Note: This is one of the most comprehensive and thoughtful op-eds I have read on the Gaza Crisis.
By Mark LeVine
Aljazeera.net
UPDATED ON:
TUESDAY, JANUARY 13, 2009
10:20 MECCA TIME, 07:20 GMT
http://english.aljazeera.net/focus/war_on_gaza/2009/01/2009110112723260741.html
Mark LeVine is a professor of Middle East history at the University of California, Irvine, and is the author of Heavy Metal Islam: Rock, Resistance, and the Struggle for the Soul of Islam and the soon to be published An Impossible Peace: Israel/Palestine Since 1989.
One by one the justifications given by Israel for its latest war in Gaza are unraveling.
The argument that this is a purely defensive war, launched only after Hamas broke a six-month ceasefire has been challenged, not just by observers in the know such as Jimmy Carter, the former US president who helped facilitate the truce, but by centre-right Israeli intelligence think tanks.Instead , “the escalation and erosion of the lull arrangement” occurred after Israel killed six Hamas members on November 4 without provocation and then placed the entire Strip under an even more intensive siege the next day.
According to a joint Tel Aviv University-European University study, this fits a larger pattern in which Israeli violence has been responsible for ending 79 per cent of all lulls in violence since the outbreak of the second intifada, compared with only 8 per cent for Hamas and other Palestinian factions.
Indeed, the Israeli foreign ministry seems to realise that this argument is losing credibility. He claimed that such tunnels were “as big as the Holland and Lincoln tunnels,” and offered as proof the “fact” that lions and monkeys had been smuggled through them to a zoo in Gaza. In reality, the lions were two small cubs that were drugged, thrown in sacks, and dragged through a tunnel on their way to a private zoo.
Israel’s self-image
The claim that Hamas will never accept the existence of Israel has proved equally misinformed, as Hamas leaders explicitly announce their intention to do just that in the pages of the Los Angeles Times or to any international leader or journalist who will meet with them.Anyone with an internet connection can Google “Gaza humanitarian catastrophe” and find the UN’s Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs in the Occupied Territories and read the thousands of pages of evidence documenting the reality of the current fighting, and the long term siege on Gaza that preceded it.
The Red Cross, normally scrupulous in its unwillingness to single out parties to a conflict for criticism, sharply criticised Israel for preventing medical personnel from reaching wounded Palestinians, some of whom remained trapped for days, slowly starving and dying in the Gazan rubble amidst their dead relatives.War crimes admission
Additionally, numerous flippant remarks by senior Israeli politicians and generals, including Tzipi Livni, the foreign minister, refusing to make a distinction between civilian people and institutions and fighters – “Hamas doesn’t … and neither should we” is how Livni puts it – are rightly being seen as admissions of war crimes.
Indeed , in reviewing statements by Israeli military planners leading up to the invasion, it is clear that there was a well thought out decision to go after Gaza’s civilian infrastructure – and with it, civilians.
The following quote from an interview with Major-General Gadi Eisenkot that appeared in the Israeli daily Yedioth Ahronoth in October, is telling:
“We will wield disproportionate power against every village from which shots are fired on Israel, and cause immense damage and destruction. From our perspective these [the villages] are military bases,” he said.
“This isn’t a suggestion. This is a plan that has already been authorised.”
Causing “immense damage and destruction” and considering entire villages “military bases” is absolutely prohibited under international law.
Eisenkot’s description of this planning in light of what is now unfolding in Gaza is a clear admission of conspiracy and intent to commit war crimes, and when taken with the comments above, and numerous others, renders any argument by Israel that it has tried to protect civilians and is not engaging in disproportionate force unbelievable.
International laws violated
On the ground, the evidence mounts ever higher that Israel is systematically violating a host of international laws, including but not limited to Article 56 of the IV Hague Convention of 1907, the First Additional Protocol of the Geneva Convention, the Fourth Geneva Convention (more specifically known as the “Geneva Convention relative to the Protection of Civilian Persons in Time of War of 12 August 1949”, the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, and the principles of Customary International Humanitarian Law.
None of this excuses or legitimises the firing of rockets or mortars by any Palestinian group at Israeli civilians and non-military targets. By the same logic, however, Israel does not have the right to use such attacks as an excuse to launch an all-out assault on the entire population of Gaza.
