Summary
The people’s tribunal whose third session, in Cape Town between November 5 and 7, 2011, was to assess charges of apartheid against Israel, and which Falk defends against Richard Goldstone’s preemptive New York Times attack (Palestine: The Legitimacy of Hope, PDF p.191-197).
Details
- Falk presents recourse to such a tribunal of the people as a constructive and serious response to the failure of governments and international institutions to declare and implement international criminal law over many years (PDF p.191).
- Its participants as Falk lists them include Desmond Tutu, Ronnie Kasrils, Alice Walker, Mairead Maguire, Cynthia McKinney and Stephane Hessel, with John Dugard offering expert testimony in support of the legal argument for charging Israel with the crime of apartheid (PDF p.191-192).
- Dugard’s press statement confines his testimony to the existence of conditions of apartheid in the occupied territories; Falk says the Tribunal focuses on the West Bank occupied since 1967 and is likely to forgo an apartheid charge for the events surrounding Israel’s founding in the late 1940s, which took place before apartheid was criminalised in the mid-1970s (PDF p.195).
- Goldstone condemned the venture before it began as an “assault” on Israel with the “aim to isolate, demonize and delegitimize” the country, and contended that charging Israel with apartheid is “slander”, “false and malicious”, a contention Falk answers in the post (PDF p.192-193).
- The legitimacy-struggle post in Part 1 names citizens’ tribunals, from the Russell Tribunal to the 2005 Iraq War Tribunal, among the forms global civil society has taken into the vacuum left by hegemonic impunity (PDF p.29-30).
Related pages
Palestine: The Legitimacy of Hope, Apartheid, Richard Goldstone, John Dugard, Lawfare, Legitimacy struggle