Who Rules the World? (25 page)

The (unrevised) 1999 platform of Israel’s governing party, Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud, “flatly rejects the establishment of a Palestinian Arab state west of the Jordan river.”
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And for those who like to obsess about meaningless charters, the core component of Likud, Menachem Begin’s Herut party, has yet to abandon its founding doctrine that the territory on both sides of the Jordan is part of the Land of Israel.

The crime of the Palestinians in January 2006 was punished at once. The United States and Israel, with Europe shamefully trailing behind, imposed harsh sanctions on the errant population, and Israel stepped up its violence. By June, when the attacks sharply escalated, Israel had already fired more than 7,700 shells at northern Gaza.
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The United States and Israel quickly initiated plans for a military coup to overthrow the elected government. When Hamas had the effrontery to foil these plans, the Israeli assaults and the siege became far more severe, justified by the claim that Hamas had taken over the Gaza Strip by force.

There should be no need to review again the horrendous record since. The relentless siege and savage attacks have been punctuated by episodes of “mowing the lawn,” to borrow Israel’s cheery expression for its periodic exercises of shooting fish in a pond in what it calls a “war of defense.”

Once the lawn is mowed and the desperate population seeks to reconstruct somehow from the devastation and the murders, there is a cease-fire agreement. These have been regularly observed by Hamas, as Israel concedes, until Israel violates them with renewed violence.

The most recent cease-fire was established after Israel’s October 2012 assault. Though Israel maintained its devastating siege, Hamas observed the cease-fire, as Israeli officials concede.
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Matters changed in June, when Fatah and Hamas forged a unity agreement, which established a new government of technocrats that had no Hamas participation and accepted all of the demands of the quartet. Israel was naturally furious, all the more so when even the Obama administration joined in signaling its approval. The unity agreement not only undercut Israel’s claim that it cannot negotiate with a divided Palestine, but also threatened the long-term goal of dividing Gaza from the West Bank and pursuing its destructive policies in both regions.

Something had to be done, and an occasion arose shortly after, when the three Israeli boys were murdered in the West Bank. The Netanyahu government had strong evidence at once that they were dead, but pretended otherwise, which provided the opportunity to launch a rampage in the West Bank, targeting Hamas, undermining the feared unity government, and sharply increasing Israeli repression.

Netanhayu claimed to have certain knowledge that Hamas was responsible. That too was a lie, as was recognized early on. There has been no pretense of presenting evidence. One of Israel’s leading authorities on Hamas, Shlomi Eldar, reported almost at once that the killers very likely came from a dissident clan in Hebron that has long been a thorn in the side of Hamas. Eldar added, “I’m sure they didn’t get any green light from the leadership of Hamas, they just thought it was the right time to act.”
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The eighteen-day rampage did succeed in undermining the feared unity government and sharply increasing Israeli repression. According to Israeli military sources, Israeli soldiers arrested 419 Palestinians, including 335 affiliated with Hamas, and killed 6, while searching thousands of locations and confiscating $350,000.
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Israel also conducted dozens of attacks in Gaza, killing five Hamas members on July 7.
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Hamas finally reacted with its first rockets in nineteen months, Israeli officials reported, providing the pretext for Operation Protective Edge on July 8.
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There has been ample reporting on the exploits of the self-declared Most Moral Army in the World, which, according to Israel’s ambassador to the United States, should receive the Nobel Peace Prize. By the end of July, some fifteen hundred Palestinians had been killed, exceeding the toll of the Operation Cast Lead crimes of 2008–9. Seventy percent of them were civilians, including hundreds of women and children.
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Three civilians in Israel were also killed.
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Large areas of Gaza were turned into rubble. During brief pauses in the bombing, relatives desperately sought shattered bodies or household items in the ruins of homes. Gaza’s main power plant was attacked—not for the first time; this is an Israeli specialty—sharply curtailing the already limited electricity and, worse yet, reducing still further the minimal availability of fresh water—another war crime. Meanwhile, rescue teams and ambulances were repeatedly attacked. As atrocities mounted throughout Gaza, Israel claimed that its goal was to destroy tunnels at the border.