In this context, even Israel’s suffering from the constant barrage of rockets is hard to pay due attention to when the numbers of dead and wounded on each side are counted. Any sense of proportion is impossible to sustain with such a calculus.
Israeli commentators and scholars, self-described “loyal” Zionists who served proudly in the army in wars past, are now publicly describing their country, in the words of Oxford University professor Avi Shlaim, as a “rogue” and gangster” state led by “completely unscrupulous leaders”.
Neve Gordon, a politics professor at Ben Gurion University, has declared that Israel’s actions in Gaza are like “raising animals for slaughter on a farm” and represent a “bizarre new moral element” in warfare.
“The moral voice of restraint has been left behind … Everything is permitted” against Palestinians, writes a disgusted Haaretz columnist, Gideon Levy.
Around the world people are beginning to compare Israel’s attack on Gaza, which after the 2005 withdrawal of Israeli forces and settlers was turned literally into the world’s largest prison, to the Jewish uprising in the Warsaw Ghetto.
Al-Qaeda is attempting to exploit this crisis to gain a foothold in Gaza and Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon and Syria, as well as through attacking Jewish communities globally. Democratic values eroded
Inside Israel , the violence will continue to erode both democratic values in the Jewish community, and any acceptance of the Jewish state’s legitimacy in the eyes of its Palestinian citizens.
And yet in the US – at least in Washington and in the offices of the mainstream Jewish organisations – the chorus of support for Israel’s war on Gaza continues to sing in tight harmony with official Israeli policy, seemingly deaf to the fact that they have become so out of tune with the reality exploding around them.
At my university, UCI, where last summer Jewish and Muslim students organised a trip together through the occupied territories and Israel so they could see with their own eyes the realities there, old battle lines are being redrawn.
I have no idea who the “us” is that is referred to in the appeal, although I am sure that the membership of that group is shrinking. Trap
Even worse, in the Arab/Muslim world, the horrific images pouring out of Gaza daily are allowing preachers and politicians to deploy well-worn yet still dangerous and inciteful stereotypes against Jews as they rally the masses against Israel – and through it – their own governments.
What is most frightening is that the most important of Israel’s so-called friends, the US political establishment and the mainstream Jewish leadership, seem clueless to the devastating trap that Israel has led itself into – in good measure with their indulgence and even help.
First, it is clear that Israel cannot destroy Hamas, it cannot stop the rockets unless it agrees to a truce that will go far to meeting the primary demand of Hamas – an end to the siege.
Israel is succeeding in doing little more than creating another generation of Palestinians with hearts filled with rage and a need for revenge.
Second, Israel’s main patron, the US, along with the conservative Arab autocracies and monarchies that are its only allies left in the Muslim world, are losing whatever crumbs of legitimacy they still had with their young and angry populations.
Third, as Israel brutalises Palestinians, it brutalises its own people. You cannot occupy another people and engage in violence against them at this scale without doing even greater damage to your soul.
While in the US only a small fraction of the population participates in war; in Israel, most able-bodied men end up participating.Violence-as-power
Who will save Israel from herself? As Haaretz reporter Yossi Melman described it on January 10, “Israel has created an image of itself of a madman that has lost it”.
Not Palestinians, too many of whom have fallen prey to the same condition.
Not the Middle East Quartet, the European Union, the United Nations, or the Arab League, all of whom are utterly powerless to influence Israeli policy.
Not the organised Jewish leadership in the US and Europe, who are even more blind to what is happening than most Israelis, who at least allow internal debate about the wisdom of their government’s policies.
And not senior American politicians and policy-makers who are either unwilling to risk alienating American Jewish voters, or have been so brainwashed by the constant barrage of propaganda put out by the “Israel Lobby” that they are incapable of reaching an independent judgment about the conflict.
During the US presidential race, Barack Obama was ridiculed for being a messiah-like figure. The idea does not sound so funny now. It is hard to imagine anyone less saving Israel, the Palestinians, and the world from another four years of mindless violence.Also, there are reports that the claim that extremist Muslims are using the internet to collect names and addresses of prominent British Jews in order to attack them, might in fact have been a hoax.
Mark LeVine is a professor of Middle East history at the University of California, Irvine, and is the author of Heavy Metal Islam: Rock, Resistance, and the Struggle for the Soul of Islam and the soon to be published An Impossible Peace: Israel/Palestine Since 1989.
