MARIÂNGELA BERQUÓ enfoca a Geopolítica: Rogue Apartheid State of Israel: Pure Evil unpunished?

It feels like déjà vu.

Israel launching forced evictions, raids of Al Aqsa Mosque, and persecution of Palestinians. Hamas firing rockets into Israel. Israel bombing densely populated areas of Gaza, claiming that Hamas uses civilians as “human shields”. Palestinians saying that they have nowhere to hide from the air raids. Populated towers bombed by Israeli forces into rubble. Mothers mourning the loss of their children.

2021 Massacre – 67 Gazan children killed and 2 Israeli children.

2014 Massacre – 582 Gazan children killed and 1 Israeli child.

2009 Massacre 345 Palestinian children, 0 Israeli.

2006 Massacre – high accuracy missiles killed 56 Gazan children, 0 Israeli.

Is a Jewish child 350 times more valuable than a Palestinian child?

“After the first death, there is no other” if you feel “The majesty and burning of the child’s death” *

In 2021 it should be obvious what needs to be done immediately to prevent more death.

“And the bare minimum of what an international community watching now, that just cares about the violence during these spectacular moments — if you really, really sincerely care about the violence, you must place sanctions on Israel. You must demilitarize Israel. You must force Israel to sign the Non-Nuclear Proliferation Treaty. You must hold Israel to account. Otherwise, you are only asking Palestinians to die quietly.” Noura Erakat, speaking on Democracy Now.

Additional bare minimum demands: Stop all arms shipments to Israel. UN observers and peacekeepers must stop all IDF incursions into Gaza and the West Bank. Open Gaza borders and dismantle West Bank checkpoints: this is urgent for Palestinians requiring emergency medical treatment.
Immediately provide essential medications including Covid-19 vaccines, diagnostic tests, Personal Protective Equipment (PPE), ICU beds, oxygen, emergency field hospitals. Immediately restore 100% electrical power to Gaza to ensure electricity, water purification and sanitation. Allow essential building supplies into Gaza so that bombed medical facilities, ambulances, schools, housing can be repaired or replaced.

Dispelling Lies: It is not antisemitic to abhor Israel’s violence. Israeli poet Aharon Shabtai, in his 2003 poem J’Accuse about the targeted killing of a Palestinian child hiding behind his father’s arm, writes that Israeli society is organized to exterminate “a population of a certain size,/Which needs to be pounded and ground/Then shipped off as human powder”. The 2004 Olga Document uses the same words and was signed by 142 Israeli Jews including founder of Physicians for Human Rights/Israel Dr. Ruchama Marton, former deputy mayor of Jerusalem Meron Benvenisti, Sakharov Peace Prize winner Professor Nurit Peled-Elhanan who lost her daughter in a suicide bomber attack: “Israel is amplifying the devastation of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, as if determined to pulverize the Palestinian people to dust.” These words were written before the five massacres against Gaza (2006, 2008/9, 2012, 2014, 2021). Henry Siegman’s Israel’s Lies. documents Israel’s repeated strategy of subtly provoking a reaction in Gaza that justifies its wars as “self-defense”, now seen in an even more ominous way in its provocations of Iran, represented as “existential” threat to Israel.

Shabtai’s “J’Accuse” continues: “the sniper wasn’t acting alone…Many wrinkled brows leaned over the plans.” Israeli journalist Amira Hass reported on May 18 the numerous incidents of intentionally killing entire families in Israel’s bombings in Gaza. “The bombings follow a decision from higher up, backed by the approval of military jurists.” Precision air strikes kill a handful of Hamas leaders but mainly strike hospitals, schools, power stations, the building housing the press, kill Dr. Ayman Abu al-Ouf who headed the coronavirus response at Shifa Hospital, and two of his teenage children. Precision air strikes have damaged 18 hospitals and clinics including the only Covid-19 laboratory able to carry out testing.

Israel controls all supplies to Palestinians through military orders, checkpoints, laws, tax revenues and closures of land/sea/air borders (Gaza). As of March 2020 in Gaza, there was a deficit of oxygen, of 45% essential drugs, 31% medical supplies, 65% lab equipment and blood bank, and PPE (Personal Protective Equipment). Gaza had its highest daily number of Covid infections since the start of the pandemic with a positivity rate as of 4/24 at 43%.

