Method and Madness: The Hidden Story of Israel's Assaults on Gaza (12 page)

Initially, Israel grossly inflated the threat posed by Hamas’s projectiles to justify its campaign of terror bombing. However, its pretext backfired when the projectiles kept coming and, among other things, Israel’s tourism industry took a big hit.
³⁰
When a Hamas projectile landed in the vicinity of Ben-Gurion Airport, prompting international airlines to suspend flights to Israel, former New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg obligingly flew over in order to reassure prospective travelers.
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But if all was well in Israel because of Iron Dome, then why was Israel pulverizing Gaza? Not missing a beat, Israel conjured a new rationale, quickly aped by credulous and apologetic journalists: Hamas’s “terror tunnels,” which “exist solely to annihilate our civilians and to kill our children” (Netanyahu). But this pretext also backfired when Israeli evacuees recoiled at the prospect of returning to their border communities. So, some Israelis eventually conceded that the targets of Hamas fighters infiltrating via tunnels were Israeli soldiers, not civilians.
³²
Spewing forth one lie after another, Israel kept catching itself in the tangled web of its deceits. The miracle of Iron Dome also provided Israelis with psychological solace. Israel first boasted of its success after Pillar of Defense when Gazans flooded the streets celebrating victory against the invading army. Israel’s purported technical ingenuity served to compensate, then and now, for its failure to inflict a decisive military defeat on Hamas. Israel’s flourishing arms trade also stood to reap rich dividends from Iron Dome’s bogus advertising.

Israel’s targeting of UN schools, which HRW later found to be “war crimes,” killed scores of Gazans seeking refuge and eventually evoked international outrage.
³³
Even normally comatose US puppet Ban Ki-moon finally denounced one of these atrocities as a “moral outrage and criminal act.”
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Totally isolated on the world stage, the Obama administration itself joined in the chorus of condemnation. Notwithstanding Obama’s abrupt reversal, Israel’s Congressional cheerleaders went mute: defending Israel internationally had become too heavy a burden to bear, as it undermined the US “national interest.” Immediately after Washington declared on 3 August that it was “appalled” by Israel’s “disgraceful” shelling of a UN school sheltering civilians,
³⁵
Netanyahu announced that Israeli troops were withdrawing. But another factor also came into play. Israel could only proceed with the ground invasion if it ventured into Gaza’s built-up areas. To avoid street-by-street fighting and concomitant combatant casualties, Israel would have to blast everything in sight, causing many thousands of civilian deaths, which international public opinion would not abide, and, even then, Israel would still suffer heavy combatant losses as Hamas fighters popped out of the tunnels.
³⁶
To cover up for its failure to destroy Hamas’s catacombs, Israel proclaimed that it had destroyed nearly all of Hamas’s “known” tunnels.
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Across the official political spectrum, a broad consensus crystallized on two points: Israel had the right to defend itself and Hamas had to be disarmed. For argument’s sake, let’s set aside the curiosity that Israel was said to be defending itself although it initiated the armed hostilities, while Hamas was called upon to disarm although it was acting in self-defense. Instead, let’s juxtapose these consensus beliefs with the relevant norms of international law.

International law prohibits an occupying power from using force to suppress a struggle for self-determination, whereas it does
not
prohibit a people struggling for self-determination from using force.
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The International Court of Justice (ICJ) stated in a 2004 advisory opinion that the Palestinian people’s “rights include the right to self-determination,” and that “Israel is bound to comply with its obligation to respect the right of the Palestinian people to self-determination.”
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Israel consequently has no legal mandate to use force to suppress the Palestinian self-determination struggle. Israel also cannot contend that, because this self-determination struggle unfolds within the framework of an occupation, it has the legal right, as the occupying power, to enforce the occupation so long as it endures.
⁴⁰
In 1971, the ICJ ruled that South Africa’s occupation of Namibia had become illegal because it refused to carry out good-faith negotiations to end the occupation. It is beyond dispute that Israel has failed to carry out good-faith negotiations to end the occupation of Palestinian territory. On the Namibia precedent, the Israeli occupation is also illegal.
⁴¹
The only “right” Israel can claim is—in the words of the US at the time of the Namibia debate—“to withdraw its administration . . . immediately and thus put an end to its occupation.”

Although claiming for itself the right of self-defense against Hamas projectiles, in fact Israel is claiming the right to maintain the occupation. If Israel ceased using force to suppress the Palestinian struggle for self-determination, the occupation would end, and the projectile attacks would cease. (If they didn’t stop, the legal situation would, of course, be different.) Put otherwise, if it ended the occupation, Israel wouldn’t need to use force. The refrain that Israel has the right to self-defense is a red herring. The real question is,
Does Israel have the right to use force to maintain an illegal occupation?
The answer is no.

