Don’t Carp, Organize
By GEORGE GALLOWAY | Counterpunch, June 5 / 7, 2009
“Where is the ummah; where is this Arab world they tell us about in school.”
Those words will forever remain etched on my brain. They were spoken by a 10 year old girl in a bombed out ruin in Gaza in March. She had lost her almost her entire family in the 22-day Gazat earlier this year. The second time she spoke, it was to the back of my head. I had to turn away; what answer could you give her?
While Hugo Chavez expelled the Israeli ambassador to Venezuela, the leaders of the Arab League, with a handful of exceptions, spent those murderous weeks in December and January scarcely summoning even the synthetic indignation that has so often attended previous bloody episodes in the Palestinian tragedy.
But that was not so of public opinion, not only in the Muslim world, but mobilized on the streets of Western capitals. In Britain, over 100,000 people took to the streets and night after night we blockaded the Israeli embassy. Above all, the Gaza onslaught produced in the US an unprecedented outpouring. There have, for sure, been protests before, but this has turned out to be more than an ephemeral release of impotent rage. Something is changing.
That has become more and more apparent to me over the last two months as I’ve spoken on Palestine at packed meetings and fundraisers across the US. The opinion polls in January showed a plurality of Americans against the Israeli onslaught. It may not have been a surprise to those of us who witnessed Ariel Sharon’s leveling of Beirut in the late summer of 1982, but the sight of white phosphorous – which forms a gaseous cloud – being used against civilians in Gaza stunned the senses of millions or people who had up to that point been led to believe that it was somehow the Palestinians who were occupying Israeli land rather than the other way round.
Seasoned activists in the Palestinian cause confirm that there is now a window of opportunity to take this case beyond the ghetto and into the mainstream of political life – in the US and in Britain, which between them bear the heaviest responsibility for the suffering in Palestine: the US as the cashier for Israeli colonization; Britain, as the author of the tragedy in 1917, when a leader of one people, British foreign secretary Arthur Balfour (an anti-Semite), gave to the purported leaders of another people, the Zionist movement, the land belonging to a third people, the Palestinians. And all without asking any of the people, which even by the standards of British imperialism is quite a triumph.
How then to bring to the cause of Palestine the kind of political movement that helped shatter apartheid, between the hammer of the ANC resistance and the anvil of international solidarity? This is the question that has led to me flitting backwards and forwards across the Atlantic, between lectures and fundraisers here, and the unfolding of an extraordinary political crisis at home. It was the question we asked ourselves as we marched past the Israeli embassy on those cold days in January.
The demonstrations were important. Anyone who doubts that should listen to those living under siege whose capacity to resist was strengthened every time they saw those protests on Al Jazeera and Press TV. But they were not enough, nor were the speeches, though they too have their place. It is actions that speak louder than words. That’s why on January 10 I announced at the big London demonstration that I would be leading a convoy of humanitarian aid from Britain to Gaza.
We decided to head off just five weeks later and to go through a difficult route – down to Spain, cross to Morocco and then driving across the Maghreb. We hoped to take a dozen or so vehicles. In the end, we left Hyde Park on February14 with 107 vehicles, 255 people and around $2 million of aid. Some 23 days and 5,500 miles later we entered Gaza. And now, we’re doing it all again, this time from the US.
On July 4, the Vietnam vet Ron Kovic, myself and hundreds of US citizens will fly out from JFK to Cairo where we will form up a convoy of hundreds of vehicles carrying medical aid and head into Gaza. We will be in Egypt exactly one month to the day from when President Obama delivered his historic speech offering a new and more egalitarian relationship between the US and the Muslim world. And that speech makes it all the more imperative that anyone and everyone gets on board this convoy.
For Obama’s speech, like his election campaign and presidency, can be looked at two ways. There were the expressions of general support for Israel and continuity in foreign policy which it would be naïve not to expect from any US president. How easy it would be to slump into the cynical and knowing snorting that has been such an unappealing trait of too much of the left for far too long. Because at the same time, his skilful appeal for a more respectful East-West dialogue opens up many roads for friends of Palestine and the Arab cause. If you doubt that, look at the frenzied reaction of the Israeli right who, in their usual understated way, are likening opposition to the settlement program to genocidal murder.
