Craig Mokhiber, a high United Nations human rights official who stepped down on the weekend over the organisation’s response to the battle in Gaza, has referred to as on the UN to connect the identical requirements to Israel because it does when assessing human rights violations in different international locations around the globe.
Mokhiber, who was the director of the New York workplace of the UN’s Excessive Commissioner for Human Rights, wrote in his October 28 resignation letter that Israel’s military actions in Gaza had been “textbook genocide”, and accused the UN of once more “failing” to behave, referring to earlier genocides in Bosnia, Rwanda, and Myanmar.
Mokhiber, a world human rights lawyer, had been with the UN since 1992 and labored beforehand as a human rights adviser in Afghanistan and the occupied Palestinian territories.
No less than 8,805 Palestinians have been killed in Israeli attacks in Gaza since October 7 after the armed group Hamas launched a shock assault on Israel, killing a minimum of 1,400 individuals and taking greater than 200 individuals captive.
“The present wholesale slaughter of the Palestinian individuals, rooted in an ethno-nationalist colonial-settler ideology, in continuation of a long time of their systematic persecution and purging, based mostly completely upon their standing as Arabs … leaves no room for doubt,” Mokhiber stated in his letter to the UN human rights chief, Volker Turk.
Al Jazeera’s correspondent on the UN, Gabriel Elizondo, sat down with Mokhiber in New York.
He requested him about his evaluation of the state of affairs in Gaza and the possibilities of a two-state answer.
The interview has been edited for size and readability.
Al Jazeera: Why did you come to conclusion that the state of affairs in Gaza quantities to a genocide?
Craig Mohkiber: Normally essentially the most troublesome a part of proving genocide is intent as a result of there needs to be an intention to destroy in entire, or partially, a specific group. On this case, the intent by Israeli leaders has been so explicitly said and publicly said – by the prime minister, by the president, by senior cupboard ministers, by army leaders – that that’s a simple case to make. It’s on the general public file.
It’s essential that we begin utilizing the language that the regulation units out, simply as , in latest occasions, each main worldwide human rights organisation, Israeli human rights organisations, Palestinian human rights organisations, United Nations human rights mechanisms, impartial mechanisms have discovered that the state of affairs in Israel Palestine quantities to the crime of apartheid.
The UN must get used to addressing these explicit violations, simply as we’ve got in different conditions.
Al Jazeera: Once we requested the secretary-general and his workplace about genocide, he gained’t use that time period. He says a earlier secretary-general stated that that’s for courts to resolve. Do you suppose that the secretary-general ought to begin utilizing the time period ‘genocide’ in terms of what we’re seeing in Gaza?
Mokhiber: If we are able to allege that we see battle crimes, crimes towards humanity, as we’ve got usually finished, there’s no purpose to exclude, the place we see very sturdy proof, the potential of genocide being dedicated, and I feel you’re going to be listening to that time period increasingly more in reference to what we’re witnessing in Gaza.
However establishments, after all, need to undergo the required steps earlier than they’ll make that pronouncement. As of immediately, I’m an impartial citizen, not carrying the establishment on my shoulders. And I really feel fairly assured as a human rights lawyer in saying that what I see unfolding in Gaza and past is genocide.
Al Jazeera: [US President] Joe Biden has lately stated that after this battle is over, we have to get again to a two-state answer. In your letter, you say the mantra of a two-state answer has turn out to be, and I quote, an open joke within the corridors of the United Nations the place we’re sitting proper now. Is it actually an open joke within the corridors of the United Nations?
Mokhiber: Sure, and it has been for fairly a very long time, in case you ask any person of their official capability concerning the two states, and they’ll repeat that phrase again and again because the official place of the United Nations. Certainly, that’s the official place of the USA. However no person who follows these circumstances both from the political aspect or from the human rights aspect believes {that a} two-state answer is feasible anymore.
There’s nothing left for a Palestinian state that will be sustainable or simply or had been doable the least bit, and everybody is aware of that.
And secondly, that answer by no means handled the issue of the basic human rights of Palestinians. So for instance, it might go away them as second-class residents with out full human rights inside what’s now Israel correct.
And so when individuals are not speaking from official speaking factors, you hear more and more a couple of one-state answer.
And what which means is starting to advocate for the precept of equality of human rights as an alternative of those previous political taglines, that will imply a state through which we’ll have equal rights for Christians, Muslims and Jews, based mostly upon human rights and based mostly upon the rule of regulation. It’s what we name for in each different circumstance around the globe. And the query is, why is the United Nations not going for that in Israel and Palestine?