It might be said that, even if Israel cannot use force to suppress the Palestinian struggle for self-determination, Hamas’s use of indiscriminate projectiles and its targeting of Israeli civilians still amount to war crimes. But it is not altogether clear what constitutes an indiscriminate weapon. The apparent standard is a relative one set by cutting-edge technology: If an existing weapon has a high probability of hitting its target, then any weapons with a significantly lower probability are classified as indiscriminate. But, by this standard, only rich countries, or countries rich enough to purchase high-tech weapons, have a right to defend themselves against high-tech aerial assaults. It is a peculiar law that would negate the raison d’être of law: the substitution of might by right.

It is often alleged that, even if its civilians are being relentlessly targeted, a people does not have a legal right to carry out “belligerent reprisals”—that is, to deliberately target the civilians of the opposing state until it desists. “Regardless of who started this latest round, attacks targeting civilians violate basic humanitarian norms,” HRW asserted right after armed hostilities broke out. “All attacks, including reprisal attacks, that target or indiscriminately harm civilians are prohibited under the laws of war, period.”
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Not so. International law does not—at any rate, not yet—prohibit belligerent reprisals.
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The US and Britain, among others, have staunchly defended the right of a state to use even
nuclear
weapons by way of belligerent reprisals.
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By this standard, the people of Gaza surely have the right to use makeshift projectiles to end an illegal, merciless seven-year-long Israeli blockade or to end Israel’s criminal bombardment. Indeed, in its landmark 1996 advisory opinion on the legality of nuclear weapons, the ICJ ruled that international law is not settled on the right of a state to use nuclear weapons when its “survival” is at stake. But, if a state might have the right to use nuclear weapons when its survival is at stake, then surely a
people
struggling for self-determination has the right to use makeshift projectiles when its survival is at stake.

One might legitimately question the political prudence of Hamas’s strategy. But the law is not unambiguously against it, while the scales of morality weigh in its favor. Israel has imposed a brutal blockade on Gaza. Fully 95 percent of the water in Gaza is unfit for human consumption. By all accounts, the Palestinian people stood behind those engaging in belligerent reprisals against Israel. In the Gaza Strip, they preferred to die resisting rather than continue living under an inhuman blockade.
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Their resistance is mostly notional, as the makeshift projectiles caused little damage. So, the ultimate question is,
Do Palestinians have the right to symbolically resist slow death punctuated by periodic massacres, or is it incumbent upon them to lie down and die?

OPERATION PROTECTIVE EDGE DRAGGED ON
three more weeks after Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced the end of the ground offensive. He still harbored hopes of inflicting a decisive defeat on Hamas by attrition through massive aerial bombardments, massive civilian casualties, and the assassination of senior Hamas military leaders. Because Western media attention, after the beheading of an American journalist, shifted to ISIS, and the Gaza massacre entered the ho-hum, more-of-the-same phase of the news cycle, Israel was able to resume the precision terror strikes with unprecedented abandon, flattening high-rise apartment buildings, as if playing a video game and with barely a pretense that they constituted legitimate military objectives.
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But the Hamas projectiles and mortar shells kept coming, causing Israeli civilian casualties to mount. On 26 August 2014, a cease-fire went into effect.

By massacre’s end, Israel had killed 2,200 Palestinians, of whom 70–75 percent were civilians. Among the dead were 500 Palestinian children. In addition, 11,000 Palestinians suffered injuries (including 3,300 children, of whom 1,000 will be permanently disabled); 11,000 homes, 360 factories and workshops, 160 mosques, 100 schools, and 10 hospitals were either destroyed or severely damaged; 100,000 Palestinians were left homeless.
²
Israel suffered at least 66 combatant and five civilian casualties (a foreign guest worker was also killed). Among the dead was one Israeli child. In addition, 120 Israelis suffered injuries (one person was seriously wounded).