Our case is that Obama is right to identify that if the US wants to drain the swamp of hatred against it, then it needs a radical change in policy. The road he marked out in Cairo points in the right direction. But he stopped short. Literally. The road leads a couple of hundred dusty desert miles further from the Nile Delta, across the Sinai and to the Rafah crossing into Gaza. Hence the convoy, whose aims are manifold.
First, it is to take much-needed aid to a people subsisting under siege. We are a link in the supply chain that others who have sent delegations to Gaza have also helped establish.
Second, it is to take people – lots of American people. No one should underestimate the impact that will have on the Palestinian people. It was emphasized by our hosts in March that the presence of so many Britishers was even more valuable than the aid we brought. It meant hundreds of people going back as ambassadors for Palestine in towns and cities across the country. For the people of the Gaza Strip it was proof positive, in front of their very eyes, that they had not been forgotten.
Third, it is to contribute to the mighty process of changing US public opinion on this issue. And where public opinion changes, public policy follows – even if the mechanism is complex and difficult. The eight dark years of the Bush era saw, in effect, the criminalization of solidarity with the Palestinian cause. Whole organization, Muslim and Arab, were closed down, their leaders disappeared and deported or imprisoned, witness the appalling trial and verdict of the Holy Land Foundation organizers. This convoy is about ending that. We want a cross-section of US society, including prominent figures, to take part and demonstrate that this is no longer a no go area; that Palestine is the issue and nobody is going to turn us around.
In Gaza, Ron Kovic will hand over wheelchairs to Palestinian amputees. That’s the image the world’s media will carry. Let the rabid supporters of the Netanyahu-Lieberman regime raise their voices against that. That’s a public relations battle we should relish.
There’s no point passively bewailing what this presidency might be failing to do. If we make an impact in July and beyond, it can help shift the balance, throwing the die-hard defenders of Israeli aggression on the defensive and making it more politically attractive for President Obama to move further down the dusty road.
In a sense George W Bush had an excuse for the mayhem he unleashed: he was a complete and utter imbecile. Barack Obama does not have that excuse. He’s highly intelligent and cultured. He met the sorely missed Edward Said. He doesn’t just know who the President of Pakistan is, he can pronounce the name of the country.
If the new sentiment for Palestine in this country is roused and made politically effective, there will be no excuse for anyone not to do the right thing.
Go to www.vivapalestina-us.org for information on the US to Gaza convoy or phone 773 226 2742
George Galloway is the Respect Party Member of Parliament for Bethnal Green and Bow.
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Peace and Justice Post 
Israel’s Indiscriminate Use of Indiscriminate Weapons
June 5, 2009On May 9, Israel announced to the UN Department of Peacekeeping Operations in New York that it would release a set of maps showing where cluster munitions had been dropped by the Israeli Defense Forces during the IDF military incursions into South Lebanon in July-August of 2006.
There has been some speculation in Washington about the timing of the release, coming as it did two days prior to the arrival in the U.S. of Israel’s new Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for his first official visit, and first “face to face” with President Obama.
The near three-year delay in release of the maps has been costly. The United Nations Mine Action Coordination Center of South Lebanon (MACC-SL), which is primarily responsible for defusing and removal of the cluster bomblets, estimates that approximately ½ to one million of these remain unexploded in South Lebanon, and that 30 people have been killed and some 203 have been injured since the termination of hostilities in August, 2006.
The MACC-SL figures for total cluster munitions used by the Israeli Defense Forces correspond closely with information given by the Israeli Defense Forces to Ha’aretz reporter Meron Rapoport and published in an op-ed on September 13, 2006. For this piece, Rapoport interviewed numerous soldiers and officers to the level of battalion commander.
