John Pilger | New Statesman, January 8, 2009
By refusing to condemn Israeli atrocities, intellectuals in the West are complicit in its crimes, argues JOHN PILGER.
“WHEN the truth is replaced by silence,” the Soviet dissident Yevgeny Yevtushenko said, “the silence is a lie.”
It may appear that the silence on Gaza is broken. The small cocoons of murdered children, wrapped in green, together with boxes containing their dismembered parents, and the cries of grief and rage of everyone in that death camp by the sea can be witnessed on Al-Jazeera and YouTube, even glimpsed on the BBC.
But Russia’s incorrigible poet was not referring to the ephemera we call news. He was asking why those who knew the why never spoke it and so denied it.
Among the Anglo-US intelligentsia, this is especially striking. It is they who hold the keys to the great storehouses of knowledge – the historiographies and archives that lead us to the why.
They know that the horror now raining on Gaza has little to do with Hamas or, absurdly, “Israel’s right to exist.”
They know the opposite to be true – that Palestine’s right to exist was cancelled 61 years ago and that the expulsion and, if necessary, extinction of the indigenous people was planned and executed by the founders of Israel.
They know, for example, that the infamous “Plan D” of 1947-8 resulted in the murderous depopulation of 369 Palestinian towns and villages by the Haganah (Israeli army) and that massacre upon massacre of Palestinian civilians in such places as Deir Yassin, al-Dawayima, Eilaboun, Jish, Ramle and Lydda are referred to in official records as “ethnic cleansing.”
Arriving at a scene of this carnage, David Ben Gurion, Israel’s first prime minister, was asked by a general, Yigal Allon: “What shall we do with the Arabs?” Ben Gurion, reported the Israeli historian Benny Morris, “made a dismissive, energetic gesture with his hand and said: ‘Expel them’.”
The order to expel an entire population “without attention to age” was signed by Yitzhak Rabin, a future prime minister promoted by the world’s most efficient propaganda as a peacemaker.
The terrible irony of this was addressed only in passing, such as when the Mapam party co-leader Meir Ya’ari noted “how easily” Israel’s leaders spoke of how it was “possible and permissible to take women, children and old men and to fill the road with them because such is the imperative of strategy. And this we say … who remember who used this means against our people during the (second world) war … I am appalled.”
Every subsequent “war” that Israel has waged has had the same objective – the expulsion of the native people and the theft of more and more land. The lie of David and Goliath, of perennial victim, reached its apogee in 1967 when the propaganda became a righteous fury that claimed the Arab states had struck first against Israel.
Since then, mostly Jewish truth-tellers such as Avi Shlaim, Noam Chomsky, Tanya Reinhart, Neve Gordon, Tom Segev, Uri Avnery, Ilan Pappé and Norman Finkelstein have undermined this and other myths and revealed a state shorn of the humane traditions of Judaism, whose unrelenting militarism is the sum of an expansionist, lawless and racist ideology called zionism.
“It seems,” wrote the Israeli historian Pappé on January 2, “that even the most horrendous crimes, such as the genocide in Gaza, are treated as discrete events, unconnected to anything that happened in the past and not associated with any ideology or system … Very much as the apartheid ideology explained the oppressive policies of the South African government, this ideology – in its most consensual and simplistic variety – allowed all the Israeli governments in the past and the present to dehumanise the Palestinians wherever they are and strive to destroy them.
“The means altered from period to period, from location to location, as did the narrative covering up these atrocities. But there is a clear pattern (of genocide).”
In Gaza, the enforced starvation and denial of humanitarian aid, the piracy of life-giving resources such as fuel and water, the denial of medicines, the systematic destruction of infrastructure and killing and maiming of the civilian population, 50 per cent of whom are children, fall within the international standard of the Genocide Convention.
“Is it an irresponsible overstatement,” asked Richard Falk, UN special rapporteur for human rights in the occupied Palestinian territories and international law authority at Princeton University, “to associate the treatment of Palestinians with this criminalised nazi record of collective atrocity? I think not.”
