Method and Madness: The Hidden Story of Israel's Assaults on Gaza (3 page)

Hamas’s acquiescence in the two-state settlement and its honoring of the cease-fire agreement proved a daunting challenge to Israel. It could no longer justify shunning Hamas; it would be only a matter of time before the Europeans renewed dialogue and relations with the organization. The prospect of an incoming US administration negotiating with Iran and Hamas, and edging closer to the international consensus for settling the Israel-Palestine conflict, which some policymakers in Washington now advocated,
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threatened to further spotlight Israel’s intransigence and isolate it diplomatically. Israel needed to provoke Hamas into taking up arms again. Once hostilities broke out, Israel could radicalize or destroy Hamas, eliminating it as a legitimate negotiating partner or as an obstacle to a final agreement on Israel’s terms.

It was not the first time Israel had confronted such a threat—an Arab peace initiative, tentative Palestinian support for a two-state settlement, and a Palestinian cease-fire—and not the first time it had embarked on provocation and war to nip it in the bud. “By the late 1970s,” a pair of Israeli scholars recalled, “the two-state solution had won the support of the Palestinian leadership in the occupied territories as well as that of most Arab states and other members of the international community.”
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In addition, PLO leaders headquartered in Lebanon strictly adhered to a cease-fire with Israel negotiated in July 1981.
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In August 1981, Saudi Arabia unveiled a peace plan (later approved by the Arab League) based on the two-state settlement.
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Reacting to these dire developments, Israel stepped up preparations to destroy the PLO.
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In his analysis of the buildup to the 1982 Lebanon war, an Israeli strategic analyst reported that PLO leader Yasser Arafat was contemplating a historic compromise with the “Zionist state,” whereas “all Israeli cabinets since 1967” as well as “leading mainstream doves” opposed a Palestinian state. Fearing diplomatic pressures, Israel maneuvered to sabotage the two-state settlement by eliminating the PLO as a potential negotiating partner. It conducted punitive military raids “deliberately out of proportion” against “Palestinian and Lebanese civilians” in order to weaken “PLO moderates,” strengthen the hand of Arafat’s “radical rivals,” and guarantee the PLO’s “inflexibility.”

Still, Israel eventually had to choose between a pair of stark options: “a political move leading to a historic compromise with the PLO, or preemptive military action against it.” To fend off Arafat’s “peace offensive”—the Israeli analyst’s telling phrase—Israel embarked on military action in June 1982. The Israeli invasion “had been preceded by more than a year of effective cease-fire with the PLO.” But after murderous Israeli provocations, the last of which left as many as 200 civilians dead (including 60 occupants of a Palestinian children’s hospital), the PLO finally retaliated, causing a single Israeli casualty. Although Israel exploited the PLO’s resumption of attacks on northern Israel as a pretext for its invasion (Operation Peace for Galilee), the Israeli analyst concluded that the “raison d’être of the entire operation” was “destroying the PLO as a political force capable of claiming a Palestinian state on the West Bank.”
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Fast forward to the eve of Cast Lead in December 2008. Israeli Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni stated that whereas Israel wanted to create a temporary period of calm with Hamas, an extended truce “harms the Israeli strategic goal, empowers Hamas, and gives the impression that Israel recognizes the movement.”
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Translation: a protracted cease-fire, which cast a bright light on Hamas’s pragmatism in word and deed and consequently increased international pressure on Israel to negotiate a diplomatic settlement, would undermine Israel’s strategic goal of retaining the West Bank. Israel had already resolved to attack Hamas as far back as March 2007 and only acquiesced in the June 2008 truce because “the Israeli army needed time to prepare.”
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Once all the pieces were in place, Israel still required a pretext to abort the cease-fire. A careful study covering the period 2000–2008 demonstrated that “overwhelmingly” it was “Israel that kills first after conflict pauses.”
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After the Gaza redeployment in late 2005, it was Israel that broke the de facto truce with Hamas that began in April 2005 and, after Hamas won the 2006 elections, it was Israel that persisted in its illegal practice of “targeted assassinations” despite a Hamas cease-fire.
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Again on 4 November 2008, while the American public and media were riveted to the election-day returns that elevated Barack Obama to the presidency, Israel broke the cease-fire. On the spurious pretext of preempting a Hamas raid, it killed Palestinian militants, knowing full well that it would provoke Hamas into hitting back.
