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Globalizing Gaza

By Jeff Halper | CounterPunch | August 18, 2014

Operation Protective Edge was not merely a military assault on a primarily civilian population. As in its previous “operations” (Cast Lead in 2008-9 and Pillar of Defense in 2012), it was also part of an ongoing assault on international humanitarian law (IHL) by a highly coordinated team of Israeli lawyers, military officers, PR people and politicians, led by (no less) a philosopher of ethics. It is an effort not only to get Israel off the hook for massive violations of human rights and international law, but to help other governments overcome similar constraints when they embark as well on “asymmetrical warfare,” “counterinsurgency” and “counter-terrorism” against peoples resisting domination. It is a campaign that Israel calls “lawfare” and had better be taken seriously by us all.

The urgency of this campaign has been underscored by a series of notable legal setbacks and challenges Israel has incurred over the past decade or so, beginning with the indictment of Ariel Sharon in 2001 by a Belgian court over his involvement in the Sabra and Shatila massacres, for which he escaped trial. In the wake of Operation Defensive Shield in 2002, when Sharon’s government oversaw the demolition of hundreds of Palestinian homes in the West Bank, the utter destruction of virtually all the infrastructure of Palestinian cities, the death of 497 Palestinians and the arrest of 7000 people, Israel was accused of war crimes, but succeeded in foiling a UN investigation.

In 2004, at the request of the General Assembly, the International Court of Justice in The Hague ruled that Israel’s construction of the wall inside Palestinian territory is “contrary to international law” and must be dismantled. The ruling was upheld almost unanimously by the UN General Assembly, with only Israel, the US, Australia and a few Pacific atolls dissenting – though, again, it lacked any means of enforcement. In the second Lebanon War in 2006, after destroying the Dahiya neighborhood in Beirut, the Hizbollah “stronghold,” Israel announced its “Dahiya Doctrine.” Declared Gadi Eisenkott, head of the IDF’s Northern Command,

What happened in the Dahiya quarter of Beirut in 2006, “will happen in every village from which Israel is fired on…. We will apply disproportionate force on it and cause great damage and destruction there. From our standpoint, these are not civilian villages, they are military bases.… This is not a recommendation. This is a plan. And it has been approved.”

And it was applied again. The Goldstone Report on Operation Cast Lead concluded that

The tactics used by Israeli military armed forces in the Gaza offensive [of 2008-2009] are consistent with previous practices, most recently during the Lebanon war in 2006. A concept known as the Dahiya doctrine emerged then, involving the application of disproportionate force and the causing of great damage and destruction to civilian property and infrastructure, and suffering to civilian populations.

The Dahiya Doctrine violates two cardinal principles of IHL: The Principle of Distinction and the Principle of Disproportionality. The Principle of Distinction, embodied in the four Geneva Conventions of 1949 and their two Additional Protocols of 1977, lays down a hard-and-fast rule: civilians cannot be targeted by armies. On the contrary, they must be protected; violence to life and person is strictly prohibited, as are “outrages upon personal dignity.” The Principle of Proportionality, also embodied in the 1977 Protocols to the Fourth Geneva Conventions considers it a war crime to intentionally attack a military objective in the knowledge that the incidental civilian injuries would be clearly excessive in relation to the anticipated military advantage. “The presence within the civilian population of individuals who do not come within the definition of civilians,” says Protocol I, Article 50 (3), “does not deprive the population of its civilian character.”

Not only were these principles violated yet again in the current round of fighting – and the Israeli government, aware of this, has carefully prepared its defense before the UN Human Rights Council’s international committee of inquiry as well as before the International Criminal Court, should the Palestinian Authority turn to it – but an additional doctrine of intentional disproportionality has also been declared and perpetrated: the Hannibal Doctrine. This states that when an Israeli soldier is captured, rescuing him becomes the main mission, no matter how many civilians are killed or injured, how much damage is caused, or even if the captured soldier himself is killed or wounded by “friendly” fire. When, then, it was believed (falsely, it turned out) that an IDF soldier had been captured by Hamas in the Rafah area, the entire urban area came under massive Israeli artillery fire and air strikes, in which hundreds of buildings were destroyed and at least 130 people killed.

Violations of the Principles of Distinction and Disproportionality constitute grave breaches of international law – and we can only imagine what states would do if they were eliminated from the legal code or significantly watered down. But this is precisely what Israel aims to do. Using the Palestinians as their guinea pigs in a bold and aggressive strategy of “fixing” international law, it wants to create new categories of combatants – “non-legitimate actors” such as “terrorists,” “insurgents” and “non-state actors,” together with the civilian population that supports them – so that anyone resisting state oppression can no longer claim protection. This is especially relevant when, as British General Rupert Smith tells us, modern warfare is rapidly moving away from the traditional inter-state model to what he calls a “new paradigm” – “war amongst the people” – in which “We fight amongst the people, not on the battlefield.” A more popular term used by military people, “asymmetrical warfare,” is perhaps more honest and revealing, since it highlights the vast power differential that exists between states and their militaries and the relative weakness of the non-state forces confronting them.

But “the people,” those pesky “non-state actors,” also have rights. Back in 1960, the UN General Assembly’s Declaration on the Granting of Independence to Colonial Countries and Peoples endorsed the right of peoples to self-determination and, by extension, their right to resist, even by armed force, “alien subjugation, domination and exploitation.” The push-back by governments over the years, and certainly since 9/11, led by the US and Israel, has been to delegitimize the right of non-state actors to resist oppression. Thus, when Obama or the EU uphold Israel’s right to defend itself, they do not include as part of that right that of an occupied people to defend itself. Indeed, non-state actors are cast as “terrorists” (the category into which Israel dumps all insurgents, revolutionaries and, by extension, any protesters threatening the powers-that-be), thus deprived of any legitimacy as “a side” to a conflict with whom negotiations are possible. When they seek the protection of international law, as did the people of Gaza, and take steps to hold state actors accountable for their illegal actions, they are engaging in what Israel defines as “lawfare”: when “terrorists” employ international law as a weapon against democracies. Israel’s campaign against lawfare attempts to cast non-state actors as the villains, of course, but “lawfare’ best describes Israel’s own efforts to bend IHL to its needs – a kind of asymmetrical lawfare to remove all constraints on states in their attempts to pursue wars against peoples.

Israel’s lawfare campaign is led by two Israeli figures. One is Asa Kasher, a professor of philosophy and “practical ethics” at Tel Aviv University, the author of the Israeli army’s Code of Conduct. Indeed, attaching a professional ethicist to the IDF provides the basis for Israel’s oft-stated claim to have the “most moral army in the world.” The second figure is Major General Amos Yadlin, former head of the IDF’s National Defense College, under whose auspices Kasher and his “team” formulated the Code of Conduct, and today the head of Military Intelligence.

It is completely appropriate and understandable that Israel should be leading the campaign to remove the protections enjoyed by non-combatant civilians, Kasher vigorously asserts. “The decisive question,” he says,

is how enlightened countries conduct themselves. We in Israel are in a key position in the development of law in this field because we are on the front lines in the fight against terrorism. This is gradually being recognized both in the Israeli legal system and abroad…. What we are doing is becoming the law. These are concepts that are not purely legal, but also contain strong ethical elements.

The Geneva Conventions are based on hundreds of years of tradition of the fair rules of combat. They were appropriate for classic warfare, where one army fought another. But in our time the whole business of rules of fair combat has been pushed aside. There are international efforts underway to revise the rules to accommodate the war against terrorism. According to the new provisions, there is still a distinction between who can and cannot be hit, but not in the blatant approach which existed in the past. The concept of proportionality has also changed….

I am not optimistic enough to assume that the world will soon acknowledge Israel’s lead in developing customary international law. My hope is that our doctrine, give or take some amendments, will in this fashion be incorporated into customary international law in order to regulate warfare and limit its calamities.