Four hospitals were attacked, each yet another war crime. The first was the Al-Wafa Rehabilitation Hospital in Gaza City, attacked on the day Israeli ground forces invaded the prison. A few lines in the
New York Times
, within a story about the ground invasion, reported that “most but not all of the 17 patients and 25 doctors and nurses were evacuated before the electricity was cut and heavy bombardments nearly destroyed the building, doctors said. ‘We evacuated them under fire,’ said Dr. Ali Abu Ryala, a hospital spokesman. ‘Nurses and doctors had to carry the patients on their backs, some of them falling off the stairway. There is an unprecedented state of panic in the hospital.’”
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Three working hospitals were then attacked, while patients and staff were left to their own devices to survive. One Israeli crime did receive wide condemnation: the attack on a UN school that was harboring 3,300 terrified refugees who had fled the ruins of their neighborhoods on the orders of the Israeli army. The outraged UNRWA commissioner-general, Pierre Krähenbühl, said, “I condemn in the strongest possible terms this serious violation of international law by Israeli forces.… Today the world stands disgraced.”
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There were at least three Israeli strikes at the refugee shelter, a site well-known to the Israeli army. “The precise location of the Jabalia Elementary Girls School and the fact that it was housing thousands of internally displaced people was communicated to the Israeli army seventeen times, to ensure its protection,” Krähenbühl said, “the last being at ten to nine last night, just hours before the fatal shelling.”
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The attack was also condemned “in the strongest possible terms” by the normally reticent secretary-general of the United Nations, Ban Ki-moon. “Nothing is more shameful than attacking sleeping children,” he said.
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There is no record that the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations “choked up as she spoke of infants who perished” in the Israeli strike—or in the attack on Gaza altogether.

But White House spokesperson Bernadette Meehan did respond. She said that “we are extremely concerned that thousands of internally displaced Palestinians who have been called on by the Israeli military to evacuate their homes are not safe in UN designated shelters in Gaza. We also condemn those responsible for hiding weapons in United Nations facilities in Gaza.” She omitted to mention that these facilities were empty and that the weapons were found by UNRWA, who had already condemned those who hid them.
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Later, the administration joined in stronger condemnations of this particular crime—while at the same time releasing more weapons to Israel. In doing so, however, Pentagon spokesman Steve Warren told reporters, “And it’s become clear that the Israelis need to do more to live up to their very high standards … for protecting civilian life”—the high standards it had been exhibiting for many years while using U.S. arms.
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Attacks on UN compounds sheltering refugees is another Israeli specialty. One famous incident is the Israeli bombardment of the clearly identified UN refugee shelter in Qana during Shimon Peres’s murderous Grapes of Wrath campaign in 1996, killing 106 Lebanese civilians who had taken refuge there, including 52 children.
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To be sure, Israel is not alone in this practice. Twenty years earlier, its ally South Africa launched an airborne strike deep into Angola against Cassinga, a refugee camp run by the Namibian resistance SWAPO.
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Israeli officials laud the humanity of their army, which even goes so far as to inform residents that their homes will be bombed. The practice is “sadism, sanctimoniously disguising itself as mercy,” in the words of Israeli journalist Amira Hass: “A recorded message demanding hundreds of thousands of people leave their already targeted homes, for another place, equally dangerous, 10 kilometers away.”
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In fact, no place in the prison is safe from Israeli sadism.

Some find it difficult to profit from Israel’s solicitude. An appeal to the world by the Gazan Catholic Church quoted a priest who explained the plight of residents of the House of Christ, a care home dedicated to looking after disabled children. They were removed to the Holy Family Church because Israel was targeting the area, but soon thereafter he wrote, “The church of Gaza has received an order to evacuate. They will bomb the Zeitun area and the people are already fleeing. The problem is that the priest Fr. George and the three nuns of Mother Teresa have 29 handicapped children and nine old ladies who can’t move. How will they manage to leave? If anyone can intercede with someone in power, and pray, please do it.”
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Actually, it shouldn’t have been difficult. Israel already provided the instructions at the Al-Wafa Rehabilitation hospital. And fortunately, at least some states tried to intercede, as best they could. Five Latin American states—Brazil, Chile, Ecuador, El Salvador, and Peru—withdrew their ambassadors from Israel, following the course of Bolivia and Venezuela, which had broken relations in reaction to earlier Israeli crimes.
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These principled acts were another sign of the remarkable change in world relations as much of Latin America begins to free itself from Western domination, sometimes providing a model of civilized behavior to those who controlled it for five hundred years.