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“A cease-fire agreed in June between Israel and Palestinian armed groups in Gaza held for four-and-a-half months,” Amnesty observed in its annual report, “but broke down after Israeli forces killed six Palestinian militants in air strikes and other attacks on 4 November.”
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The predictable sequel to Israel’s attack was that Hamas resumed its rocket attacks—“in retaliation,” as the Israeli Intelligence and Terrorism Information Center wrote.
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Still, Hamas was “interested in renewing the relative calm with Israel,” according to Israeli internal security chief Yuval Diskin, and Hamas would have accepted a “bargain” in which it “would halt the fire in exchange for easing of . . . Israeli policies [that] have kept a choke hold on the economy of the Strip,” according to former IDF commander in Gaza Shmuel Zakai.
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But Israel tightened yet again the illegal economic blockade of Gaza while demanding a unilateral and unconditional cease-fire by Hamas. Even before Israel intensified the blockade, former UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Mary Robinson decried its effects: Gaza’s “whole civilization has been destroyed, I’m not exaggerating.”
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By December 2008, Israel had brought Gaza’s infra-structure “to the brink of collapse,” according to an Israeli human rights organization.
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“Food, medicine, fuel, parts for water and sanitation systems, fertilizer, plastic sheeting, phones, paper, glue, shoes and even teacups are no longer getting through in sufficient quantities or at all,” Sara Roy reported. “The breakdown of an entire society is happening in front of us, but there is little international response beyond UN warnings which are ignored.”
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If Hamas had stayed passive after the 4 November killings, Israel would almost certainly have ratcheted up its provocations, just as it did in the lead-up to the 1982 war, until restraint became politically untenable for the Islamic movement. In any event, faced with the prospect of an asphyxiating Israeli blockade even if it ceased firing rockets, and thus forced to choose between “starvation and fighting,”
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Hamas opted for resistance, albeit largely symbolic. “You cannot just land blows, leave the Palestinians in Gaza in the economic distress they’re in, and expect that Hamas will just sit around and do nothing,” the former IDF commander in Gaza observed.
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“Our modest, home-made rockets,” Khalid Mishal wrote in an open letter during Cast Lead, “are our cry of protest to the world.”
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But Israel could now enter a plea of self-defense to its willfully gullible Western patrons as it embarked on yet another murderous invasion. Apart from minor adaptations in the script—the bogey was not “PLO terrorism” but “Hamas terrorism,” the pretext was not shelling in the north but rocket fire in the south—the 2008 reprise stayed remarkably faithful to the 1982 original. It derailed a functioning cease-fire and foiled another Palestinian peace offensive.
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Israel could now breathe a deep sigh of relief.

IN APRIL
2009,
THE PRESIDENT
of the United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC) appointed a “Fact-Finding Mission” to “investigate all violations of international human rights law and international humanitarian law that might have been committed at any time in the context of the military operations that were conducted in Gaza during the period from 27 December 2008 and 18 January 2009, whether before, during or after.”
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Richard Goldstone, former judge of the Constitutional Court of South Africa and former Prosecutor of the International Criminal Tribunals for the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda, was named head of the Mission. The Mission’s original mandate was to scrutinize only Israeli violations of human rights during Operation Cast Lead, but Goldstone made his acceptance of the job conditional on broadening the mandate to include violations by all parties. The council president invited Goldstone to write the mandate himself, which Goldstone did and which the president then accepted. “It was very difficult to refuse . . . a mandate that I’d written for myself,” Goldstone later observed. Nonetheless, Israel did not cooperate with the Mission on the grounds of its alleged bias.
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In September 2009, the long-awaited report of the Goldstone Mission was released.
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It was a searing indictment, not just of the Gaza invasion, but also of the ongoing Israeli occupation.

The Goldstone Report found that much of the death and destruction Israel inflicted on Gaza’s civilian population and infrastructure was premeditated. The assault was said to be anchored in a military doctrine that “views disproportionate destruction and creating maximum disruption in the lives of many people as a legitimate means to achieve military and political goals,” and was “designed to have inevitably dire consequences for the noncombatants in Gaza.”
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The “disproportionate destruction and violence against civilians” were part of a “deliberate policy,” as were the “humiliation and dehumanization of the Palestinian population.”
