Party to Murder

Our self-righteous celebration of ourselves and our supposed virtue is as
false as that of Israel. We have become monsters, militarized bullies,
heartless and savage. We are a party to human slaughter, a flagrant war crime,
and do nothing. We forget that the innocents who suffer and die in Gaza
are a reflection of ourselves, of how we might have been should fate
and time and geography have made the circumstances of our birth different.
We forget that we are all absurd and vulnerable creatures. We all have the
capacity to fear and hate and love. “Expose thyself to what wretches feel,”
King Lear said, entering the mud and straw hovel of Poor Tom, “and show
the heavens more just.”

Privilege and power, especially military power, is a dangerous narcotic.
Violence destroys those who bear the brunt of its force, but also those who
try to use it to become gods. Over 350 Palestinians have been killed, many
of them civilians, and over 1,000 have been wounded since the air attacks
began on Saturday. Ehud Barak, Israel’s defense minister, said Israel is
engaged in a “war to the bitter end” against Hamas in Gaza. A war? Israel
uses sophisticated attack jets and naval vessels to bomb densely crowded
refugee camps and slums, to attack a population that has no air force,
no air defense, no navy, no heavy weapons, no artillery units, no mechanized
armor, no command and control, no army, and calls it a war. It is not a war.
It is murder.

The U.N. special rapporteur for human rights in the occupied Palestinian
territory, former Princeton University law professor Richard Falk, has labeled
what Israel is doing to the 1.5 million Palestinians in Gaza “a crime against
humanity.” Falk, who is Jewish, has condemned the collective punishment of
the Palestinians in Gaza as “a flagrant and massive violation of international
humanitarian law as laid down in Article 33 of the Fourth Geneva
Convention.” He has asked for “the International Criminal Court to
investigate the situation, and determine whether the Israeli civilian leaders
and military commanders responsible for the Gaza siege should be indicted
and prosecuted for violations of international criminal law.”

Falk’s unflinching honesty has enraged Israel. He was banned from entering
the country on Dec. 14 during his attempt to visit Gaza and the West Bank.

“After being denied entry I was put in a holding room with about 20 others
experiencing entry problems,” he said. “At this point I was treated not as a
U.N. representative, but as some sort of security threat, subjected to an
inch-by-inch body search, and the most meticulous luggage inspection I have
ever witnessed. I was separated from my two U.N. companions, who were
allowed to enter Israel. At this point I was taken to the airport detention
facility a mile or so away, required to put all my bags and cell phone in a
room, taken to a locked, tiny room that had five other detainees, smelled of
urine and filth, and was an unwelcome invitation to claustrophobia. I spent
the next 15 hours so confined, which amounted to a cram course on the
miseries of prison life, including dirty sheets, inedible food, and either
lights that were too bright or darkness controlled from the guard office.”

The foreign press has been, like Falk, barred by Israel from entering Gaza
to report on the destruction.

Israel’s stated aim of halting homemade rockets fired from Gaza into Israel
remains unfulfilled. Gaza militants have fired more than 100 rockets and
mortars into Israel, killing four people and wounding nearly two dozen more,
since Israel unleashed its air assault. Israel has threatened to launch a
ground assault and has called up 6,500 army reservists. It has massed tanks
on the Gaza border and declared the area a closed military zone.

The rocket attacks by Hamas are, as Falk points out, also criminal violations
of international law. But as Falk notes, “… such Palestinian behavior does
not legalize Israel’s imposition of a collective punishment of a life- and
health-threatening character on the people of Gaza, and should not distract
the U.N. or international society from discharging their fundamental moral
and legal duty to render protection to the Palestinian people.”

“It is an unfolding humanitarian catastrophe that each day poses the entire
1.5 million Gazans to an unspeakable ordeal, to a struggle to survive in
terms of their health,” Falk has said of the ongoing Israeli blockade of
Gaza. “This is an increasingly precarious condition. A recent study reports
that 46 percent of all Gazan children suffer from acute anemia. There are
reports that the sonic booms associated with Israeli overflights have caused
widespread deafness, especially among children. Gazan children need
thousands of hearing aids. Malnutrition is extremely high in a number of
different dimensions and affects 75 percent of Gazans. There are widespread
mental disorders, especially among young people without the will to live.
Over 50 percent of Gazan children under the age of 12 have been found to
have no will to live.”

Before the air assaults, Gaza spent 12 hours a day without power, which can
be a death sentence to the severely ill in hospitals. Most of Gaza is now
without power. There are few drugs and little medicine, including no cancer
or cystic fibrosis medication. Hospitals have generators but often lack
fuel. Medical equipment, including one of Gaza’s three CT scanners, has been
destroyed by power surges and fluctuations. Medical staff cannot control the
temperature of incubators for newborns. And Israel has revoked most exit
visas, meaning some of those who need specialized care, including cancer
patients and those in need of kidney dialysis, have died. Of the 230 Gazans
estimated to have died last year because they were denied proper medical
care, several spent their final hours at Israeli crossing points where they were
refused entry into Israel. The statistics gathered on children—half of Gaza’s
population is under the age of 17—are increasingly grim. About 45 percent of
children in Gaza have iron deficiency from a lack of fruit and vegetables,
and 18 percent have stunted growth.

