A retiring United Nations (U.N.) official called for a one-state solution to the Israel-Palestine conflict.
In what he described as his “last official communication” as the Director of the New York Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, Craig Mokhiber wrote to U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Türk to describe a “U.N. norm-based position” on the conflict.
Mokhiber wrote, “As a human rights lawyer with more than three decades of experience in the field, I know well that the concept of genocide has often been subject to political abuse. But the current wholesale slaughter of the Palestinian people, rooted in an ethno-nationalist settler colonial ideology, in continuation of decades of their systematic persecution and purging, based entirely upon their status as Arabs, and coupled with explicit statements of intent by leaders in the Israeli government and military, leaves no room for doubt or debate.”
“This is a text-book case of genocide,” the letter added. “The European, ethno-nationalist, settler colonial project in Palestine has entered its final phase, toward the expedited destruction of the last remnants of indigenous Palestinian life in Palestine. What’s more, the governments of the United States, the United Kingdom, and much of Europe, are wholly complicit in the horrific assault. Not only are these governments refusing to meet their treaty obligations ‘to ensure respect’ for the Geneva Conventions, but they are in fact actively arming the assault, providing economic and intelligence support, and giving political and diplomatic cover for Israel’s atrocities.”
“We must support the establishment of a single, democratic, secular state in all of historic Palestine, with equal rights for Christians, Muslims and Jews, and, therefore, the dismantling of the deeply racist, settler-colonial project and an end to apartheid across the land,” Mokhiber noted.
Mokhiber provided a “clarity of vision,” which read, “We must stop the pretense that this is simply a conflict over land or religion between two warring parties and admit the reality of the situation in which a disproportionately powerful state is colonizing, persecuting, and dispossessing an indigenous population on the basis of their ethnicity.”
He then blamed part of the conflict on the United States, writing, “We must recognize that the US and other western powers are in fact not credible mediators, but rather actual parties to the conflict who are complicit with Israel in the violation of Palestinian rights, and we must engage them as such.”
Director of the Touro Institute on Human Rights and the Holocaust Anne Bayefsky told Fox News that Mokhiber’s “overt call for the destruction of the Jewish state lays bare what is really going on at the U.N. in the war now being waged by and at the U.N. against Israel.”
“Listen to Mokhiber’s chilling words. Yes, Israel is engaged in an existential fight. At the U.N., there are human rights for everyone but Jews, who are supposed to lay down their arms in the face of a genocidal enemy currently enslaving their people,” Bayefsky added. “Mokhiber’s phony ‘human rights’ cover is extremely disturbing. He says equality means 21 Arab states, 56 Islamic states and zero Jewish states. That’s antisemitism dressed up as human rights.”
