ABDUL WAHID OSMAN BELAL
Will Israel be brought to book?
Seumas
Milne
guardian.co.uk,
Monday 23 March 2009 17.15 GMT
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/mar/23/israel-gaza
The evidence of war crimes in Gaza is a challenge to universal
justice: will western-backed perpetrators ever stand trial?
Evidence of
the scale of Israel's war crimes in its January onslaught on Gaza is becoming
unanswerable. Clancy Chassay's three films investigating allegations against
Israeli forces in the Gaza strip, released by the Guardian today, include
important new accounts of the flagrant breaches of the laws of war that marked
the three-week campaign – now estimated to have left at least 1,400
Palestinians, mostly civilians, and 13 Israelis dead.
The films provide
compelling testimony of Israel's use of Palestinian teenagers as human shields;
the targeting of hospitals, clinics and medical workers, including with
phosphorus bombs; and attacks on civilians, including women and children –
sometimes waving white flags – from hunter-killer drones whose targeting systems
are so powerful they can identify the colour of a person's
clothes.
Naturally, the Israeli occupation forces' spokesperson insists
to Chassay that they make every effort to avoid killing civilians and denies
using human shields or targeting medical workers – while at the same time
explaining that medics in war zones "take the risk upon themselves". By banning
journalists from entering Gaza during its punitive devastation of the strip, the
Israeli government avoided independent investigations of the stream of war
crimes accusations while the attack was going on.
But now journalists and
human rights organisations are back inside, doing the painstaking work, the
question is whether Israel's government and military commanders will be held to
account for what they unleashed on the Palestinians of Gaza – or whether, like
their US and British sponsors in Iraq and Afghanistan, they can carry out war
crimes with impunity.
It's not as if Clancy's reports are unique or
uncorroborated by other evidence. Last week, the Israeli newspaper Ha'aretz
reported that a group of Israelis soldiers had admitted intentionally shooting
dead an unarmed Palestinian mother and her two children, as well as an elderly
Palestinian woman, in Gaza in January. As one explained: "The lives of
Palestinians, let's say, is something very, very less important than the lives
of our soldiers. So as far as they are concerned they can justify it that
way".
They also tally with testimony of other Israeli soldiers from the
Givati Shaked battalion, which operated in the Gaza city suburb of Zeitoun, that
they were told to "fire on anything that moves". The result was that one family,
the Samunis, reported losing 29 members after soldiers forced them into a
building that subsequently came under fire – seven bleeding to death while
denied medical care for nearly three days. The Helw and Abu Zohar families said
they saw members shot while emerging from their homes carrying white flags.
"There was definitely a message being sent", one soldier who took part in the
destruction of Zeitoun told the Times.
Or take the case of Majdi Abed
Rabbo – a Palestinian linked to Fatah and no friend of Hamas – who described to
the Independent how he was repeatedly used as a human shield by Israeli soldiers
confronting armed Hamas fighters in a burned-out building in Jabalya in the Gaza
strip. The fact of Israeli forces' use of human shields is hard to gainsay, not
least since there are unambiguous photographs of several cases from the West
Bank in 2007, as shown in Chassay's film.
Last week Human Rights Watch
wrote to European Union foreign ministers calling for an international inquiry
into war crimes in Gaza. In the case of Israel, the organisation cited the siege
of Gaza as a form of collective punishment; the use of artillery and white
phosphorus in densely populated civilian areas, including schools; the shooting
of civilians holding white flags; attacks on civilian targets; and "wanton
destruction of civilian property".
Israel and others also accuse Hamas of
war crimes. But while both Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International have
echoed that charge, particularly in relation to the indiscriminate rocketing of
towns such as Sderot, an exhaustive investigation by Human Rights Watch has
found no evidence, for example, of Hamas using human shields in the clearly
defined legal sense of coercion to protect fighters in combat. And as Richard
Falk, the UN Special Rapporteur on Palestinian Human Rights, argued recently,
any attempt to view the two sides as "equally responsible" is an absurdity: one
is a lightly-armed militia, effectively operating underground in occupied
territory – the other the most powerful army in the region, able to pinpoint and
pulverise targets with some of the most sophisticated weaponry in the
world.
There is of course no chance that the UN security council will
authorise the kind of International Criminal Court war crimes indictment now
faced by Sudan's leaders over Darfur. Any such move would certainly be vetoed by
the US and its allies. And Israel's own courts have had no trouble in the past
batting away serious legal challenges to its army's atrocities in the occupied
territories. But the use of universal jurisdiction in countries such as Spain or
even Britain is making Israeli commanders increasingly jumpy about travelling
abroad.
With such powerful evidence of violations of the rules of war now
emerging from the rubble of Gaza, the test must be this: is the developing
system of international accountability for war crimes only going to apply to the
west's enemies – or can the western powers and their closest allies also be
brought to book?
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Truth is bitter, but
its result is sweet; falsehood appears to be sweet but it is poisonous in its
effect. - Sayyiduna Ali
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