"It pains me that this past decade has been lost to peace. Ten years lost to illegal settlement expansion. Ten years lost to intra-Palestinian divide, growing polarization and hopelessness," he surmised, as if both parties -- the occupied and the military occupier -- were equally responsible for the bloodshed and that Palestinians are equally blamed for their own military occupation by Israel.
"This is madness," he exclaimed. "Replacing a two-state solution with a one-state construct would spell doom: denying Palestinians their freedom and rightful future, and pushing Israel further from its vision of a Jewish democracy towards greater global isolation."
But again, no solid commitment either way. Who is "replacing a two-state solution?" Why would a "one state reality" -- which incidentally happens to be the most humane and logical solution to the conflict -- "spell doom"? And why is Ban so keen on the ethnic status of Israel's "Jewish democracy" vision, considering that it was Israel's demographic obsession that pushed Palestinians to live under military occupation or live under perpetual racial discrimination in Israel itself?
The fact is that there is more to Ban's muddled language than a UN chief who is desperately trying to find the balance in his words, so that he may end his mission without registering any serious controversies, or raise the ire of Israel and the US.
(Incidentally, Israeli Ambassador to the UN, Danny Danon, still ranted against the UN chief for calling Israel's illegal Jewish settlements "illegal" in his address. Other Israeli commentators raged against him for being a "liar." Strange that even repeating old, irrefutable facts is still a cause of anger in Israel.)
Yet again, this is not the matter of the choice of words. A WikiLeaks document from August 2014 is an excellent case in point.
According to the document released by WikiLeaks, Ban collaborated secretly with the US to undermine a report issued by the UN's own Board of Inquiry's report on Israeli bombing of UN schools in Gaza during the war of December 2008 -- January 2009.
"Collaborated" is actually a soft reference to that event, where Susan Rice -- then the White House national security adviser -- called on him repeatedly to bury the report, not to bring it to the council for discussion and, eventually, to remove the strongly-phrased recommendations of "deeper" and "impartial" investigations into the bombing of the UN facilities.
When Ban explained to Rice that he was constrained by the fact that the Board of Inquiry is an independent body, she told him to provide a cover letter that practically disowns the recommendations as ones that "exceeded the scope of the terms of reference and (that) no further action is needed."
Ban Ki-moon obliged.
When the UN chief is gone, he will be missed -- but certainly not by Palestinians in Gaza or refugees in Syria, or war victims in Afghanistan. But by the likes of Susan Rice, whose job was made very easy when all she needed to do was merely instruct the chief of the largest international organization on earth to do exactly as she wished and for him to gladly do so.
In his last visit to Palestine in June, Ban Ki-Moon told distraught Gazans that the "UN will always be with you."
As tens of thousands there still stand on the rubble of their own homes, denied freedom to move or rebuild, his statement is as forgettable as the man's legacy at the UN.
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