In order to provide a philosophical basis for undermining the Principles of Distinction and Proportionality, Kasher and Yadlin put forward a “new doctrine of military ethics” based on their version of a “Just War Doctrine of Fighting Terror.” Basically they privilege states in their conflicts with non-state actors by giving them the authority to deem an adversary “terrorist,” a term lacking any agreed-upon definition in IHL, thereby depriving it of any legal protection. They define an “act of terror,”

as an act, carried out by individuals or organizations, not on behalf of any state, for the purpose of killing or otherwise injuring persons, insofar as they are members of a particular population, in order to instill fear among the members of that population (‘terrorize’ them), so as to cause them to change the nature of the related regime or of the related government or of policies implemented by related institutions, whether for political or ideological (including religious) reasons.

If we remove the words “not on behalf of any state,” this definition of a terrorist act conforms precisely to Israel’s Dahiya Doctrine. According to Major General Giora Eiland, attacks against Israel will be deterred by harming “the civilian population to such an extent that it will bring pressure to bear on the enemy combatants.” Reducing a popular struggle to a series of discrete acts, moreover, makes it possible to label an entire resistance movement “terrorist” purely on the basis of one or more particular acts, with no regard to its situation or the justness of its cause. Once this is done, it is easy to criminalize non-state resistance, since terrorism is, in Kasher’s words, “utterly immoral.”

Israel’s attempts to have the Iranian Revolutionary Guards declared a “terror organization,” even though it is an agent of a state, shows the tendentiousness of Kasher’s and Yadlin’s philosophical definitions, since it does not fit into their very own “state/non-state” dichotomy. What, then, would prevent the international community from naming the IDF and various covert Israeli agencies such as the Mossad or the Shin Bet (the General Security Services) as “terror organizations”? The Goldstone Report itself concluded that Israel’s offensive against Gaza during Operation Cast Lead was “a deliberately disproportionate attack designed to punish, humiliate and terrorize a civilian population.”

Having de-legitimized state-defined “acts of terrorism,” Kasher and Yadlin then go on to further legitimize state actions such as those taken by Israel against Hizbollah, Hamas or, indeed, all Palestinian resistance, by invoking “self-defense” – again, a claim which, according to Just War Theory and Article 51 of the UN Charter, only a state can make. In order to do so, they begin the narrative of events leading up to the attacks on Gaza with the discreet acts that the “terrorist” organization had done by launching rockets on Israel without any regard whatsoever for 47 years of occupation, 25 years of closure, seven years of a self-described regime of semi-starvation and the attacks on Hamas that preceded the rocket fire – or, for that matter, the right of Palestinians to resist “alien subjugation, domination and exploitation.”

Kasher and Yadlin also imply that states cannot engage in terrorism – only because they are states which have a “legitimate monopoly” over the use of force. In fact, the non-state “terrorism from below” which so concerns them pales in scale when compared to “terrorism from above,” State Terrorism. In his book Death By Government, R.J. Rummel points out that over the course of the 20th century about 170,000 innocent civilians were killed by non-state actors, a significant figure to be sure. But, he adds,

during the first eighty-eight years of this [20th] century, almost 170 million men, women and children have been shot, beaten, tortured, knifed, burned, starved, frozen, crushed or worked to death; buried alive, drowned, hung, bombed or killed in any other of the myriad ways governments have inflicted death on unarmed, helpless citizens and foreigners. The dead could conceivably be nearly 360 million people.

And that, written in 1994, does not include Zaire, Bosnia, Somalia, Sudan, Rwanda, Saddam Hussein’s reign, the impact of UN sanctions on the Iraqi civilian population and other state-sponsored murders that occurred after Rummel compiled his figures. It also does not account for all the forms of State Terrorism that do not result in death: torture, imprisonment, repression, house demolitions, induced starvation, intimidation and all the rest.

“We do not deny,” Kasher concedes, “that a state can act for the purpose of killing persons in order to terrorize a population with the goal of achieving some political or ideological goal.” However, he adds,

when such acts are performed on behalf of a state, or by some of its overt or covert agencies or proxies, we apply to the ensuing conflict moral, ethical and legal principles that are commonly held to pertain to ordinary international conflicts between states or similar political entities. In such a context, a state that killed numerous citizens of another state in order to terrorize its citizenry would be guilty of what is commonly regarded as a war crime [italics added].

Kasher’s caveat – “a state that killed numerous citizens of another state in order to terrorize its citizenry” – does not relate at all to a state that terrorizes its own citizens, and lets Israel off the hook, since the terrorized population of Gaza are not citizens of another state.

Israel’s strategy of lawfare rests on repeating illegal acts while continuing to justify them with “new military ethics.” “If you do something for long enough,” says Colonel (res.) Daniel Reisner, former head of the IDF’s Legal Department, “the world will accept it. The whole of international law is now based on the notion that an act that is forbidden today becomes permissible if executed by enough countries…. International law progresses through violations. We invented the targeted assassinations thesis [that extra-judicial killings are permitted when it is necessary to stop a certain operation against the citizens of Israel and when the role played by the target is crucial to the operation] and we had to push it. Eight years later it is in the center of the bounds of legality.” “The more often Western states apply principles that originated in Israel to their own non-traditional conflicts in places like Afghanistan and Iraq,” says Kasher, “then the greater the chance these principles have of becoming a valuable part of international law.”

A few years ago (2005) the The Jerusalem Post published a revealing interview with an Israeli “expert in international law” who, choosing to remain anonymous, explained:

International law is the language of the world and it’s more or less the yardstick by which we measure ourselves today. It’s the lingua franca of international organizations. So you have to play the game if you want to be a member of the world community. And the game works like this. As long as you claim you are working within international law and you come up with a reasonable argument as to why what you are doing is within the context of international law, you’re fine. That’s how it goes. This is a very cynical view of how the world works. So, even if you’re being inventive, or even if you’re being a bit radical, as long as you can explain it in that context, most countries will not say you’re a war criminal.

This, again, is serious stuff. Just as Israel exports its occupation – its weaponry and tactics of suppression – to such willing customers as US and European militaries, security agencies and police forces, so, too, does it export its legal expertise in manipulating IHL and its effective PR/hasbara techniques. Gaza itself represents little more than a testing ground for these varied instruments of suppression. It is the globalization of Gaza that is a key Israeli export. Exports, however, need local agents to package the product and create a market for it in the local economy. Thus, B’nai Brith in the US spawned “The Lawfare Project” under the slogan “Protecting Against the Politicization of Human Rights”, whose main strategy is to enlist prominent legal experts to delegitimize attempts to hold Israel accountable for its crimes under IHL.

Globalizing Gaza in both military and legal terms raises the slogan “we are all Palestinians” from one of political solidarity to literal accuracy. Its corollary also highlights a key element of international politics of which we must be keenly aware: our governments are all Israel.

Jeff Halper is the head of The Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions (ICAHD). He can be reached at: jeff@icahd.org.

August 18, 2014 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | , , , | Leave a comment

Touring the devastated industrial zones of Gaza

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By Martin Lejeune | Ma’an | August 18, 2014

On the night of the July 27, the first day of the Muslim Eid-Al-Fitr festival following the fasting month of Ramadan, the Israeli air force dropped three bombs on Al-Hurani’s carpentry workshop. Each of the three bombs had an explosive force of 250 pounds.

Al-Hurani pointed towards the charred left overs of the tables, armchairs and beds, “all designed according to the desires of each individual customer, processed with the best woods and decorated with passion, as our customers expect from us,” he told Ma’an.

The carpentry of the Al-Hurani family is well-known across the northern Gaza Strip city of Jabaliya, and is respected throughout the Gaza Strip for its precise designs. In addition to family members, Al-Hurani employed 25 workers in his workshop before the Israeli assault.

“Due to the total destruction of our plant everyone had to be dismissed immediately and I do not know how to feed my family anymore. We don’t know how to move on from here,” he said.

