Israel’s barbarism in Gaza

More than a month after Israel launched a murderous onslaught on the Gaza Strip, with over 2,000 casualties, there’s still no clarity about when ‘Operation Protective Edge’ might end. Israel has destroyed 10,000 homes, turned a quarter of Gaza’s population into refugees, and repeatedly targeted civilian installations – in flagrant violation of international law.

The present crisis was triggered by the June 12 kidnapping and murder of three Israeli students from a West Bank settler community. When their bodies were found, a group of Israeli Jews abducted a 16-year-old Palestinian outside East Jerusalem and burned him alive. Israel blamed Hamas for the murders without a shred of evidence, and launched its biggest anti-Hamas campaign since the Second Intifada (2000-2005).

By coincidence, the kidnapping happened 10 days after a new government was formed in Gaza following a ‘reconciliation’ agreement between Hamas, which had won the 2006 election in Gaza, and the heavily compromised Al-Fatah. Although the agreement overwhelmingly favoured Fatah, Israel strongly opposed it because it united the Palestinians and detracted from Israel’s goal of isolating and disarming Hamas.

Fatah shamefully collaborated with Israel’s crackdown on Hamas, with 550 arrests and six killings. Anti-Fatah protests erupted throughout the West Bank. In solidarity, non-Hamas militants in Gaza attacked Israel with primitive rockets. Hamas backed these attacks and itself resumed firing rockets – for the first time after the November 2012 ceasefire.

Then came the third onslaught in five years by the world’s fourth largest military power against one of its most impoverished territories, with 1.8 million people. Israel targeted Al Raffah hospital, Gaza’s only rehabilitation clinic, which housed 17 paralysed patients, almost all comatose.

Israel shelled a girls’ school designated by the UN as a shelter for 3,300 Palestinians, killing 16, and wounding hundreds. The UN had given Israel the school’s coordinates 17 times. The UN official-in-charge stated: “Children killed in their sleep; this is an affront to all of us, a source of universal shame. Today, the world stands disgraced.”

Israel is guilty of war crimes on three counts. It inflicted collective punishment on Gaza by killing over 1,900 civilians. Second, its response was grossly disproportionate. And third, it deliberately targeted non-combatant civilians, which is simply impermissible, even in self-defence.

Legal experts have debunked Israel’s ‘self-defence’ argument, including John Dugard, former UN special rapporteur on human rights in the Palestinian territories: “Given the fact that Gaza is an occupied territory… Israel’s present assault is simply a way of enforcing the continuation of the occupation… the response of the Palestinian militants should be seen as the response of an occupied people that wishes to resist the occupation,” which is permissible in law.

But so vitiated is the dominant public opinion in Israel, which claims it wants ‘peace’, that over 85 percent of Jewish Israelis oppose a ceasefire. Direct calls to genocide now come not from fringe elements, but from the highest levels.

Take Ayelet Shaked, an MP from a Far-Right party that’s part of Prime Minister Netanyahu’s coalition, who recently posted a Facebook entry calling for killing all Palestinians: “The entire Palestinian people is the enemy…In wars, the enemy is usually an entire people, including its elderly and its women, its cities and its villages, its property and its infrastructure”.

This is of a piece with what Gilad Sharon, former prime minister Ariel Sharon’s son, wrote at the time of the 2012 Gaza invasion: “The desire to prevent harm to innocent civilians in Gaza will ultimately lead to harming the truly innocent: the residents of southern Israel. The residents of Gaza are not innocent, they elected Hamas… they… must live with the consequences…”

He further said: “We need to flatten entire neighbourhoods in Gaza. Flatten all of Gaza. The Americans didn’t stop with Hiroshima – the Japanese weren’t surrendering fast enough, so they hit Nagasaki, too.” Incredibly perverse as this is in sanctifying mass destruction from atomic bombing, it represents an important current of Israel’s right-wing sentiment.

Israel systematically violated the letter and spirit of the 2012 ceasefire, which required it to end the blockade of Gaza, which has turned it into “the world’s largest open-air prison”. By contrast, Hamas abided by the ceasefire terms, and even created a new police force tasked with arresting Palestinians who tried to launch rockets.

After Abdel Fattah al-Sisi’s July 2013 military coup in Egypt, the situation gravely worsened for Hamas, which was banned. Almost all the tunnels that had brought goods from Egypt were closed. Gaza has since suffered untold misery, with severe food shortages, power cuts lasting up to 18 hours a day, and no salaries for its 40,000 civil servants.

The London Review of Books wrote: “Those in need of treatment in Egyptian hospitals paid bribes as high as $3,000 to cross the border when it was occasionally opened for a day… Garbage piled in the streets because the government couldn’t afford fuel for refuse lorries… sanitation plants shut down and sewage flowed through the streets… more than 90 percent of Gaza’s aquifer was now contaminated.”

Hamas, isolated, desperate, and with travel bans on its leaders, made the ‘reconciliation’ deal in April with Fatah, which Israel is now undermining. Hamas is fighting with its back to the wall. It too has violated international law, but its violations cannot be equated with those by Israel, an occupying power, which has a responsibility to protect civilians. Palestine’s real problem has always been the occupation – the longest and cruellest in history – and the root-cause of all crises in the region.

Meanwhile, coddled by the US, whose West Asia-North Africa policy has been captured by America’s powerful Zionist lobby, Israel shows no intention of ending the occupation. By torpedoing a two-state solution, Israel risks creating more discontent and perpetuating the cycle of violence, aggravating its own citizens’ insecurity. It may win the battle, but lose the larger war.

Unless there’s a concerted international Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) campaign, similar to the Anti-Apartheid Movement of the 1970s, which raises the political and economic cost of the occupation, it won’t end.

India can play a vital role in a BDS campaign, as well as through creative diplomacy which mounts pressure on Israel and the US. But it has failed to play this – despite paying lip-service to Palestinian nationhood. Successive Indian governments have made their Israel policy a hostage to arms deals with Tel Aviv, now India’s second biggest weapons supplier.

As Gaza is being pulverised, India is about to finalise the purchase of Barak-1 anti-ship missiles from an Israeli company blacklisted in 2006 for bribery. Nothing could be more myopic.

This policy won’t change unless public opinion itself undergoes a transformation. This means overcoming the enormous apathy that exists among the Indian middle class towards the Palestinian cause, rejecting the lazy option of siding with the winner, and re-founding Indian thinking on a solid base of political morality, compassion, legality and justice.

Going by the Modi government’s sorry conduct on the Gaza issue – on which it stalled a debate, and adopted an ambivalent position equating Israel’s aggression with “violence by non-state actors”, before voting for a wishy-washy UN Human Rights Council resolution calling for an immediate ceasefire – this will be an uphill task. But that’s no reason to give up!

The writer, a former newspaper editor,is a researcher and rights activist based in Delhi. Email: prafulbidwai1@yahoo.co.in