The essential terms of the cease-fire required Israel (and Egypt) to ease the blockade of Gaza. The Palestinian Authority (PA), headed by President Mahmoud Abbas, would administer the border crossings, coordinate the international reconstruction effort, and was expected to prevent weapons from entering Gaza. Other points of contention (e.g., release of Palestinian prisoners, construction of an airport and seaport in Gaza) were deferred to future negotiations.
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At a news conference after the cease-fire had been reached, Netanyahu boasted of Israel’s “great military and political achievement.”
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In fact, Israel did not achieve any of its avowed aims. Initially, Netanyahu’s goal was to fracture the Palestinian unity government by once more demonizing Hamas as a terrorist organization. But the unity government held together, although Abbas no doubt secretly longed for Israel to deliver Hamas a death blow. If Israel hoped to prove that Hamas was a terrorist organization, it ended up convincing many more people that Israel was a terrorist state. If Israel hoped to convince the US and EU not to negotiate with a unity government that included Hamas, it ended up itself negotiating with the unity government and indirectly even with Hamas. “Effectively,” an influential Israeli columnist observed, “Israel has recognized Hamas.”
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Once hostilities escalated, Netanyahu’s avowed goal was to destroy Hamas’s “rockets” and “terror tunnels.” But Israel was unable to fully realize either of these objectives: Hamas kept firing rockets and mortar shells (killing two Israelis in the last hour before the cease-fire), while an unknown number of tunnels remained intact. Israel’s broader, tacit goal of inflicting a comprehensive military and political defeat on Hamas also went unfulfilled. Although Israel made any concessions conditional on Hamas’s disarmament, the cease-fire agreement did not require the Islamic resistance to lay down its weapons, and only a vague promise was extracted from the PA to stem the flow of arms into Gaza. The cease-fire’s terms “didn’t include any statement, not even a hint, regarding Israel’s security demands,” an Israeli diplomatic correspondent groused. “There was nothing about the demilitarization of the strip, the rearming or the issue of the tunnels.”
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Despite being the regional superpower, Israel “failed to impose its will on an isolated enemy operating in a besieged territory without advanced weaponry.”
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Such an inglorious outcome could not but undermine Israel’s sacred “deterrence capacity”—i.e., its ability to terrify potential regional rivals into submission. Ironically, the chief beneficiary of this latest Gaza massacre was Lebanon. After its military fiasco, Israel will think twice before attacking Hezbollah, which possesses a formidable arsenal of real, sophisticated rockets,
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reducing Iron Dome’s potential efficacy quotient from ten percent to near zero, and a tunnel network dug deep inside mountains. In a replay of the aftermath of Operation Pillar of Defense, Israel’s Prime Minister, Defense Minister, and Chief of Staff cut sorry figures at the news conference proclaiming Israel’s “victory” in Protective Edge.
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Netanyahu’s one unqualified achievement was to satiate the bloodlust of Israeli society that he himself whipped up. Rubbing their hands in undisguised glee, many Israelis relished the prospect of Gazans confronting, once the soot had settled, the massive death and destruction Israel had visited on them.

Hamas also claimed victory.
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Once hostilities broke out, its primary goal was to end the blockade of Gaza. Whereas the original Egyptian cease-fire proposal stipulated that the siege would be lifted only after “the security situation stabilizes” in Gaza, the final cease-fire agreement omitted this condition. However, it called only for the blockade to be eased (not lifted) and did not include an external enforcement mechanism. In effect, it reinstated the cease-fire terms that ended Operation Pillar of Defense (2012), which Israel had then proceeded to ignore. Hamas apparently settled for less because of Israel’s relentless devastation. “Our demands were just,” Hamas leader Khalid Mishal told a news conference, “but in the end we had the Palestinian demands on the one hand and the pain of Gaza’s civilian population on the other.”
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“We agreed to the cease-fire,” Mishal continued, “in the knowledge that the siege will be lifted,” but, based on Israel’s past performance, this seems wishful thinking unless Hamas disarms or is unable to rearm.
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If Gazans flocked into the streets to celebrate after the cease-fire was declared, it was to proclaim, firstly to themselves and then to the world, that, however enormous the toll, however great the sacrifice, the people of Palestine still live.
We were, we are, we will be!

As hostilities wound down, Netanyahu gestured to the possibility of a final agreement with Palestinians. He spoke of a “new diplomatic horizon” and beckoned Abbas to join him.
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If he meant accepting US Secretary of State John Kerry’s recent initiative, the PA would jump at such a prospect, and indeed is being groomed for it. It has been delegated the dual task of preventing Hamas from rearming, in order to clear away any political obstacle to a deal, and supervising international reconstruction of Gaza, in order to enhance its financial authority—i.e., capacity to dole out bribes—among Gazans. The US and EU would surely also leap at an end to the conflict. But the odds are against such a deal materializing. The maximum that could come of this process would be Kerry’s parameters, which amount to a thinly disguised Palestinian surrender.
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Still, in Israel’s current vengeful mood, licking its wounds from the military debacle, even if he so desired (which is doubtful), Netanyahu couldn’t sell anything short of total Israeli victory/abject Palestinian defeat to the Israeli public and, in particular, his political base. On the other side, Abbas will not be able to disarm Hamas if only because corrupt PA-Egyptian security forces stationed at the Rafah border crossing can be paid off to turn a blind eye as arms trickle in. Nor will he be able to impose a Palestinian surrender after the resurgence of Hamas’s popularity.
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Meanwhile, the US is preoccupied elsewhere in the region, Obama’s term of office is coming to an end, and, after having had his fingers burnt so many times by Netanyahu, he probably won’t risk any more political capital unless Israel sends an unambiguous and unequivocal signal—which it won’t—that it’s ready to settle.
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The bottom line is, Palestinians cannot even hope for an unjust deal, let alone a just deal, through diplomacy.