Mona al-Farra M.D. and Yara Hawari, Ph.D., among others, provide details about Israel’s intentional and ongoing destruction of Gaza’s health infrastructure even before the apartheid withholding of Covid-19 vaccines from Palestinians, and ostensibly during times of peace. Between 2008 and 2014, 147 hospitals and primary health clinics and 80 ambulances were damaged or destroyed and 125 medical workers injured or killed. ICU beds in Gaza after 2000 decreased from 56 to 49 although the population doubled. At present, there are 255 intensive care beds in the West Bank for a population of 3 million people, and 180 in Gaza for over 2 million people.

Shabtai writes of the “technicians of slaughter”. Israel deploys non-conventional (outlawed) weapons against Gazan civilians, including white phosphorus, DIME, flechettes. According to the Goldstone Report about the 2008/9 war, Israel used civilians as human shields, not Hamas. Israel never signed the Non-Proliferation Treaty and is the only nuclear-armed state in the Middle East. Its “Samson Option”, i.e.”all options are on the table”, is a thinly-veiled threat against Iran. Israel’s delivery system includes submarines donated by Germany as Holocaust reparation, capable of carrying 144 nuclear warheads. Even making this threat is against international law.

A 15 year old Gazan child will have experienced 5 terrifying wars, the random killing and maiming in the Great March of Return, the killing on the aid flotilla Mavi Marmara. At the time of 2009 Operation Cast Lead assault, 85% of Gaza’s 1.5 million people depended on humanitarian aid for securing their basic needs, 80% lived below the poverty line, 70% of infants aged nine months suffered from anemia, and 13% to 15% of Gaza’s children were stunted in growth due to malnutrition. Amnesty International reported that Israel even barred infants from leaving Gaza to receive life-saving cardiovascular surgery. At checkpoints, Israeli soldiers show Palestinian children they are in full control over their lives as they arbitrarily decide how long to keep children from home and school. Palestinian youth are arrested in the middle of the night and indefinitely detained in military prisons where they are often tortured. The sonic booms from low altitude Israeli aircraft in the middle of the night over Gaza intentionally cause childhood night terror, bedwetting and hearing loss. Nurit Peled-Elhanan and the late Dr. Eyad El-Sarraj, director of the Gaza Community Health Programme, both said that the cruelest psychological effect on children is seeing their parents humiliated and debased by Israeli soldiers.

The late Israeli scholar Tanya Reinhart identified Israel’s “slow ethnic cleansing” strategy of killing a small number of Palestinians every day and of inflicting devastating injuries on children’s eyes, head, or knees. For example, on October 11, 2000, 16 people in Gaza were treated for eye injuries including 13 children, in Hebron 11 Palestinians including 3 children were treated for eye injuries, and 50 Palestinians were treated for eye injuries in Jerusalem. For the blind, crippled, and maimed, she writes that ‘their fate is to die slowly, far away from the cameras….[many] because they cannot survive crippled amidst the near starvation and infrastructure destruction that is inflicted on their communities.” The incremental killing is “not yet an atrocity” and the “’injured’ are hardly reported; they ‘do not count’ in the dry statistics of tragedy.” [2] Israeli prime ministers Netanyahu and Golda Meir have blamed Palestinian parents for Israel’s killing their children and for making Israel feel guilty about it. Silent daily crimes: Israeli soldiers raid Palestinian hospitals, injure patients including pregnant women.

If the “incremental genocide” is to be “never again”, past failures to fix anything must be a warning. In the 2014 massacre, ½ million people in Gaza lost their homes and after there was no money for reconstruction. (p.199 Rothchild) Oxfam reporting on the 2014 aftermath: “at current rates it could take more than 100 years to complete essential building of homes, schools and health facilities unless the Israeli blockade is lifted…. Less that 0.25 percent of the truckloads of essential construction materials needed have entered Gaza in the past three months. Six months since the end of the conflict, the situation in Gaza is becoming increasingly desperate. Gaza needs more than 800,000 truckloads of construction materials to build homes, schools, health facilities and other infrastructure required after repeated conflicts and years of blockade, according to aid agencies on the ground. Yet, in January only 579 such trucks entered Gaza.”

