The U.N. has convened the immense World Summit on Sustainable Development in Johannesburg at the end of August. The conference will be a chance to celebrate yet another divorce between the institutions that should be safeguarding human and civil rights all over the world and Israel.
Over 6,000 people will be attending, if you include volunteers from the NGOs along with the delegates. From the way things are shaping up, we'll probably be seeing another Durban. That was the racist conference against Israel that the United Nations held last year … instead of a conference on racism.
In the works for years, we are witnessing the divorce of the institutions for human and civil rights from the only democratic nation in the Middle East. Which is a high price to pay for international political correctness.
In the long run, at least for men and women of good will, it undermines the credibility of those very institutions. Meaning all of them, from the Geneva Convention, to meetings in defense of children, conferences on peace and on education … right up to the U.N. Security Council, chaired by Syria.
Last July 1, for instance, the world sacrificed a great deal to those recurrent international majorities, maniacally committed to passing resolutions against the Jewish state. Though Israel and the Americans originally signed the Treaty of Rome for the International Court for Crimes against Humanity and War Crimes, both countries refused to ratify it.
Why? First of course, they were concerned that their soldiers fighting a war of defense against terrorism might be incriminated. But they also have objections to the Court's founding charter. What does that document do? It is highly inadequate in its treatment of terror as a crime against humanity, subject to the judgment of the Court of The Hague.
Instead, it declares (and the Arab countries worked very hard at this) that moving populations into occupied territories is a "war crime." It thus turns all the inhabitants of the West Bank and Gaza settlements into potential criminals.
Now, there is no doubt that living in a territory within the borders of a Palestinian state, whenever political conditions allow it, is eminently undesirable. Indeed, Barak proposed that almost all the settlements be removed. Even today, there is hope that President Bush's last speech will lead to a resumption of talks.
But in order to leave, the settlers need a political treaty that both sides find convincing. What they do not need is the threat of another international tribunal. Not one that, under pressure from all the Arab League countries – aided and abetted by former Soviet aligned Third World countries – is devoted to defining Jews as criminals on the most wanted list, dead men walking.