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The End of Israel’s Impunity?
Muhammad Idrees Ahmad
The assault on Gaza marks the end of an era for Israel. For
the second time in two years its colonial ambition has floundered in the face
of determined resistance. It may persist for some time; but the trajectory is
clear – it is losing both legitimacy and power. Support for it is dwindling
in Washington; its friends are alarmed. Citizens are acting where governments
have failed; the movement for boycott, divestment and sanctions is snowballing.
Apologists are finding it more difficult to justify its persistent criminality.
Rifts have emerged in the transatlantic alliance over its recent actions; EU
leaders have broken with Israel and the US, questioning the wisdom of continuing
to isolate Hamas. Even the pliant Tony Blair will no longer toe the line.
This leviathan may yet be tamed, accountability restored; but what part, if any,
will international law have played in this?
At one point in Errol Morris’s 2004 documentary ‘Fog of War’,
former US Secretary of Defence Robert McNamara recounts a conversation he had
had with General Curtis Lemay of the United States Air Force à propos the
fire bombing of Japanese cities. LeMay, according to McNamara, said that if the
US ended up losing the war “we would be hanged for this”. As it transpired,
the US did not lose; and far from being hanged, the allied command got to play
hangman.1 The trials that led to the execution of German and Japanese high command
assumed a broader significance; they became the founding documents of international
law. The conclusions from these trials served as the basis for the Genocide Convention
(1948), the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948), the Nuremberg Principles
(1950), The Convention on the Abolition of the Statute of Limitations on War
Crimes and Crimes against Humanity (1968), the Geneva Convention on the Laws
and Customs of War (1949), its supplementary protocols (1977), and the International
Criminal Court (2002).
As Kirsten Sellars details in her book ‘The Rise and Rise of Human Rights,’ the
Nuremberg trials and the subsequent Tokyo trials which would later provide the
basis for international law were not themselves free of controversy. At the end
of the war, Western powers saw Germany and Japan as potential allies in the looming
conflict against the Soviet Union. However, the passions that had been mobilized
against the Axis powers demanded blood sacrifice before Japan and Germany could
be laundered back into the Free World. It was to satisfy this purpose that the
tribunals were reluctantly instituted. While Justice Robert Jackson’s eloquent
pronouncements on the rule of law in international affairs have become de
rigueur in discourses on the subject, his contemporaries took a less generous
view. US chief justice Harlan Stone called the whole Nuremberg exercise a “sanctimonious...fraud” accusing
Jackson of conducting a “high-grade lynching party”. Justice William
Douglas of the US Supreme Court accused the allies of “substituting power
for principle” and creating laws “ex post facto to suit the passion
and clamour of the time”. In his famous dissent at the Tokyo trials, Indian
Justice Radhabinod Pal indicted the tribunal for its exclusion of European colonialism
and the American use of the atomic bomb. The trial, he argued, was nothing more
than an “opportunity for the victors to retaliate”. Antiwar US senator
Robert Taft called it “victors’ justice”.
Power asymmetry has defined the application of International Law since. Gaza
is a case in point.
Jus ad Bellum?
Israel and its apologists have sought to justify its military
assault on Gaza as an act of “self-defence” against Hamas rockets invoking
Article 51 of the United Nations Charter.2 So pervasive was this view that even
putatively antiwar voices frequently worked the word “disproportionate” into
their denunciations. Israel, according to this view, has a right to defend itself
but used more force than was necessary. However, this argument relies on the
inversion of cause and effect and a defective legal premise.
Israel’s assault was not meant to protect its citizens against the Hamas
rockets, but to protect its colonial project and right to continue the strangulation
of Gaza. Israel broke the truce on 4th November 2008 when under the cover of
the US elections it launched an attack inside Gaza killing six Palestinians.
The attack, writes Middle East scholar Sara Roy, was “no doubt designed
finally to undermine the truce”,3 as even according to Israel’s own
intelligence agencies Hamas had implemented the ceasefire with remarkable effectiveness.