In describing a “holocaust-in-the making,” Falk was alluding to the nazis’ establishment of Jewish ghettos in Poland.
For one month in 1943, the captive Polish Jews, led by Mordechaj Anielewicz, fought off the German army and the SS, but their resistance was finally crushed and the nazis exacted their final revenge. Falk is also a Jew.
Today’s holocaust-in-the-making, which began with Ben Gurion’s Plan D, is in its final stages. The difference today is that it is a joint US-Israeli project.
The F-16 jet fighters, the 250lb “smart” GBU-39 bombs supplied on the eve of the attack on Gaza having been approved by a congress dominated by the Democratic Party, plus the annual $2.4 billion in war-making “aid,” give Washington de facto control.
‘The unreported news is that the death toll in Gaza is the equivalent of 18,000 dead in Britain. Imagine, if you can.’
It beggars belief that president-elect Obama was not informed. Outspoken about Russia’s war in Georgia and the terrorism in Mumbai, Obama has maintained a silence on Palestine that marks his approval, which is to be expected given his obsequiousness to the Tel Aviv regime and its lobbyists during the presidential campaign and his appointment of zionists as his secretary of state and principal Middle East advisers. When Aretha Franklin sings Think, her wonderful 1960s anthem to freedom, at Obama’s inauguration on January 20, I trust that someone with the brave heart of Muntader al-Zaidi, the shoe-thrower, will shout: “Gaza!”
The asymmetry of conquest and terror is clear. Plan D is now Operation Cast Lead, which is the unfinished Operation Justified Vengeance.
This was launched by prime minister Ariel Sharon in 2001 when, with George W Bush’s approval, he used F-16s against Palestinian towns and villages for the first time.
In that same year, the authoritative Jane’s Foreign Report disclosed that the Blair government had given Israel the “green light” to attack the West Bank after it was shown Israel’s secret designs for a bloodbath. It was typical of new Labour’s enduring complicity in Palestine’s agony.
However, the Israeli plan, reported Jane’s, needed the “trigger” of a suicide bombing which would cause “numerous deaths and injuries (because) the ‘revenge’ factor is crucial.” This would “motivate Israeli soldiers to demolish the Palestinians.”
What alarmed Sharon and the author of the plan, General Shaul Mofaz, then Israeli chief of staff, was a secret agreement between Yasser Arafat and Hamas to ban suicide attacks.
On November 23 2001, Israeli agents assassinated Hamas leader Mahmoud Abu Hanoud and got their “trigger.” The suicide attacks resumed in response to his killing.
Something uncannily similar happened on November 4 last year when Israeli special forces attacked Gaza, killing six people.
Once again, they got their propaganda “trigger,” a ceasefire sustained by the Hamas government, which had imprisoned its violators, was shattered as a result of the Israeli attacks and home-made rockets were fired into what used to be called Palestine before its Arab occupants were “cleansed.”
On December 23, Hamas offered to renew the ceasefire, but Israel’s charade was such that its all-out assault on Gaza had been planned six months earlier, according to the Israeli daily Haaretz.
Behind this sordid game is the Dagan Plan, named after General Meir Dagan, who served with Sharon during his bloody invasion of Lebanon in 1982.
Now head of the Israeli intelligence organisation Mossad, Dagan is the author of a “solution” that has brought about the imprisonment of Palestinians behind a ghetto wall snaking across the West Bank and in Gaza, now effectively a concentration camp.
The establishment of a quisling government in Ramallah under Mahmoud Abbas is Dagan’s achievement, together with a hasbara (propaganda) campaign relayed through mostly supine, if intimidated Western media, notably in the US, which says that Hamas is a terrorist organisation devoted to Israel’s destruction and is to “blame” for the massacres and siege of its own people over two generations, since long before its creation.
“We have never had it so good,” said the Israeli foreign ministry spokesman Gideon Meir in 2006. “The hasbara effort is a well-oiled machine.”
In fact, Hamas’s real threat is its example as the Arab world’s only democratically elected government, drawing its popularity from its resistance to the Palestinians’ oppressor and tormentor.