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Although Israel justified its assault on grounds of self-defense against Hamas rocket attacks, the Goldstone Report pointed to a different motive. The “primary purpose” of the economic blockade Israel imposed on Gaza was to “bring about a situation in which the civilian population would find life so intolerable that they would leave (if that were possible) or turn Hamas out of office, as well as to collectively punish the civilian population.” The invasion itself aimed to “punish the Gaza population for its resilience and for its apparent support for Hamas, and possibly with the intent of forcing a change in such support.”
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The Report concluded that the Israeli assault on Gaza constituted “a deliberately disproportionate attack designed to punish, humiliate and terrorize a civilian population, radically diminish its local economic capacity both to work and to provide for itself, and to force upon it an ever increasing sense of dependency and vulnerability.”
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The Report also paid tribute to “the resilience and dignity” of the Gazan people “in the face of dire circumstances.”
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The Goldstone Report found that, in seeking to “punish, humiliate and terrorize” the Gazan civilian population, Israel committed numerous violations of customary and conventional international law. It also ticked off a lengthy list of war crimes that Israel committed, such as “willful killing, torture or inhuman treatment,” “willfully causing great suffering or serious injury to body or health,” “extensive destruction of property, not justified by military necessity and carried out unlawfully and wantonly,” and “use of human shields.”
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It further found that Israeli actions that “deprive Palestinians in the Gaza Strip of their means of sustenance, employment, housing and water, that deny their freedom of movement and their right to leave and enter their own country, that limit their access to courts of law and effective remedies . . . might justify a competent court finding that crimes against humanity have been committed.”
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The Goldstone Report pinned primary culpability for these criminal offenses on Israel’s political and military elites: “The systematic and deliberate nature of the activities . . . leave the Mission in no doubt that responsibility lies in the first place with those who designed, planned, ordered and oversaw the operations.”
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It also found that the fatalities, property damage, and “psychological trauma” resulting from Hamas’s “indiscriminate” and “deliberate” rocket attacks on Israel’s civilian population constituted “war crimes and may amount to crimes against humanity.”
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Because the Goldstone Mission (like human rights organizations) devoted a much smaller fraction of its findings to Hamas rocket attacks, critics accused it of bias. The accusation was valid, but its weight ran in the opposite direction. If one considers that the ratio of Palestinian to Israeli deaths stood at more than 100:1 and of dwellings ravaged at more than 6,000:1, then the proportion of the Goldstone Report given over to death and destruction caused by Hamas in Israel was
much greater
than the objective data would have warranted.
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When it was subsequently put to Goldstone that the Report disproportionately focused on Israeli violations of international law, he replied, “It’s difficult to deal equally with a state party, with a sophisticated army, with the sort of army Israel has, with an air force, and a navy, and the most sophisticated weapons that are not only in the arsenal of Israel, but manufactured and exported by Israel, on the one hand, with Hamas using really improvised, imprecise armaments.”
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Although powerless beside Israeli armed might, Palestinians are often taken to task for not embracing a Gandhian strategy of nonviolent resistance. In 2003, then-US Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz told a Georgetown University audience, “If the Palestinians would adopt the ways of Gandhi, I think they could in fact make enormous change very, very quickly.”
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Whatever the merits of this contention, it should still be recalled what Gandhi actually had to say on the subject of nonviolence. He categorized forceful resistance in the face of impossible odds—a woman fending off a rapist with slaps and scratches, an unarmed man physically resisting torture by a gang, or Polish armed self-defense to the Nazi aggression—as “almost nonviolence” because it was essentially symbolic and a fillip to the spirit to overcome fear and enable a dignified death; it registered “a refusal to bend before overwhelming might in the full knowledge that it means certain death.”
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In the face of Israel’s infernal, high-tech slaughter in Gaza, it is hard not to see desultory Hamas rocket attacks falling into the category of token violence that Gandhi was loath to condemn. Even if it were granted that Hamas rocket attacks did constitute full-fledged violence, it is still not certain that Gandhi would have disapproved. “Fight violence with nonviolence if you can,” he counseled, “and if you can’t do that, fight violence by any means, even if it means your utter extinction. But in no case should you leave your hearths and homes to be looted and burnt.”
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After Israel breached the cease-fire agreement and intensified the illegal blockade that was destroying Gaza’s “whole civilization” (Mary Robinson) and causing “the breakdown of an entire society” (Sara Roy),
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did Hamas really transgress the Mahatma’s teachings when it decided to “fight violence by any means” even if it meant “utter extinction”?