Though Hamas retaliated with rockets, it still offered to renew the truce provided
Israel ended the siege. Israel refused.4
Between the evacuation of its settlements from Gaza in 2005 and the beginning
of its latest assault, Israel had killed a total of 1,250 Palestinians, including
222 children, and maimed many more. This despite Hamas’s 18 month unilateral
ceasefire to which it strictly adhered. The situation was so dismal before the
siege that the late Israeli historian and author Tanya Reinhart described it
as “a process of slow and steady genocide”.5 Sara Roy saw in it a deliberate
process of what she calls “de-development”. The siege, in her view,
had two objectives: to reduce the Palestinian issue to a humanitarian problem;
and to “foist Gaza onto Egypt”. Israel’s economic stranglehold
over the territory, she said, was leading to the “breakdown of an entire
society”.6
The UN human rights rapporteur John Dugard, a South African legal scholar, has
compared the situation in the Occupied Territories to apartheid. His successor
Richard Falk, an American Jew and a leading authority on international law, called
the situation a “prelude to genocide”. Gaza, he said, was “slouching
towards a holocaust” insofar as the situation expressed vividly “a
deliberate intention on the part of Israel and its allies to subject an entire
human community to life-endangering conditions of utmost cruelty”. Falk
accused Israel of bringing Gaza to the “brink of collective starvation”,
imposing “a sub-human existence” on a people “repeatedly and systematically” victimized.
Poignantly, he added:
“To persist with such an approach under present circumstances is indeed
genocidal, and risks destroying an entire Palestinian community that is an integral
part of an ethnic whole. It is this prospect that makes appropriate the warning
of a Palestinian holocaust in the making, and should remind the world of the
famous post-Nazi pledge of ‘never again’.”7
On 5th November, Israel sealed all entries and exits to Gaza and intensified
the stranglehold.
For Gaza – a region whose unemployment rate is 49.1%, where the majority
relies on food aid (from the World Food Program and the UN Relief and Works Agency
(UNRWA), the latter alone feeding about 750,000 Gazans), and 50% of whose population
comprises children – the consequences were devastating. Roy reports that
according to Oxfam, an average of 4.6 trucks per day entered Gaza in November
2008 as compared to 564 trucks a day in December 2005. There were three days
where 20,000 went without food and on 18 December UNRWA had to suspend food distribution
altogether. On top of that, the WFP had to pay more than $300,000 to Israeli
businesses in November and December for storage of the food being withheld from
Gaza. Thirty out of Gaza’s forty-seven commercial bakeries had to close
for the lack of cooking gas; by April there will be no poultry, on which 70%
of Gazans rely for their protein. UNRWA’s cash assistance to the most needy
has had to be suspended. The embargo on paper, ink and glue needed for the production
of textbooks would affect 200,000 students.8
Gaza faces regular shortages of diesel, petrol and cooking gas. On 13th November,
Gaza’s only power station suspended operations because it ran out of industrial
diesel. Spare parts for the power station were auctioned by Israel after being
held in customs for eight months. Gaza’s hospitals have had to rely on diesel
and gas smuggled from Egypt via the tunnels. In an attempt to undermine Hamas,
Israel’s surrogates in the Palestinian Authority (PA) withheld World Bank
funds from Gaza’s Coastal Municipalities Water Utility (CMWU) to pay for
fuel to run Gaza’s sewage system. Israel has allowed in only 18 of the 200
tons of chlorine requested by CMWU for water purification. While medical supplies
in Gaza have been running dangerously low, the collaborationist PA has been turning
supply shipments away rather then send them to Gaza.9
It was within this context that on 19th December Hamas officially ended its truce.
All of this is significant, as in 1967 Israel used Nasser’s blockade of
the Gulf of Tiran as the casus belli for its pre-emptive attacks on Egypt,
Syria and Jordan – the fateful war where it captured the West Bank and Gaza
Strip. Unlike Gaza, however, Israel faced no shortages of food, fuel or medicine – indeed,
trade continued unimpeded all across its main air- and sea ports (all of which
are located on the Mediterranean coast). Yet, in spite of the facts, ’67
has entered mainstream discourse as a legitimate case of pre-emptive self-defence
under Article 51 of the Geneva Conventions. The precedent was even invoked by
Colin Powell when on 5th February 2003 he made his case for invading Iraq at
the UN Security Council. If Israel was within its rights to launch a pre-emptive
war in ’67 – a highly tendentious proposition – then the Palestinians
most definitely had a similar right. It is not only enshrined in the Fourth Geneva
Convention, it is also accorded them by virtue of Israel’s denial of basic
necessities.
