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international criminal court

Israel’s Video Justifying Destruction of a Hospital Was From 2009

The video clip showing apparent firing from an annex to the hospital was actually shot during Israel's 2008-09 “Operation Cast Lead,” and the audio clip accompanying it was from an incident unrelated to Al Wafa. (Screengrab: The Times of Israel)

A video distributed by the Israeli military in July suggesting that Palestinian fighters had fired from the Al Wafa Rehabilitation and Geriatric Hospital in Gaza City was not shot during the recent Israeli attack on Gaza, and both audio and video clips were manipulated to cover up the fact that they were from entirely different incidents, a Truthout investigation has revealed.

The video, released by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) on July 23, the same day Israeli airstrikes destroyed Al Wafa, was widely reported by pro-Israeli publications and websites as proving that the hospital was destroyed because Hamas had turned the hospital into a military facility. But the video clip showing apparent firing from an annex to the hospital was actually shot during Israel's 2008-09 “Operation Cast Lead,” and the audio clip accompanying it was from an incident unrelated to Al Wafa.

The misleading video was only the last in a series of IDF dissimulations about Al Wafa hospital that included false claims that Hamas rockets had been launched from the hospital grounds, or very near it, and that the hospital had been damaged by an attack on the launching site.

The IDF began to prepare the ground for the destruction of Al Wafa hospital well before Israeli ground troops entered Gaza on July 17. On July 11, the IDF fired four warning rockets on the fourth floor of Al Wafa, making a large hole in the ceiling – the standard IDF signal that a building was going to be destroyed by an airstrike.

On July 17, the hospital was hit by a total of 15 rockets, according to Dr. Basman Alashi, Al Wafa's director. After the first few rockets, a phone call from the IDF “asked how much time do you need to evacuate?” he told Truthout. After the second and third floors were largely destroyed, the patients' rooms were filled with smoke and the hospital lost electricity, he gave the order to evacuate the hospital.

An IDF spokesman told Allison Deger of Mondoweiss that Hamas rocket launches had come “from exactly near the hospital, 100 meters near.” A slide show released by the IDF August 19 includes an aerial view of Al Wafa Hospital with two alleged rocket launching sites marked that are clearly much farther from the hospital than the 100 meters.

Even if that IDF claim of 100 meters were accurate, however, it was more than sufficient to allow the IDF to hit the launch site with precision-guided munitions without damaging the hospital. Israeli air to ground missiles, especially those fired from drones, are known to be able to hit small targets without causing collateral damage to nearby buildings. An IDF video posted on August 9, for example, shows a missile destroying what is said to be a hidden rocket launch site without harming a mosque only a few meters away from the explosion.

IDF spokesman Captain Eytan Buchman nevertheless blandly suggested that it was collateral damage from striking the launch site. He said the IDF was “left with no choice” but to “target the launcher with the most precise munitions capable of ensuring its destruction.”

On July 21, the IDF Spokesman's Office pushed its propaganda line linking Al Wafa and rocket launching sites even further, claiming in a tweet and on its blog, “Hamas fires rockets from Wafa hospital in the Gaza neighborhood of Shujaiya.” Under that headline was an aerial photo enhanced to highlight what was said to be Al Wafa Hospital, along with a red dot representing an M-75 rocket launch site that was not on the hospital grounds, but appeared to be a few meters away.

But the building shown in the aerial photo was not Al Wafa hospital, as Dr. Alashi quickly pointed out. A Google map of Al Wafa hospital shows none of the buildings resemble the one the IDF identified as Al Wafa. The building in the IDF image belongs to the Right to Life Society.

After that prevarication had been revealed, the IDF added a new claim that “the hospital grounds” had been used by Hamas and the Palestinian Islamic Jihad as “a post enabling terrorists to open fire at soldiers.”

The IDF said that Hamas had “fired at Israel and at IDF forces from the hospital” despite warnings from the IDF, and the IDF had been forced to attack targets on the hospital site.