This was demonstrated when Hamas foiled a CIA coup in 2007, an event ordained in the Western media as “Hamas’s seizure of power.”
Likewise, Hamas is never described as a government, let alone democratic.
Neither is its proposal of a 10-year truce reported as a historic recognition of the “reality” of Israel and support for a two-state solution with just one condition – that the Israelis obey international law and end their illegal occupation beyond the 1967 borders.
As every annual vote in the UN general assembly demonstrates, most states agree. On January 4, the president of the general assembly, Miguel d’Escoto, described the Israeli attack on Gaza as a “monstrosity.”
When the monstrosity is done and the people of Gaza are even more stricken, the Dagan Plan foresees what Sharon called a “1948-style solution” – the destruction of all Palestinian leadership and authority, followed by mass expulsions into smaller and smaller “cantonments” and, perhaps, finally into Jordan.
This demolition of institutional and educational life in Gaza is designed to produce, wrote British-based Palestinian exile Karma Nabulsi, “a Hobbesian vision of an anarchic society: truncated, violent, powerless, destroyed, cowed … Look to the Iraq of today: that is what (Sharon) had in store for us and he has nearly achieved it.”
Dr Dahlia Wasfi is a US writer on Iraq and Palestine. She has a Jewish mother and an Iraqi Muslim father. “Holocaust denial is anti-semitic,” she wrote on December 31.
“But I’m not talking about the World War II, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad (the president of Iran) or Ashkenazi Jews. What I’m referring to is the holocaust we are all witnessing and responsible for in Gaza today and in Palestine over the past 60 years … Since Arabs are semites, US-Israeli policy doesn’t get more anti-semitic than this.”
She quoted Rachel Corrie, the young US citizen who went to Palestine to defend Palestinians and was crushed by an Israeli bulldozer.
“I am in the midst of a genocide,” wrote Corrie, “which I am also indirectly supporting and for which my government is largely responsible.”
Reading the words of both, I am struck by the use of “responsibility.”
Breaking the lie of silence is not an esoteric abstraction but an urgent responsibility that falls to those with the privilege of a platform.
With the BBC cowed, so too is much of journalism, merely allowing vigorous debate within unmovable, invisible boundaries, ever fearful of the smear of anti-semitism.
The unreported news, meanwhile, is that the death toll in Gaza is the equivalent of 18,000 dead in Britain. Imagine, if you can.
Then there are the academics, the deans and teachers and researchers. Why are they silent as they watch a university bombed and hear the Association of University Teachers in Gaza plead for help?
Are British universities now, as Terry Eagleton believes, no more than “intellectual Tescos, churning out a commodity known as graduates rather than greengroceries?”
Then there are the writers. In the dark year of 1939, the Third American Writers’ Congress was held at Carnegie Hall in New York and the likes of Thomas Mann and Albert Einstein sent messages and spoke up to ensure that the lie of silence was broken. By one account, 2,500 jammed the auditorium.
Today, this mighty voice of realism and morality is said to be obsolete. The literary review pages affect an ironic hauteur of irrelevance. False symbolism is all.
As for the readers, their moral and political imagination is to be pacified, not primed. The anti-Muslim Martin Amis expressed this well in Visiting Mrs Nabokov: “The dominance of the self is not a flaw, it is an evolutionary characteristic; it is just how things are.”
If that is how things are, we are diminished as a civilised people. For what happens in Gaza is the defining moment of our time, which either grants war criminals impunity and immunity through our silence, while we contort our own intellect and morality, or it gives us the power to speak out.
For the moment, I prefer my own memory of Gaza – of the people’s courage and resistance and their “luminous humanity,” as Nabulsi put it.
On my last trip there, I was rewarded with a spectacle of Palestinian flags fluttering in unlikely places. It was dusk and children had done this. No-one had told them to do it. They made flagpoles out of sticks tied together and a few of them climbed onto a wall and held the flag between them, some silently, others crying out. They do this every day when they know foreigners are leaving, in the belief that the world will not forget them.