But what of international law?
The use of force is an act of last resort under international law subject to
the customary rules of proportionality and necessity. As a signatory to the Geneva
Conventions, Israel has a right to defend itself against attacks; but it has
no right to do so by force. In order to use force, it will have to show that
other options were not available. This was clearly not the case. It had the option
to end its occupation, withdraw from Palestinian land, and accept the international
consensus on the two-state solution. It also had more immediate options: it could
have agreed to renew the truce and end the crippling siege of Gaza. The Hamas
government had made three separate peace offers over a period of two years through
veteran Israeli peace activist Gershon Baskin, including one a mere two weeks
before the assault. Relayed through a family member of Israeli Prime Minister
Ehud Olmert all of these overtures were rebuffed.10 In spurning this opportunity
Israel had forfeited any claims to self-defence. Had Hamas attacked after Israel
had tried all these options, writes political scientist Jerome Slater, “then – and
only then – would it have a true ‘right of self defense’.” It
is also the only condition under which the question of proportionality would
arise.
The rocket attacks had not killed a single individual before Israel began its
assault; had they done so, they would still not entitle Israel to kill 1,300
Palestinians, mostly civilians, injure 5,000 and destroy schools, mosques, homes,
UN compounds and government buildings. As the occupying power Israel has no rights
under the Fourth Geneva Convention, it has only obligations – including
a responsibility to protect Palestinian civilians and infrastructure. And as
the occupied the Palestinians have a right to resist Israel’s oppression.
Writes Slater: “An oppressor is not engaged in ‘self defense’ when
it uses force in order to annihilate resistance to its repression, and that holds
true even if the form of resistance–attacks intended to kill civilians–is
itself morally wrong”. The fact is lost on no-one, except perhaps the BBC
and CNN, that Israel’s occupation predates both the rockets and Hamas. “Israel’s
actions amount to aggression, not self-defence,” wrote distinguished lawyers
and legal scholars in an 11th January 2009 letter to the Sunday Times, “not
least because its assault on Gaza was unnecessary”. They added:
“As things stand, its invasion and bombardment of Gaza amounts to collective
punishment of Gaza’s 1.5m inhabitants contrary to international humanitarian
and human rights law. In addition, the blockade of humanitarian relief, the destruction
of civilian infrastructure, and preventing access to basic necessities such as
food and fuel, are prima facie war crimes.”
That the Palestinians also have a right to self-defence is not an issue the UN
Security Council would even allow anyone to raise. Instead, there are feeble
pleas for ‘restraint’. In lieu of an investigation, in the initial
phase of the massacre some UN officials dignified the Israeli claim that a mere
25% of the Palestinian casualties were civilians (in fact the majority were police
trainees killed at their graduation). The notoriously undemocratic executive
arm of the UN continued to treat the assault as a ‘war’ even though
Gaza is recognized as an Occupied Territory, according Israel the right to ‘defend
itself’, albeit ‘proportionately’. In reserving their condemnation
exclusively for the targeting of ‘women and children’, the UN was also
declaring Gaza’s male population fair game. Despite the verdict of international
law experts that Israel’s murder spree in Gaza constitutes war crimes and
crimes against humanity, writes Omar Barghouti,
“this UN discourse not only reduces close to half a million Palestinian
men in that wretched, tormented and occupied coastal strip to “militants,” radical “fighters,” or
whatever other nouns in currency nowadays in the astoundingly, but characteristically,
biased western media coverage...it also treats them as already condemned criminals
that deserve the capital punishment Israel has meted out on them.” (The
Electronic Intifada, January 1st 2009)
Jus in Bello
Israel made no bones about its attacks on civilian targets:
one army spokeswoman declared that “[a]nything affiliated with Hamas is
a legitimate target”; another added that “we are trying to hit the
whole spectrum, because everything is connected and everything supports terrorism
against Israel”. The government which had only a year earlier rejected the
results of an election which had seen Hamas take the majority of the vote, was
suddenly willing to acknowledge the party’s popularity so it could hold
it against the whole population of Gaza as evidence of their support for “terrorism
against Israel”.11 As the democratically elected government of the Palestinian
people all of Gaza’s civilian infrastructure was thus “affiliated” with
Hamas and hence a legitimate target. In the very first hour of its assault Israel
bombed the Palestinian Legislative Council, the Ministries of Education and Justice,
the Islamic University of Gaza, mosques, ambulances and many homes. Palesitinian
civilian infrastructure was subjected as a whole to Israeli terror. By the end,
Israel had destroyed 4,700 homes completely or partially, leaving tens of thousands
of people homeless.
