The statements released today by both US-based Human Right’s Watch and the Israeli human rights organisation BT’Selem on the Israeli Beit Hanoun massacre of 19 Palestinian civilians make for intensely interesting and disturbing reading. Remember Ehud Olmert claimed these were the result of a “technical failure.” In fact there’s also been an internal Israeli army probe into the shellings which we are told were part of a strategy aimed at ending Palestinian Qassim rocket attacks into Israel. The probe incidentally was headed by one Major General Kalifi, who also happens to have been Deputy chief of ground forces at the time of the massacre.
According to their statement HRW argue that the internal probe was to all intents “insufficient,” adding that “[t]he Israeli government should immediately conduct a comprehensive independent investigation to establish these issues”. In fact HRW call for a thoroughgoing investigation into the whole Israeli policy of shelling Gaza. HRW specify that the investigation:
should examine the policy that has led Israel to fire some 15,000 artillery shells into Gaza since September 2005, killing 49 Palestinian civilians and seriously injuring dozens more. A comprehensive investigation should identify issues of individual and command responsibility, including criminal responsibility, for any violation of international humanitarian law committed in the conduct of these artillery operations in northern Gaza.
HRW also suggest that the Israeli army may be guilty of several serious contraventions of international law:
Only military objects can be the lawful target of attack under international humanitarian law. International law also permits attacks on military objects in or near civilian areas only if their destruction would provide a definite military advantage at the time of the attack, and even then, only if the concrete military advantage outweighs any anticipated civilian casualties or damage. An artillery attack, with no specific military target at the time of the attack, directed at or near areas populated by civilians, violates international law. The evidence suggests that Israel’s day-old information that homemade rockets had been launched from the area, with no specific information that rockets continued to be launched from the area, was an insufficient basis for considering the area attacked to be a legitimate military target. That insufficiency was compounded by the intended target’s location near a heavily populated neighborhood, where significant civilian casualties could be reasonably anticipated.
Indeed, the IDF’s internal probe is rendered even more suspect by the fact that the IDF “has [in the recent past] systematically failed to investigate cases in which its soldiers have used lethal force against Palestinian civilians, fostering a climate of impunity in the army and robbing victims of an effective remedy.”
But, doesn’t Israel have the right to defend itself against attacks on its own citizens? The HRW document doesn’t seem to be denying that; what it does deny Israel, in line with international law, is Israel’s right to defend itself regardless of the cost. It’s a simple principle and can be exemplified as follows: if someone harms your children, you do not then have the right to taken even more harmful action against their children in response. (Yet funnily enough as we saw during the Lebanese war, this simple principle is broadly ignored by staunch apologists for Israeli terrorism). HRW puts it thus:
Human Rights Watch recognizes that the stated justification for this Israeli attack is Palestinian groups’ ongoing firing of homemade rockets into populated civilian areas of Israel, but that does not excuse Israel’s own violation of the same international humanitarian law that makes the Palestinian attacks unlawful. Human Rights Watch has repeatedly called on Palestinian armed groups to cease immediately firing homemade rockets into Israel, in contravention of international humanitarian law. Since September 2005 alone , Palestinian armed groups have fired around 1,700 homemade rockets into Israel, injuring 36 Israeli civilians. The rocket attacks have largely been launched toward civilian areas rather than at any apparent military target, which makes them illegal under the laws of war, and criminal. Even in cases where there may be military targets as well as civilians and civilian objects, these rockets are inherently indiscriminate weapons, since that they cannot be aimed at a specific target, and thus violate the prohibition on indiscriminate attacks. To date, the Palestinian Authority has been unable and unwilling to rein in the armed groups responsible for the attacks.
So that paradoxically, Israel’s response to the unlawful actions committed by Palestinian fighters has been to commit the same unlawful actions against the Palestinians themselves; and predictably given the absolute disparity between the two sides in terms of arms and defensive capability, the Israeli response has incurred a far bloodier toll. So, not so much an eye for an eye, but two eyes, a nose, two ears, a neck, two shoulders and a torso for an eye.