The statement was accompanied by a video purporting to document the firing at Israeli troops. Based on the camera angle and altitude, the video was taken by an Israeli drone, according to a former US intelligence officer, with experience in interpreting military-related images, who analyzed the video for Truthout.

The first segment of the video is a grainy, black-and-white aerial shot of a building that starts with the legend, “Terrorists Threaten IDF from inside Wafa Hospital.” The building shown is not Al Wafa hospital, however, but an annex to the hospital that had been empty, both Dr. Alashi and Charlie Andeasson, a Swedish activist who was in the hospital when it was attacked on July 16, told Truthout.

The eight-second video shows what could be two brief bursts of fire from one of the windows on the third floor and then a third flash in a fourth story window. The former US intelligence officer confirmed that the footage of the building was selected from two different times of day. After the first three seconds of the video, the camera angle and the amount of light both change perceptibly. Nevertheless an exchange between the two voices on the audiotape accompanying the video continues as though the scene were continuous during the entire eight seconds.

The first voice heard on the audio recording says, in Hebrew, “Do you see this firing? Have spotted fires from within the house.” The English subtitles accompanying the audio add “hospital” in parentheses after the word “house,” but Seattle-based blogger on Israeli affairs Richard Silverstein, who speaks Hebrew, confirmed to Truthout after listening to the audio clip that the speaker uses the word “bayit,” which can only mean “house.”

A second voice then says, according to the subtitles, “Positive, fire from within the house.” But the speaker actually uses the term “small house” (“bayit ha katan hazeh”), according to Silverstein.

Those references to firing from a small house indicate that the audio clip was taken from an entirely different incident at another location. That device was obviously used because there was no audio of an incident involving firing from the hospital.

Dr. Alashi said he believes the eight-second video clip portrays firing from the annex that occurred in the 2008-09 Israeli attack on Gaza. “People confirmed to me that there was firing from the building then,” he told Truthout. That building was, in fact, attacked on January 16, 2009, by Israeli tanks only 70 meters away from the hospital, damaging the third and fourth floors of the building – the very floors from which the flashes are shown in the video – as the UN Fact-Finding Mission noted in its September 2009 report.

The last segment of the video showing the bombing of the Al Wafa hospital, bears the legend “secondary explosion” – meaning explosions of weapons – as each building is shown being destroyed, in line with the Israeli argument throughout the operation that Hamas stored rockets and other weapons in hospitals, schools and mosques.

The video fist shows the hospital itself being blown up, followed by heavy billowing smoke covering the entire hospital and then another flash of fire. But the former intelligence official who viewed the video said that flash indicated another Israeli missile strike on the target rather than a secondary explosion.

The clip then cuts to the destruction of the annex, again with the “secondary explosion” legend. The billowing smoke from the initial bomb explosion covers the building, and then two or three small puffs of darker smoke appear. Those puffs of smoke would suggest a secondary explosion, according to the former US intelligence officer. But he also observed that a hospital would have flammable materials other than hidden weapons that could cause the darker smoke to appear.

Given the existence of Hamas' complex network of tunnels, which provided plenty of storage space for its rockets and other weaponry, it would have made no sense for Hamas to store rockets in a hospital that it knew had already been targeted by the IDF.

In its final seconds, the video focuses in to show a square which the legend describes as a “tunnel opening near Al Wafa.” But Dr. Alashi told Truthout that it is actually a water well.

The IDF real reason for the destruction of Al Wafa hospital appears to be related to the determination to raise the cost to the civilian population of Gaza for Palestinian resistance, in line with the approach represented by its “Dahiya doctrine,” named after the Beirut suburb dominated by Hezbollah, much of which the Israeli Air Force reduced to rubble in the 2006 war.

That strategy, recognized as a violation of the international laws of war, was pursued most obviously in the complete destruction of every house in several square blocks in three separate areas of the Shujaiya district of Gaza City July 19-20. But it was also evident in IDF attacks on Al Wafa and in the series of mortar and artillery attacks on six different UN shelters from July 21 though August 3. Those attacks killed a total of 47 civilians and wounded 341, according to a survey of the incidents by The Guardian.

