Tag: Pulse

Israel May Escape War Crimes Charges

An interview with Phyllis Bennis, a fellow of both TNI and the Insitute for Policy Studies in Washington DC, on holding Israeli officials accountable for war crimes committed in Gaza.

IPS: What are the specific war crimes Israel is accused of committing?

PB: The Geneva Convention’s prohibitions against collective punishment, targeting civilians, and disproportionate military force were all violated, as was Geneva’s requirement that Israel provide medical care for the wounded. The use of sometimes-legal white phosphorous and DIME weapons was made illegal under the Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons by Israel’s decision to use them in densely-populated civilian neighbourhoods. Israel’s (and Egypt’s) denial of the Palestinian civilians’ right to flee to find refuge over Gaza’s borders may represent a newly-defined war crime.

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The silence of the jurists

An excellent article by Gideon Levy, condemning the complicity of Israeli lawyers in the war crimes of their own government. Most lawyers, Levy argues, are complicit simply through their silence, as “there is only one group now preoccupied with the war: the members of the Israel Defense Forces international law division, who continue to serve their bosses with piercing obedience, legitimizing every criminal act.” There are some who are even rewarded for their noble efforts, like Col. Pnina Sharvit-Baruch, who has been offered to “to join the staff of lecturers at Tel Aviv University’s law faculty, where she will present her doctrine of ‘devious jurisprudence that permits mass killing,’ in the words of the jurist Professor Haim Ganz.”

Incidentally, these lawyers were joined in their efforts to legitimize war crimes by the Spanish Foreign Minister Miguel Moratinos who vowed to “amend legislation that granted a Spanish judge the authority to launch a much-publicized war crimes investigation against senior Israeli officials” after pressure from Israeli leaders [preliminary court investigations were launched by a judge at the national court in Madrid on Thursday, 30 January 2009].

One silence, of all the shameful silences, has thus far roared especially loud – the silence of the jurists. The 41,000 attorneys in the State of Israel are entrusted with protecting its image as a lawful state, and this large and grand army has once again strayed from its function. There is a deep suspicion throughout the world that Israel carried out a series of war crimes, and the jurists of our country are holding their peace.

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On Palestinian Resistance and Israeli Psychosis

Hamas isn’t Hizbullah, and Gaza isn’t Lebanon. The resistance in Gaza – which includes leftist and nationalist as well as Islamist forces – doesn’t have mountains to fight in. It has no strategic depth. It doesn’t have Syria behind it to keep supply lines open; instead it has Mubarak’s goons and Israel’s wall. Lebanese civilians can flee north and east; the repeat-refugees of Gaza have no escape. The Lebanese have their farms, and supplies from outside; Gaza has been under total siege for years. What else? Hizbullah has remarkable discipline. It is surely the best-trained, best-organised army in the region, perhaps in the world (I’m not talking of weapons, but of men and women). Hamas, on the other hand, though it has made great strides, is still undisciplined. Crucially, Hizbullah has air-tight intelligence control in Lebanon, while Gaza contains collaborators like maggots in a corpse.

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Belgium to stop exporting ‘arms that bolster the IDF’ to Israel

Though no official decision has been taken as yet, a consensus is emerging amongst leading Belgian politicians to ban the sales of weapons to the IDF.

Belgium’s government has agreed to ban the export to Israel of weapons that “strengthen it militarily,” a Belgian minister said on Thursday. A Brussels-based research group accused Israel of enlisting child soldiers.

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Aid reaching Gaza, but is it enough?

As only 100-120 aid trucks are allowed into Gaza per day by the Israeli and Egyptian authorities (compared to 500-600 before June 2007), the humanitarian situation remains critical. A brief report from UN OCHA:

Israel says 453 trucks entered Gaza 18-23 January, but only about half of them carried humanitarian aid – not nearly enough for 1.5 million Gazans, say UN agencies and international aid groups.

“The donors and the general public have mobilised from all over the world but the aid is stuck outside Gaza,” said John Ging, head of the UN agency for Palestinian refugees (UNRWA) in Gaza.

