Wishful Thinking Will Not Solve The Israel-Palestine Conflict
This article was originally published on Oct. 26, 2016 on the Huffington Post.
The appearance of B’Tselem Director Hagai El-Ad at the UN last week caused a healthy furor. While European and other politicians supported his testimony, Israel’s right-wing leaders went so far as to accuse El-Ad of treason. Yet this tiny Israeli human rights organization did what international diplomacy has failed to do for years: it held Israel to account – just briefly – for important violations of international law.
El-Ad argued something that most Canadian politicians have thus far been unwilling to accept: that you can like Israel, yet still criticize it. More importantly, El-Ad clearly implicated the international community in the resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. “The occupation isn’t an internal Israeli issue, but a major international issue. There’s no such thing as a democratic occupation. This can’t be an [Israeli] internal matter.”
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