In none of the six cases where UN shelters were hit by IDF mortar shells was the military able to offer a plausible explanation, and in three cases, it offered no explanation whatever. More

Gareth Porter (@GarethPorter) is an independent investigative journalist and historian writing about US national security policy, and the recipient of the Gellhorn Prize for Journalism in 2012. His investigation of the US entry into war in Vietnam, Perils of Dominance: Imbalance of Power and the Road to War in Vietnam, was published by University of California Press in 2005.

 

Israel remorseless after military campaign that killed more than 500 children, destroyed 20,000 buildings and displaced as many as half a million Palestinians

Despite hailing as a victory the seven weeks of fighting that killed more than 2,100 Palestinians and destroyed large swathes of Gaza’s infrastructure, Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, appears to have emerged as the main political casualty of Operation Protective Edge.

Jonathan Cook

Among Israeli Jews, polls continue to show strong backing for the army, the most revered of Israel’s national institutions.

Last week, a survey by the Jerusalem Post and Maariv newspapers revealed that 61 per cent of respondents agreed with the statement that the Israeli military – but not Israel – had won in Gaza.

“Israel”, in this case, is clearly understood as a synonym for Netanyahu, whose fortunes have taken a sharp downturn in the aftermath of the military campaign.

In late July, as Israel launched its ground offensive, Netanyahu’s approval ratings stood at 82 per cent. Days before the current ceasefire took effect on 26 August, that figure had slumped to 55 per cent.

Last week, as the ceasefire began, Channel 2 TV found that his popularity had plummeted even further, to 32 per cent. Half the country were reported to be positively dissatisfied with his performance.

No signs of remorse

Israelis’ unhappiness with their prime minister does not indicate, as elsewhere in the world, a backlash against a military campaign that killed more than 500 children, destroyed 20,000 buildings and displaced as many as half a million Palestinians. In Israel there are scant signs of remorse, even from the country’s last remaining self-declared liberals.

Netanyahu and his allies in the cabinet, including defence minister Moshe Yaalon, have been trying to play up Israel’s successes, arguing that the army scored an “impressive victory”. Yaalon noted that Hamas had used up most of its rockets, while Israel had destroyed Hamas’ tunnels, killed key leaders and wrecked its supporting infrastructure.

That assessment has been challenged not only by Palestinians in the occupied territories but by leaders of the Palestinian minority in Israel. At the weekend several Palestinian members of the Israeli parliamentattended a victory rally for Hamas near Acre.

One of them, Haneen Zoabi, told Middle East Eye: “This was the longest Israeli attack faced by Palestinians in modern times. It was longer even than the war against Lebanon in 2006. And yet the will of the Palestinian resistance was not broken, and the people of Gaza stood strong. Israel did not achieve any of its political or military aims. When bombarded by one of the strongest armies in the world, that is an undoubted victory.”

Even Netanyahu sounded barely convinced of Israel’s success at a “post-war” press conference. Comparing Hamas to Islamic extremist groups, he observed defensively that even the United States had been unable to defeat al-Qaeda. That refrain was repeated in a rash of interviews with Israeli TV at the weekend.

Herculean task

Few found the comparison persuasive. Settler leader Amiel Ungar noted disparagingly that Hamas’ “Gaza emirate occupies 360 square kilometers and is surrounded on all sides. A week earlier we were told that if the order came down, the IDF could overrun Gaza in seven days. Now a week's work had suddenly mushroomed into a herculean task that would last years.”

Netanyahu’s problem appears to stem from the fact that he has failed to convince his natural constituency on the right that he acted decisively in Gaza. They expected Hamas “smashed”, a term used by many on the right throughout the fighting, or at the very least that Israel would insist on the faction’s “demilitarisation”.

Many Israelis appear particularly incensed by televised scenes of Hamas in Gaza celebrating last week, following the ceasefire announcement. Under its terms, Israel agreed to allow in aid and building materials to ease the humanitarian situation and to extend the fishing zone for Gaza’s fishermen.