Oxfam report about the aftermath of the 2009 war, Cast Lead: “Despite the international community’s pledging billions to reconstruct the Gaza Strip after Israel razed much of it to the ground during its January offensive, donations have proved futile in the face of Israel’s persistent blockade that has prevented key building material from entering the Strip for security reasons. “Having a roof over one’s head is basic humanitarian need. The narrowest definition of humanitarian aid is food, water and shelter. The last necessitates the rebuilding of infrastructure, not just pitching tents amid the ruins.”

Israel took full control over Palestinian water days after the 1967 war. In the West Bank, industrial parks allow Israel’s most polluting and least profitable industries to dump waste on Palestinian land and water. Israel takes 30% of its water from the West Bank and Gaza aquifers, with 80% of the West Bank aquifer going to Jewish settlements.

Killing children with impunity is not unique to Israel. U.S. in 1991 and 2003 strategically bombed Baghdad’s electrical power station, knowing its effect on water and sanitation. The US Defense Intelligence Agency predicted that failure to secure supplies of clean water for much of the population” would lead to “increased incidences, if not epidemics of disease” and that the “United States knew sanctions had the capacity to devastate the water treatment system of Iraq. It knew what the consequences would be: increased outbreaks of disease and high rates of child mortality….The United States has deliberately pursued a policy of destroying the water treatment system of Iraq, knowing full well the cost in Iraqi lives.” [3] One-half million Iraqi children died in the 1990s as a result of UN sanctions and the destroyed infrastructure. According to the Lancet [4], between May 2003 and June 2008, 50% of Iraqi children under fifteen years of age were killed by coalition air strikes.

In drought-ridden and war-torn Yemen, devastated by American and Canadian weapons wielded by Saudi Arabia, the World Food Programme estimates that it would take an estimated $1.9b to save 400,000 children under five from dying of starvation in the next year but that it is facing a significant shortfall. Shameless: in the U.S., four white men’s personal wealth has increased by $129b in the last year. Action on Armed Violence estimates that the U.S. and Afghan airstrikes have killed 785 children and injured 813 since 2016. 40% of all civilian casualties from airstrikes in Afghanistan in the last five years were children.

The Biden administration is currently detaining over 20,000 unaccompanied migrant children — including toddlers — across more than 200 facilities in two dozen states with little to no oversight.

The recently disclosed information about Iranian weapons technology in the hands of Hamas and Hezbollah is of great concern: did Israel previously know the details about Iranian weapons in Gaza and Lebanon? How does the Iranian threat serve Israel and the U.S./NATO (including Canada) and their nuclear weapons policy, their opposition to the nuclear ban treaty, their first-strike option? There has been a series of Israeli provocations: Israel’s role in the assassination of Major General Soleimani; the assassinations of nuclear physicists most recently in November 2020; Israel’s opposition to the Iran nuclear deal (JCPOA), pressure on Biden to not re-open negotiations; the attack on the Natanz nuclear site. Israel is the only nuclear weapons power in the Middle East and its arsenal is aimed at Iran. It is urgent to demand inspection and dismantling of Israel’s nuclear arsenal.

Israeli brazen violence against the Palestinians is outrageous. Except for evil or ignorant Zionists, everybody agrees with that. The latest round of this deeply asymmetric conflict has cost at least 254 Palestinians lives (including 66 children and 39 women) and 13 people in Israel (including two children and soldiers). Once more, senior UN officials have declared that the Israeli bombing of Gaza, if found to be disproportionate, would constitute war crimes.

The situation is on a “doom loop” from which there appears to be no escape. This time, however, is different. This time, the International Criminal Court (ICC) is watching.

The ICC currently has a live investigation into the situation in Palestine. While some insist that the ICC cannot investigate Palestine because it is not a state, this is not a view shared by the court or the majority of its members. It was also made moot when ICC judges gave the green light for an official probe into alleged atrocities committed in Palestine earlier this year.

It is not yet clear which acts or actors might be targeted by the ICC. But all signs point to Hamas leaders and Israeli government officials facing scrutiny. Hamas is accused of war crimes, including for intentionally firing rockets at civilian areas in Israel. The Israeli government is accused of war crimes for its repeated and disproportionate bombing of Gaza as well as establishing and expanding Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank.

Israel has rejected any ICC investigation, claiming that the court – an institution that came into existence in 2002 to investigate and prosecute mass atrocities – is illegitimate and emboldens “terrorist groups”. Israel loudly supported and coordinated an anti-ICC misinformation campaign with the administration of US President Donald Trump, even endorsing sanctions against senior ICC staff. Israeli Prime Minister Binyjamin Netanyahu went so far as to insist that the court represented “pure anti-Semitism” for investigating war crimes in Palestine and to woo right-wing governments – including those that hold openly anti-Semitic positions – into criticising the court.