Sara Roy implored the world in the name of International law – and “human
decency” – to protect the people of Gaza. Perhaps the appeal to human
decency is a tacit acknowledgment of the irrelevance of international law where
it doesn’t align with the interests of major powers. As Conor Gearty notes,
the assault on Gaza “has laid bare the relative impotence of international
law in the face of determined sovereign action”.12 Like Roy and Gearty,
Falk also places little faith in international law for redress. It would be unrealistic,
he writes, “to expect the UN to do anything in the face of this crisis,
given the pattern of US support for Israel and taking into account the extent
to which European governments have lent their weight to recent illicit efforts
to crush Hamas as a Palestinian political force”.13
The impotence of the mechanisms for enforcing international law was exposed in
Israel’s refusal to heed the UN’s calls for a ceasefire. Israel blithely
ignored the UN Security Council’s call on January 8th 2009 for “an
immediate, durable and fully respected ceasefire”. Likewise, it ignored
the strong statement by High Commissioner for Human Rights, Navi Pillay, the
next day about the applicability of international human rights law “in all
circumstances and at all times”. Pillay stressed that the violations of
these laws “may constitute war crimes for which individual criminal responsibility
may be invoked”. She urged the UN’s Human Rights Council to “consider
authorizing a mission to assess violations” in order to establish “the
relevant facts and ensure accountability”. The Council in its resolution
said that it “strongly condemns the ongoing military operation” for
its “massive violations of human rights of Palestinian people and systematic
destruction of the Palestinian infrastructure”; it was particularly outraged
at Israel’s “targeting” of UN facilities. At the conclusion of
the assault, Ban Ki Moon, the UN Secretary General himself, visited Gaza. He
said he was “appalled” by the destruction, which he found “outrageous
and totally unacceptable” and called for the perpetrators to be “punished”.14
The UN has called for the attack to be investigated as a war crime.
Writes Gearty:
“The anger evident in all this UN activity, and in particular the passion
evident in the High Commissioner’s choice of words, is founded upon the
blatancy of the disregard of the law that has been evident in Gaza.”15
In a highly unusual move, the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC)
broke with convention to condemn the Israeli military for breaching international
humanitarian law when it refused access for four days to a Zeitoun neighbourhood
where four small children were later found starving among twelve corpses, including
those of their mothers. The incident also occasioned one of the most extraordinary
moments in the history of British journalism when Alex Thomson of Channel 4 subjected
the Israeli spokesperson Mark Regev to an unrelenting interrogation ending with
the plea, “In the name of humanity what is Israel doing?”16
While Israel may have taken a hit in terms of its image – already the worst
brand in the world, according to a 2006 poll17 – a wave of boycotts sweeping
Europe also adds economic pressure. “But in the absence of any kind of enforcement
mechanism,” writes Gearty, “the legal effect of all this international
noise has been for all practical purposes zero”.18 There being no international
adjudicative body to which Israel is required to defer, he writes, the worst
Israel has to fear is five minutes of interrogation on the media, which is itself
a rare occurrence. Israel’s claim to self-defence “might not be able
to survive a few hours in a court of law”, Gearty avers, but with a mostly
pliant media already humming with a chorus of friendly ‘academic terrorism
experts’ and ‘defence analysts’ Israel is all but immune from
accountability.19
It was Israel’s ’67 pre-emptive attacks on neighbouring Arab states
and Reagan’s March 1986 bombing of Libya – both invoking Article 51
of the UN charter – that demonstrated that unilateral action was possible
without eliciting any legal repercussions. The US refusal to join the International
Criminal Court, and Israel’s repeated rejection of its jurisdiction, is
transforming the whole concept of international law is revealed so far to be
a farce. The only people brought to trial in the Hague have all belonged to countries
either on the rough end of the unipolar world’s stick, or to countries in
which major powers have no vested interests. The irony of the US supporting the
ICC’s prosecution of Sudanese president Omar al-Bashir while itself refusing
to ratify its charter is lost on few in the outside world. Under these circumstances,
warnings about criminal responsibility are seen as little more than empty threats.
