By Dennis Loo
Israel continues to claim that the hundreds of civilian deaths (including children) in its war upon Gaza are the result of Hamas using civilians as human shields.
Israel repeated this claim today in responding to the International Committee of the Red Cross’ unusually blunt criticism of Israel wherein the Red Cross describes conditions as “shocking” (including finding infants next to the corpses of their mothers) and that it had to take the wounded out during the three hour ceasefire by donkey cart because of Israel’s building berms making ambulance use impossible.
Defenders of Israel’s actions also repeat the absurd human shields claim ad nauseum. Some others, who are decidedly not Likudniks, have also bought into this assertion or some other variant, such as arguing that Palestinians voted for Hamas so this somehow makes them legitimate targets for death from Israel’s bombs, tanks, rockets, and guns.
Gaza, as others have pointed out, is one of the most densely populated places in the world. This density is not something the Palestinians imposed upon themselves. It is something that Israel itself has created and enforced. (I am reminded here of my response as a child when first hearing that the Irish were starving because of the potato blight: why did the Irish plant only potatoes? It was only many years later that I learned that the land that the British permitted the Irish to use could only grow potatoes.)
Where are the Hamas fighters going to go and not be among civilians?Even if Hamas was using civilians as human shields, and there is no evidence that it is, Israel’s war tactics (and its preceding occupation and blockade of the entire civilian population of Gaza) are designed to target everyone. This is a war that Israel’s been preparing for for at least a year.
The form of collective punishment being carried out by Israel – converting Gaza into a free fire zone – is a war crime under international law.
Who is doing what to the civilians? Who exactly is treating civilians as cannon fodder here?
Israel’s refusal to tend to civilians and ensure their safety, since they are the occupying and invading power, is another war crime.
One of the express terms of the cease-fire that Israel and its apologists keep bleating about was that Israel would lift its blockade of Gaza. It failed to do this.
Israel’s disproportionate response to Hamas’ attacks is also against international law and against basic principles of common criminal law – you are not, even if provoked, permitted to engage in unfettered retaliation and you are certainly not allowed to go after innocents.
Israel’s complaints that Hamas is using human shields represents the tired old refrain of imperial powers going after a population in resistance.
The British complained that the Americans in the American Revolution weren’t standing up in neat rows and were instead hiding behind trees and rocks. How unfair!
Americans during the Vietnam War complained that the Vietnamese were not standing up and identifying themselves and instead, shockingly, living in and amongst the people! Imagine that: guerrilla fighters who live among the people! How peculiar! Why don’t they live in barracks like the Americans? In response to this monstrously unfair mode of fighting, as infamously uttered by an American soldier while the village was going up in flames: “We had to destroy the village in order to save it.”
Professor Rashid Khalidi in a 1/7/09 New York Times Op-Ed quotes Moshe Yaalon, then Israel’s Defense Chief, as saying in 2002: “The Palestinians must be made to understand in the deepest recesses of their consciousness that they are a defeated people.”
This is Israel’s aim: to destroy the will of the Palestinian people. This is the aim of all occupying, settler and of imperialist states: to wipe out the resistance of the people they are oppressing.
I would not be the first person to point out that it is a terrible irony that from among the Jewish people, a people who have suffered so long from discrimination and pogroms in history, most spectacularly during the Holocaust, and a people who can claim from among its ranks so very many who have a long and proud history of being on the side of justice (and can continue to so claim), that there should emerge from this people a political trend – Zionism – that advocates revenge and carries out the systematic dispossession and methodical destruction of a people – the Palestinians – and in so doing, are doing precisely to others what has been done to them as a people historically.
The crimes against humanity of Israel in Gaza reflect, as Gary Kamiya wrote the other day at Salon, a moral collapse.