Among Israeli Jews, the celebrations in Gaza are widely seen as crowing at the relatively large death toll of Israeli soldiers in the Gaza fighting. Yesterday, it was reported that another soldier had died from wounds sustained in earlier fighting, bringing the total to 66 soldiers and seven civilians.

The high price in blood – even if small in comparison to the suffering of Palestinians in Gaza – placed an added burden on Netanyahu to show he had secured major achievements against Hamas, said Shlomo Bron, a retired general and analyst for the Institute for National Security Studies at Tel Aviv University.

Sacrifice for nothing

“The public is prepared to accept heavy losses if war aims are achieved,” he told Middle East Eye. “But if the sacrifice is seen as for nothing – and that is the view of those who bought into the narrative that Hamas could be destroyed – then Netanyahu is likely to get the blame.”

In addition, the military campaign’s costs to the Israeli economy are already becoming apparent. Yesterday, it was revealed that $560 million cuts were needed immediately, slashing 2 per cent off the budgets of every government department apart from the defence ministry.

To many Israelis, it looks as though the ceasefire has simply restored the status quo, with forthcoming negotiations in Cairo that, it is feared, may win Hamas bigger concessions.

Such concerns were underscored yesterday when an Israeli military source suggested to the Haaretz newspaper that the army’s preferred new approach, designed to prevent renewed confrontation with Hamas, was an easing of the seven-year siege on Gaza. Hamas’ main demand has long been an end to the blockade.

“If we can assist by expanding fishing grounds and easing restrictions on border crossings of people and goods into and from Israel, this will help maintain the quiet,” an unnamed official said.

Rather than making concessions, the Israeli public believes Netanyahu should have pressed on against Hamas. Such sentiments have been voiced by the Israeli prime minister’s rivals in the cabinet, such as Avigdor Lieberman and Naftali Bennett. They have called for the army to “finish the job”.

The Jerusalem Post poll found 58 per cent of Israelis believed the truce was a mistake and that the army should have pushed deeper into Gaza to degrade Hamas military capabilities.

Reflecting that mood, Lieberman’s told Channel 1 TV at the weekend: “The fact that a 20,000-strong terror group has endured for 50 days against the strongest army in the Middle East and has stayed in power – it bothers me very much.”

Confidence shaken

Yoav Bar, a leftwing activist and blogger from Haifa, noted that grand but misleading claims made early in the operation had undermined trust in the leadership’s competence. Early, on, he noted, “Israeli military commanders claimed that the resistance is running out of ammunition. By the end of the first week they declared that a third of the missiles were already used. After 51 days of war the only possible conclusion is that they didn’t have any idea how many rockets there were.”

Similar evasiveness over prior intelligence of Hamas’ extensive network of tunnels under Gaza, some of them leading into Israel, also shook Israelis’ confidence. How was it possible that the tunnels became the major justification for continuing the operation only after the ground invasion had begun?

David Horovitz, editor of the Times of Israel, said that, given the army’s near-sacred status in Israel, the blame was most likely to fall on Netanyahu.

The Israeli public, he pointed out, was “psychologically reliant on the assumption that its army can ultimately de-fang all threats, and that if the army fails to do so, that must be because it did not get the correct orders from the political leadership.”

Part of the disquiet, according to Moshe Arens, a former defence minister from Netanyahu’s Likud party, stems from a sense that Netanyahu lacks the political courage to deal with what is seen as a growing threat posed to Israel from Islamic extremism in the region.

That has not been helped by Netanyahu’s repeated efforts to equate Hamas with Islamic State, the jihadist group notorious for beheadings that has recently made major territorial gains across the region.

‘Al-Qaeda on the border’

At the weekend, Netanyahu told Channel 2 he had decided “not to invest all my resources” in Gaza at a time when “the Islamic State is galloping toward us, al-Qaeda is on the Golan borders.”