“It is macabre,” Falk said of the blockade. “I don’t know of anything that
exactly fits this situation. People have been referring to the Warsaw ghetto as
the nearest analog in modern times.”

“There is no structure of an occupation that endured for decades and
involved this kind of oppressive circumstances,” the rapporteur added. “The
magnitude, the deliberateness, the violations of international humanitarian
law, the impact on the health, lives and survival and the overall conditions
warrant the characterization of a crime against humanity. This occupation
is the direct intention by the Israeli military and civilian authorities. They are
responsible and should be held accountable.”

The point of the Israeli attack, ostensibly, is to break Hamas, the radical
Islamic group that was elected to power in 2007. But Hamas has repeatedly
proposed long-term truces with Israel and offered to negotiate a permanent
truce. During the last cease-fire, established through Egyptian intermediaries
in July, Hamas upheld the truce although Israel refused to ease the blockade.
It was Israel that, on Nov. 4, initiated an armed attack that violated the truce and
killed six Palestinians. It was only then that Hamas resumed firing rockets at Israel.**

“This is a crime of survival,” Falk said of the rocket attacks by Palestinians.
“Israel has put the Gazans in a set of circumstances where they either have to
accept whatever is imposed on them or resist in any way available to them.
That is a horrible dilemma to impose upon a people. This does not alleviate
the Palestinians, and Gazans in particular, for accountability for doing these
acts involving rocket fire, but it also imposes some responsibility on Israel for
creating these circumstances.”

Israel seeks to break the will of the Palestinians to resist. The Israeli
government has demonstrated little interest in diplomacy or a peaceful
solution. The rapid expansion of Jewish settlements on the West Bank is an
effort to thwart the possibility of a two-state solution by gobbling up
vast tracts of Palestinian real estate. Israel also appears to want to thrust the
impoverished Gaza Strip onto Egypt. Dozens of tunnels had been the
principal means for food and goods, connecting Gaza to Egypt. Israel had
permitted the tunnels to operate, most likely as part of an effort to further cut
Gaza off from Israel. This ended, however, on Sunday when Israeli fighter
jets bombed over 40 tunnels along Gaza’s border with Egypt. The Israeli
military said that the tunnels, on the Gaza side of the border, were used for
smuggling weapons, explosives and fugitives. Egypt has sealed its border
and refused to let distraught Palestinians enter its territory.

“Israel, all along, has not been prepared to enter into diplomatic process
that gives the Palestinians a viable state,” Falk said. “They [the Israelis] feel
time is on their side. They feel they can create enough facts on the
ground so people will come to the conclusion a viable state cannot emerge.”

The use of terror and hunger to break a hostile population is one of the
oldest forms of warfare. I watched the Bosnian Serbs employ the same tactic
in Sarajevo. Those who orchestrate such sieges do not grasp the terrible
rage born of long humiliation, indiscriminate violence and abuse. A father
or a mother whose child dies because of a lack of vaccines or proper medical
care does not forget. A boy whose ill grandmother dies while detained at an
Israel checkpoint does not forget. A family that loses a child in an airstrike
does not forget. All who endure humiliation, abuse and the murder of
family members do not forget. This rage becomes a virus within those who,
eventually, stumble out into the daylight. Is it any wonder that 71 percent
of children interviewed at a school in Gaza recently said they wanted to be
a “martyr”?

The Israelis in Gaza, like the American forces in Iraq and Afghanistan, are
foolishly breeding the next generation of militants and Islamic radicals.
Jihadists, enraged by the injustices done by Israel and the United States, seek
to carry out reciprocal acts of savagery, even at the cost of their own lives.
The violence unleashed on Palestinian children will, one day, be the violence
unleashed on Israeli children. This is the tragedy of Gaza. This is the
tragedy of Israel.

* “Israel’s Crime Against Humanity,” Chris Hedges, Truthdig, Dec. 15, 2008
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/20081215_israels_crime_against_humanity/   

Chris Hedges, who went to seminary at Harvard Divinity School, is currently
a senior fellow at The Nation Institute and a Lecturer in the Council of the
Humanities and the Anschutz Distinguished Fellow at Princeton University.
He spent nearly two decades as a foreign correspondent in Central America,
the Middle East, Africa and the Balkans. He is the author of the best selling
War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning, American Fascists, and most recently,
I Don’t Believe in Atheists.