Awkward questions arose in January this year as to whether or not the Palestinian Authority condoned -- some went so far as to say encouraged -- Israel's 22-day long war on Gaza with the aim of achieving the joint Israeli-PA objective of removing Hamas from power. It is still hard to digest such a scenario -- Palestinians inciting the mass killing and suffering of fellow Palestinians to remove a political rival from power -- from a humanitarian perspective. No matter how corrupt Fatah has become one can only shudder at the prospect of its complicity with Israel in war crimes and crimes against humanity. Yet today we are faced with an impossible situation in which the PA and its chairman are at best guilty of protecting Israeli war criminals, and therefore depriving their own people of any form of justice, at worst of siding with the enemy and assisting it to kill Palestinians. The UN Human Rights Council was due to vote on its fact-finding mission's report on war crimes in Gaza on 2 October. If the council had been allowed to vote and endorsed the report it would have submitted it to the UN General Assembly with the recommendation that it be referred to the International Criminal Court's prosecutor. It would have been the first time that Israeli officials faced trial under international law, without a US veto and its carte blanche promise of impunity. The murder of over 1,400 Palestinians by the Israeli occupation army last January might not have gone completely unpunished. Endorsing the report, which accuses Israel, alongside Hamas, of having possibly committed war crimes, would have also affected Israel's relations with other countries, most significantly in the production, research and sale of weapons. A Geneva resolution would, among other things, have undermined the Israel-EU Association which is the basis for all scientific cooperation. Mahmoud Abbas, Palestinian president and head of the Fatah movement, thwarted all this last Friday when he ordered Palestine's representative in the Human Rights Council to defer the vote for six months. The PA's justification for this deplorable decision -- that it didn't want the report to reach the UN Security Council only to be thwarted by the expected US veto -- insults everyone's intelligence. Other similarly absurd justifications by Abbas loyalists only made the man, the PA and Fatah appear even more complicit in Israel's criminality. The truth now staring the world in the face is that the PA's leadership came under Israeli and US pressure to defer the vote. The Israeli and Palestinian press published unsourced information claiming a video tape supposedly exists showing Abbas encouraging then- Israeli Defence Minister Ehud Barak to pursue the war on Gaza in January and that the Palestinian president was blackmailed by this video to defer the vote. The existence of such a video is questionable, but does that really matter any more? Abbas lost any vestige of credibility a long time ago. It is time to exit.
