Professor Richard Falk is an outstanding Jewish American scholar: emeritus professor in international law at Princeton University, writer, the author or co-author of 20 books ) speaker, activist on world affairs, and an appointee to2 UN positions on the Occupied Palestinian Territories (for detailed biography see Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_A._Falk ). In 2008 this eminent Jewish international law scholar was arrested, imprisoned and deported by Apartheid Israel when he attempted to fulfil his role as UN Special Rapporteur on the Occupied Palestinian Territories.
Professor Richard Falk in “Slouching toward a Palestinian holocaust”: “There is little doubt that the Nazi Holocaust was as close to unconditional evil as has been revealed throughout the entire bloody history of the human species. Its massiveness, unconcealed genocidal intent, and reliance on the mentality and instruments of modernity give its enactment in the death camps of Europe a special status in our moral imagination … Against this background, it is especially painful for me, as an American Jew, to feel compelled to portray the ongoing and intensifying abuse of the Palestinian people by Israel through a reliance on such an inflammatory metaphor as ‘holocaust’ … Is it an irresponsible overstatement to associate the treatment of Palestinians with this criminalized Nazi record of collective atrocity? I think not. The recent developments in Gaza are especially disturbing because they express so vividly a deliberate intention on the part of Israel and its allies to subject an entire human community to life-endangering conditions of utmost cruelty … But Gaza is morally far worse[ than Darfur], although mass death has not yet resulted. It is far worse because the international community is watching the ugly spectacle unfold while some of its most influential members actively encourage and assist Israel in its approach to Gaza. Not only the United States, but also the European Union, are complicit, as are such neighbors as Egypt and Jordan … Israel is currently stiffening the boycott on economic relations that has brought the people of Gaza to the brink of collective starvation. This set of policies, carried on for more than four decades, has imposed a sub-human existence on a people that have been repeatedly and systematically made the target of a variety of severe forms of collective punishment.” [1].
Professor Richard Falk and other outstanding writers: “The latest chapter of the conflict between Israel and Palestine began when Israeli forces abducted two civilians, a doctor and his brother, from Gaza. An incident scarcely reported anywhere, except in the Turkish press. The following day the Palestinians took an Israeli soldier prisoner - and proposed a negotiated exchange against prisoners taken by the Israelis - there are approximately 10,000 in Israeli jails.
That this "kidnapping" was considered an outrage, whereas the illegal military occupation of the West Bank and the systematic appropriation of its natural resources - most particularly that of water - by the Israeli Defence (!) Forces is considered a regrettable but realistic fact of life, is typical of the double standards repeatedly employed by the West in face of what has befallen the Palestinians, on the land allotted to them by international agreements, during the last seventy years.
Today outrage follows outrage; makeshift missiles cross sophisticated ones. The latter usually find their target situated where the disinherited and crowded poor live, waiting for what was once called Justice. Both categories of missile rip bodies apart horribly - who but field commanders can forget this for a moment?
Each provocation and counter-provocation is contested and preached over. But the subsequent arguments, accusations and vows, all serve as a distraction in order to divert world attention from a long-term military, economic and geographic practice whose political aim is nothing less than the liquidation of the Palestinian nation.
This has to be said loud and clear for the practice, only half declared and often covert, is advancing fast these days, and, in our opinion, it must be unceasingly and eternally recognised for what it is and resisted.
(Signed) Tariq Ali, Russell Banks, John Berger, Noam Chomsky, Richard Falk, Eduardo Galeano, Charles Glass, Naomi Klein, W.J.T. Mitchell, Harold Pinter, Arundhati Roy. Jose Saramago, Giiuliana Sgrena, Gore Vidal, Howard Zinn.” [2].
Richard A. Falk (United Nations Special Rapporteur for Palestine, an investigator with the UN Human Rights Council and an eminent American professor emeritus of international law at 41-Nobel-laureate Princeton University) addressing the UN Human Rights Council as it prepared to pass a resolution condemning settlement building in the occupied West Bank, including East Jerusalem (2010): “The continued pattern of settlement expansion in East Jerusalem combined with the forcible eviction of long-residing Palestinians is creating an intolerable situation in the part of the city previously controlled by Jordan. This situation can only be described in its cumulative impact as a form of ethnic cleansing” [3].
[1]. Richard Falk, “Slouching toward a Palestinian holocaust “, The Translational Foundation for Peace and Future research (TFF), 29 Jiune 2007: http://www.transnational.org/Area_MiddleEast/2007/Falk_PalestineGenocide.html .
[2]. Letter from Richard Falk with Tariq Ali, Russell Banks, John Berger, Noam Chomsky, Eduardo Galeano, Charles Glass, Naomi Klein, W.J.T. Mitchell, Arundhati Roy, Harold Pinter, Jose Saramago, Giiuliana Sgrena, Gore Vidal, and Howard Zinn re Palestine, Peninsular Peace and Justice Centre, Palo Alto, Califoirnai, USA, 19 July 2006: http://peaceandjustice.org/article.php?story=20060726115326120&query=zinn .
[3]. Richard Falk quoted in Mel Frykberg, “Legal expert warns of “ethnic cleansing” in Jerusalem”, Electronic Intifada, 24 March 2011: https://electronicintifada.net/content/legal-expert-warns-ethnic-cleansing-jerusalem/9281 .