{"id":1104,"date":"2014-06-18T00:14:54","date_gmt":"2014-06-17T22:14:54","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.jonathan-cook.net\/blog\/?p=1104"},"modified":"2014-06-18T08:22:08","modified_gmt":"2014-06-18T06:22:08","slug":"why-i-accuse-the-red-cross-of-being-gutless","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.jonathan-cook.net\/blog\/2014-06-18\/why-i-accuse-the-red-cross-of-being-gutless\/","title":{"rendered":"Why I accuse the Red Cross of being gutless"},"content":{"rendered":"

I have had further\u00a0thoughts\u00a0about\u00a0my\u00a0brief Facebook comments attacking the International Committee of the Red Cross. I accused the organisation of\u00a0hypocrisy\u00a0for\u00a0calling for the immediate release of the three abducted Israeli teenagers while refusing to call for a similar\u00a0release of the nearly 200 Palestinian children effectively taken hostage by a member state of the UN (Israel) while in their own territory (Palestine) and then illegally transferred into foreign territory (Israel). For more on the issue, read Ali Abunimah’s excellent account<\/a>.<\/p>\n

I stand by my earlier accusation that the ICRC has proved itself to be serially\u00a0gutless in remaining\u00a0silent\u00a0over decades about Israel’s belligerent\u00a0occupation,\u00a0but I should have set out the reasons for my criticism more fully.<\/p>\n

Back in 2003, rumours\u00a0started to surface that Israel was running\u00a0a secret prison where Arabs seized by its security services overseas (mostly from Lebanon) were being held and horrifically abused. It was Israel’s Abu Ghraib. The Israeli media even\u00a0reported later on a\u00a0court case in which\u00a0a Lebanese Shia leader, Mustafa Dirani, who was held in this secret jail, revealed<\/a> that he had been repeatedly sodomised with a wooden\u00a0baton during interrogations.<\/p>\n

The prison, known only as Facility 1391, started to come to light only because of a\u00a0small oversight by Israel. Following the\u00a0mass round-ups of Palestinians as\u00a0the second intifada reached its peak, Israel\u00a0ran out space in its normal prisons and started to put a few\u00a0Palestinians into\u00a0the secret jail, or possibly jails. However,\u00a0Israel\u00a0had habeas corpus-style\u00a0obligations, even according to\u00a0its own\u00a0legal codes, to report the whereabouts of Palestinian prisoners to their lawyers (not true for the other Arab inmates, who had no legal representation). Some leading\u00a0Israeli human rights lawyers started to work out that\u00a0these few\u00a0Palestinian prisoners had effectively been disappeared.<\/p>\n

I began\u00a0working on the story, and published it (here<\/a>, here<\/a> and here<\/a>). During the research I was told\u00a0that the ICRC knew about 1391 and\u00a0were aware of\u00a0its location.<\/p>\n

When I called their office in Jerusalem to speak to them about it, they refused to say anything on the record. In fact they pretty much refused to say anything at all, apart from confirming that they knew of the prison’s existence,\u00a0although they claimed not to have had\u00a0access to it.<\/p>\n

Their justification for refusing to speak further or to criticise Israel for the\u00a0gross violation of international law the prison represented was that they believed it was more important to maintain a position of absolute political neutrality. They told me\u00a0it was\u00a0vitally in the interests of the Palestinian prison population that they\u00a0keep\u00a0the trust of Israel\u00a0so that their\u00a0access\u00a0would not be withdrawn. That was not a view I shared, but it was one I could believe\u00a0was honourably held.<\/p>\n

But the principle of “absolute political neutrality” that was so important to the ICRC back in 2003 \u2013 and has apparently directed their policy for decades, given their almost complete\u00a0silence on Israel’s belligerent occupation \u2013 has now been jettisoned\u00a0with casual abandon when it comes to defending the rights of three Israeli teenagers. What about “absolute political neutrality” towards the Palestinians?<\/p>\n

This is hypocrisy of the highest order, and why I continue to call the ICRC gutless – more concerned about the might of the Israel lobby than the rights of Palestinians under occupation.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I have had further\u00a0thoughts\u00a0about\u00a0my\u00a0brief Facebook comments attacking the International Committee of the Red Cross. I accused the organisation of\u00a0hypocrisy\u00a0for\u00a0calling for the immediate release of the three abducted Israeli teenagers while refusing to call for a similar\u00a0release of the nearly 200 Palestinian children effectively taken hostage by a member state of the UN (Israel) while in […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[55],"class_list":{"0":"post-1104","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-uncategorized","7":"tag-israel-war-crimes"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jonathan-cook.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1104","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jonathan-cook.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jonathan-cook.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jonathan-cook.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jonathan-cook.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1104"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.jonathan-cook.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1104\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jonathan-cook.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1104"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jonathan-cook.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1104"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jonathan-cook.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1104"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}