He was told that cluster munitions were delivered primarily by IDF MLRS (Multiple Launch Rocket System) units, but also by bombs dropped from aircraft and shot in shells fired by 155mm artillery. Some of the other artillery shells used were phosphorous rounds. The MLRS units alone fired 1,800 cluster rockets containing over 1.2 million cluster bomblets, the vast majority of which, according to the IDF officers and soldiers he interviewed were fired into villages in South Lebanon, near the Israeli border, in the last 10 days of the operation.
Cluster munitions, however delivered, are by definition “indiscriminate” weapons prohibited by Article 50 of the 1977 Protocols to the Geneva Conventions. In the summer of 2006, these indiscriminate weapons were used indiscriminately and often against Lebanese villages which were “civilian objects” as defined by Article 52 of the Protocols.
Perhaps the most accessible and comprehensive history to date of the military operations conducted by Israel in the summer of 2006, is “Eyewitness Lebanon: An International Law Inquiry,” published by the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee (ADC) in 2007. As the title indicates, this study focuses directly upon those aspects of the operations which constituted violations of international law, and upon those individuals with general and local command authority who committed the violations, and are named in the study.
The vast majority of the cluster munitions used by Israel in July-August 2006 military operation in South Lebanon were provided under U.S.-Israel military assistance grants which are governed by the 1952 Mutual Defense Assistance Agreement (TIAS 2675) between the two countries, which includes this section:
The sanctions which are the muscle in all such U.S. military assistance agreements with countries involved in concessionary sales, are contained in the Arms Export Control Act (AECA). As detailed in a 2005 report to Congress by the Congressional Research Service (CRS), there had been three possible violations of the AECA by Israel prior to the 2006 invasion of South Lebanon:
There were two other instances: the 1976 air rescue mission at Entebbe, Uganda, and the 1985 bombing of PLO Headquarters in Tunis where the Ford and Reagan Administrations, respectively, simply reported that U.S.-provided aircraft to Israel had been used, but no violation of relevant military assistances were deemed to have occurred.
Given this history of U.S. presidential and congressional attentiveness to Israel’s implementation of military assistance agreements in the past, those Israelis in the government and military involved in the gross misuse of American weapons in South Lebanon by the IDF in the summer of 2006, and the Bush Administration which looked the other way, did more than break the U.S.-Israel military assistance agreement; to paraphrase Mark Twain, they threw it down upon the ground and danced upon it.
Ironically, the reaction to the crimes in South Lebanon was far more rigorous in Israel. Defense Minister Amir Peretz ordered an internal IDF inquiry into the use of cluster munitions (particularly) in the last weeks of the operation, and the Knesset launched an investigation of its own. As testimony was taken, responsibility began to climb up the chain of command, and within days of the beginning of the investigation, it became clear that heavy MLRS and artillery strikes had, according to Haaretz (again, Meron Rapoport) dumped between 1.2 million (IDF figures) and 3 million (UN estimates) cluster bomblets on the densely populated areas in South Lebanon, near the Israeli border.
It got worse. Phosphorous shells had been used. United Nations demining staff who moved into South Lebanon to begin the clean-up discovered that the vast majority of cluster bombs used by the IDF had been taken from older stocks of US weapons (again, concessionary sales) and not from plentiful IDF supplies of newer, Israeli-made weapons.
The difference was that the high dud-rates of the former made the work of demining far more dangerous for both Lebanese and UN troops — and insured that the Lebanese farmers and their children would be maimed and killed for many years to come.
And then the questions began to be asked about the Geneva Conventions. Article 50 of the 1977 protocols specifically prohibit “indiscriminate attacks” which are not directed at a specific military objective, and may be expected to cause incidental loss of or injury to civilians and damage to civilian objects. Sooner or later, senior Israeli military and civilian leaders will be called to account in the Hague.
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Tags:cluster munitions, Geneva Conventions, Israel, Israeli Defense Forces, phosphorous rounds, South Lebanon, Stephen Green
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