The views expressed by the author are not necessarily those of Al Jazeera.
Source:
Al Jazeera
Update: In a further challenge to the democratic process in Israel, on January 12, the Israeli newspaper Haaretz reported that the Central Elections Committee had voted overwhelmingly to bar Arab-led parties from participating in the upcoming parliamentary elections.
Not the growing progressive Jewish community , which will need years to achieve enough social and political power to challenge the status quo.
Israelis are clearly incapable. Their addiction as a society to the illusion of violence-as-power has reached the level of collective mental illness.
The effects of the latest violence perpetrated against Palestinians upon the collective Israeli soul is incalculable ; the notion that it can survive as an “ethnocracy” – favouring one ethnic group, Jews, yet by and large democratic – is becoming a fiction.
The high incidence of violent crimes committed by veterans returning from combat duty in Iraq is but one example of how the violence of occupation and war eat away at people’s moral centre.
The weaker the US and its axis becomes in the Middle East, the more precarious becomes Israel’s long-term security. Indeed, any chance that the US could convince the Muslim world to pressure Iran to give up its quest for nuclear weapons has been buried in Gaza.
Merely by surviving (and it surely will survive) Hamas, like Hezbollah in 2006, will have won.
It is one that threatens the country’s existence far more than any Qassam rockets, with their 0.4 per cent kill rate; even more than the disastrous 2006 invasion of southern Lebanon, which by weakening Israel’s deterrence capability in some measure made this war inevitable.
I ndeed, one of the sad facts of this latest tragedy is that with each claim publicly refuted by facts on the ground, more and more Americans, including Jews, are refusing to trust the assertions of Israeli and American Jewish leaders.
The Anteaters for Israel, the college pro-Israel group at the University of California, Irvine, sent out an urgent email to the community explaining that, “Over the past week, increasing amounts of evidence lead us to believe that Hamas is largely responsible for any alleged humanitarian crisis in Gaza”.
Iran’s defiance of both Israel and its main sponsor, the US, is winning it increasing sympathy with each passing day.
Extremist Muslims are using internet forums to collect names and addresses of prominent European Jews with the goal, it seems clear, of assassinating them in retaliation for Israel’s actions in Gaza. [Note: these reports may have been a hoax, see author’s update in last paragraph.]
Fellow Haaretz columnist and daughter of Holocaust survivors, Amira Haas writes of her late parents disgust at how Israeli leaders justified Israel’s wars with a “language laundromat” aimed at redefining reality and Israel’s moral compass. “Lucky my parents aren’t alive to see this,” she exclaimed.
‘Rogue’ state
As Richard Falk, the UN special rapporteur, declared in his most recent statement on Gaza: “It should be pointed out unambiguously that there is no legal (or moral) justification for firing rockets at civilian targets, and that such behavior is a violation of IHR, associated with the right to life, as well as constitutes a war crime.”
Meanwhile, the United Nations has flatly denied Israeli claims that Palestinian fighters were using the UNRWA school compound bombed on January 6, in which 40 civilians were killed, to launch attacks, and has challenged Israel to prove otherwise.
With each new family, 10, 20 and 30 strong, buried under the rubble of a building in Gaza, the claim that the Israeli forces have gone out of their way to diminish civilian casualties – long a centre-piece of Israel’s image as an enlightened and moral democracy – is falling apart.
During a conference call with half a dozen pro-Israel professors on Thursday, Asaf Shariv, the Consul General of Israel in New York, focused more on the importance of destroying the intricate tunnel system connecting Gaza to the Sinai.
The Intelligence and Terrorism Information Center, whose December 31 report titled ” Six Months of the Lull Arrangement Intelligence Report,” confirmed that the June 19 truce was only “sporadically violated, and then not by Hamas but instead by … “rogue terrorist organisations”.
This was all known to me.
Can you imagine my frustration in discussions about that conflict?
Oh, I forgot to mention. There are several videos of IDF soldiers using Palestinians as human shields on vehicles and during house searches (never trust videos, but there’s also an interview of at least one such human shield by Western journalists on tape).
Meanwhile, to be a combatant in a city among civilians is not covered by the definition of using human shields and the Red Cross denied that Hezbollah had used human shields in 2006.
