What’s the last straw?
March 25, 2009
John Ging, who is the head of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) in Gaza, came to speak at a meeting in the Houses of Parliament on Monday.
UNRWA is the UN’s oldest special agency. It was founded in 1948 to give relief to the Palestinian refugees who were driven out of the nascent state of Israel into Gaza and the West Bank. It remains, quite literally, the lifeline for generations of Palestinians. Any assessment of the humanitarian needs of Palestinians offered by UNRWA must be treated with enormous respect.
John Ging delivered a gruesome account of the situation there. The population of Gaza have a daily shortfall of 40 per cent in their calorie intake, we were told. Because of the constant food shortage, UNRWA has developed a school feeding programme to try to improve the children’s ability to concentrate on their work rather than on their hunger and fatigue. The programme amounts, in reality, to no more than a snack for the children. But given the dire need for funds and access, it is better than nothing.
Ging is not a peace envoy, nor is he in Gaza to bring about a political solution. As a very senior and well respected UN representative, he must work within the rules of law. So when he explains that the bombardment of Gaza appears to run contrary to the fourth Geneva Convention, in that it was a disproportionate attack on a civilian population and took place in densely populated areas, amounting to nothing short of collective punishment, his comments must be taken very seriously indeed.
The Sunday edition of Israel’s Haaretz newspaper led with stories concerning the behaviour of Israeli forces during the most intense period of the conflict in Gaza. Radhika Coomaraswamy, who is the UN envoy tasked with protecting children in armed conflict, has reported that Israeli Defence Force (IDF) soldiers had used an 11-year-old Palestinian boy as a human shield during the war. She also accused Israeli soldiers of shooting Palestinian children, bulldozing a home with a woman and child still inside and shelling a building that they had ordered civilians to vacate just the day before. Coomaraswamy said that what she had reported were just a few examples of the “hundreds of incidents that have been documented and verified by UN officials.”
Haaretz also quoted IDF chief of staff Gabi Ashkenazi, who said that he did not believe that “Israeli soldiers had harmed civilians in cold blood,” after the paper printed testimonies given to it by soldiers who had served in Operation Cast Lead. The soldiers admitted that they had killed Palestinian civilians using permissive rules of engagement and intentionally destroyed their property. Ashkenazi appears to be in some form of denial because he then went on to claim that the IDF is the most moral army in the world.
Also writing at the weekend, Israeli journalist Gideon Levy described how Israeli soldiers had been dehumanised. He described how an army, whose armoured corp had yet to encounter an enemy tank and whose pilots had yet to face an enemy combat jet in 36 years, had been trained to think that the only function of a tank was to crush civilian cars and that a pilot’s job was to bomb residential neighbourhoods.
Predictably, the IDF has described the criticisms as a conspiracy against Israel. Yet again, it has said that it will investigate any allegations made against it. But Levy insists that the IDF “is incapable of investigating crimes of its soldiers and commanders and it is ridiculous to expect it to do so.”
Public outrage against Israel is stronger than it has been after any previous conflict, including the war with Lebanon in 2006. This time around, the world was able to witness the attacks on the civilian population of Gaza, day after day. This has prompted a very eminent group of international human rights experts, led by former Irish president and UN human rights commissioner Mary Robinson and Archbishop Desmond Tutu of South Africa, to call for an international investigation into the crimes in Gaza.
Israel is not a signatory to the International Criminal Court convention. But most of the countries that it trades with and those that it depends on for its economic survival are. In any event, Israel is a member of the United Nations and participates in the UN human rights council.
The issue of how international law can be used is very important. Under British case law, there is universal jurisdiction following the Pinochet arrest in London. So anyone subject to an ICC arrest warrant is liable to be detained if they travel to a signatory nation. When there is prima facie evidence of war crimes committed by a state against the civilian population, the international community is obliged to act. The evidence against Israel is enormous. The excuse that this was an act of self defence against Hamas rockets simply does not stand up to logic or examination.
The EU has a conditional trade agreement according to which all EU countries can trade with Israel.
But the agreement has human rights conditions attached to it, all of which have been broken by Israel.
It is not enough for the EU to defer a decision on the upgraded association status that Israel desires.
Instead, it must suspend the existing trade agreement because of the repeated breaches of human rights clauses.
The quartet represented by former prime minister Tony Blair always claims to be making even-handed demands. But even-handedness is what has given Israel the excuse for its murderous attacks on Gaza and removed the obligation to achieve a political solution.
Yesterday, prime minister-designate Benjamin Netanyahu trumpeted the agreement that he’d reached with Ehud Barack of the Israeli Labour Party to join his coalition. This is at odds with Barack’s professed support for a two-state solution, while Netanyahu refuses to even contemplate recognising the pre-1967 borders.
As ever with Israeli politics, there is always somebody worse waiting in the wings to take over from whichever nationalist and xenophobic leader may have gone before.
We were told this about Ariel Sharon and we are now told it about Netanyahu.
The Palestinian political groups, including Hamas, Fatah and the independents, are all inching towards the creation of a national unity government. If they are successful, then Europe and the US will either have to condemn all Palestinians for seeking unity, or swallow their pride and actually talk to Hamas. Some members of the fabled international community have taken this to ludicrous degrees by, for instance, banning George Galloway from Canada because he met Hamas when in Gaza.
The Palestinian people have suffered for 60 years. The behaviour of successive Israeli governments has imprisoned and destroyed the hopes of generations. There can be no peace until there is recognition of the Palestinian people’s rights.
Recent coverage of Gaza - Guardian film clips
March 23, 2009
Three clips about Gaza from the Guardian.
Gaza war crimes investigation: human shields - Clancy Chassay’s film investigates claims from three brothers that the Israeli military used them as human shields during the invasion of Gaza.
Gaza war crimes investigation: attacks on medics - Clancy Chassay asks why 16 medical workers were killed and more than half of Gaza’s hospitals hit during Israel’s invasion of Gaza.
Gaza war crimes investigation: Israeli drones - Clancy Chassay asks why Israeli drones with optics capable of seeing the colour of a target’s clothes killed so many Palestinian civilians during the recent Gaza invasion.