Arens wrote in the Haaretz newspaper yesterday that Israel’s operation in Gaza “could have been the beginning of a successful campaign against the fanatical Islamic terror spreading its tentacles through the Middle East, threatening not only Israel, but also many Arab countries.”

He and others have noted that the alignment of regional forces in Israel’s favour provided the best strategic environment Netanyahu could have hoped for. “Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia and the Palestinian Authority were eager to see Israel defeat Hamas.”

Netanyahu’s approach to Gaza over the past two months has also risked exposing his own lack of a positive political vision. He appears afraid to destroy Hamas, but equally loath to make any concessions to bolster the position of Mahmoud Abbas.

Isaac Herzog, leader of the opposition Labour party, who had largely supported the operation, argued last week that the military offensive “could have been avoided” if Netanyahu had embraced diplomatic negotiations with Abbas.

Troubling inconsistency

That view may not be a majority one, but, as Horovitz notes, many Israeli Jews sense a troubling ambiguity in their prime minister’s attitude towards Abbas. Netanyahu has implied that Israel’s problems in Gaza could be solved by bringing in Abbas while at the same time also suggesting that the Palestinian leader is not a credible partner in the West Bank.

Bron said he had detected two trends among the Israeli public in the wake of Operation Protective Edge. The first group, Netanyahu’s natural constituency on the right, demanded Israel get even tougher with Hamas and the Palestinians.

The second trend – associated with those in the political centre and the left – believed the main lesson from Gaza was that there is no military solution to Israel’s conflict with the Palestinians and that Netanyahu must revive a diplomatic process.

Netanyahu has increasingly come to be identified with this latter view. At a cabinet meeting just before the ceasefire was agreed, Yaalon, his defence minister, observed: “There are no magic solutions.”

“This situation is full of political difficulties for Netanyahu. If there is no military solution, then he must engage in a diplomatic process. But if he does so, he will be seen as betraying his support base and this group will search for an alternative on the right who they feel better represents them.” More

 

DIARIES: LIVE FROM PALESTINE “A clumsy army beating Palestinians into submission”: TIME correspondent’s Nablus diary from 1990

An excerpt from the unpublished memoirs of the former TIME journalist Murray J. Gart describing the occupied West Bank city of Nablus at the height of the first intifada, or uprising, could have been written today.

Murray J. Gart interviews Yasser
Arafat on a plane en route to
Baghdad on 25 October 1988

Closure under the pretext of “security,” tear gas and lethal fire against unarmed protesters was what Gart observed in the city in 1990.

Gart’s granddaughter, Brooke DeNisco, says of her grandfather that “the Middle East was his passion and he spent years living and traveling there.”

When he retired from TIME, the publication with which he spent most of his career, Gart “began working on a book about the Middle East peace process, but died in 2004 before its completion. I inherited some of the notes and drafts for the book, including a narrative of five weeks he spent living in the West Bank,” DeNisco explains.

“My grandfather was proudly Jewish and enjoyed traveling often to Israel,” she adds. “He voted for Ronald Reagan and was a member of George Bush Sr.’s Council on Foreign Affairs.”

The following “is a small excerpt from his pages of notes about his experiences in Nablus, forty miles north of Jerusalem in the occupied West Bank,” DeNisco told The Electronic Intifada. “He wrote on the manuscript that this is a draft and had not been thoroughly fact-checked.”

The excerpt from Murray J. Gart’s memoirs follows.

Nablus, occupied West Bank, 1990

Though I was there only five weeks, it was long enough for a good look at Nablus life.

I had to remind myself of the baggage I carried, limitations of culture, sense of history, background and language. But, after twenty years of visits to Israel, I was also aware that my experiences and preparations for the trip, including long interviews for TIME with Ariel Sharon and Yasser Arafat would help to shield me from being unfair.

I had tried to reach Nablus the previous year but was turned away by Israeli soldiers who said the city was a closed “security zone.” An invitation to consult at An-Najah National University got me into the West Bank’s most active cultural and political center. But when I arrived, the university’s campus was as closed as a tomb and prohibited from opening or operating.