Judicial recourse also doesn’t hold much promise. The UN Human Rights Council appointed a fact-finding mission “to investigate purported violations of international humanitarian and human rights law . . . since the conflict began on 13 June.”
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The head of the mission, William Schabas, although a consistent critic of Israeli violations of international law, is privately reputed to be a vainglorious personality accommodating to power, much like his predecessor Richard Goldstone (Schabas is part Jewish). It doesn’t bode well in the face of an inevitable US-Israeli juggernaut opposing the mission; Israel has already launched a preemptive campaign to delegitimize Schabas.
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The PA (alongside members of the Arab League) helped kill the Goldstone Report in the Human Rights Council
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and, if called upon, it will almost certainly do so again. The PA is additionally being pressured by its own public, as well as human rights organizations and prominent legal scholars, to seek legal redress at the International Criminal Court (ICC). Even if, despite US-EU opposition,
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the PA does manage to access the Rome Statute of the ICC,
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the possibility remains remote that Israel’s leaders will ever be indicted for war crimes. The tacit axiom of the ICC is that only nonwhites commit heinous acts warranting prosecution; to date, it has only indicted Africans. The ICC mindset can be gleaned from comments of its former chief prosecutor. On a recent visit to Israel, Luis Moreno-Campo heaped praise on Israel’s legal system, its respect for the “rule of law,” and its “great lawyers.”
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Indeed, who dares cast doubt on a judicial system that legalized torture and hostage taking?
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Meanwhile, the PA, in thrall to Washington, will not venture beyond using the prospect of an ICC indictment to extract political concessions from Israel,
²⁴
and Hamas, although officially supporting ICC intervention, no doubt fears its own vulnerability in this venue. In short, judging by the fate of the Goldstone Report and Turkey’s attempt to hold Israel accountable after the
Mavi Marmara
massacre, as well as by the built-in biases of the ICC, the legal route is almost certainly a cul-de-sac.

If diplomacy and judicial redress won’t go anywhere, then the only option left is popular resistance. But what
kind
of popular resistance? The question is not whether Palestinians have the right to use armed force to end the occupation. Of course, they do. Rather, the point at issue is a practical one:
Which tactics and strategy are most likely to yield political gains?
However heroic the resistance of the people of Gaza, however inspiring their indomitable will, the fact remains that, after going three bloody rounds with Israel in the past five years, after suffering death and destruction on a heartrending scale, armed resistance has yet to produce substantive improvements in people’s daily lives.

What if the quantum of time, energy, creativity and ingenuity channeled into building the tunnels (a wondrous feat of civil engineering) were instead invested in Gaza’s most precious resource:
the people
? What if they organized a mass nonviolent demonstration demanding an end to the blockade of Gaza? What if 1.8 million Gazans marched on the Israeli border crossings under the banner,
STOP STRANGLING US
!
END THE ILLEGAL BLOCKADE OF GAZA
! What if Gaza’s one million children stood at the head of the march? Yes,
children
. Wasn’t it the “children’s miracle” in Selma, Alabama, during the Civil Rights Movement that broke the back of segregation, when Black children, positioned in the front lines, fended off police attack dogs and high-velocity fire hoses?
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What if Palestinians found the inner wherewithal to stay nonviolent even as Israel fired murderously on the crowd? What if the vast reservoir of Palestine’s international supporters simultaneously converged, in the
hundreds of thousands
, on UN headquarters in New York and Geneva, enveloping and blockading the buildings?

Wouldn’t Ban Ki-moon (or whatever US minion happens to be holding office) be forced to denounce the Israeli bloodbath, just as he did on 3 August when Israel destroyed the UN shelter filled with children? Wouldn’t Washington, isolated on the world stage, then be forced to denounce Israeli atrocities, just as it did on 3 August? Wouldn’t Israel then be politically cornered, just as Netanyahu was on 3 August when he suspended the ground invasion? Long before Israel killed 2,200 Palestinians, 500 of them children, it’s quite possible, judging by the sequence of events on 3 August, that mass nonviolent resistance can end the blockade if, in one last exertion of will, Palestinians find the strength to sacrifice, and the rest of us flood the streets surrounding the UN, ready to risk arrest and injury.

The best that can be said for armed resistance is that it has been tried many times to break the siege but failed. The worst that can be said for mass nonviolent resistance is that it hasn’t yet been tried. Shouldn’t it at least be given a chance?