International law has hitherto served no purpose other than to lull the aggrieved
into believing that verbal indictments are somehow a substitute for justice.
The End of Impunity?
Concerns about prosecutions at the Hague led the Bush administration
to repeal the US signature from the treaty enabling the ICC and in 2002 to pass
the American Service Members Protection Act (ASMPA), more commonly known as the
Invasion of The Hague Act which permits the United States to unilaterally invade
the Netherlands to liberate any military personnel and other elected and appointed
officials held for war crimes. The US also pressured weaker states around the
world to sign ‘bilateral immunity’ policies that require them to sign
a waiver stating that they will contravene the ICC in the case of Americans being
arrested. Those who do not comply risk losing US military assistance: Kenya and
Trinidad-Tobago, for example, learned this the hard way. According to the Observer,
ICC prosecutor Luis Moreno-Ocampo is already pursuing seriously the legal instruments
that would allow him to put Israelis on trial for war crimes.20 Fear of prosecution
has already caused the Israeli government to launch an international campaign
to defend its legal position while and at the same time redacting names written
in reports and masking photographs of military personnel involved. Director of
the Israel Law Center, Nitsana Darshan-Leitner, has opted for bluster, urging
the Knesset to legislate a law prohibiting cooperation with any war crimes tribunal
and to pass an ASMPA-style Invasion of the Hague law. “Foreign countries
should be made to understand we mean business”, she added.
Obstacles remain, however, and precedents of the actual implementation of international
law demand one to attenuate expectations. It is this recognition that has led
some to consider using the universal jurisdiction laws enshrined in the legal
codes of several European countries to bring US and Israeli war criminals to
the dock. Several Israelis have already had close brushes with the law in Europe.
In 2001 prosecutors in Belgium filed a war crimes indictment against Ariel Sharon
and General Amos Yaron over their responsibility for the massacre of Palestinians
in Lebanon. The case was later dismissed by an appeals court on a technicality.
On 10th September 2005, General Doron Almog escaped arrest on arrival in London
only through a last minute warning from someone at the Foreign Office. Had he
disembarked, he would have faced arrest for violations of the Geneva Convention
in carrying out house demolitions in Gaza.
Using the same laws that led to the 1998 arrest of the former Chilean dictator
Augusto Pinochet, Spanish judge Fernando Andreu has launched an investigation
of Israeli officials over a 2002 bombing where a one-ton bomb dropped on a densely
populated Gaza neighbourhood killed fifteen, including nine children. Those charged
include former defense minister, Binyamin Ben-Eliezer; former chief-of-staff,
Moshe Ya’alon; former airforce chief, Dan Halutz; head of Southern command,
Doron Almog; head of the National Security Council, Giora Eiland; the defense
minister’s military secretary, Mike Herzog; and head of Shin Bet, Avi Dichter.
The Israel lobby flexed its muscle, and foreign minister Tzipi Livni was soon
claiming that she had been assured by her Spanish counterpart, Miguel Moratinos,
that his government would amend its laws to diminish the possibility of investigating
torture and war crimes committed outside Spain. This however was immediately
contradicted by Deputy Prime Minister María Teresa Fernández de
la Vega who stated defiantly that “Spain is a country ruled by law” whose
justice system enjoys “absolute independence”; this fact was “made
clear to Israel and we are sure they understand this”.21
The ground is also shrinking around leading US war criminals. Henry Kissinger
already can’t set foot in many European countries without risking arrest.
