Above: the scene in the school in southern Gaza where 15 children were killed and dozens injured from a precision bombing by the Israelis.
Current Events
The Israeli Spin On Its War Crimes
HAROON SIDDIQUI
There is the Israeli spin and there are Israeli actions.
Israel says its fight is with Hamas, not Gazans.
Yet it is killing Gazans -- the current death toll is now well over 800 -- most of them civilians, including women and children.
Israel says it is only out to punish Hamas.
But it is hitting hospitals, mosques, schools, apartment buildings and entire neighbourhoods full of civilians.
Israel accuses Hamas of being callously indifferent to the lives of Palestinians by hiding its rockets and mortar shells among them. Hamas uses civilians as human shields but Israel goes ahead and bombs them anyway.
This is a very strange way for Israel to seek the moral high ground.
Israel says Hamas has cynically calculated that the worse the situation gets for Gazans, the better it is for Hamas.
If so, why is Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu obliging Hamas?
Israel says it makes great efforts to avoid/minimize civilian casualties.
If so, it is failing, day after day and hour after hour.
It peppers Gazans with recorded phone messages and leaflets, and also pings their roofs as warnings to get out ahead of the impending destruction. But, as a Gaza doctor said, “Where can we go? There’s nowhere to go” for the 1.7 million residents of the densely populated coastal territory.
The Israeli army acknowledged that half the casualties, as of July 16, 2014 were not involved in terrorism. They were collateral damage, either because of mistaken targeting or because Hamas uses ordinary Palestinians as human shields.
“Not all the casualties are due to mistakes,” an unnamed senior military official told the New York Times this week. Another army spokesperson said that “civilian casualties are a tragic inevitability of the brutal and systematic exploitation of homes, hospitals and mosques.”
That didn’t seem so in the case of four boys blown up at the beach where they had gone because their neighbourhood was under constant attack by air strikes; or of another three children killed while playing on a rooftop; or of homes being hit with people inside at dusk when families gather to break their daylong Ramadan fast; or of targeting the entire Gaza City neighbourhood of Shejaia where more than 60 Palestinians were killed.
The attack on Shejaia was “a hell of a pinpoint operation,” mocked U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry, talking to an aide without realizing that his microphone was on.
The UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Navi Pillay suggests that international humanitarian law is being violated, “in a manner that could amount to war crimes.” Other UN agencies as well as Human Rights Watch are accusing Israel of targeting civilians as collective punishment.
“Israel’s rhetoric is all about precision attacks but attacks with no military target and many deaths can hardly be considered precise,” said Sarah Leah Whitson, Human Rights Watch’s Middle East director.
If the Israeli objective is to inflict the maximum suffering on Palestinians in the hope of turning them against Hamas, that sentiment is yet to manifest itself.
Over the last few years, Hamas has lost support because of its corruption, nepotism and incompetence, not because of the 2008-09 Israeli air and ground operations that killed nearly 1,400 Palestinians and 13 Israelis, or the 2012 air operation -- both of which, in fact, ended up propping Hamas’s sinking fortunes. Since then, Hamas has developed or imported rockets that now reach deeper into Israel than ever before.
Whatever one thinks of Hamas or its tactics, its opposition to the suffocating Israeli and Egyptian blockade reflects the desperate needs of the Gazans.
The stated Israeli aim this time is to destroy the tunnels that reach into Israel and also demilitarize but not decapitate Hamas (for fear that its place may be taken up by an Al Qaeda-type outfit). According to Yuval Steinitz, minister for strategic affairs, the immediate goal is “quiet,” but “the strategic goal is demilitarization. We have to finally not be satisfied with a temporary filling, but do a root canal.”
It might prove a temporary respite, at best.
Israel wants peace and quiet without ending its brutal 47-year-old occupation of Palestinian lands. It says it wants a peace agreement with the Arabs. But Netanyahu has thwarted it -- by expanding illegal Jewish settlements in occupied lands; refusing to define Israel’s ever-elastic borders; imposing new demands on Mahmoud Abbas, the most pliant of Palestinian leaders; and derailing American efforts to revive the peace talks.
And when Abbas recently signed a unity agreement with Hamas, an accord cautiously welcomed by the United States, Netanyahu has tried to undermine it. Abbas was long accused of not representing all Palestinians. Now that he was on his way to doing so, he has been sabotaged.
“Israel does not want peace,” writes Gideon Levy, the respected Israeli columnist in Haaretz newspaper. “In recent years, Israel has moved away from even the aspiration to make peace . . . The preservation of the status quo has become the true Israeli aim, the primary goal of Israeli policy, almost its be-all and end-all. The problem is that the existing situation cannot last forever. Historically, few nations have ever agreed to live under occupation without resistance . . . The Palestinians have made more than one mistake but their mistakes are marginal. Basic justice is on their side and basic rejectionism is the Israelis’ purview. The Israelis want occupation, not peace. I only hope I am wrong.”
But, as Kerry has said, the status quo “cannot be maintained.”
Netanyahu thinks it can be.
The rest is spin.
As Vancouver author Gabor Maté wrote on this page Wednesday:
“The powerful party has succeeded in painting itself as the victim, while the ones being killed and maimed become the perpetrators . . . Israel’s ‘right to defend itself,’ unarguable in principle, does not validate mass killing.”
[Courtesy: The Toronto Star]
July 25, 2014
Conversation about this article
1: Kaala Singh (Punjab), July 25, 2014, 1:05 PM.
This is true in the case of Sikhs too. Sikhs in India were subjected to fiendish atrocities in 1984, and thereafter. Their places of worship destroyed, well planned state-sponsored massacres carried out all over the country. Community after community of Sikhs was wiped out in a well-planned campaign of ethnic cleansing and yet India is regarded as a "secular democracy" and Sikhs are branded as "terrorists". This is all the result of false and unethical reporting by media houses and news channels. Sikhs must have their own media to counter false propaganda.
2: Dr Birinder Singh Ahluwalia (Toronto, Ontario, Canada), July 26, 2014, 11:52 AM.
Israel's right to exist in peace is an unalienable right, as also are the rights of Palestinians to live in peace and liberty. I am sure most Israelis do not condone what their political leaders are doing as also I am certain most Palestinians do not condone what Hamas is doing. The sad part is that leaders of the ilk of Benjamin Netanyahu or Dick Cheney or George W. Bush or Hamas ... (including the current reticient Canadian leadership) think they can explain through academic / (ir)rational / hollow non-sensible logic the atrocities being committed against humanity (especially children) by waging evil wars and conflicts, or showing support for them. If history has taught any lesson, it resoundingly is "Peace based on understanding and accommodation and respect between parties is long lasting, but never the truce based on war, fear and disdain for the other". I do not want to lay the sole blame on Israel or Hamas because I know deep down both understand whatever they are doing is wrong and no explanation can justify their actions. However it is important for both to understand that the "Two-State Solution" is the way to go, it is possible and achievable, and Israel has to cease building new settlements in occupied territories - Benjamin Netanyahu, STOP IT.