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Israel's 'Crime Against Humanity'
By Chris Hedges, Truthdig
Posted on December 16, 2008, Printed on December 16, 2008
http://www.alternet.org/story/113143/
Israel’s siege of Gaza, largely unseen by
the outside world because of Jerusalem’s refusal to allow humanitarian aid
workers, reporters and photographers access to Gaza, rivals the most egregious
crimes carried out at the height of apartheid by the South African regime. It
comes close to the horrors visited on Sarajevo by the Bosnian Serbs. It has
disturbing echoes of the Nazi ghettos of Lodz and Warsaw.
 “This is a stain on what is left of Israeli morality,” I was
told by Richard N. Veits, the former U.S. ambassador to Jordan who led a
delegation from the Council on Foreign Relations to Gaza to meet Hamas leaders
this past summer. “I am almost breathless discussing this subject. It is so
myopic. Washington, of course, is a handmaiden to all this. The Israeli
manipulation of a population in this manner is comparable to some of the crimes
that took place against civilian populations fifty years ago.”
The U.N. special rapporteur for human rights in the occupied
Palestinian territory, former Princeton University law professor Richard Falk,
calls 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, while condemning the rocket attacks by the militant
group Hamas, which he points out are also criminal violations of international
law, goes on to say that “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 said when I reached him by phone in
California shortly before he left for Israel. “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.”
Gaza now spends 12 hours a day without power, which can be a
death sentence to the severely ill in hospitals. 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. “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 this Israeli siege, 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. Palestinians have launched more than 200
rockets on Israel since the latest round of violence began. There have been no
Israeli casualties.
“This is a crime of survival,” Falk said of the rocket
attacks. “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. There are now dozens of tunnels, the
principal means for food and goods, connecting Gaza to Egypt. Israel permits the
tunnels to operate, most likely as part of an effort to further cut Gaza off
from Israel.
“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. 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.
Chris Hedges, a Pulitzer prize-winning reporter, is a Senior Fellow at the
Nation Institute. His latest book is Collateral Damage: America's War Against
Iraqi Civilians.
© 2008 Truthdig All rights reserved.
View this story online at:
http://www.alternet.org/story/113143/
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