What we're talking about today is what happened in Jenin. Why? Because the Security Council - as a result of what can only be described as a blood libel initiated by the Palestinians and the Arabs, but taken up by the international community and the Europeans - as if Israel had carried out a massacre of the Palestinians in Jenin.
Since then, of course, we know otherwise. This whole blood libel has basically
been unveiled and blown open, and we're hearing that, if at all, we're not
talking about 300 or 200, but possibly about 80 people who were killed during
the course of the fighting in the Jenin refugee camp - most of whom were
armed terrorists. There was certainly no massacre.
But, as things happen in the United Nations, this became the subject of a
proposal for intervention by the international community. And as a result of our
own willingness to prove that we have nothing to hide, and to indicate to the
world at large that "here, come and see", we agreed to a fact-finding team by
the United Nations to come to the area and collect information on the recent
events in the Jenin refugee camp.
We agreed to this simply because we wanted the truth to come out; we wanted
to get rid of this pathetic blood libel that people seem to be believing. Why such
a thing wasn't done in Srebrenica, where 7,000 people were killed in a couple
of hours - there was no Security Council fact-finding team.
Or, when the Jordanians killed 8,000 Palestinians on September 20,
1970, there was no Security Council fact-finding team. But, we decided, in
order to clean the table, so that the world will believe what we are saying, we
will go along with this; we agreed to have a fact-finding team come.
The basis for agreement was Article 2 of the Security Council Resolution, which
says: "The Security Council welcomes the initiative of the Secretary General to
develop accurate information regarding recent events in the Jenin refugee camp
through a fact-finding team, and requests him to keep the Security Council
informed."
This is what we agreed to, this is what we are prepared to do. This was
adopted on Friday, and what we have seen over the last few days is a sort of
fogging of this mandate, which would appear to be very clear to anybody
reading it, and an alteration of the ground rules of this fact-finding mission.
When one talks about developing accurate information regarding recent events
in the Jenin refugee camp, the intention of those who drafted the Resolution
was of all the events in the refugee camp: both the fact that the Palestinians
had turned it into an armed terrorist encampment, as well as the resulting
reaction by Israel in having to deal with the extensive armed nature of the
refugee camp.
By the way, this is despite the fact that General Assembly resolutions
oblige everybody to honor the special status of refugee camps and not to allow
arms to be stored there, produced there, or used there for any purpose. This is
one of the functions of the United Nations bodies here in the area, supervising
refugees, to make sure that this doesn't happen. Clearly, they didn't do very
well in this aspect. So, the whole idea of this fact-finding mission was to come
and check into the facts regarding this situation, and to report on the facts.
What we saw evolving over the weekend was that this mandate was widened
and extended by the statements made, the documentation circulated - it wasn't
necessarily just in the Jenin refugee camp, but there was a statement made
that Jenin was just the beginning and it could possibly be elsewhere.
And then, it wasn't just collecting information, but it was also coming to
conclusions.
Then, it wasn't the recent events in the Jenin refugee camp, but the
military activities by Israel in the Jenin refugee camp.
What we saw was a slow expansion of the terms of reference, or the
mandate, of the team which we agreed we would cooperate with into spheres
which we felt didn't have any clear framework or boundary.
We were also somewhat surprised by the people appointed to lead the
fact-finding team, who were appointed without consulting us. We had hoped
that there would be a concentration of military expertise and anti-terror
expertise, in view of the nature of the fighting there and of the situation that
existed there before the fighting began.
Hence, the Israeli government decided to ask the Secretary General to
clarify, together with us, the terms of reference so that we would all know
clearly where we stand and the various basic components of a fact-finding
mission, which is a standard procedure in United Nations practice, of detailing
the mandate - the composition, the modes of movement, the modes of meeting
people, of interviewing people, questions of confidentiality, and the way in
which the findings of the team will be handled and presented and shown to the
sides. All these things need to be set down as they are usually set down in
commissions of fact-finding or teams of fact-finding.
This is what we asked the Secretary General to do. We asked that,
pending this clarification, the team "hang on" until we can come to an
agreement with the United Nations on this.
This is the situation as it stands at the moment. As I said, this position has
been very well-stated by the Foreign Minister, that we have nothing to hide.
This was a terrible blood libel, another instance of exaggerating and taking
completely out of context the situation here and the activities of Israel.
It reminds me - two or three weeks ago, when the first Security Council
Resolution, 1402, was adopted, calling upon the parties to cease fire, calling
upon the Palestinians to cease terror, calling upon the Israelis to withdraw from
Area A, the only thing that anybody remembered in all the approaches that
were made to us by the world at large and the Europeans and everybody else
was: Ah, you have to withdraw from the territories; everybody forgot that there
was also a call to the Palestinians to stop terror.
Here, we're seeing the same thing. There is this misconception that the whole
idea of the fact-finding team is to deal with the alleged massacre by Israel of
the Palestinians in Jenin.
Everybody seems to have forgotten that this fact-finding team is to deal
with the situation in Jenin that existed, that brought about the need for Israel to
have to fight from house to house and to suffer a huge amount of casualties in
order not to bomb military targets - which, by any standards of international
humanitarian law, can be attacked from the air or in any other way, in view of
their blatant military nature.
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