This hysterical opprobrium comes despite the fact that some experts believe that the ICC is more likely to first start looking into accusations against Hamas because Israel would gladly cooperate with such an investigation and give investigators access to the occupied Palestinian territories. The Israeli government, however, has made it clear it will not cooperate with an ICC probe into its own crimes and that the Israeli courts would not prosecute alleged Israeli war criminals either.

In the eyes of many, the Israeli government’s radical, anti-ICC rhetoric makes the state look more responsible for the atrocities that the court is investigating. So too does Netanyahu telling Israeli soldiers not to “be afraid” of “commissions of inquiry, investigations, [and] inspections” over war crimes. In the midst of a military conflict, Netanyahu effectively told soldiers that the Geneva Conventions were not their concern.

Still, Israel – and Hamas – are undeterred. As the recent violence has shown, neither appears interested in mitigating their behaviours just because the ICC is watching. This is unsurprising. A litany of UN reports, independent investigations, and commissions of inquiry have claimed that Hamas has committed war crimes and Israel – war crimes and crimes against humanity, while recommending that they be investigated by the ICC. Israel has dismissed each and every one, with state officials viciously attacking their authors.

Some might therefore conclude that the ICC is an irrelevant player right now. Far from it.

With the world watching as apparent war crimes were livestreamed on social media, the ICC’s chief Prosecutor Fatou Bensouda stated that she is looking at ongoing violence “very seriously”, adding that “[w]e are monitoring very closely and I remind that an investigation has opened and the evolution of these events could also be something we look at”.

Bensouda will be replaced at the ICC this summer by British barrister Karim Khan. The atrocities of this week will make it effectively impossible for him not to proceed with the ICC investigation. It would be too humiliating for the institution to pull its punches in the wake of such callous disregard for international humanitarian law.

Likewise, the eviction of civilians from Sheikh Jarrah in Jerusalem and Israel’s mass bombardment of civilian homes and infrastructure in response to Hamas’ rockets will only convince more people that the court must intervene and hold perpetrators to account.

The situation will push more people to consume and convince themselves that respected human rights institutions like B’Tselem and Human Rights Watch are correct in finding that Israel’s treatment of Palestinians amounts to persecution and apartheid. Current events are taking the edge of controversy off of the term apartheid, as applied to Israel’s treatment of Palestinians. Mainstream journalists and political figures are even using the term to describe the plight of Palestine.

People will thus be more convinced that the ICC should intervene. It is becoming only clearer that the status quo for Palestinians and Israelis is driven by impunity for atrocities, persecution, and the oppressive conditions that Palestinians find themselves in the occupied West Bank, Gaza, and Israel.

The ICC cannot bring peace to Israel-Palestine. It cannot end apartheid. It is not the solution. But it should be part of it. Every hour that passes offers only more evidence that the ICC should continue its investigation and, ultimately, issue warrants for those responsible for international crimes in Palestine.

The court is watching. Perpetrators ignore this fact at their peril.

The Listening Post

PALESTINA

The ‘Palestinian Revolt of 2021’ will go down in history as one of the most influential events that irreversibly shaped collective thinking in and around Palestine. Only two other events can be compared with what has just transpired in Palestine: the revolt of 1936 and the First Intifada of 1987.

The general strike and rebellion of 1936-39 were momentous because they represented the first unmistakable expression of collective Palestinian political agency. Despite their isolation and humble tools of resistance, the Palestinian people rose across Palestine to challenge British and Zionist colonialism, combined.

The Intifada of 1987 was also historic. It was the unprecedented sustainable collective action that unified the occupied West Bank and Gaza after the Israeli occupation of what remained of historic Palestine in 1967. That legendary popular revolt, though costly in blood and sacrifices, allowed Palestinians to regain the political initiative and to, once more, speak as one people.

That Intifada was eventually thwarted after the signing of the Oslo accords in 1993. For Israel, Oslo was a gift from the Palestinian leadership that allowed it to suppress the Intifada and use the then newly invented Palestinian Authority (PA) to serve as a buffer between the Israeli military and occupied, oppressed Palestinians.

