Foreign Policy In Focus | Detaining the United Nations
Detaining the United Nations
Phyllis Bennis | December 22, 2008
Editor: Emily Schwartz Greco
Foreign Policy In Focus
Richard Falk was detained at the airport and denied entry to Israel on December 13, when he arrived in Tel Aviv. The American professor of international law was traveling to the West Bank and Gaza, to fulfill his mandate as the United Nations Special Rapporteur for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories to investigate the human rights conditions affecting the civilian population. His most urgent task includes monitoring the rising humanitarian crisis facing the 1.5 million Palestinians, of whom half are children, living in the besieged Gaza Strip.
The decision to keep Falk out fits a pattern of Israeli efforts to hide the human consequences of the siege of Gaza and of the escalating settlement expansion in the West Bank. Denying entry to the UN Special Rapporteur for Human Rights is part of the same occupation playbook as keeping Palestinian human rights defenders such as Raji Sourani, director of the Palestine Center for Human Rights, locked up in Gaza and denied the right to leave to speak to the outside world. It's at one with the Israeli policy of blocking international journalists who might report on the spiraling humanitarian crisis (especially in Gaza). The same goal is evident in the beating and effort to intimidate the few Palestinian journalists who do manage the rare opportunity to get out and tell the world, such as Mohamed Omer, the young Gazan winner of the prestigious Martha Gellhorn Prize in Britain.
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