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Every family has a story, here are some of them

A terrifying personal account of wanton Israeli destruction of the homes of ordinary Gazans and the resulting psychological terror that is being inflicted upon them, by Eva Bartlett.

Destruction in Izbet Abed Rabu.

There are many stories. Each account — each murdered individual, each wounded person, each burned-out and broken house, each shattered window, trashed kitchen, strewn item of clothing, bedroom turned upside down, bullet and shelling hole in walls, offensive Israeli army graffiti — is important.

I start to tell the stories of Ezbet Abbed Rabu, eastern Jabaliya, where homes off the main north south road, Salah al-Din, were penetrated by bullets, bombs and/or soldiers. If they weren’t destroyed, they were occupied or shot up. Or occupied and then destroyed. The army was creative in their destruction, in their defacing of property, in their insults. Creative in the ways they could shit in rooms and save their shit for cupboards and unexpected places. Actually, their creativity wasn’t so broad. The rest was routine: ransack the house from top to bottom. Turn over or break every clothing cupboard, kitchen shelf, television, computer, window pane and water tank.

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Spain investigates claims of Israeli crimes against humanity

Former Israeli defence minister Benjamin Ben Eliezer and six others are being accused of crimes against humanity – the killing of 15 people, mostly children, in Gaza in 2002 – as a Spanish judge opens preliminary investigations.

A Spanish judge today opened preliminary investigations into claims that a bomb attack on Gaza in 2002 warranted the prosecution of a former Israeli defence minister and six senior military officers for crimes against humanity.

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Peace Recedes as Israeli Settlements Expand

With the Western mainstream media’s attention focused on the ‘peace’ efforts of the new US envoy to the Middle East, George Mitchell, one would expect the latest report by Peace Now, the largest extra-parliamentary movement in Israel, detailing the illegal expansion of settlements in the West Bank, to be of utmost relevance. But no. Yet again, key documentary evidence of grave violations of international law by the Israeli state is consigned to oblivion…

Israeli settlement construction in the West Bank increased sharply in 2008, despite Israel’s pledge at the beginning of the year to freeze all construction, according to a new report by an Israeli non-governmental organisation.

The report, released Wednesday by the group Peace Now, found that settlement construction in 2008 increased by almost 60 percent, including new construction both inside and outside of the security barrier and within illegal settlement outposts.

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Turkish PM Erdogan storms out of Davos over Gaza

A star is born.

Turkish PM Recep Tayyip Erdogan quotes Avi Shlaim, reminds Shimon Peres of the sixth commandment (Thou shalt not kill), tells him ‘You are killing people’, and tells Davos he’s never coming again before storming off the stage.

So first it was Venezuela, then Bolivia, and now Turkey. Have the Arab states no shame?

Norman Finkelstein doesn’t think so. Here is what he told an audience in Bahrain: ‘The reaction from the Arab world was a total disgrace, a disgrace to the whole region and its people…What you showed in the last massacre in Gaza is that you have no shame at all…The most powerful reactions in the world came from Bolivia, Venezuela, Mauritania, Turkey and Qatar…There was more solidarity in South America than here’.

Stormy debate in Davos over Gaza

The Turkish prime minister has stormed out of a heated debate at the World Economic Forum in Davos over Israel’s offensive in the Gaza Strip.

Recep Tayyip Erdogan walked out of the televised debate on Thursday, after the moderator refused to allow him to rebut the Israeli president’s justification about the war that left about 1,300 Gazans dead.

Before storming out, Erdogan told Shimon Peres, the Israeli president: “You are killing people.”

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The BBC on basic moral values

The following is an extract from a BBC internal document from 1972 called Principles and Practice in News and Current Affairs.

 

The BBC cannot be neutral in the struggle between truth and untruth, justice and injustice, freedom and slavery, compassion and cruelty, tolerance and intolerance.  It is not only within the Constitution: it is within the consensus about basic moral values.

 

Evidently this is no longer BBC policy.