Donald Rumsfeld likewise had to be spirited out of Paris a few years back in
order to save him the embarrassment of being served a French subpoena. Recently
the renowned prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi has shown how criminal law can be used
to prosecute George W. Bush for murder in any of the districts where a soldier
has been killed as a result of a war sold on lies.22 Until international law
evolves a mechanism for enforcement that does not allow any state exemption from
its purview, the potential of domestic laws to keep war criminals on their toes
if not behind bars will remain indispensable.
In the wake of the 11th September 2001 attacks, Dick Cheney and the cabal of
neoconservatives around him had gone about dismantling the international legal
framework which had been developed across several presidencies as a result of
a growing preference for hegemony by consent rather than coercion. Given the
extreme unpopularity of the last regime, Obama feels compelled pragmatically
to distance himself from its legacy. The appointments of George Mitchell as Middle
East envoy and Charles Freeman as the director of the National Intelligence Council
have already occasioned tension between the Obama administration and the Israel
lobby. The growing unease over the ascension of Benjamin Netanyahu and Avigdor
Lieberman to power in Israel is only likely to exacerbate matters. Gestures towards
Syria and Iran have caused alarm among Israel-Firsters in Washington. While many
rightly criticized Obama for his silence in the face of the Israeli slaughter,
the standard reflex of a US politician would have been to come out unconditionally
in support of the attacks.
In a remarkable departure from her earlier stance where she opposed the impeachment
of Bush administration officials, the house majority leader, Nancy Pelosi, has
recently declared that “no one is above the law”.23 Maybe she only
wants to one-up Senator Patrick Leahy who has proposed a Truth and Reconciliation
Commission. But for the first time talk of prosecutions has entered mainstream
discourse. What was dismissed as unthinkable only months ago appears now almost
attainable. Since Pelosi controls the assignment of hearings to relevant committees
in the Congress, writes the veteran journalist Alexander Cockburn,
“this means that she could give the green light to House Justice Committee
chairman John Conyers to organize hearings...equipped with a capable director
and subpoena power - that is, the ability to compel testimony and documents under
the threat of criminal sanction.”24
Pelosi may or may not be serious but for the left there is a rich opportunity
in all this, writes Cockburn. “Obama’s pledges in the campaign to run
a lawful government were very explicit”. He clearly seeks a break with the
image if not necessarily the policies of the Bush administration. The closing
of Guantanamo and the categorical ban on torture is part of this new trajectory
(even though unlawful detention and subcontracted torture will likely continue).
This attempt to re-engage with the world will not be effective until Obama affirms
US commitment to international law, including a re-signing of the ICC charter.
This would also have the effect of empowering the UN rapporteurs, special representatives,
tribunals and so on, Gearty argues:
“Since its application would be general, Obama could do all this without
any mention of Israel, leaving the consequences to be worked through by various
bureaucracies...Were pressure from the lobbies to reach dangerous levels, the
president might choose to take the issue to the American people, to discuss openly
whether Israel should have an exemption from the system of values to which...the
US itself will by then have signed up.”25
While this is no doubt a scenario that the Israel lobby would want to avoid,
Gearty’s otherwise original and practical proposal overlooks the fact that
the Israel lobby has long exploited an existing US disposition for unilateralism
to generate hostility towards the UN. The UN is undermined in general so it won’t
have any legitimacy when it comes to the particular demands of making Israel
abide by its resolutions. The bulk of US vetoes in the Security Council have
been cast in support of Israel. Likewise, the precedent of appealing directly
to the public has also failed to gain any cover for the last two presidents who
tried it. Both Gerald Ford and George Bush (Snr.) ended up as one-term presidents:
the former balked after receiving a letter signed by the majority of the Senate;
the latter suffered a major electoral loss for which the Israel lobby claimed
credit.26 However, Obama is in a unique position: he has the tide of history
with him. He is also more susceptible to public pressure. The Israel lobby is
on the backfoot. There has never been a time more propitious for groundbreaking
change. Gaza was the catalyst. It is time demands were made of Obama to restore
faith in international humanitarian law. Until then, Europe’s universal
jurisdiction laws should suffice to keep the war criminals on their toes.
