ISRAELI WAR CRIMES - ENOUGH IS ENOUGH

So the death toll in Gaza is now more than 1000 (including some 350 children) matching that in the Lebanon in 2006. The massacre of 106 refugees in a UN shelter in Qana is mirrored by the deaths of 40 Palestinians in a UN school in Gaza. The slaughter of the Marwahin civilians in Lebanon who were ordered to leave their homes and then gunned down by a helicopter gunship is matched by civilians being shot (one through the head) as they leave their homes carrying white flags.

And yet we are told that Israel does not target civilians. That is like saying that a drink driver increasing his speed around a blind bend had his hazard warning lights on in case any pedestrians were in the vicinity. You have 1.5 million people crammed into 360 square kilometers with no escape routes and you blitz it with cluster bombs, some of which allegedly contain white phosphorous, and you still claim that you are doing everything you can to avoid civilian casualties.

It seems strange that Israel has the capability to send a laser guided missile into a moving car yet it continually slams bombs and rockets into houses, hospitals, schools and ambulances.

The fact is that Israel cynically engineered this assault on Gaza, the purpose of which was to bring Hamas to its knees. It broke the ceasefire with Hamas in the first week of November when it killed six Palestinians. The timing was perfect with Israeli elections approaching and the compliant Bush administration in its last few days. Hamas was elected in free and fair elections in January 2006. Rather than engage it in meaningful dialogue, Israel blockaded the Gaza strip, bombed the power station and championed the imposition of the International Community’s economic sanctions on Hamas. In response, Hamas intensified the firing of rockets in to Israel. I know of no other situation in which the onus is on the occupied entity to meet pre-conditions for negotiations.

Israel simply repeats its mantra over and over again that Hamas are terrorists or militants. As the British Labour Party MP, Gerald Kaufman, has pointed out, they are no different to the Jews fighting for their lives in the Warsaw ghetto. Kaufman also reminds us that the Jewish terrorist groups, Irgun and the Stern Gang, massacred both Palestinians and the ruling British in their war of independence.

Israel also argues ad infinitum that the Palestinians are not partners for peace and only want ‘to push us into the sea’. They continually cite the fact that the Hamas charter calls for an end to the state of Israel. In response to which I say ‘so what?’ You sit down with them and negotiate. On its accession to power, Hamas offered Israel a long-term truce if it withdrew to its 1967 borders. Sounds like a decent starting point to me. All sorts of extremists from Eugene Terre Blanch and his white supremacist Afrikaner movement in South Africa and the IRA splinter group, the Real IRA, have been mollified and/or marginalized despite earlier threats of apocalyptic warfare. Hamas may be deeply unpleasant but it is folly to ignore them.

If Israel itself was a genuine partner for peace it would have stopped building settlements on occupied land long ago. Since it handed back Gaza in 2005, it has constructed at least 12,000 new dwellings in the West Bank. Creating facts on the ground which render a viable Palestinian state ever more unlikely is the Israeli aim. Not to mention the fact that the security wall, which was declared ‘contrary to International Law’ by the International Court of Justice in 2004, entailed the annexation of a further 280,000 square kilometers of fertile West Bank land.

Israel maintains that it is a democracy surrounded by a sea of authoritarian Arab regimes. If the measure of a democracy was nothing more than the use of the ballot box every few years, this claim might be true. But, as long as Israel continues to detain thousands of Palestinians for years on end without trial, imprison conscientious objectors, hide the truth about its actions in Gaza from the Israeli public and ban the press from entering Gaza, it will not be a real democracy.

As for America, when it comes to Israel, it feels like North Korea or Saddam’s Iraq here. There is total and utter uniformity in the support of Israel, both in the mainstream press and amongst lawmakers. It is a given that any politician (or indeed academic) who dares to speak out in favour of Palestinian rights is vilified (Ex-President Jimmy Carter is the prime example). In a 2006 vote in the House of Representatives during the Lebanon war, a resolution supporting Israel passed by 410 votes to 8 and a vote a few days ago in support of the Gaza offensive passed by 390 to 5.

The reality is that Israel dare not entertain the notion of peace. On the deepest of traumatized levels, it is fighting an existential battle with its own soul. A state of war is the sine qua non of the Israeli state. The victimhood of the holocaust has been replaced by the dehumanizing use of brute force. It is a classic case of an abused child wreaking vengeance in adulthood.

I have just joined the US Campaign to end the Israeli occupation, an umbrella group to which a few Jewish groups belong. One of its primary aims is to change the unconditional support of Israel which every US regime offers and to call into question the $3 billion a year in economic and military aid which has sustained the 40-year occupation.

Naomi Klein is surely right when she says it is time for the sort of global movement against the occupation that put an end to apartheid in South Africa. She has called for the campaign entitled ‘Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions’ which was founded in 2005, to be ratcheted up.