The family possesses no savings for the construction of a new workshop and they believe there is no hope for obtaining any kind of compensation for the estimated $450,000 in damages they have suffered.

Abu Eida, one of the largest construction companies in the Gaza Strip, is headquartered in the industrial area east of Jabaliya that the air force also dropped several 250 pound bombs on Aug. 2.

Abed Rabou Abu Eida, CEO of the construction company, told Ma’an he was not aware of the exact number of bombs being dropped.

An on-site inspection of the premises, however, revealed the extent of the destruction: Three large buildings, which had all been reinforced by concrete, the warehouse containing cement and bricks, as well as the construction machinery have all been flattened.

Abu Eida estimates the cost of the total damage to be around $7.5 million. As a result of the attack, he had to dismiss all of his 70 permanent workers because the company could no longer operate. Hundreds of part-time workers that deal with Abu-Eida on a sporadic basis are also out of work.

“In 2008 and 2012 the factory premises were already completely destroyed by the Israeli air force and our company has not received any kind of compensation, due to the law passed in 2007,” Abu Eida said, referring to an Israeli law that defined Gaza as enemy territory and thus its residents ineligible for compensation through civil suits.

“This time we have no more money to rebuild our company a third time.”

At the end of Abu Khayr street in the Jabaliya industrial area sits the Al-Fayoumi family farm. The farm once owned 150 cows and sold milk twice a day to dairy factories.

130 of the cows were killed in their stables during the Israeli bombing on Aug. 2, according to workers on the farm.

During a visit to the ruined courtyard on August 13, workers were still trying to collect and burn the remaining corpses. The terrible smell of the semi-decomposed carcasses of cattle lay side by side with charred hens when Ma’an visited.

A swarm of flies covered the corpses, trying to get its share.

“Where can the Al-Fayoumis get new cows from?” asked a worker who did not want to give his name. “The borders to Gaza are closed and the smuggling tunnels destroyed.”

Wael Al-Wadia, owner of the Saraio candy factory in the same area, showed Ma’an the remains of his completely ruined factory buildings, where ice cream, biscuits, and cakes were once made.

“I had 100 workers on permanent contracts. 100 workers who have fed 100 families and now have no income,” al-Wadia said. The factory produced five tons of sweets on a daily basis, he said. Now, everything is gone.

Al-Qadia estimated that it would cost him $7 million to purchase the same equipment again, which he had initially brought to Gaza from Italy.

“We have made the best biscuits in the Gaza Strip. Every market in Gaza sold our products. Our biscuits were as good as the Biscotti’s from Italy,” he told Ma’an.

But it was not only factories, hospitals, schools, farms, agricultural land, and the famous orange groves of Beit Hanoun that were bombed during the worst of the Israeli assault between July 6 and Aug. 3.

Gaza’s sole power station, its largest mosques, and the building of the popular TV station Al-Quds were also hit, while tens of thousands of private homes were destroyed or severely damaged.

Muhsen Abu Ramadan, Director of the Arab Center for Agricultural Economic Development in Gaza, told Ma’an that the damage to the besieged coastal enclave’s economy, however, predates the recent Israeli assault.

“The economic crisis began long before the aggression, and is a result of the eight years lasting blockade of Gaza,” he said.

Abu Ramadan estimates that even before the beginning of the Israeli attacks in July, 40 percent of the labor force was unemployed, 30 percent lived below the poverty line, 57 percent were at risk of malnutrition, and 70 percent received food parcels from the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East or other organizations.

“These numbers have increased dramatically since the bombings,” said Abu Ramadan.

He also said that Israeli army completely destroyed 220 factories in the campaign, while hundreds more suffered partial damage.

Abu Ramadan estimates the cost of destruction of agricultural land at around $200 million and the amount of the total costs to the economy at several billion dollars.

“Gaza would need five years to rebuild the destroyed infrastructure,” he said.

But given the current economic conditions caused by the occupation and the blockade of Gaza, he estimated that reconstruction will take at least ten years.

“We have the right to import building materials and this right must be given to us immediately, especially with the help of the international community. Otherwise, we will not be able to rebuild our destroyed houses and factories,” Abu Ramadan added.

Tens of thousands have joined the ranks of the unemployed since the imposition of the harsh Israeli blockade in 2007, and given the scale of the damage suffered during the massive Israeli assault, of those who were still employed in industry and agriculture in July it is unlikely that more than a few thousand are still working in either sector. A few thousand out of 1.8 million people.

“Israel is not only attacking civilians and their homes, but also systematically destroyed the economy of the Gaza Strip in order to make people dependent on emergency aid,” Abu Ramadan argued.

“Now that almost the entire economy is destroyed, people can no longer work, thus cutting their purchasing power dramatically. Now youth want to emigrate at even younger ages than before. Due to the emigration of young skilled workers the economy is becoming even weaker.”

“Israel has managed to transform a functioning economy into a third world country through eight years of embargo and three assaults in five years. Without ending the embargo, it is impossible to break out of this vicious cycle ourselves,” Abu Ramadan added.

Martin Lejeune is a German journalist based in Gaza. Follow him on twitter

August 18, 2014 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Subjugation - Torture, War Crimes | , , , | Leave a comment

Attacking journalists makes Israel a plastic democracy

By Alastair Sloan | MEMO | August 18, 2014

I’ve just had the pleasure of spending eight hours in detention at the border between Egypt and Israel, between Tabaa and Israel’s southern-most city, Eilat. My crime at first appeared to be a single male travelling alone into a Middle Eastern country. But once the immigration police realised I was a journalist, I was in for the long haul.

At first – I was asked the standard cavalcade – where was I staying, who with, and what were my plans? But on discovering my profession, brows furrowed faster than a Horah dance at a bar mitzvah.

My stay in a holding area, punctuated by increasingly aggressive interrogations, peaked when the most senior official asked me to write down the names and addresses of all my sources in Israel and Palestine.

Of course they wanted sources in “the Palestinian Territories,” and in a Freudian slip, I blurted out that I certainly wouldn’t be revealing any sources in the “Occupied Territories”. After a brief staring match, the official kept tapping away into her computer.

I didn’t give them the information they were after, not wanting to endanger anyone – which resulted in a further four hour wait, during which not much appeared to be happening. They let me go in time for me to miss my best friend’s engagement party, where I was stopping by before heading up to Ramallah. They knew I was in a rush to make this, and they knew I was best man. I’ll never know if they let me go when they did out of spite, but I suspect they did. Bullies enjoy a pathetic victory.

Thomas Jefferson was unequivocal in his support for the media, summarising that “the basis of our government being the opinion of the people, the very first object should be to keep that right; and were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers, or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter.”

Nelson Mandela, no friend to Israel but a hero to civilised nations – described freedom of information as “the lifeblood of democracy”. Curbing journalistic freedoms is not only a red rag to the bull – it’s arrogant and betrays the electorate. Too often we think of democracy as happening at the ballot box – but it is the media that informs the voter before they reach the polling station and in harassing, imprisoning and even killing journalists, Israel makes a mockery of their insistent claim to be “the only democracy in the Middle East”.

What I experienced was a mere bump in the road compared to other journalists’ troubles. Majd Kayyal, a Palestinian journalist, was arrested in April 2014 on his return from Beirut – allegedly for entering an “enemy state” and conspiring with a “foreign agent”. He was held in a windowless room for five days, interrogated by Shin Bet, and denied access to a lawyer. The government prohibited Israeli media outlets from reporting on the matter in real time – a ban which was luckily ignored by many editors. The charges were later dropped – however veteran Israeli journalist Itai Anghel noted that having travelled to several “enemy states”, including Iraq and Afghanistan – he had not once been stopped or detained by the Israeli security services.

But again, what happened to Kayyal is, sadly, mild. Seventy-one journalists were killed in Israel last year. Over 2,000 reported being physically attacked or threatened. Eighty-seven were kidnapped. Over 800 were arrested. Seventy seven had had enough and fled the country and, as of December 2013, there were 178 journalists in Israeli prisons. This doesn’t sound like a free press.

