From Humanity for Palestines Peter Cohen: Rethinking the Palestinian Struggle in the Wake of the Russell Tribunal Extraordinary Session on Gaza We are putting the world on notice, with very heavy hearts, that we believe that something [terrible] will happen - Abdaf Soueif There is no reason that [we] can say we don’t know. We know - Dr. Mads Gilbert We shredded them - Col. Ofer Winter (IDF) The Russell Tribunal held an Extraordinary Session in Brussels last week Operation Protective Edge, on September 24th, with a press conference and presentation to the European Parliament on the 25th, and several members of Humanity for Palestine were there. Founded by Bertrand Russell in 1966, the Russell Tribunal is a “Tribunal of conscience” that acts as a court of the People that investigates injustices and violations of international law that are not adequately addressed by the international community. The first Tribunal, to investigate war crimes in Vietnam, was head by Jean-Paul Sartre. Subsequent Tribunals examined, among others, human rights violations in Argentina and Brazil (1973), Chile (1974–76) and Iraq (2004). The Russell Tribunal on Palestine held five sessions between 2009 and 2012 and delivered a Final Report. During this summer’s Israeli offensive on Gaza, however, the Tribunal decided to hold an Extraordinary session to reflect the urgency of the attack. The Extraordinary Session was extraordinary in more ways than one. The intellectual caliber, humanity and commitment of the Jurors and witnesses were impressive. The testimonies were detailed, comprehensive and chilling. The patterns that clearly emerged from them amounted to a compelling case for systematic and deliberate war crimes committed in a broader social context of racism, impunity and incitement to genocide. While the legal definition of that last word sets a high bar, the Tribunal’s conclusion – and that of many of those who were there – was that we are all too close and getting ever closer to the mass-scale willful extermination of a people. Three of the four Gazan witnesses were unable to leave Gaza, due to such Catch-22 restrictions as being required to personally obtain Israeli approval for their Belgian visas in Jerusalem (even when leaving via Egypt), while of course being denied access to Jerusalem. The only one who managed to get out, Palestinian journalist Mohamed Omar, was only able to do so with his Dutch passport, after having first been refused using his Gazan passport. The European Parliament Members who two weeks earlier had attempted to enter Gaza were also denied access. The deliberate targeting of civilians, prisoners, and the wounded; abductions, beatings, humiliation and torture; use of children as human shields; attacks on journalists and medics; systematic destruction of property, homes, mosques, churches, cemeteries, farms, factories, businesses and basic infrastructure, including water, food, sanitation and electricity; explicit revenge attacks on local population – all committed against a backdrop of rising ethno-religious supremicism, hate speech and hate crimes – lend a new urgency to the international struggle in support of the Palestinian people. To cite a few specific examples, handcuffed bodies were found with bullet casings next to their heads, victims with bullets to the head and chest, in classic “shoot to kill” fashion. A family was ordered to stay in their home or be shot, and the house bombed several hours later with them inside. 89 families were completely liquidated. A man was shot to death while searching for a family member in the rubble accompanied by international solidarity workers, including a coup de grace after he was wounded and on the ground. Groups were asked who spoke Hebrew and those who came forward promptly shot in the chest. A man was told to step forward and hold up his lighter and when he did so, shot. A 17-year-old boy was held by the IDF for 5 days, stripped, beaten, tortured and used as a human shield (only one of multiple cases of children being used as human shields). A 55 year-old Imam was ordered to strip naked in front of women and to call over the mosque PA for people to leave their homes. The men were then taken at gunpoint, also made to strip naked and marched away, while the Imam was put against a bulldozer, a bottle placed on his neck, and used for target practice. A family was sheltering in their basement from an F-16 attack when IDF soldiers broke into their house and held them captive. They were refused to use the toilet and told: “Do it on yourself.” A 65-year-old man shot at close range by an IDF solider in front of his family while pleaded with the soldiers in English. His last words were: “Please don’t shoot me.” The totality of the evidence suggested that such examples were not isolated, but consistent with broader policies and attitudes, the low level of convictions and light sentences for such crimes, when investigated, being one (“systemic impunity is the status quo,” said Yvan Karakashian). The sheer scope of the damage – including deaths of at least 1658 civilians, the wounding of 11,231, and the destruction of 18,000 housing units (13% of available housing in Gaza), leaving 110,000 people homeless – was another. The 51-day assault dropped an estimated 700 tons of explosives – 2 tons per square kilometer –equal to the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs. The