Gaza: God forbid, Israel again plays the devil

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s the Gaza Strip is being reduced to smithereens once again in what is seen as a regular military exercise for Israeli troops, genocide appears to be an art. And which country is more skillful than Israel in committing war crimes and yet drawing little or no condemnation from the international community? What’s worse, the perpetrator is rewarded while the victim is condemned as a wrongdoer or even a terrorist.

The indiscriminate military strikes against the Palestinian people in the Gaza Strip, the world’s biggest prison, have little or no justification. The two million Palestinian people, most of whom depend on United Nations food aid, had nothing to do with the deaths of the three Israeli teenagers who went missing while hitch-hiking in the Israeli-occupied West Bank. Yet they pay with their lives. Some 80 people have been killed since Tuesday in Israeli air attacks.

Since the teenagers went missing, the hawkish Israeli government has blamed Hamas, the Palestinian resistance movement which Israel and its Western allies such as the United States have labelled as a terrorist group, though Tel Aviv could not offer a shred of evidence to support its assertion. The disappearance of the teenagers and their deaths could not have come at a time more propitious for Israel which was waiting an opportunity to re-demonise Hamas.

Even before the bodies were found in an area where Hamas has no political clout, the Benjamin Netanyahu government launched a major international propaganda campaign, employing the Twitter hash tag #BringBackOurBoys to indict Hamas. In the subsequent Israeli operations in the occupied West Bank, some 600 Palestinians, including senior Hamas leaders, were arrested. The high-handed Israeli intrusion into Palestinian Authority-controlled West Bank areas drew little or no condemnation from Israel’s friends in the West, even though the Palestinians rose in protest and six of them died.  

Osama Hamdan, representative of Hamas’ international relations department denied any responsibility for the kidnapping or the killing of the three boys.  “We don’t have any information on who did that [the abduction and killings] and how it happened. So we cannot renounce it [the incident] or take responsibility for it. But the Israelis want to blame the Palestinians for everything,” he said.

However much Hamas claimed it was not responsible for the killings, Israeli officials’ propaganda and oratorical skills prevailed. Hamas stands condemned in the eyes of the West, which in any case is ready to swallow any rubbish Israel dishes out as manna from heaven. They ask no questions about the facts of the case. The boys were from a Jewish settlement in the occupied West Bank. All Jewish settlements are heavily guarded and movements in and out are monitored by security cameras. The boys, it was claimed, were last seen in a West Bank area which is under the sole and exclusive control of Israeli security forces in terms of the Oslo Accord. Even in the Palestinian Authority-controlled West Bank area where the bodies of the three teenagers were later found, Israeli troops operate without restrictions.

Whoever carried out this heinous crime needs to be brought before justice. But civilised behaviour demands that punishment should be meted out only if there is evidence against the suspect or suspects and it should be proportionate to the crime. But Israel does not subscribe to the principle of proportionality. It believes in a shock-and-awe response and adopts a scorched earth policy in dealing with Palestinians’ right to resist occupation -- a right recognised under international law. Israeli’s motto appears to be that if a Palestinian kills one Israeli, a hundred Palestinians will be killed.  What is disheartening is that this genocidal logic – collective punishment – has found the endorsement of Israel’s western friends, including the United States.  Many Western nations believe their national interests are served if Israel is allowed to keep the Middle East in flames. This national-interest driven inaction of the West has prevented a just solution to the century-old Palestinian crisis.
The West, especially the US, instead of condemning Israel’s excesses, has been heaping praise on it, describing it as the only true democracy surrounded by hostile Arab nations. The description or the mollycoddling hides Israel’s undemocratic practices. They include discrimination against Israel’s 20 per cent Arab population, illegal occupation of the Palestinian territory, settlement building in Palestinian lands, imprisonments of tens of thousands of Palestinian freedom fighters and the siege of the Gaza Strip where even UN humanitarian programmes and the provision of water, medicine and cooking gas and other essentials depend on Israel’s mercy which is in extremely short supply.

Whoever carried out this heinous crime needs to be brought before justice. But civilised behaviour demands that punishment can be meted out only if there is evidence against the suspect or suspects and it should be proportionate to the crime. But Israel does not subscribe to the principle of proportionality. It believes in shock-and-awe response and adopts a scorched earth policy in dealing with Palestinians’ right to resist occupation -- a right recognised under international law.

Israel is the only country which can show its middle finger to the United Nations Human Rights Council and get away without any international action or sanctions.
Even in instances where the UN has acted, Israel has emerged unscathed.  Take for instance the report prepared by Richard Goldstone, an internationally recognised jurist.  Commissioned by the UN to probe Israel’s war on the Gaza Strip in 2009, he found there was evidence to press charges against Israel for war crimes. But two years later, under apparent Western pressure, he recanted the findings that Israel deliberately targeted civilian areas during the war. In this war which Israel called Operation Cast Lead, more than 1,400 Palestinians, half of them civilians and nearly 300 of them children, were killed.