At the end of last year – diplomats, politicians, activists and NGOs concluded that the Palestinian territories were one of the worst places in the world to practice journalism. Not only is violence regularly deployed to repress domestic and foreign reporters, censorship laws are used to deny useful debate and manipulate opinion – often in favour of war.

For example, on July 24 the Israeli Broadcasting Authority prohibited the broadcast of an advert produced by B’Tselem, an Israeli NGO, which listed the names of 150 children killed in Gaza. Likewise, the killings of three Israeli teenagers took place almost immediately after their kidnapping, shortly before Operation Protective Edge began, yet a gagging order on the media prevented publishing the key facts.

Instead, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu orchestrated a phoney manhunt for three weeks in which pro-war fervour was whipped up. He even lied to the children’s parents.

Now, talking to Israelis across the country, it is clear that support for the most recent Gaza onslaught is near unprecedented – based on the distorted image of the events leading up to the war. The range of opinions I heard was extremely narrow, with narratives drawing clearly on simplistic hasbara distributed by the government. To take a country to war, you need the media with you. Netanyahu has become an expert on this.

Similar censorship laws were invoked when Lt Hadar Goldin was apparently briefly captured by Hamas during the most recent conflict, and Israeli artillery shelled his location in an effort to kill him. This infamous “Hannibal Doctrine”, which dictates Israeli soldiers should be killed by friendly fire rather than become prisoners, was considered so unpalatable to the national spirit – that reporting on it was completely banned. In an extraordinary display of arrogance, Israeli military censors even attempted to stop The New York Times from publishing further information on the case.

So far, only Haaretz has run a piece seriously questioning the doctrine. Thankfully, the newspaper ended a 10 year reporting ban of the Doctrine in 2003, when they completed an investigation into the matter. Still, knowledge of the Doctrine was not as apparent as you would hope for from the ordinary Israelis I spoke to this week.

Though part of the Israeli public’s thirst for war can be attributed to a lack of media information, many Israelis are wilfully blind to the misgivings of the Israeli Defence [sic] Force (IDF). In a survey last year, Tel Aviv University found that just over half of Israelis believe that the media should not publish immoral conduct by the IDF. This has created an environment in which self-censorship is the norm. Recent civilian casualties in Gaza, despite numbering over 2,000 have barely been reported. The morning after the offensive began, Israel’s most widely circulated newspaper, Yisrael Hayom, did not contain a single word regarding civilian casualties. Instead, editors splashed an enormous explosion in Gaza City, and an emotive photo of an IDF conscript hugging his girlfriend goodbye. Yisrael Hayom’s slogan is sickeningly unquestioning for a major media outlet: “Remember, we are Israelis.”

The complicity of the Israeli media – largely a phoney industry with a sense of social responsibility akin to Blackwater or G4S, fills responsible hacks with professional disgust. One in 10 members of the Knesset is a former journalist. The leader of the country’s second most popular party is Yair Lapid and the leader of the Labour Party is Shelly Yachimovich, both came from Channel 2, Israel’s largest TV station. Of course many highly capable leaders have come from journalistic backgrounds, but the mass migration to the other side of the fence suggests the industry has a fundamental misunderstanding of what journalism is about: holding power to account.

Moreover – the continuing brutality of the Israeli regime against Palestinian and foreign journalists is profoundly troubling. I was lucky – my punishment was eight hours in detention and an unplanned overnight stay in Eilat (incidentally – a depressing sinkhole of tourist tack thronging with recently released IDF conscripts, celebrating their mass slaughter in Gaza).

But for many journalists, the price they pay for reporting on Israel’s crimes is beating, arrest, imprisonment, kidnapping or death. For Israel to be anything more than a plastic democracy its leaders need to rethink press freedoms. And if Israelis want to understand why the world is constantly so critical of them, they need to understand that they live in a media bubble in which only a certain reality about the Occupied Territories is presented. The full picture might not be nice, but is extremely important.

August 18, 2014 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Deception, Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Full Spectrum Dominance, Mainstream Media, Warmongering | , , , , , , | Leave a comment

UK government faces lawsuit over arms sales to Israel

Press TV – August 17, 2014

The British government is facing unprecedented legal action over its continued arms sale to Israel in the wake of the recent deadly Israeli aggression against the Gaza Strip.

British law firm, Leigh Day, representing the Campaign Against Arms Trade (CAAT), said Saturday that it has written to Business Secretary Vince Cable, calling for the immediate suspension of arms export licenses to Israel.

The law firm said the UK government’s failure to suspend the licenses is illegal, adding that it has been instructed to seek a High Court judicial review of the administration’s reluctance to halt the arms sales to Israel.

A recent report by the British parliamentary committee for arms export controls showed that Israel received around £8 billion in the form of 400 arms licenses from the UK in 2013.

Leigh Day further said there is a risk that British-made weapons may have been used by Israel during its recent onslaught on Gaza in breach of humanitarian and human rights law.

“If arms from the UK are being used to commit crimes against humanitarian law, and human rights law, then export licenses for these materials must be revoked immediately,” said Rosa Curling, representing the CAAT, adding, “If this is not done, the government’s current policy is unlawful and susceptible to legal challenge.”

The British government has come under persistent pressure to toughen its stance against Israel, including by halting arms exports, since Tel Aviv began its onslaught on the besieged Palestinian enclave more than a month ago.

Nearly 2,000 Palestinians, including 470 children, have lost their lives and more than 10,200 have been wounded since the Israeli military unleashed fatal assaults against Gaza on July 8.

Human rights groups say Israeli forces are systematically killing Palestinian children and youths.

August 17, 2014 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Solidarity and Activism, War Crimes | , , , , | Leave a comment

Palestine Supporters Block Israeli Ship from Docking on California Coast

By Celine Hagbard | IMEMC News | August 16, 2014

The Israeli cargo ship ‘Zim’ was set to dock in the Oakland port, on Saturday morning. But activists have claimed credit for an announced delay in the ship’s docking, and are planning to stop the ship wherever it tries to dock.

The U.S. activists are following the lead of trade unionists in South Africa, who successfully blocked Israeli ships from docking on several occasions, to protest Israeli aggression against Palestinians and call for a just and lasting peace.

Activists in Oakland, California are gathering Saturday to carry out direct action to stop the ship from being able to dock at the port. And, activists in Seattle, WA and Vancouver, BC are also planning to blockade scheduled stops in those ports.

The actions could potentially cost Israeli exporters millions of dollars, if their goods are unable to reach their ports of destination. The exact products on board the Zim are unknown, but they are likely to include Sodastream, a do-it-yourself soda-making device that is manufactured in an Israeli settlement on illegally-seized Palestinian land, Ahava dead sea salts, which are seized from Palestinian land in violation of the Dead Sea Agreement, and Osem brand food products, some of which are manufactured and packaged in Israeli settlements on illegally-seized Palestinian land, in the West Bank.

In their organizing materials, protesters say, “Palestine is calling us to action! Palestinian laborers [and the] Palestinian General Federation Trade Union have called on workers around the world to refuse to handle Israeli goods.”

They say that their “Block the Boat” actions are in response to a call by the Palestinian General Federation of Trade Unions, which calls for people around the world to “educate and build awareness among the labor movements of the U.S., and urge them to condemn the Israeli aggression and to boycott Israel.”

The Oakland action ran into some complications when the local branch of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union, or ILWU, was unable to take a public stand in favor of the action – reportedly because of an active negotiation between the union and management. But individual union members are supporting the action, and are part of Saturday’s blockade.

One of the organizers of the event, Reem Assil of the Arab Resource and Organizing Center, told reporters, “Symbolically, for Oakland we can say, ‘Not in our name!’ We’re not going to be complicit and an accomplice to the ongoing genocide and massacres going on.”

