Operation Desert Storm, and the the 2003 Iraq War.
The last speaker to appear was Rania Al-Madi of the Irish and Scandanavian government funded Badil. Al-Madi accused Israel of colonial and apartheid policies and that it must be held accountable for its crimes. She repeated the slander that Israel was created solely out of European guilt over the Holocaust. She called for a general boycott and an arms ban on Israel as well as suspension of the EU-Israel upgrade agreement.
During the Q&A session, the delegate from Sri Lanka called the Palestinian solidarity movement to be a failure for its endorsement of the type of violence used by the resistance. He called for a complete cessation of violence against soft targets. Many audience members, including UN officials, mocked his comments.