Israel Is Committing War Crimes
January 13, 2009Hamas’s violations are no justification for Israel’s actions.
By GEORGE E. BISHARAT | The Wall Street Journal, January 10, 2009
Israel’s current assault on the Gaza Strip cannot be justified by self-defense. Rather, it involves serious violations of international law, including war crimes. Senior Israeli political and military leaders may bear personal liability for their offenses, and they could be prosecuted by an international tribunal, or by nations practicing universal jurisdiction over grave international crimes. Hamas fighters have also violated the laws of warfare, but their misdeeds do not justify Israel’s acts.
The United Nations charter preserved the customary right of a state to retaliate against an “armed attack” from another state. The right has evolved to cover nonstate actors operating beyond the borders of the state claiming self-defense, and arguably would apply to Hamas. However, an armed attack involves serious violations of the peace. Minor border skirmishes are common, and if all were considered armed attacks, states could easily exploit them — as surrounding facts are often murky and unverifiable — to launch wars of aggression. That is exactly what Israel seems to be currently attempting.
Israel had not suffered an “armed attack” immediately prior to its bombardment of the Gaza Strip. Since firing the first Kassam rocket into Israel in 2002, Hamas and other Palestinian groups have loosed thousands of rockets and mortar shells into Israel, causing about two dozen Israeli deaths and widespread fear. As indiscriminate attacks on civilians, these were war crimes. During roughly the same period, Israeli forces killed about 2,700 Palestinians in Gaza by targeted killings, aerial bombings, in raids, etc., according to the Israeli human rights group B’Tselem.
But on June 19, 2008, Hamas and Israel commenced a six-month truce. Neither side complied perfectly. Israel refused to substantially ease the suffocating siege of Gaza imposed in June 2007. Hamas permitted sporadic rocket fire — typically after Israel killed or seized Hamas members in the West Bank, where the truce did not apply. Either one or no Israelis were killed (reports differ) by rockets in the half year leading up to the current attack.
Israel then broke the truce on Nov. 4, raiding the Gaza Strip and killing a Palestinian. Hamas retaliated with rocket fire; Israel then killed five more Palestinians. In the following days, Hamas continued rocket fire — yet still no Israelis died. Israel cannot claim self-defense against this escalation, because it was provoked by Israel’s own violation.
An armed attack that is not justified by self-defense is a war of aggression. Under the Nuremberg Principles affirmed by U.N. Resolution 95, aggression is a crime against peace.
Israel has also failed to adequately discriminate between military and nonmilitary targets. Israel’s American-made F-16s and Apache helicopters have destroyed mosques, the education and justice ministries, a university, prisons, courts and police stations. These institutions were part of Gaza’s civilian infrastructure. And when nonmilitary institutions are targeted, civilians die. Many killed in the last week were young police recruits with no military roles. Civilian employees in the Hamas-led government deserve the protections of international law like all others. Hamas’s ideology — which employees may or may not share — is abhorrent, but civilized nations do not kill people merely for what they think.
Deliberate attacks on civilians that lack strict military necessity are war crimes. Israel’s current violations of international law extend a long pattern of abuse of the rights of Gaza Palestinians. Eighty percent of Gaza’s 1.5 million residents are Palestinian refugees who were forced from their homes or fled in fear of Jewish terrorist attacks in 1948. For 60 years, Israel has denied the internationally recognized rights of Palestinian refugees to return to their homes — because they are not Jews.
Although Israel withdrew its settlers and soldiers from Gaza in 2005, it continues to tightly regulate Gaza’s coast, airspace and borders. Thus, Israel remains an occupying power with a legal duty to protect Gaza’s civilian population. But Israel’s 18-month siege of the Gaza Strip preceding the current crisis violated this obligation egregiously. It brought economic activity to a near standstill, left children hungry and malnourished, and denied Palestinian students opportunities to study abroad.
Israel should be held accountable for its crimes, and the U.S. should stop abetting it with unconditional military and diplomatic support.
George E. Bisharat is a professor at Hastings College of the Law in San Francisco.
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