In 2010, Oakland activists successfully turned back an Israeli ship, while protesting the Israeli siege on Gaza. But that ship was later able to dock in Los Angeles. This time, activists are coordinating via social media and contact lists to ensure that protesters prepared for direct action will be on hand to meet the ship in Los Angeles, Seattle, or Vancouver, BC if it decides to re-route.

The protesters are calling for an end to the Israeli siege on Gaza, and an end to the Israeli occupation of Palestinian land. Their demands are in sync with the Palestinian core demands, which include equal rights for Palestinian people, the return of Palestinian refugees to their former homes in what is now Israel, and the release of Palestinian prisoners held in Israeli prison camps.

August 17, 2014 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Solidarity and Activism | , , , , , | Leave a comment

Self-defense or provocation: Israel’s history of breaking ceasefires

IMEU | May 15, 2012

Since Israel’s creation in 1948, Israeli political and military leaders have demonstrated a pattern of repeatedly violating ceasefires with their enemies in order to gain military advantage, for territorial aggrandizement, or to provoke their opponents into carrying out acts of violence that Israel can then exploit politically and/or use to justify military operations already planned.

The following fact sheet provides a brief overview of some of the most high profile and consequential ceasefire violations committed by the Israeli military over the past six decades.

2012 – On November 14, two days after Palestinian factions in Gaza agree to a truce following several days of violence, Israel assassinates the leader of Hamas’ military wing, Ahmed Jabari, threatening to escalate the violence once again after a week in which at least six Palestinian civilians are killed and dozens more wounded in Israeli attacks.

2012 – On March 9, Israel violates an Egyptian-brokered ceasefire and assassinates the head of the Gaza-based Popular Resistance Committees, sparking another round of violence in which at least two dozen Palestinians are killed, including at least four civilians, and scores more wounded. As usual, Israel claims it is acting in self-defense, against an imminent attack being planned by the PRC, while providing no evidence to substantiate the allegation. Following the assassination, Israeli journalist Zvi Bar’el writes in the Haaretz newspaper:

“It is hard to understand what basis there is for the assertion that Israel is not striving to escalate the situation. One could assume that an armed response by the Popular Resistance Committees or Islamic Jihad to Israel’s targeted assassination was taken into account. But did anyone weigh the possibility that the violent reaction could lead to a greater number of Israeli casualties than any terrorist attack that Zuhair al-Qaisi, the secretary-general of the Popular Resistance Committees, could have carried out? “In the absence of a clear answer to that question, one may assume that those who decided to assassinate al-Qaisi once again relied on the ‘measured response’ strategy, in which an Israeli strike draws a reaction, which draws an Israeli counter-reaction.”

Just over two months prior, on the third anniversary of Operation Cast Lead, Israeli army Chief of Staff Lt. Gen. Benny Gantz tells Israel’s Army Radio that Israel will need to attack Gaza again soon to restore its power of “deterrence,” and that the assault must be “swift and painful,” concluding, “We will act when the conditions are right.”

2011 – On October 29, Israel breaks a truce that has maintained calm for two months, killing five Islamic Jihad members in Gaza, including a senior commander. The following day, Egypt brokers another truce that Israel proceeds to immediately violate, killing another four IJ members. In the violence, a total of nine Palestinians and one Israeli are killed.

2008 – In November, Israel violates a ceasefire with Hamas and other Gaza-based militant groups that has been in place since June, launching an operation that kills six Hamas members. Militant groups respond by launching rockets into southern Israel, which Israel shortly thereafter uses to justify Operation Cast Lead, its devastating military assault on Gaza beginning on December 27. Over the next three weeks, the Israeli military kills approximately 1400 Palestinians, most of them civilians, including more than 300 children. A UN Human Rights Council Fact Finding Mission led by South African jurist Richard Goldstone subsequently concludes that both Israel and Hamas had committed war crimes and crimes against humanity during the fighting, a judgment shared by human rights organizations such as Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch.

2002 – On July 23, hours before a widely reported ceasefire declared by Hamas and other Palestinian groups is scheduled to come into effect, Israel bombs an apartment building in the middle of the night in the densely populated Gaza Strip in order to assassinate Hamas leader Salah Shehada. Fourteen civilians, including nine children, are also killed in the attack, and 50 others wounded, leading to a scuttling of the ceasefire and a continuation of violence.

2002 – On January 14, Israel assassinates Raed Karmi, a militant leader in the Fatah party, following a ceasefire agreed to by all Palestinian militant groups the previous month, leading to its cancellation. Later in January, the first suicide bombing by the Fatah linked Al-Aqsa Martyr’s Brigade takes place.

2001 – On November 23, Israel assassinates senior Hamas militant, Mahmoud Abu Hanoud. At the time, Hamas was adhering to an agreement made with PLO head Yasser Arafat not to attack targets inside of Israel. Following the killing, respected Israeli military correspondent of the right-leaning Yediot Ahronot newspaper, Alex Fishman, writes in a front-page story: “We again find ourselves preparing with dread for a new mass terrorist attack within the Green Line [Israel’s pre-1967 border]… Whoever gave a green light to this act of liquidation knew full well that he is thereby shattering in one blow the gentleman’s agreement between Hamas and the Palestinian Authority; under that agreement, Hamas was to avoid in the near future suicide bombings inside the Green Line…” A week later, Hamas responds with bombings in Jerusalem and Haifa.

2001 – On July 25, as Israeli and Palestinian Authority security officials meet to shore up a six-week-old ceasefire, Israel assassinates a senior Hamas member in Nablus. Nine days later, Hamas responds with a suicide bombing in a Jerusalem pizzeria.

1988 – In April, Israel assassinates senior PLO leader Khalil al-Wazir in Tunisia, even as the Reagan administration is trying to organize an international conference to broker peace between Israelis and Palestinians. The US State Department condemns the murder as an “act of political assassination.” In ensuing protests in the occupied territories, a further seven Palestinians are gunned down by Israeli forces.

1982 – Following Israel’s invasion of Lebanon in June, and after PLO fighters depart Beirut under the terms of a US-brokered ceasefire, Israel violates the terms of the agreement and moves its armed forces into the western part of the city, where the Palestinian refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila are located. Shortly thereafter, Israeli soldiers surround the camps and send in their local Christian Phalangist allies – even though the long and bloody history between Palestinians and Phalangists in Lebanon is well known to the Israelis, and despite the fact that the Phalangists’ leader, Bashir Gemayel, has just been assassinated and Palestinians are rumored (incorrectly) to be responsible. Over the next three days, between 800 and 3500 Palestinian refugees, mostly women and children left behind by the PLO fighters, are butchered by the Phalangists as Israeli soldiers look on. In the wake of the massacre, an Israeli commission of inquiry, the Kahan Commission, deems that Israeli Defense Minister (and future Prime Minister) Ariel Sharon bears “personal responsibility” for the slaughter.

1981-2 – Under Defense Minister Ariel Sharon, Israel repeatedly violates a nine-month-old UN-brokered ceasefire with the PLO in Lebanon in an effort to provoke a response that will justify a large-scale invasion of the country that Sharon has been long planning. When PLO restraint fails to provide Sharon with an adequate pretext, he uses the attempted assassination of Israel’s ambassador to England to justify a massive invasion aimed at destroying the PLO – despite the fact that Israeli intelligence officials believe the PLO has nothing to do with the assassination attempt. In the ensuing invasion, more than 17,000 Lebanese are killed.

1973 – Following a ceasefire agreement arranged by the US and the Soviet Union to end the Yom Kippur War, Israel violates the agreement with a “green light” from US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger. According to declassified US documents, Kissinger tells the Israelis they can take a “slightly longer” time to adhere to the truce. As a result, Israel launches an attack and surrounds the Egyptian Third Army, causing a major diplomatic crisis between the US and Soviets that pushes the two superpowers to the brink of nuclear war, with the Soviets threatening to intervene to save their Egyptian allies and the US issuing a Defcon III nuclear alert.