By the end of the week I became accustomed to bursts of Israeli gunfire, exploding gas and other disturbing noises of daily urban warfare.

Distracted

One of my first mornings in Nablus I was distracted by heavy gunfire. When I leaned out my open first-floor window, I saw fires in my street at the corner of a walled schoolyard, teenage boys running and teachers shouting.

The yard filled with smoke, driving students into the school directly opposite my window. I could see cannisters landing, exploding and spewing out more smoke. In seconds, the gas got my face and forced me to fall back and grope my way blindly to the bathroom for a wet towel. When I was able to look out the window again, perhaps ten minutes later, there wasn’t a person in sight outdoors. Later the ashes and rubble were cleaned up. The job was done by Palestinians rousted from passing cars and made to do it by soldiers pointing guns.

The Israelis had turned the most vital center of Palestinian life into something resembling a vast, maximum security prison. That at least, was how it felt from the inside.

Armed troops did all the work of police, tightly controlled every life in the city and dispensed summary justice. They guarded entry and exit roads like prison gates and enforced Israel’s iron-fist occupation rules, which in practice meant repressive martial-law measures like collective punishment and preventive detention.

They used force to suppress the slightest hint of civil resistance, and responded to nonviolent protest with the force of lethal arms. To conceal these conditions to the world, the city was almost always a “closed military zone” which barred entry by the press, diplomats, clergy and anyone else the army chose to keep out.

There was no one to witness the real conditions of the Nablus lockup. Twenty-four hours a day every day of their lives, residents saw soldiers, as I did, close by on foot and in vehicles keeping relentless house-to-house pressure on every neighborhood. They broke into private homes, mosques and even hospital operating rooms, leaving a tornado-like aftermath.

A lot of residents have died. Doctors in Nablus said the number of wounded or dead was probably ten to twenty times more than reported. Injuries from beatings and stonings, illnesses made worse by gas, including the loss of human fetuses ran into the thousands.

Dozens of Nabulsis were dragged off daily for interrogations, beatings, jailing or imprisonment, without trial, for terms that can last years. On walks or from my window, it was common to see people carted off in military vehicles. A command car drove past me with two feet in white sneakers sticking out the rear. Inside, the prisoner’s face was being smashed into the floor by an Israeli soldier’s boot.

No safety

In Nablus I met old and young people, activists, businessmen, doctors, writers, lawyers and students. Not one of them felt safe or secure anywhere in town, and I came to understand why. Thousands of violent incidents, few of them ever reported, had touched the life of every person in town.

They stated their views respectfully, but asked me heated questions about American policy. The bitterness they felt toward the US for supporting Israel against the Palestinians poured out. They saw the American-Israeli alliance as hostile and directed against them.

A tall fellow about twenty put it this way: “Americans send bullets and gas for Israelis to shoot at us. Why do you hate us too?” When asked, I stated frankly the unwelcome opinion that the US will not, as Palestinians I met almost universally hope it will, punish Israel if it does not leave the West Bank and Gaza.

My biggest discovery was that there was no big discoveries to be made about the conflict beyond its awesome scope and pervasiveness, and the degree to which Israel had come to rely on brute force dealt out by a clumsy army to beat Palestinians into submission.

I saw what I already knew, but somehow had refused to believe could be happening in the same Jewish state meant to shelter an oppressed people. It was why the Palestinians in lands Israel rules under martial law so passionately oppose occupation, why they hate Israelis and why they feel so strongly that their struggle must continue, whatever the cost. They do believe they have little left to lose. Murray J. Gart, 1990 More

 

 

 

 

The Historical Perspective of the 2014 Gaza Massacre

August 23, 2014 “ICH” – “PIPR” – – People in Gaza and elsewhere in Palestine feel disappointed at the lack of any significant international reaction to the carnage and destruction the Israeli assault has so far left behind it in the Strip.