Last but not least:
http://turcopolier.typepad.com/sic_semper_tyrannis/2009/01/the-idf-ground.html
That’s certainly interesting for someone who focuses on leadership topics.
The Western democracies are no exception to the fallibility of humans; we side with the wrong or at least with ‘bad’ guys very often.
The absence of war isn’t peace. That a conflict has gone on for ages means that fundamental issues have not been settled.
Your post only highlights the extent to which ideological, religious, political, economic, and social arguments have been muddled.
Thank you for this.
“The absence of war isnt peace..”
The assumption of leaders seems to be – I only know what I read – that there is a 2 or 3 state solution .
The calls and responses on the Uk march on Sat :
What do we want ? ONE state .
When do we want it ? now.
Israel ? Terr-or state. George Bush ? Terr-or-rist . Free , free? Pal-est-ine .( and Iraq . and Pakistan . )
We are ALL , Palestinians .
The first and last lines seem , from snippets I have read , to have cropped up at demos worldwide . Suggesting , organisation . Possibly, any two state solution will be but the end of the beginning .
Was an existing concern of group of Jewish ladies I spoke to .( there were a number of Jewish protesters ) . They had family who had lived in Palestine for generations , and feared for their future safety .
I have read no discussion by leaders on any side , of a one state solution .
Yet this is a world wide question … Bosnia , Maldives , Nevada , Ossetias, Kashmir , Kurdistan , Pakistan , Bangladesh , Botswana , Ruanda , Sri Lanka , Luxembourg , Northern Ireland etc – what makes an un/successful unit or alliance – Does it matter whose flag flies over government house if you have bearable government who can balance the books – Does it matter who has legal title to the land you live on , where does the clock start ?
Perhaps billions are being spent , as part of the War on Turr , hiring the best brains in the world to analyse these things …..
[…] Who will save Israel from itself? « Don Vandergriff is a good article about the conflict. Isreal is really making a huge strategic blunder. Fareed Zakaria is also making a good case that Israels actions make life for Ahmadinejad easier. Quote: […]
Al Jazeera is not exactly an unbiased source of information.
Israel is utilizing one of the few strategies available to stop the politically unacceptable rocket attacks: inflict enough pain on Gaza to force a halt to the attacks. Of course there is a very good chance that this strategy will not work.
Hamas is doing what a non-state 4th generational warfare entity would do: Mix in with the population, leading to heavy civilian casualties that will allow them to win the information/public opinion war.
“Al Jazeera is not exactly an unbiased source of information.”
I doubt that we can identify any unbiased source of information in regard to this conflict.
The good thing about AZ is that it is biased slightly to the other direction than most media in the West. It’s a valuable addition.
Gaza has offshore gas .
Wouldnt think this has the leverage of Iraq’s oil though ! Googled ,
Exploration started by BG ( british gas ) , with small stake from CCC ( started by Haifa exile , based Greece via Lebanon , in the sticky over failing to pay a debt in Yemen ) and Palestinian Authority . Project on hold ; parallel contract with Israel re Israeli offshore gas cancelled Jan 9 th .
First, thanks for some great insights and taking your time to post them. Sorry I am slow, I spent the week up at West Point where many departments, but the most key one, Department of Military Instruction, are using my book Raising the Bar to change their Program of Instruction (POI).
Haven’t we learned, it is about money (as Anna points out), and corrupt strategic leaders. It explains why Dems and Republicans stay committed to Israel (I better watch out now, I might find a bomb under my hood). That is why in my new book Manning the Legions, that our biggest issue of our leadership crisis.
Don
” Money ”
My first reaction was that this was strategic – if I was Hamas , I know what I’d be importing if I had a fat gas cheque and an international port . And I wouldnt be needing those tunnels .
However , looks like DV is right . CCC have judgement against them for not paying 10% of a yemeni oil field revenue to M al Masri , also a Palestinian and the 50 th Richest Arab in the World . All contactors to the US .
Read more about Consolidated Contractors Company (CCC) and the Masri case at
http://www.hataf.us
http://hataf.us
“Haven’t we learned, it is about money (as Anna points out), and corrupt strategic leaders.”
Major Vandergriff, sir : Only in America can people make comments like this with no fear of reprisal. Congrats to the newly inaugurated POTUS. The road is long… but I’m hopin’ that with a few good men, any sort of crisis can be overcome. What’s his slogan again? “Yes, we can.”