Eighteen years ago the UN Human Rights Council (UNHRC) appointed the late Archbishop Desmond Tutu to head a fact-finding mission into Israeli military operations in Gaza.
The council expressed grave concern “at the continued violation by the occupying power, Israel, of the human rights of the Palestinian people in the occupied Palestinian territory”, describing its military attacks as “a collective punishment of the civilians”.
These events followed Israel’s shelling of a Palestinian house in Beit Hanoun that claimed the lives of 18 members of a single family. Israel ascribed the incident to a technical error.
After several delays, when Tutu’s mission was ready to roll in 2008, Israel declined to give him a visa. So Egypt agreed to open the Rafah border crossing to enable him to enter Gaza without Israel’s permission.
While he was there, Tutu was interviewed by UN Radio and he described Israel’s blockade of Palestine as an abominable act.
“We need to call to the international community to stop its complicity and speak out on behalf of the people who are suffering so much,” he said.
If any of this sounds familiar it’s because ... it is. Nearly two decades after that horror in Beit Hanoun, virtually the whole of Gaza has been reduced to rubble.
More than 40,000 Palestinians have been killed since October 7 2023, when Hamas invaded Israel, killing 1,200 people and taking more than 250 hostages. Most of the dead in Gaza have been civilians, including a high proportion of women and children.
Now Israel’s parliament has voted to ban the UN Relief & Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA), at a moment when the humanitarian crisis in Gaza is at its most desperate and Israel is under increased pressure to allow in aid supplies.
This is a disgraceful act by a rogue state that is itself a member of the UN, which regrettably appears more toothless by the day. The silence of the international community that enables Israel to take this extraordinary step is the same silence that enabled Hitler.
How tragically ironic that people who are descendants of the survivors of the Holocaust are hell-bent on doing the same to Palestinians. I am appalled as a health professional that my fellow health professionals globally are not up in arms.
I place these events in the context of Tutu’s last visit to the Holy Land because he was a peacemaker and a reconciler, and the world sorely misses his honest voice.
Israel is shutting down the UNRWA because it knows it can, and there’s nothing the UN can do about it because Israel’s friends in the West won’t allow it.
Tutu famously spoke of one human family, of which all human beings form interdependent parts. Thanks to technology, this family occupies what social scientists have termed a global village.
But sadly, for all their cleverness the villagers can’t agree on terms to resolve disputes. The UN was set up 75 years ago for precisely this purpose, but through its inability to force Israel into meaningful talks about justice for Palestinians it hangs itself out to dry.
If the UN doesn’t provide humanitarian aid to Gazans, who will? Or is it a case of some nations being able to decide that other nations don’t deserve aid, and are not worthy of being negotiated with, because they are not considered fully human?
When Israel first raised allegations that members of the UNRWA had acted in support of Hamas in January, the agency fired nine staff members. But that wasn’t enough to stop Australia, Austria, Britain, Canada, Estonia, Finland, Germany, Iceland, Italy, Japan, Latvia, Lithuania, the Netherlands, Romania, Sweden and the US from suspending their funding of the UNRWA.
Which of these nations will seriously object, 10 months later, to the Israeli parliamentary decision to suspend the UNRWA altogether?
What would Tutu have done? The most instructive answers are those he provided himself. He would have strongly supported Palestinians’ right to struggle for the liberation of their nation and their rights under international law, while calling on Hamas to stop targeting civilians.
He would have strongly supported the right of Israelis to live in peace, while calling on the state of Israel to trash its apartheid policies and stop committing genocide. And he would have called for dialogue for the parties to sustainably settle their differences.
The Arch was open to dialogue with all people, because in his view no members of the human family were irredeemable. His belief in talking and listening to resolve human-engineered crises was therefore absolute.
When he visited Gaza in 2008 on his fact-finding mission it was logical that he speak to local leaders, including those designated terrorists in the West. This was not aberrational, because he’d previously enjoyed cordial relations with the leader of a “terrorist” organisation — OR Tambo.
When Tutu addressed the media at the conclusion of his three-day mission, he said: “My message to the international community is that our silence and complicity, especially on the situation in Gaza, shames us all ... Gaza needs the engagement of the outside world, especially its peacemakers.”
Among the people he met in Gaza was a senior Hamas leader in the Gaza strip, Ismail Haniyeh . He told the media he had demanded of Haniyeh: “Can you stop the firing of rockets into Israel?” Haniya was assassinated in July.
Providing feedback on his Gazan visit to the UNHRC in September 2018, Tutu said: “Addressing human rights violations suffered by individuals in Israel and in the occupied Palestinian territories must be the prime motivating force for members of the council.”
Few could possibly disagree — besides Israel and its army of enablers.
• Dr Ramphele chairs the Archbishop Desmond Tutu Intellectual Property Trust.
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