The inability, or unwillingness, to act seems to be first and foremost an acceptance of the Israeli narrative and argumentation for the crisis in Gaza. Israel has developed a very clear narrative about the present carnage in Gaza.

It is a tragedy caused by an unprovoked Hamas missile attack on the Jewish State, to which Israel had to react in self-defence. While mainstream western media, academia and politicians may have reservations about the proportionality of the force used by Israel, they accept the gist of this argument. This Israeli narrative is totally rejected in the world of cyber activism and alternative media. There it seems the condemnation of the Israeli action as a war crime is widespread and consensual.

The main difference between the two analyses from above and from below is the willingness of activists to study deeper and in a more profound way the ideological and historical context of the present Israeli action in Gaza. This tendency should be enhanced even further and this piece is just a modest attempt to contribute towards this direction.

Ad Hoc Slaughter?

An historical evaluation and contextualization of the present Israeli assault on Gaza and that of the previous three ones since 2006 expose clearly the Israeli genocidal policy there. An incremental policy of massive killing that is less a product of a callous intention as it is the inevitable outcome of Israel’s overall strategy towards Palestine in general and the areas it occupied in 1967, in particular.

This context should be insisted upon, since the Israeli propaganda machine attempts again and again to narrate its policies as out of context and turns the pretext it found for every new wave of destruction into the main justification for another spree of indiscriminate slaughter in the killing fields of Palestine.

The Israeli strategy of branding its brutal policies as an ad hoc response to this or that Palestinian action is as old as the Zionist presence in Palestine itself. It was used repeatedly as a justification for implementing the Zionist vision of a future Palestine that has in it very few, if any, native Palestinians. The means for achieving this goal changed with the years, but the formula has remained the same: whatever the Zionist vision of a Jewish State might be, it can only materialize without any significant number of Palestinians in it. And nowadays the vision is of an Israel stretching over almost the whole of historic Palestine where millions of Palestinians still live.

This vision ran into trouble once territorial greed led Israel to try and keep the West Bank and the Gaza Strip within its rule and control ever since June 1967. Israel searched for a way to keep the territories it occupied that year without incorporating their population into its rights-bearing citizenry. All the while it participated in a ‘peace process’ charade to cover up or buy time for its unilateral colonization policies on the ground.

With the decades, Israel differentiated between areas it wished to control directly and those it would manage indirectly, with the aim in the long run of downsizing the Palestinian population to a minimum with, among other means, ethnic cleansing and economic and geographic strangulation. Thus the West Bank was in effect divided into a ‘Jewish’ and a ‘Palestinian’ zones – a reality most Israelis can live with provided the Palestinian Bantustans are content with their incarceration within these mega prisons. The geopolitical location of the West Bank creates the impression in Israel, at least, that it is possible to achieve this without anticipating a third uprising or too much international condemnation.

The Gaza Strip, due to its unique geopolitical location, did not lend itself that easily to such a strategy. Ever since 1994, and even more so when Ariel Sharon came to power as prime minister in the early 2000s, the strategy there was to ghettoize Gaza and somehow hope that the people there — 1.8 million as of today — would be dropped into eternal oblivion.

But the Ghetto proved to be rebellious and unwilling to live under conditions of strangulation, isolation, starvation and economic collapse. There was no way it would be annexed to Egypt, neither in 1948 nor in 2014. In 1948, Israel pushed into the Gaza area (before it became a strip) hundreds of thousands of refugees it expelled from the northern Naqab and southern coast who, so they hoped, would move even farther away from Palestine.

For a while after 1967, it wanted to keep as a township which provided unskilled labour but without any human and civil rights. When the occupied people resisted the continued oppression in two intifadas, the West Bank was bisected into small Bantustans encircled by Jewish colonies, but it did not work in the too small and too dense Gaza Strip. The Israelis were unable to ‘West Bank’ the Strip, so to speak. So they cordoned it as a Ghetto and when it resisted the army was allowed to use its most formidable and lethal weapons to crash it. The inevitable result of an accumulative reaction of this kind was genocidal.