The hideous revelations elicited a different reaction from the Most Moral President in the World, the usual one: great sympathy for Israelis, bitter condemnation of Hamas, and calls for moderation on both sides. In his August press conference, President Obama did express concern for Palestinians “caught in the crossfire” (where?) while again vigorously supporting the right of Israel to defend itself, like everyone. Not quite everyone—not, of course, Palestinians. They have no right to defend themselves, surely not when Israel is on good behavior, keeping to the norm of quiet for quiet: stealing their land, driving them out of their homes, subjecting them to a savage siege, and regularly attacking them with weapons provided by their protector.

Palestinians are like black Africans—the Namibian refugees in the Cassinga camp, for example—all terrorists for whom the right of defense does not exist.

A seventy-two-hour humanitarian truce was supposed to go into effect at 8:00 a.m. on August 1. It broke down almost at once. According to a press release of the Al Mezan Center for Human Rights in Gaza, which has a solid reputation for reliability, one of its field workers in Rafah, at the Egyptian border in the south, heard Israeli artillery firing at about 8:05 a.m. By about 9:30 a.m., after reports that an Israeli soldier had been captured, intensive air and artillery bombing of Rafah was underway, killing probably dozens of people and injuring hundreds who had returned to their homes after the cease-fire entered into effect, though numbers could not be verified.

The day before, on July 31, the Coastal Municipalities Water Utility, the sole provider of water in the Gaza Strip, had announced that it could no longer provide water or sanitation services because of lack of fuel and frequent attacks on its personnel. The Al Mezan Center for Human Rights reported that by then, “almost all primary health services [had] stopped in the Gaza Strip due to the lack of water, garbage collection and environment health services. UNRWA had also warned about the risk of imminent spreading of disease owing to the halt of water and sanitation services.”
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Meanwhile, on the eve of the cease-fire, Israeli missiles fired from aircraft continued to kill and wound victims throughout the region.

When the current episode of sadism is finally called off, whenever that will be, Israel hopes to be free to pursue its criminal policies in the Occupied Territories without interference. Gazans will be free to return to the norm in their Israeli-run prison, while in the West Bank they can watch in peace as Israel dismantles what remains of their possessions.

That is the likely outcome if the United States maintains its decisive and virtually unilateral support for Israeli crimes and its rejection of the long-standing international consensus on diplomatic settlement. But the future would be quite different if the United States withdraws that support. In that case it might be possible to move toward the “enduring solution” in Gaza that Secretary of State John Kerry called for, eliciting hysterical condemnation in Israel because the phrase could be interpreted as calling for an end to Israel’s siege and regular attacks and—horror of horrors—the phrase might even be interpreted as calling for implementation of international law in the rest of the Occupied Territories.

It is not that Israel’s security would be threatened by adherence to international law; it would likely be enhanced. But as explained forty years ago by Israeli general (and later president) Ezer Weizman, Israel could not then “exist according to the scale, spirit, and quality she now embodies.”
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There are similar cases in recent history. Indonesian generals swore that they would never abandon what Australian foreign minister Gareth Evans called “the Indonesian province of East Timor” as he was making a deal to steal Timorese oil. As long as the ruling generals retained U.S. support, through decades of virtually genocidal slaughter, their goals were realistic. Finally, in September 1999, under considerable domestic and international pressure, President Clinton informed them quietly that the game was over and they instantly withdrew from East Timor, while Evans turned to a new career as the lauded apostle of “responsibility to protect”—in a version designed, of course, to permit a Western resort to violence at will.
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