The Euro-Mediterranean Human Rights Monitor (Euro-Med) today called on the German Bridge Prize Society to withdraw the 2020 prize awarded to former Israeli official Tzipi Livni.
In a letter to Willi Xylander, President of the Bridge Prize Society for 2020, the Geneva-based Euro-Med said it was “seriously concerned with the decision of the Bridge Prize Society to award the 2020 prize to Ms. Tzipi Livni of Israel, who’s accused of alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity committed in the blockaded Gaza Strip during Operation Case Lead 2008/9 when she was Israel’s Foreign Minister.”
It said that “Livni has worked relentlessly during the internationally condemned operation to whitewash Israel’s assault on Gaza’s civilian population. The operation led to the death 1,400 Palestinians, most of whom were civilians.”
The 2009 UN Fact Finding Mission on the Gaza Conflict concluded that the operation “was a deliberately disproportionate attack designed to punish, humiliate and terrorize a civilian population, radically diminish its local economic capacity both to work and to provide for itself, and to force upon it an ever-increasing sense of dependency and vulnerability.”
In December 2009, Livni became the subject of an arrest warrant issued by a United Kingdom court over her role in the same war. Livni cancelled a visit to London then to evade accountability.
Similarly, in 2017, Livni cancelled a visit to Brussels after learning that Belgian prosecutors had been hoping to question her over allegations of war crimes in the 2008-9 Israeli war.
“In that regards, we would like to emphasize that granting such prize to an Israeli politician who stands accused of war crimes would essentially contribute to whitewashing the crimes of Israel’s occupation of the Palestinians if not further incentivize Israeli politicians to escalate atrocities against Palestinians when knowing that such brutalities wouldn’t affect their international standing,” said Euro-Med in the letter.
“Euro-Med Monitor would like to assert that the international community is morally responsible to stand with the powerless and oppressed and deter human rights violations in all ways possible. This obligation is heavily violated by contributing either willingly or inadvertently to casting a positive light on those responsible for the suffering of Palestinians,” it said.
“We find it regrettably that at a critical moment, when Israel is about to obliterate the two-state solution and peace process, the Bridge Prize Society choses to celebrate an Israeli politician that contributed to oppressing Palestinians as a person that stands for ‘liberal thinking, democracy, openness and humanity’.”
Euro-Med Monitor called on the Bridge Prize Society to seriously reconsider its decision and withdraw the prize awarded to Livni, “in order to avoid whitewashing or incentivizing further human rights violations in the occupied Palestinian territories.”