The Goldstone Report did not limit itself narrowly to Cast Lead. It broadened out into a comprehensive, full-blown indictment of Israel’s treatment of Palestinians during the long years of occupation. The Report condemned Israel’s fragmentation of the Palestinian people,
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and its restrictions on Palestinian freedom of movement and access;
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its “institutionalized discrimination” against Palestinians both in the Occupied Palestinian Territories and in Israel;
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its violent repression of Palestinian (as well as Israeli) demonstrators opposing the occupation, and the violent assaults on Palestinian civilians in the West Bank by Israeli soldiers and Jewish settlers;
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its wholesale detention on political grounds of Palestinians (including hundreds of children as well as Hamas parliamentary members),
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the lack of due process, and the violence inflicted on Palestinian detainees;
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its “silent transfer” of Palestinians in East Jerusalem to ethnically cleanse it;
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its “de facto annexation” of ten percent of the West Bank, which “amount[s] to the acquisition of territory by force, contrary to the Charter of the United Nations,”
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and its settlement expansion, land expropriation, and demolition of Palestinian homes and villages. The Report concluded that certain of these policies constituted war crimes,
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and also violated the “
jus cogens
” right (i.e., peremptory norm under international law) to self-determination.
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Although it did not mark out a clear distinction between those perpetrating and those resisting a brutal occupation, the Goldstone Report did not pretend to a false equivalence between Israel and the Palestinians either. On the contrary, it eschewed “equating the position of Israel as the Occupying Power with that of the occupied Palestinian population or entities representing it. The differences with regard to the power and capacity to inflict harm or to protect, including by securing justice when violations occur, are obvious.”
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The Goldstone Report proposed several options to hold Israel and Gaza authorities accountable for violations of international law during Cast Lead. Individual states in the international community should “start criminal investigations in national courts, using universal jurisdiction, where there is sufficient evidence of the commission of grave breaches of the Geneva Conventions of 1949. Where so warranted following investigation, alleged perpetrators should be arrested and prosecuted in accordance with internationally recognized standards of justice.”
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It also called on the UN Security Council to monitor the readiness of Israel and Gaza authorities to “launch appropriate investigations that are independent and in conformity with international standards into the serious violations of international humanitarian and international human rights law.” If Israel and Gaza authorities failed to undertake “good-faith investigations,” the Goldstone Report recommended that the Security Council should “refer the situation in Gaza to the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court.”
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It further recommended that Israel pay compensation for damages through a UN General Assembly escrow fund.
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Additionally, the Goldstone Report recommended that the High Contracting Parties to the Fourth Geneva Convention should convene in order to “enforce the Convention” and “ensure its respect” in the Occupied Palestinian Territories; that Israel terminate its blockade of Gaza and strangulation of Gaza’s economy, its violence against Palestinian civilians, its “destruction and affronts on human dignity,” its interference in Palestinian political life and repression of political dissent, and its restrictions on freedom of movement; that Palestinian armed groups “renounc[e] attacks on Israeli civilians and civilian objects” and release an Israeli soldier held in captivity; and that Palestinian authorities release political detainees and respect human rights.
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The Israeli reaction to the Goldstone Report came fast and furious. Apart from a few honorable (if predictable) exceptions,
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it was subjected for months to a torrent of abuse across the Israeli political spectrum and at all levels of society. After ridiculing the Report as a “mockery of history,” and Goldstone himself as a “small man, devoid of any sense of justice, a technocrat with no real understanding of jurisprudence,” Israeli President Shimon Peres proceeded to set the record straight: “IDF [Israel Defense Forces] operations enabled economic prosperity in the West Bank, relieved southern Lebanese citizens from the terror of Hezbollah, and have enabled Gazans to have normal lives again.”
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Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu purported that the Goldstone Report was “a kangaroo court against Israel,”
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while Defense Minister Ehud Barak inveighed that it was “a lie, distorted, biased and supports terror.”
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Netanyahu subsequently proposed launching an international campaign to “amend the rules of war” in order to facilitate the “battle against terrorists” in the future. (“What is it that Israel wants?,” Israeli historian Zeev Sternhell wondered aloud. “Permission to fearlessly attack defenseless population centers with planes, tanks and artillery?”)
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Knesset Speaker Reuven Rivlin warned that the Goldstone Report’s “new and crooked morality will usher in a new era in Western civilization, similar to the one that we remember from the [1938] Munich agreement.”
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