Palestinians Archives

Palestinians Move to Join International Criminal Court, Defying Israeli and U.S. Warnings

JERUSALEM — President Mahmoud Abbas of the Palestinian Authority signed papers Wednesday to join the International Criminal Court, a provocative move that could lead to the prosecution of Israeli officials on charges of war crimes and risks severe sanctions from Washington and Jerusalem.

The defiant step came a day after the defeat of a United Nations Security Council resolution that demanded an end to Israel’s occupation of Palestinian territory by 2017. It was billed as part of a strategic shift by the Palestinian leadership to pursue statehood in the international arena after decades of failed American-brokered negotiations with Israel.

“There is aggression practiced against our land and our country, and the Security Council has let us down — where shall we go?” Mr. Abbas said at his headquarters in the West Bank city of Ramallah, as he signed the Rome Statute, the founding charter of the court, as well as 17 other international treaties and conventions.

“We want to complain to this organization,” he said of the court. “As long as there is no peace, and the world doesn’t prioritize peace in this region, this region will live in constant conflict. The Palestinian cause is the key issue to be settled.”

Mr. Abbas, whose popularity has plummeted since this summer’s battle between Israel and Hamas, has been under increasing pressure from the public and other Palestinian leaders to join the court, and use it to pursue cases against Israel’s settlement policy and military operations. But doing so could have major repercussions, both because Palestinians could also face charges at the court, and because Israel and the United States Congress have promised to respond harshly.

“There is no question mark as to what are the consequences, that there will be immediate American and Israeli financial sanctions,” said Khalil Shikaki, director of the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research in the West Bank city of Ramallah. “Those sanctions will gradually become more and more crippling, and this could indeed be the beginning of the end of the P.A. They fully realize that.”

A December poll by Mr. Shikaki’s group showed 35 percent of Palestinians approved of the president’s performance, down from 50 percent before this summer’s war, and that if there were elections, Mr. Abbas, of the secular Fatah party, would lose to his rival from Hamas, the militant Islamist faction that dominates the Gaza Strip. With reconstruction of Gaza after the summer’s devastating war stalled amid ongoing acrimony between Hamas and Fatah despite an April reconciliation pact, analysts said Mr. Abbas was increasingly desperate to show he was doing something.

“They have to take some meaningful steps to recover anything of their really shredded credibility,” Nadia Hijab, executive director of Al-Shabaka: The Palestinian Policy Network, said of Mr. Abbas’s team.

“That fig leaf of action is growing steadily more tattered,” she added. “They keep saying it’s a new paradigm and they want to use international tools, but now they have actually been put on the spot.”

Photo Essay By Muhammed Muheisen

A lifetime has passed since hundreds of thousands of Palestinians fled or were forced out their homes in the Mideast war over Israel’s 1948 creation. Today, those who were uprooted and their descendants number more than 5 million people, scattered across the West Bank, Gaza Strip, Jordan, Syria and Lebanon.

The Palestinian refugee problem is one of the most entrenched in the world, with a solution linked to an elusive Israeli-Palestinian peace deal. About one-third of the refugees still live in camps, or tent cities that have been transformed into crowded urban slums. Some families live in the camps for the fourth generation.

The plight of millions of refugees everywhere is marked Friday on World Refugee Day. The United Nations refugee agency says that at the end of last year, more than 50 million people have been forced from their homes worldwide, the highest figure of displaced since World War II.

More than 700,000 Palestinians fled or were driven out in the 1948 Mideast war, according to U.N. figures. The war began after Israel declared its independence and surrounding Arab nations invaded. Tens of thousands more Palestinians were displaced in the 1967 war in which Israel captured the West Bank, Gaza and east Jerusalem, lands the Palestinians seek for a state.

The fate of the Palestinian refugees is one of the most explosive issues in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, with Israel saying it cannot accept a mass return because that would dilute the state’s Jewish majority. Palestinian negotiators say each refugee has the right to choose between return and resettling, whether in a future state of Palestine or a third country.

In the Jenin camp in the northern West Bank, murals express the hardships of life in exile and the yearning to return to what is now Israel. Some old-timers there cling to hopes of return of going back.

Fatimah Jalamneh, 85, spends her day sitting by the doorway of her house in an alley in the camp. She was in her late teens when her family fled from the village of Noures near what is now the Israeli town of Afula.

“Until death takes me away, my only dream is to go back to my village and sit under a tree in my home which was taken away from me and my children,” said Jalamneh, a great-grandmother.

She had tears in her eyes when she spoke and held what she said was a key to her old family home.

Abduljalil Al-Noursi, 70, sat in front of a large mural showing a ship and the words “We will return” written on the sail. In Palestinian refugee art, a ship is a common symbol of the hopes of return

Al-Nursi was 4 years old when he and 19 relatives fled with just the clothes on their backs. “I won’t let go of my right of return,” he said.

This series of images is by Associated Press photographer Muhammed Muheisen and are of some of the oldest Palestinian refugees in the Jenin refugee camp in the northern West Bank on World Refugee Day.

Source: Ap