1967 – Israel violates the 1949 Armistice Agreement, launching a surprise attack against Egypt and Syria. Despite claims Israel is acting in self-defense against an impending attack from Egypt, Israeli leaders are well aware that Egypt poses no serious threat. Yitzhak Rabin, Chief of the General Staff of the Israeli army during the war, says in a 1968 interview that “I do not believe that Nasser wanted war. The two divisions he sent into Sinai on May 14 would not have been enough to unleash an offensive against Israel. He knew it and we knew it.” And former Prime Minister Menachem Begin later admits that “Egyptian army concentrations in the Sinai approaches did not prove that Nasser was really about to attack us. We must be honest with ourselves. We decided to attack him.”

1956 – Colluding with Britain and France, Israel violates the 1949 Armistice Agreement by invading Egypt and occupying the Sinai Peninsula. Israel only agrees to withdraw following pressure from US President Dwight Eisenhower.

1949 – Immediately after the UN-brokered Armistice Agreement between Israel and its neighbors goes into effect, the armed forces of the newly-created Israeli state begin violating the truce with encroachments into designated demilitarized zones and military attacks that claim numerous civilian casualties.

August 16, 2014 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism | , , , , | Leave a comment

Egypt opens Rafah crossing, denies Kuwaiti aid entry to Gaza

Ma’an – August 14, 2014

GAZA CITY – Egyptian authorities denied entry to a Kuwaiti delegation bringing aid to the Gaza Strip on Thursday as it opened the Rafah crossing for humanitarian cases.

Palestinian crossing officials said that injured Palestinians, medical patients and foreign nationals were allowed to use the crossing and Gaza residents in Egypt were allowed to return.

Egyptian security prevented a four-man Kuwaiti delegation carrying medical aid from entering Gaza.

No reason was given for the refusal.

Egyptian authorities have largely kept the Rafah crossing closed since the army ousted President Mohamed Morsi in 2013.

The terminal is the only border crossing that most of Gaza’s 1.8 million people can use to leave the enclave.

August 14, 2014 Posted by | Subjugation - Torture, War Crimes | , , , | Leave a comment

Israel wants a truce that does not include a halt on assassinations

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MEMO | August 13, 2014

While Cairo is witnessing talks about a cease-fire in the Gaza Strip and in light of an international effort to reach a long-term truce between Hamas and Israel, Israeli security officials have demanded that the policy of assassinations against the Palestinian leaders should not stop.

Israeli media reports quoted security officials on Tuesday as saying that currently there are three options available, namely: an international effort to extend the cease-fire, or “surrendering” to some of Hamas’ demands, or launching a new aggression against the Gaza Strip. According to the officials themselves, the latter is less likely to happen.

Security officials added that “Hamas has put on the negotiating table demands for a seaport and an airport as a counterweight to Israel’s demand to strip the sector of any weapon,” and that the Israeli security apparatus “wants to test Hamas’ long-term steps, therefore, Hamas must be prevented from achieving anything that could help the movement’s strength grow.”

The security officials explained that the security apparatus demands that the Israeli government  “reserves the possibility of returning to the assassinations choice,” adding that “it is prohibited to waive this requirement in the context of the negotiations” taking place in Egypt.

Walla website quoted an Israeli security official as claiming that the assassinations issue is a “point of serious concern among the movement leaders.”

He added, in a sarcastic tone, that “if Hamas wants to control the sector, it should do so from the tunnels and cellars.”

The same security official said an agreement has been reached between the parties involved in Cairo negotiations regarding a section of the demands put forward by Hamas, including the issuance of permits for the exit of a limited number of Palestinians through Erez crossing, under the control of the Shin Bet, and the immediate expansion of the volume of goods coming into the Gaza Strip through Karam Abu Salem crossing, as well as handing over control of the Palestinian side of the Rafah border crossing to the Palestinian Authority, so that the crossing would be supervised by both Israel and Egypt.

The Israeli official also confirmed that among the agreements reached was an agreement regarding the transfer of funds from Qatar, Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states into the Gaza Strip, where the parties agreed that this should only happen through the Palestinian Authority and under strict international-Israeli-Egyptian supervision.

August 13, 2014 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Subjugation - Torture, War Crimes | , , , , | Leave a comment

U.S. Avoided Threat to Act on Israel’s Civilian Targeting

A Palestinian man salvages items from the rubble of his home destroyed by Israeli strikes on a building in northern Gaza Strip. Aug 7, 2014. Credit: UN Photo/Shareef Sarhan

A Palestinian man salvages items from the rubble of his home destroyed by Israeli strikes on a building in northern Gaza Strip. Aug 7, 2014. UN Photo/Shareef Sarhan
By Gareth Porter | IPS | August 12, 2014

Washington — United Nations officials and human rights organisations have characterised Israeli attacks on civilian targets during the IDF war on Gaza as violations of the laws of war.

During the war, Israeli bombardment leveled whole urban neighbourhoods, leaving more than 10,000 houses destroyed and 30,000 damaged and killing 1,300 civilians, according to U.N. data. Israeli forces also struck six schools providing shelter to refugees under U.N. protection, killing at least 47 refugees and wounding more than 340.

The administration’s public stance in daily briefings in the early days of the war suggested little or no concern about Israeli violations of the laws of war.

But the Barack Obama administration’s public posture during the war signaled to Israel that it would not be held accountable for such violations.

A review of the transcripts of daily press briefings by the State Department during the Israeli attack shows that the Obama administration refused to condemn Israeli attacks on civilian targets in the first three weeks of the war.

U.S. officials were well aware of Israel’s history of rejecting any distinction between military and civilian targets in previous wars in Lebanon and Gaza.

During the 2006 Israeli War in Lebanon, IDF spokesman Jacob Dalal had told the Associated Press that eliminating Hezbollah as a terrorist institution required hitting all Hezbollah institutions, including “grassroots institutions that breed more followers”.

And during Israel’s “Operation Cast Lead” in December 2008 and January 2009, the IDF had shelled a school in the Jabaliya refugee camp, killing 42 civilians. The IDF’s justification had been that it was responding to mortar fire from the building, but officials of the United Nations Relief Works Agency (UNRWA) who ran the school had denied that claim.

Given that history, Obama administration policy makers knew that Israel would certainly resort to similar targeting in its Gaza operation unless it believed it would suffer serious consequences for doing so. But the administration’s public stance in daily briefings in the early days of the war suggested little or no concern about Israeli violations of the laws of war.

On July 10, two days after the operation began, State Department spokesperson Jan Psaki was asked in the daily briefing whether the administration was trying to stop the Israeli bombardment of Gaza, as well as the firing of rockets by Hamas.

Psaki’s answer was to recite an Israeli talking point. “There’s a difference,” she said, “between Hamas, a terrorist organisation that’s indiscriminately attacking innocent civilians…in Israel, and the right of Israel to respond and protect their own civilians.”

After four children playing on a beach were killed as journalists watched on July 16, Psaki was asked whether the administration believed Israel was violating the international laws of war. She responded that she was unaware of any discussion of that question.

Psaki said that “tragic event makes clear that Israel must take every possible step to meet its standards for protecting civilians from being killed. We will continue to underscore that point to Israel; the Secretary [of State John Kerry] has made that point directly as well.”

The IDF shelled Al-Wafa Rehabilitation and Geriatric Hospital on July 17, claiming it was a response to launches of rockets 100 metres from the hospital. Psaki was asked the next day whether her failure to warn the Israelis publicly against bombing the hospital had “made any difference”.

She said, “We’re urging all parties to respect the civilian nature of schools and medical facilities….” But she refused to speculate about “what would’ve happened or wouldn’t have happened” had she issued an explicit warning,

On June 16, two days before the ground offensive began, the IDF began dropping leaflets warning the entire populations of the Zeitoun and Shujaiyyeh neighbourhoods to evacuate. It was a clear indication they were to be heavily bombed. IDF bombing and shelling leveled entire blocks of Shujaiyyeh July 20 and 21, citing rockets fired from that neighbourhood.

