Canada’s “humanitarian” interventionists clamor for military intervention to overthrow governments in black and brown nations but want Palestinians victimized by Israeli violence put under UN trusteeship.
As Israel has unleashed a holocaust in Gaza the Responsibility to Protect (R2P) crowd have stayed mum. As children’s heads were blown off in Rafah 48 hours after the International Court of Justice demanded Israel “immediately halt” its onslaught on the besieged city Ali Abunimah noted: “if the ‘responsibility to protect’ doctrine for military force had any validity or consistency, it would be invoked now. But instead, all the ‘R2P’ frauds like Samantha J Power are silent because all it ever was a cover for US aggression under ‘humanitarian’ cover.”
R2P was a showpiece of the previous Jean Chretien and Paul Martin governments’ foreign policy. In September 2000 then Liberal foreign affairs minister Lloyd Axworthy launched the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty, which presented its final report, The Responsibility to Protect, to the UN in December 2001. At the organization’s 2005 World Summit, Canada advocated that world leaders endorse the new doctrine. It asserts that where gross human rights abuses are occurring, it is the duty of the international community to intervene, over and above considerations of state sovereignty. The doctrine asserts that “the principle of non-intervention yields to the international responsibility to protect.”
Canadian officials cited R2P to justify destabilizing and intervening militarily to oust Haiti’s elected government in February 2004. Even more vocally, they invoked R2P to justify NATO’s 2011 invasion of Libya.
Axworthy and Canada’s ambassador to the UN when R2P was presented, Alan Rock, wrote multiple op eds promoting R2P in Libya. I found over a dozen mentions of R2P by Axworthy and Rock concerning Libya.
But Axworthy and Rock haven’t mentioned the R2P for those in Gaza. Nor have any other politician or prominent commentator. Why? Israel’s destruction in Gaza far supersedes anything Muamar Gaddafi or Jean-Bertrand Aristide were accused of.
While they’ve been mum about the need for militarily intervention to protect Palestinians,
Axworthy, Rock and Michael W. Manulak recently published commentaries in the Globe and Mail and Foreign Affairscalling for a UN Trusteeship for Palestine. They call for the UN’s long dormant Trusteeship Council to take control of Palestine, which they argue would be a “victory” for the UN system.
But it’s Israel that’s committed unspeakable horrors in Gaza. Why isn’t Israel the one put under UN trusteeship?
The answer is straightforward: A powerful, nuclear armed nation Israel won’t be put under UN trusteeship. Nor will there be an R2P style intervention to stop its holocaust in Gaza. But genuine R2P advocates would still raise the specter of a foreign intervention to pressure Israel to stop its horrors.
Calling for intervention in Libya and Haiti but not Israel highlights R2P advocates concession to power. This is qualitatively different from the concessions leftists regularly make when they operate within the confines of real-world power dynamics. It’s not akin to promoting a better union contract rather than an alternative to capitalism. Instead, it’s granting a liberal sounding ideological mask to militarist and imperialist forces.
R2P advocates’ failure to call for an intervention to stop Israel’s crimes highlights how the doctrine is little more than a tool to justify US-led interventions.