Muhammad Idrees Ahmad is a member of Spinwatch.org, and the co-founder of Pulsemedia.org.
He can be reached at m.idrees@gmail.com
Notes
1. Since the allies had carried out more bombings of
civilians than the axis powers, the American prosecutor Telford Taylor got around
the problem by declaring that “the air bombardment of cities and factories
has become a recognized part of modern warfare”, hence a part of “customary
law”; and that since the fourth Hague convention of 1907, which forbade
bombing of civilians, had not been applied during WWII, it had lost its validity
(see Sven Linqvist, ‘A History of Bombing’, Granta, 2000, n.239)
2. Zionist propagandist Paul Berman who in his book ‘Terror and Liberalism’ ridiculed
the notion that Israeli occupation might be the cause of Palestinian resentment
had to resort to hyperbole in order to justify Israel’s killing of more
than 400 children in Gaza. Israel, he told the American Jewish Committee’s
webzine Z Word, did it to prevent ‘genocide’.
3. Sara Roy, ‘If Gaza Falls’, London Review of Books, 1st January
2009
4. Henry Siegman, ‘Israel’s Lies’, London Review of Books,
29th January 2009
5. Jon Elmer, ‘Slow Genocide: Tanya Reinhart interview’, From OccupiedPalestine.org,
10th September 2003
6. Roy, op. cit.
7. Richard Falk, ‘Slouching toward a Palestinian holocaust’, The
Transnational Foundation for Peace and Future Research, 29th June 2007
8. Roy, op. cit.
9. Ibid.
10. See Peter Beaumont, ‘Israel PM’s family link to Hamas peace bid’, The
Observer, 1st March 2009
11. Cited in John Mearsheimer, ‘Another war, another defeat’, The
American Conservative, 26th January 2009
12. Conor Gearty, ‘Sovereign wrongs and human rights’, The Tablet, January
2009
13. Falk, op. cit.
14. Robert Fisk, ‘So, I asked the UN secretary general, isn’t it time
for a war crimes tribunal?’, The Independent, 19th January 2009
15. Gearty, op. cit.
16. Channel 4 News, 8th January 2008. Video of exchange available at: http://pulsemedia.org/2009/01/10/c4/
17. ‘Survey:Israel worst brand name in the world’, Israel Today,
22nd November 2006
18. Gearty, op. cit.
19. For example, the BBC gave platform to the very dubious Col. Richard Kemp
to make pronouncements such as “I don’t think there has ever been a
time in the history of warfare when any army has made more efforts to reduce
civilian casualties and deaths of innocent people than the IDF is doing today
in Gaza” (can be seen here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WssrKJ3Iqcw).
Over in the US, Anthony Cordesman, a military analyst for the Center for Strategic
and International Studies, earned his junket to Israel by declaring that it fought
a “clean war” (“The ‘Gaza War’”, CSIS, 2nd February
2009). For a debunking of Cordesman, see Norman Finkelstein, ‘War Whore:
A Camp Follower Who Aims to Please’, Pulsemedia.org, 19th February 2009
20. Peter Beaumont, The Observer, 2nd March 2009
21. JPost.com Staff, ‘Spain won’t annul judge’s decision’, Jerusalem
Post, 1st February 2009
22. For a succinct summation of Bugliosi’s case, see his interview with
Pulsemedia.org, 27th February 2009
23. ‘One-on-one with Nancy Pelosi’, Rachel Maddow Show, MSNBC,
25th February 2009
24. Alexander Cockburn, Counterpunch.org, 27th February 2009
25. Conor Gearty, London Review of Books, 15th January 2009
26. Philip Weiss, ‘Did the First President Bush Lose His Job to the Israel
Lobby?’, New York Observer, 17th July 2006 |