Kerry was recorded commenting to an aide on an open microphone July 20 that it was a “hell of a pinpoint operation”, revealing the administration’s private view. But instead of warning that the Israeli targeting policy was unacceptable, Kerry declared in a CNN interview that Israel was “under siege from a terrorist organisation”, implying the right to do whatever it believed necessary.

State Department Deputy Spokesperson Marie Harf said on July 21 that Kerry had “encouraged” the Israelis to “take steps to prevent civilian casualties”, but she refused to be more specific.

On July 23, Al Wafa hospital was hit by an Israeli airstrike, forcing the staff to evacuate it. The IDF now charged that it had been used as a “command centre and rocket launching site”.

Joe Catron, an American who had been staying at the hospital as part of an international “human shield” to prevent attacks on it, denied that claim, saying he would have heard any rocket launched close to the hospital.

On the same day, three missiles hit a park next to the Al Shifa hospital, killing 10 and wounding 46. The IDF blamed the explosions on Hamas rockets that had fallen short. The idea that three Hamas rockets had fallen short within such short distances from one another, however, was hardly a credible explanation.

The IDF also appeared to target facilities run by the UNRWA. On July 23 and 24, Israeli tank shells hit Palestinian refugees at two different school compounds designated as U.N. shelters, despite intensive communications by U.N. officials to IDF asking to spare them.

An attack on a U.N. refugee shelter at Beit Hanoun elementary school July 24 killed 15 civilians and wounded more than 200. The IDF again claimed a Hamas rocket had fallen short. But it also claimed Hamas fighters had fired on Israeli troops from the compound, then later retreated from the claim.

At the July 24 briefing, Harf read a statement deploring the Beit Hanoun strike and the “rising death toll in Gaza” and said that a UNRWA facility “is not a legitimate target”.

Harf said Israel “could do a bit more” to show restraint. But when a reporter asked if the United States was “willing to take any kind of action” if Israel did not respond to U.S. advice, Harf said the U.S. focus was “getting a ceasefire”, implying that it was not prepared to impose any consequences on Israel for refusing to change its military tactics in Gaza.

On July 25, a reporter at the daily briefing observed that the hospital and schools had been targeted despite reports confirming that there had been no militants or rockets in them.

But Harf refused to accept that characterisation of the situation and repeated the Israeli line that Hamas had used U.N. facilities to “hide rockets”. She said she could not confirm whether there were rockets in “the specific school that was hit”.

The IDF hit another UNRWA school sheltering refugees at Jabaliya refugee camp July 30, killing 10 and wounding more than 100. The IDF acknowledged it had fired several tank shells at the school, claiming again that mortar shells had been fired from there.

That was too much for the Obama administration. White House spokesman Josh Earnest called the attack “totally unacceptable and totally indefensible” and even made it clear that there was little doubt that Israel was responsible.

Even then, however, the administration merely repeated its call for Israel to “do more to live up to the high standards that they have set for themselves”, as Earnest put it.

On August 3, the IDF struck yet another refugee facility at the Rafah Boys Prep School A, killing 12 refugees and wounding 27. The IDF said it had been targeting three “terrorists” riding a motorcycle who had passed near the school.

“The suspicion that militants operated nearby does not justify strikes that put at risk the lives of so many innocent civilians,” said Psaki.

But that criticism of Israeli attacks was far too restrained and too late. The IDF had already carried out what appear to have been massive violations of the laws of war.

August 12, 2014 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Progressive Hypocrite, War Crimes | , , , , , | Leave a comment

Alamuddin turns down UN Gaza war crimes role

Al-Akhbar | August 12, 2014

Amal Alamuddin, a British-Lebanese lawyer engaged to Hollywood actor George Clooney, announced on Monday that she would not serve on a UN investigation into human rights violations and war crimes in Gaza.

“I am honored to have received the offer, but given existing commitments — including eight ongoing cases — unfortunately could not accept this role,” she said in a statement.

It was not clear who would replace Alamuddin on the panel.

Israel’s assault on Gaza became an increasingly sensitive topic among celebrities last month. Rihanna’s #FreePalestine tweet garnered 7,000 retweets before it was deleted eight minutes later. The singer later claimed it was an “accident.”

Clooney, an American actor who has previously spoken out against genocide, has remained silent over the month-long assault on Gaza, which killed at least 1,940 people, the vast majority of them civilians.

Hollywood power couple Javier Bardem and Penelope Cruz have faced serious backlash over an open letter they signed last month condemning Israel’s “genocide” in Gaza. An article in the British daily The Independent suggested several film executives were unhappy with the couple.

William Schabas, a Canadian professor of international law, will head the panel. Doudou Diene, a Senegalese veteran UN human rights expert, will also serve.

Wikileaks revealed on Friday that UN General Secretary Ban Ki-Moon secretly collaborated with Israel and the United States to undermine a UN investigation into Israel’s 2008-2009 assault on Gaza that killed 1,400 Palestinians, mostly civilians.

Among other ethical breaches, Ban apparently worked with an Israeli delegation to draft the text of the report’s cover letter.

Navi Pillay, the top UN human rights official, said on July 31 she believed Israel was deliberately defying international law in its assault on Gaza, and that world powers should hold it accountable for possible war crimes.

Israel has attacked homes, schools, hospitals, Gaza’s only power plant and UN premises in violation of the Geneva Conventions, said Pillay, a former UN war crimes judge.

Hamas Spokesman Sami Abu Zuhri in Gaza said “Hamas welcomes the decision to form an investigation committee into the war crimes committed by the occupation against Gaza and it urges that it begin work as soon as possible.”

Israeli and Palestinian negotiators resumed indirect talks mediated by Egypt on Monday on ending the war, Egypt’s state news agency said, after a new 72-hour truce appeared to be holding.

(Reuters, Al-Akhbar)

August 12, 2014 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Full Spectrum Dominance, War Crimes | , , , , , | Leave a comment

SOS: Hospital Ships Needed to Save Gaza’s Children

By Franklin Lamb | Al-Manar | August 12, 2014

The statistics are just beginning to be analyzed—by UN agencies and a myriad of NGO’s whose mandates include salvaging young lives from the nearly incalculable ravages of the five-week (and counting) Zionist aggression upon Gaza. It is of course the third aggression in six years against the 1.8 million Palestinians, sardine-canned into what is increasingly referred to as history’s largest open air prison, but the outcome this time is looking particularly cruel and grim.

As the Netanyahu regime announced (on 8/10/14) that its attacks on Gaza would continue, increasing numbers of obscene calls—for Israel to “finish the job” and “go all the way” etc.—are floating in the Zionist state’s malodorous public echo-chamber, emanating from such figures as the Knesset’s deputy speaker, who advocates driving Palestinians into the Sinai desert and resettling Gaza with Jews.

In Khuza’a “the Israeli military had trapped at least 32 people in a home and then prevented the Red Cross from evacuating them before shelling the area,” reported Lebanese-American journalist Roqayah Chamseddine. Hoping for safe haven, the people in the house sought refuge in the basement of a neighbor’s home, where they found additional families already inside.

“By that point we were 120 people, 10 men and the rest women and children,” Kamel al-Najjar recalled for Human Rights Watch.

After dawn and without warning (no polite leaflets or knocks on the roof apparently), Israel struck the house, killing three people and wounding 15 others.