Incremental Genocide

The killing of three Israeli teenagers, two of them minors, abducted in the occupied West Bank in June, which was mainly a reprisal for killings of Palestinian children in May, provided the pretext first and foremost for destroying the delicate unity Hamas and Fatah have formed in that month. A unity that followed a decision by the Palestinian Authority to forsake the ‘peace process’ and appeal to international organizations to judge Israel according to a human and civil rights’ yardstick. Both developments were viewed as alarming in Israel.

The pretext determined the timing – but the viciousness of the assault was the outcome of Israel’s inability to formulate a clear policy towards the Strip it created in 1948. The only clear feature of that policy is the deep conviction that wiping out the Hamas from the Gaza Strip would domicile the Ghetto there.

Since 1994, even before the rise of Hamas to power in the Gaza Strip, the very particular geopolitical location of the Strip made it clear that any collective punitive action, such as the one inflicted now, could only be an operation of massive killings and destruction. In other words: an incremental genocide.

This recognition never inhibited the generals who give the orders to bomb the people from the air, the sea and the ground. Downsizing the number of Palestinians all over historic Palestine is still the Zionist vision; an ideal that requires the dehumanisation of the Palestinians. In Gaza, this attitude and vision takes its most inhuman form.

The particular timing of this wave is determined, as in the past, by additional considerations. The domestic social unrest of 2011 is still simmering and for a while there was a public demand to cut military expenditures and move money from the inflated ‘defence’ budget to social services. The army branded this possibility as suicidal. There is nothing like a military operation to stifle any voices calling on the government to cut its military expenses.

Typical hallmarks of the previous stages in this incremental genocide reappear in this wave as well. As in the first operation against Gaza, ‘First Rains’ in 2006, and those which followed in 2009, ‘Cast Lead’, and 2012, ‘Pillar of Smoke’, one can witness again consensual Israeli Jewish support for the massacre of civilians in the Gaza Strip, without one significant voice of dissent. The Academia, as always, becomes part of the machinery. Various universities offered the state its student bodies to help and battle for the Israeli narrative in the cyberspace and alternative media.

The Israeli media, as well, toed loyally the government’s line, showing no pictures of the human catastrophe Israel has wreaked and informing its public that this time, ‘the world understands us and is behind us’. That statement is valid to a point as the political elites in the West continue to provide the old immunity to the Jewish state. The recent appeal by Western governments to the prosecutor in the international court of Justice in The Hague not to look into Israel’s crimes in Gaza is a case in point. Wide sections of the Western media followed suit and justified by and large Israel’s actions.

This distorted coverage is also fed by a sense among Western journalist that what happens in Gaza pales in comparison to the atrocities in Iraq and Syria. Comparisons like this are usually provided without a wider historical perspective. A longer view on the history of the Palestinians would be a much more appropriate way to evaluate their suffering vis-à-vis the carnage elsewhere.

Conclusion: Confronting Double-Standards

But not only historical view is needed for a better understanding of the massacre in Gaza. A dialectical approach that identifies the connection between Israel’s immunity and the horrific developments elsewhere is required as well. The dehumanization in Iraq and Syria is widespread and terrifying, as it is in Gaza. But there is one crucial difference between these cases and the Israeli brutality: the former are condemned as barbarous and inhuman worldwide, while those committed by Israel are still publicly licensed and approved by the president of the United States, the leaders of the EU and Israel’s other friends in the world.

The only chance for a successful struggle against Zionism in Palestine is the one based on a human and civil rights agenda that does not differentiate between one violation and the other and yet identifies clearly the victim and the victimizers. Those who commit atrocities in the Arab world against oppressed minorities and helpless communities, as well as the Israelis who commit these crimes against the Palestinian people, should all be judged by the same moral and ethical standards. They are all war criminals, though in the case of Palestine they have been at work longer than anyone else. It does not really matter what the religious identity is of the people who commit the atrocities or in the name of which religion they purport to speak. Whether they call themselves jihadists, Judaists or Zionists, they should be treated in the same way. More