Since those years, the history of Palestine has taken on a dismal trajectory, one of disunity, factionalism, political rivalry and, for the privileged few, massive wealth. Nearly four decades have been wasted on a self-defeating political discourse centered on American-Israeli priorities, mostly concerned with ‘Israeli security’ and ‘Palestinian terrorism’.

Old but befitting terminologies such as ‘liberation’, ‘resistance’ and ‘popular struggle’, were replaced with more ‘pragmatic’ language of ‘peace process’, ‘negotiation table’ and ‘shuttle diplomacy’. The Israeli occupation of Palestine, according to this misleading discourse, was depicted as a ‘conflict’ and ‘dispute’, as if basic human rights were the subject of political interpretation.

Predictably, the already powerful Israel became more emboldened, tripling the number of its illegal colonies in the West Bank along with the population of its illegal settlers. Palestine was segmented into tiny, isolated South-African-styled Bantustans, each carrying a code – Areas, A, B, C – and the movement of Palestinians within their own homeland became conditioned on obtaining various colored permits from the Israeli military. Women giving birth at military checkpoints in the West Bank, cancer patients dying in Gaza while waiting for permission to cross to hospitals, and more, became the everyday reality of Palestine and the Palestinians.

With time, the Israeli occupation of Palestine became a marginal issue on the agenda of international diplomacy. Meanwhile, Israel cemented its relationship with numerous countries around the world, including countries in the Southern hemisphere which have historically stood beside Palestine.

Even the international solidarity movement for Palestinian rights became confused and fragmented, itself a direct expression of Palestinian confusion and fragmentation. In the absence of a unified Palestinian voice amid Palestine’s prolonged political feud, many took the liberty of lecturing Palestinians on how to resist, what ‘solutions’ to fight for and how to conduct themselves politically.

It seemed that Israel had finally gained the upper hand and, this time, for good.

Desperate to see Palestinians rise again, many called for a third Intifada. Indeed, for many years, intellectuals and political leaders called for a third Palestinian Intifada, as if the flow of history, in Palestine – or elsewhere – adheres to fixed academic notions or is compelled by the urging of some individual or organization.

The rational answer was, and remains, that only the Palestinian people will determine the nature, scope and direction of their collective action. Popular revolts are not the outcome of wishful thinking but of circumstances, the tipping point of which can only be decided by the people themselves.

May 2021 was that very tipping point. Palestinians rose in unison from Jerusalem to Gaza, to every inch of occupied Palestine, including Palestinian refugee communities throughout the Middle East and, by doing so, they also resolved an impossible political equation. The Palestinian ‘problem’ was no longer that of the Israeli occupation of the West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem alone, but also of Israeli racism and apartheid which have targeted the Palestinian communities inside Israel. Further, it was also the crisis of leadership and the deep-seated factionalism and political corruption.

When Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, decided on May 8 to unleash the hordes of police and Jewish extremists on Palestinian worshippers at Al-Aqsa Mosque, who were protesting the ethnic cleansing of the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood in East Jerusalem, he was merely attempting to score a few political points among Israel’s most chauvinist right-wing constituencies. He also wanted to remain in power or, at least, to avoid prison as a result of his corruption trial.

He did not anticipate, however, that he was unleashing one of the most historic events in Palestine, one that would ultimately resolve a seemingly impossible Palestinian quandary. True, Netanyahu’s war on Gaza killed hundreds and wounded thousands. The violence he perpetrated in the West Bank and in Arab neighborhoods in Israel killed scores. But, on May 20, it was the Palestinians who claimed victory, as hundreds of thousands of people rushed to the streets to declare their triumph as one unified, proud nation.

Winning and losing wars of national liberation cannot be measured by gruesome comparisons between the number of dead or the degree of destruction inflicted on each side. If this was the case, no colonized nation would have ever won its freedom.

Palestinians won because, once more, they emerged from the rubble of Israeli bombs as a whole, a nation so determined to win its freedom at any cost. This realization was symbolized in the many scenes of Palestinian crowds celebrating while waving the banners of all Palestinian factions, without prejudice and without exception.

Finally, it can unequivocally be asserted that the Palestinian resistance scored a major victory, arguably unprecedented in its proud history. This is the first time that Israel is forced to accept that the rules of the game have changed, likely forever. It is no longer the only party that determines political outcomes in occupied Palestine, because the Palestinian people are finally a force to be reckoned with.