use of such armaments as white phosphorous, depleted uranium, DIME, flechettes, fuel-air and thermobaric munitions, and cluster bombs suggested a deliberate antipersonnel strategy against a trapped civilian population in one of the most densely populated places on earth, denied of their basic right to flee a conflict zone. The systematic destruction of businesses, manufacturing and food production including 220 factories (of which a soap factory and a candy factory), 68% of the arable land, fishing equipment that had been stored for protection, and 130 cows on a farm (“none of the cows were Hamas,” said their owner: “they were secular cows”) leading, on the heels of an 8-year embargo and four major attacks, to the effective destruction of a once healthy economy. The destruction of basic infrastructure, including water facilities for 450,000 people, (compounding the fact that Israel has already diverted water from Gaza to Negev, leading to the drying up of 3 major local wadis and expected depletion of coastal aquifer by 2016 and the fact that Gazans are not allowed to import the chemicals needed to purify their water) and Gaza’s only power plant (furthering affecting water treatment, sanitation, food and the capacity of medical facilities to treat the wounded and displaced. The destruction as well of UN sponsored and controlled infrastructure, including three UNRWA schools being used as refugee shelters. The destruction of 50% of the hospitals and 63% of the medical clinics; the shooting of ambulances and refusal to allow ambulances in (donkey carts were being to replace them); and the shooting of medics attempting to help people (one medic was shot in the hip and chest and bled to death and when his colleagues tried to help him, they were also shot); with a total of 144 healthcare workers, doctors, nurses, medics, firefighters killed or injured. As the IDF claims a 90% success rate for its shelling campaign, as did the Tribunal, one can only conclude that this destruction was willful. “There was no justification at all,” said Martin Lejeune of the bombing of factories: “I think it was really to harm the civilians and to harm the population of Gaza. That was the reason they committed these attacks.” An established military protocol (“Dahiya Doctrine”) for disproportionate revenge attacks against the local population (including a policy of shooting anything that moves) was invoked in Shuja’iyya after 13 IDF soldiers were killed during the 4-day occupation of by Golani Brigade on July 19th-23rd, dropping at least 600 shells (most with depleted uranium) and 120 1-ton bombs on the neighborhood in 7 hours. The infantry entered the area on foot with orders to destroy belongings, break windows, and destroy houses. The policy of drawing a “red imaginary line,” around the local houses in which the IDF set up temporary field posts, beyond which anyone would be immediately killed, was described. Unlike in earlier campaigns, these lines were drawn hundreds of meters from the posts. Neither the locations nor the presence of the lines was communicated to the local population. Ex-IDF soldier Eran Efrati claimed that it is not loss of life that matters to the military so much as the humiliation of sustaining losses: “What we are doing here is trying to revenge and trying to kill people for an insult.” An IDF protocol for killing its own soldiers to avoid their capture and use in prisoner exchanges (the “Hannibal Directive”) was invoked when an Israeli raid on a tunnel in Rafa went awry minutes before the start of a ceasefire (the IDF blamed Hamas for the soldiers death and proceeded to flatten Rafa along the lines proscribed by the Dahiya Doctrine). As horrifying as the individual stories of violence were, perhaps the most chilling part of the session was the presentation on Israeli hate speech, anti-Arab racism, and incitement to genocide, which placed these events in the context of the broader Israeli nationalist project, the rise of religious settler colonial extremism in the country and messianic nationalism within IDF (now comprising about a third of the officer corps), and the collapse of the ‘Israeli political center’. Many of us have been seeing the pro-Palestine movement as a human rights struggle, along the lines of the Civil Rights and anti-Apartheid Movements. The case presented in Brussels with such comprehensiveness and clarity challenged us to reframe it as the staunching of a nascent genocide that, left unchecked, will only express itself in ever-mounting numbers of dead Palestinians men, women and children. As Eran Efrati concluded: “Every time the operations are getting worse, the massacres are getting worse – I’m telling you that this massacre will happen again.” One thing that distinguishes this crisis from other attacks on civilian populations, such as in Iraq, Syria or Congo is that here, the solution is simple: boycott, sanctions and divestment (BDS), legal action against states and corporations that collude in these crimes, suspension of arms sales and financial aid – in a word, putting the Israeli government on notice that it can no longer commit these crimes with impunity. Until this is done, we are all complicit. russelltribunalonpalestine/en/sessions/extraordinary-session-brussels
Posted on: Thu, 02 Oct 2014 04:17:27 +0000
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