The toll of the war on Gaza’s children has been “catastrophic,” according to UN agencies. At least 450 have been killed, and those not having their physical bodies buried have found their innocence entombed. It is another casualty in the war—a war against all things daring to live and resist in Gaza. According to Chamseddine:child slaughtering:

“Israel has forced the children of Gaza to lay flowers atop headstones, and watch helplessly as coffins that are filled with not only their most beloved family members, teachers, neighbors, and friends but also their most treasured memories, lullabies, lessons learned and those that will never come, descend into the belly of the earth. Their lips will memorize and form prayers for the dead and the stars that defied the siege that flickered freely high above them will be snatched from their skies,”

Increasingly it is being heard from Gazans that “Israel has stolen everything beautiful in our lives,” and Israel’s barbarity confirms this sentiment.

Middle East analysts point out that it is difficult to recall a time in modern history when there has been so much sustained slaughter of this region’s civilian population, with more than two-thirds of the victims being women and children. For the past year, UN agencies and other humanitarian organizations have lamented a simple reality—that there is not a sufficient level of international aid to save lives and treat those in need of emergency and longer term medical care.

But now something is changing.

The horrors we have just witnessed, especially with respect to traumas inflicted on children, is producing, as should be the case, a major and rapidly growing international focus on salvaging young lives. Descriptions and evaluations of the consequences of Gaza wars are being published and urgently discussed. Some analysts and government officials, including Pentagon planners, are calling for a ‘Medical Marshall Plan,’ to save Gaza’s children. One proposed first step is the dispatching of a humanitarian support group of hospital ships that would sail to Gaza without further delay.

What can and must be done, by the United States and other countries with the naval and medical capacity to do so, is to organize a Hospital Ship flotilla to break the siege of Gaza, to anchor offshore, and to begin caring for the medical needs of all, with a special focus on children and their psychological well-being. Call it a Mercy Mission. Initially it could include the following countries—all well known for their hospital ships with up-and-running medical staffs: the USA, UK, France, China, Russia, Spain, Argentina, and Australia. Within this group of nations are ships with hundreds of patient beds and fully stocked pharmacies. Moreover, it is a group not likely to be interfered with by those who have imposed the inhumane blockade of Gaza (and of course it even includes some of their collaborators in the region), but perhaps most importantly, every country on the list possesses one or more hospital ships that are fully staffed and available to act.

France is reportedly ready to join such an effort and is also working on a related crisis—in Iraq, where it plans delivery of first aid equipment “in the coming hours,” according to the office of Francois Hollande. The French president has “reaffirmed the will of France to stand by the side of civilian victims of continued attacks” in Iraq, and his spokesmen said that “France will do the same thing for Gaza.”

“The European Union is called upon to also take necessary measures with great urgency to respond to immediate humanitarian needs,” the spokesman added.

Hundreds of EU citizens, with their specialized skills in fields of pediatric medicine and child psychology, are reportedly ready to help the children of Gaza. Two fully stocked and staffed American medical ships, the USNS Mercy and the USNS Comfort, could contribute greatly to the effort. Each ship’s hospital is a full floating medical treatment facility, containing 12 fully equipped operating rooms, a 1,000-bed patient capacity, digital radiological services, medical laboratory, pharmacy, optometry lab, and intensive care ward; each also has a dental clinic with full services, CT scanner, and two oxygen-producing plants.

Helicopter landing decks are available as well, for patient transports, and the ships also have side ports that could take on patients from Gaza fishing boats and other crafts at sea. In addition to these two mammoth-sized medical vessels, dozens of other US Navy ships also have hospitals on board. For example, in one year, the medical department of the USS George Washington handled over 15,000 out-patient visits, drew almost 27,000 lab samples, filled almost 10,000 prescriptions, took about 2,300 x-rays, and performed 65 surgical operations—and nearly 100 other US ships are capable of doing the same.

Just one example with respect to capacity is illustrative. In April of this year, the USNS Comfort—a converted 70,000-ton tanker—sailed from Norfolk, Virginia carrying 900 doctors, nurses, and engineers, including staff from the U.S. military, civilian agencies, non-government charities, and even foreign navies. The ship is designed to be deployed quickly for four month intensive full service medical assistance; yet similar capacities obtain in certain other US ships and in foreign navies as well. All of these resources must be put to immediate use to save Gaza’s children.

Looking at the longer term, the Pentagon should seriously consider ordering a sufficient number of catamaran transports and shallow-draft littoral ships to fill out the flotilla, vessels capable of delivering aid by sea via the relatively shallow Gaza coastline. The success of breaking the siege of Gaza will likely give impetus to a UN Security Council decision to construct a seaport for Gaza, perhaps with a shipping lane to Cyprus.

Similarly, the UK hospital ship, RFA Argus, designated as a ‘Primary Casualty Receiving Ship,’ is moored in Falmouth, England, and is also uniquely designed for this type of humanitarian crisis; and it, too, is reportedly ready to sail once given the green light by Downing Street.

Five Hospital ships are urgently needed along Gaza’s shoreline at the following locations: opposite Jabaliya and North Gaza, Gaza City, Deir al-Balah, Khan Younis, and Rafah, as shown in the map below:

figures

Although attacking a hospital ship is clearly a war crime, the Israeli pattern of targeting medical facilities in Gaza is well known, and threats from the settler movement and the right wing Likud Party to “sink any ship that enters Gaza waters if judged to be aiding the terrorists” must be taken seriously. Yet one imagines the occupation regime would have to think carefully about sinking another US Navy vessel as it did in 1967 with the repeated bombing of the USS Liberty.

Instead of recycling raw combat power, the White House can best meet the demands of a war-weary American public through an emphasis on missions such as those the USNS Mercy and USNS Comfort are designed for. Poll after US public opinion poll reveal that Americans believe their humanitarian values are best reflected when our navy is tailored for delivering humanitarian aid to places like Gaza, and not by delivering munitions to occupying colonial regimes.

August 12, 2014 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism | , , , , | Leave a comment

Egypt imposes incapacitating conditions on relief convoys delivering aid to Gaza

MEMO | August 11, 2014

An official Egyptian document has revealed that Egyptian authorities are imposing incapacitating conditions on relief convoys seeking to deliver medical and food aid to Gaza through the Rafah border crossing.

The document addressed the “regulatory rules for the entry of aid convoys to the Gaza Strip through the Rafah border crossing at this stage.”

The document, which was handed by the Egyptian authorities to the Arab branches of the Red Cross and Red Crescent organisations during their latest meeting in Jordan, stated that the Egyptian authorities have obliged relief organisations seeking to deliver aid to Gaza to submit a request to Egypt through the foreign ministries of the countries in which they operate. The request should include a list of the aid items that the organisations plan to take into Gaza through Rafah.

Relief agencies must then wait for the approval of the Egyptian foreign ministry before they start sending aid to Gaza.

The document specified that aid items must arrive at either the Ismailiya Airport or at Port Said. Aid agencies are required to pay the cost of unloading and shipping the food and medical aid items in any of the two locations.

Relief agencies are banned from providing construction material, gas cylinders, fuel, or funds into Gaza, according to the document, which also notified the Red Cross and Red Crescent that only a limited number of persons will be allowed to accompany the aid items into Gaza.

The document further stressed that journalists who seek to cross to Gaza must provide their names and passport information to the Egyptian authorities beforehand, and they must obtain approval from their countries’ foreign ministries or Cairo embassies. However, Egypt reserves the right to refuse people entry into Gaza through the Rafah crossing without specifying the reasons for this decision.

With regards medical teams, the document noted that doctors are required to submit requests to their countries’ foreign ministries and coordinate with the Palestinian Health Ministry in Ramallah before they can obtain the Egyptian authorities’ approval to enter Gaza.

The head of the Algerian Red Crescent Saida Benhabyles, who is also a former minister, said in a press conference held in the Algerian capital that the Egyptian authorities want to put the logo of the Egyptian Red Crescent along with the logo of any aid or relief agency delivering aid into Gaza.

Benhabyles announced that, due to the Egyptian conditions, the Algerian Red Crescent had to cancel a donation campaign that had aimed to deliver blood to Gaza.

August 11, 2014 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Subjugation - Torture | , , , | Leave a comment

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