The last resort of Israeli apologists always seems to be to point out that even though the Palestinians always suffer disproportionately more than the Israelis (who’ve suffered no deaths as a result of the lastest round of Palestinian shellings) the intentions of the Israelis are different from the intentions of the Palestinians. However the argument, at least in this case, only has any weight if you’re prepared to discount the worth of Palestinian lives completely, at least in the course of “defending” Israeli lives: that is if you’re willing to take the risk inherent in firing rockets into heavily populated areas as acceptable in order to protect Israelis from the same (a risk Israel has proven itself time and time again willing to accept with regard to Palestinian lives). As HRW conclude, such acts can only be regarded as just under international law if “the concrete military advantage outweighs any anticipated civilian casualties or damage.” International law merely reflects a basic principle of morality here: intention cannot be divorced from foreknowledge of effects. Regardless of whether the Israeli’s intentions were indeed to prevent rocket attacks, the awareness that their “preventative” actions would likely result in several civilian deaths makes them directly culpable for those deaths. That this has to be spelled out, really says something profound about the coverage of this conflict; coverage in which intuitive notions of morality and right and wrong are often baldly ignored.
In fact to turn to the BTSelem report:
Even according to the military, the shelling was not defensive; it was not aimed at Palestinian fire or Qassam rocket-fire that was in progress. The artillery was aimed at what the IDF refers to as a “launching space,” i.e., an area from which the army believes that Qassams had previously been fired.
Shells fired from cannons several kilometers away are known and expected to occasionally miss their target by a few hundred meters. For this reason, it is especially likely that such weapons will harm civilians when they are fired towards or near densely-populated residential areas. Several such cases have occurred over the past year, and it was to be expected that they could recur.
Moreover, in April 2006, it was reported that the IDF reduced – from 300 meters to 100 meters – the “safety range” between populated areas in the Gaza Strip and the areas targeted for artillery fire. Six human rights organization, B’Tselem among them, warned about the great risk inherent in the decision, contending it would lead to the injury of innocent civilians. The organizations petitioned the High Court of Justice to order the IDF to cancel the decision. The High Court has not yet ruled in the matter.
BTSelem conclude:
The circumstances involved in the killing of the Palestinians in Beit Hanun, including the fact that the attack was not a defensive action, raise a grave concern that the shelling constitutes a war crime. The Israeli military’s contention that they did not mean to harm civilians is meaningless, and cannot justify an action that amounts to a war crime.
In other words it would be more than remiss of Israel not to properly investigate what may likely be a war crime.
So what was the official response in the UK and US to the massacres? Well as usual it betrayed a lack of recognition of the humanity of and a complete sense of contempt towards the Palestinians. There was no immediate call for sanctions, no outright condemnations of the Israeli bloodbath or severe reprimands from amongst its biggest funders and armers. Just placid statements of regret such as for example from Margret Beckett:
It is hard to see what this action was meant to achieve and how it can be justified… Israel must respect its obligation to avoid harming civilians.
And from Israel’s greatest ally as well and its chief global source of military and financial support? The Guardian reported that:
The US called on Israel to exercise ‘restraint’, noting its ‘regret’ at civilian casualties and the launch of an inquiry into how a residential area had come under artillery fire.
UN rapporteur John Duggard on the other hand, had this to say:
This brutal collective punishment of a people, not a government, has passed largely unnoticed by the international community. The Quartet… has done little to halt Israel’s attacks.
Worse still, the [UN] Security Council has failed to adopt any resolution on the subject or attempt to restore peace to the region. The time has come for urgent action on the part of the Security Council.
Interestingly enough, I was also reading an online article from the American Prospect website today, which examined the burgeoning relationship between China and Africa. Although the article’s account of the Afro-Chinese relationship gave cause for much optimism (China’s investment in Africa may prove extremely beneficial to the growth of African economies) it seemed a tad apprehensive at the same time:
[S]ome African observers have suggested that when China does not join other nations in pressuring regimes to change their practices, its inaction actually amounts to interfering in domestic politics — on behalf of abusive rulers, and in contravention of the wishes of average Africans.
Quite rightly, the claim here is that one country’s inaction may itself be a means of granting its consent to the immoral and unjust actions of another country with which it may be closely alligned through, in this case substantial investment interests. I don’t need to spell out how this translates to the case of Israel and the US (and also the UK); and yet very few Western commentators seem to explicitly make the connection. Nor is it reflected in mainstream news coverage.
BTW.The BBC’s coverage of Bait Hanoun has been, as usual, pitiful (not to say it wasn’t covered, it was on for example Newsnight, it’s how it was covered that pisses me off).