Such western bias is evident even in the current Israeli aggression on the Gaza strip where bodies of infants are recovered from the rubble of the buildings destroyed in Israel’s missile attacks. The failure of the international community to apply pressure on Israel allows the Zionist state to carry out more atrocities and prepare for a ground assault that could precipitate another Gaza massacre, similar to the carnage in 2009. Israeli troops describe such military operations inside Gaza as “mowing the grass.” This time, they have named their operation ‘Tzuk Eytan’ which in English means ‘Solid Rock’ but for the consumption of the bleeding hearts of Israeli supporters in the West, the term has been translated as ‘Protective Edge.’

As Israel commits its illegal war by way of deception, even UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon’s statement lacks the power to stop Israel. He only urged Israel to exercise restraint and respect international obligations to protect civilians. There was no demand for Israel to stop its air strikes. His statement in other words gives tacit recognition to Israel’s right to use force, which in this instance is in violation of the UN charter.  Pointing out that the Gaza situation was on a knife’s edge, the UN Chief demanded that Hamas militants stop firing rockets, as though the Hamas rockets which hardly cause any deaths in Israel were responsible for Israel’s disproportionate military response.  Why blame Ban?  Almost all the Western mainstream media project the Israeli air strikes as retaliation for the Hamas rocket attacks.

Even the death of the 16-year-old Palestinian teenager Mohammed Abu Khdeir who was kidnapped and burnt alive by Israeli settlers in retaliation for the deaths of the three Israeli teenagers or the YouTube video of Israeli troops brutally assaulting Tariq Khdeir, the cousin of the dead Palestinian boy, did not trigger a unified international action that could have prevented Israel from launching its war on Gaza.

Israel’s military aggression in Gaza has little to do with the deaths of the three teenagers.  It is targeted at bolstering the flagging image of Prime Minister Netanyahu. The stability of his government depends on coalition partners, who are more hard-line than him.  Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman, for instance, has ended his party’s alliance with the ruling Likud party though he remains in the government. He has criticised Netanyahu for not acting tough enough against the Palestinians. In Israel, the more hardline the policy of a political party is, the more votes it will get at the next election.

The war on Gaza also helps Israel to vindicate its position that the world should not recognise the Palestinian unity government that includes Hamas. By accusing Hamas of the crime of killing the teenagers, Israel seeks to reverse the growing international support for the Palestinian cause, especially among the world’s academics and intellectuals. Israel also feels the Hamas bogey could dissuade the countries from recognising the State of Palestine if and when the UN grants it full membership.

The unity government came into existence on June 2, following an agreement in April between President Mahmood Abbas’s Fatah group, which rules parts of the West Bank, and Hamas. It consists only of technocrats and includes no Hamas members. But Israel keeps on refusing to deal with the new government citing a non-existent Hamas factor. As expected, the Israeli-friendly corporate media give credence to the Israeli version. The Netanyahu government believes that by discrediting the Palestinian unity government, it could deal a blow to Palestinian moves aimed at seeking full membership in the United Nations, where Palestine has already been recognised as a non-voting member state.

The escalating crisis over the Gaza attack could also delay moves aimed at resuming the peace initiative of the Obama administration, which is smarting over its failure to achieve a peace deal after famously setting an April 2014 deadline for such a breakthrough.

In the meantime, as the Palestinian people come under relentless Israeli military attacks, Arab leaders once again show how complicit they are with the Israelis.  Apart from issuing statements of condemnation and a call to convene the UN Security Council, the Arab nations have failed to use their influence with the US administration to stop Israel’s aggression and save the hapless Palestinians.

Since the teenagers went missing, the hawkish Israeli government has blamed Hamas, the Palestinian resistance movement which Israel and its Western allies such as the United States have labelled as a terrorist group, though Tel Aviv could not offer a shred of evidence to support its assertion.

When a similar situation arose in November 2012 against the backdrop of Israeli air attacks that killed 150 Palestinians and its preparations for a ground attack, the then Egyptian President Mohammed Morsi sent his Prime Minister to Gaza to show Egypt’s solidarity with the Palestinian people and stopped an invasion. He even opened up the Rafah border crossing, allowing the Palestinians to flee the Israeli onslaught. But the new government of military strongman Abdel Fattah al Sisi has shown no desire to play a similar role or open the Rafah border for the Palestinians to move towards safety, though he is reported to have unsuccessfully tried to work out a truce.

If the world community and the UN cannot find a permanent solution to the Palestinian crisis, they must at least find a way to stop Israel’s massacre in the Gaza Strip.