Who will save Israel from itself?
By Mark LeVine
The Israeli government's justifications for the war are being scrutinised
[GALLO/GETTY]
One by one the justifications given by Israel for its latest war in Gaza are
unravelling.
The argument that this is a purely defensive war, launched only after Hamas
broke a six-month ceasefire has been challenged, not just by observers in the
know such as Jimmy Carter, the former US president who helped facilitate the
truce, but by centre-right Israeli intelligence think tanks.
The Intelligence and Terrorism Information Center, whose December 31 report
titled "Six Months of the Lull Arrangement Intelligence Report," confirmed that
the June 19 truce was only "sporadically violated, and then not by Hamas but
instead by ... "rogue terrorist organisations" .
Instead, "the escalation and erosion of the lull arrangement" occurred after
Israel killed six Hamas members on November 4 without provocation and then
placed the entire Strip under an even more intensive siege the next day.
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Watch our coverage of the war on GazaAccording to a joint Tel Aviv
University-European University study, this fits a larger pattern in which
Israeli violence has been responsible for ending 79 per cent of all lulls in
violence since the outbreak of the second intifada, compared with only 8 per
cent for Hamas and other Palestinian factions.
Indeed, the Israeli foreign ministry seems to realise that this argument is
losing credibility.
During a conference call with half a dozen pro-Israel professors on Thursday,
Asaf Shariv, the Consul General of Israel in New York, focused more on the
importance of destroying the intricate tunnel system connecting Gaza to the
Sinai.
He claimed that such tunnels were "as big as the Holland and Lincoln tunnels,"
and offered as proof the "fact" that lions and monkeys had been smuggled
through them to a zoo in Gaza. In reality, the lions were two small cubs that
were drugged, thrown in sacks, and dragged through a tunnel on their way to a
private zoo.
Israel's self-image
The claim that Hamas will never accept the existence of Israel has proved
equally misinformed, as Hamas leaders explicitly announce their intention to do
just that in the pages of the Los Angeles Times or to any international leader
or journalist who will meet with them.
With each new family, 10, 20 and 30 strong, buried under the rubble of a
building in Gaza, the claim that the Israeli forces have gone out of their way
to diminish civilian casualties - long a centre-piece of Israel's image as an
enlightened and moral democracy - is falling apart.
Anyone with an internet connection can Google "Gaza humanitarian catastrophe"
and find the UN's Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs in the
Occupied Territories and read the thousands of pages of evidence documenting
the reality of the current fighting, and the long term siege on Gaza that
preceded it.
The Red Cross, normally scrupulous in its unwillingness to single out parties
to a conflict for criticism, sharply criticised Israel for preventing medical
personnel from reaching wounded Palestinians, some of whom remained trapped for
days, slowly starving and dying in the Gazan rubble amidst their dead relatives.
Meanwhile, the United Nations has flatly denied Israeli claims that Palestinian
fighters were using the UNRWA school compound bombed on January 6, in which 40
civilians were killed, to launch attacks, and has challenged Israel to prove
otherwise.
War crimes admission
Additionally, numerous flippant remarks by senior Israeli politicians and
generals, including Tzipi Livni, the foreign minister, refusing to make a
distinction between civilian people and institutions and fighters - "Hamas
doesn't ... and neither should we" is how Livni puts it - are rightly being
seen as admissions of war crimes.
Indeed, in reviewing statements by Israeli military planners leading up to the
invasion, it is clear that there was a well thought out decision to go after
Gaza's civilian infrastructure - and with it, civilians.
The following quote from an interview with Major-General Gadi Eisenkot that
appeared in the Israeli daily Yedioth Ahronoth in October, is telling:
"We will wield disproportionate power against every village from which shots
are fired on Israel, and cause immense damage and destruction. From our
perspective these [the villages] are military bases," he said.
"This isn't a suggestion. This is a plan that has already been authorised."
Causing "immense damage and destruction" and considering entire villages
"military bases" is absolutely prohibited under international law.
Eisenkot's description of this planning in light of what is now unfolding in
Gaza is a clear admission of conspiracy and intent to commit war crimes, and
when taken with the comments above, and numerous others, renders any argument
by Israel that it has tried to protect civilians and is not engaging in
disproportionate force unbelievable.
International laws violated
On the ground, the evidence mounts ever higher that Israel is systematically
violating a host of international laws, including but not limited to Article 56
of the IV Hague Convention of 1907, the First Additional Protocol of the Geneva
Convention, the Fourth Geneva Convention (more specifically known as the
"Geneva Convention relative to the Protection of Civilian Persons in Time of
War of 12 August 1949", the International Covenant on Economic, Social and
Cultural Rights, and the principles of Customary International Humanitarian Law.
None of this excuses or legitimises the firing of rockets or mortars by any
Palestinian group at Israeli civilians and non-military targets.
As Richard Falk, the UN special rapporteur, declared in his most recent
statement on Gaza: "It should be pointed out unambiguously that there is no
legal (or moral) justification for firing rockets at civilian targets, and that
such behavior is a violation of IHR, associated with the right to life, as well
as constitutes a war crime."
By the same logic, however, Israel does not have the right to use such attacks
as an excuse to launch an all-out assault on the entire population of Gaza.
In this context, even Israel's suffering from the constant barrage of rockets
is hard to pay due attention to when the numbers of dead and wounded on each
side are counted. Any sense of proportion is impossible to sustain with such a
calculus.
'Rogue' state
Israeli commentators and scholars, self-described "loyal" Zionists who served
proudly in the army in wars past, are now publicly describing their country, in
the words of Oxford University professor Avi Shlaim, as a "rogue" and gangster"
state led by "completely unscrupulous leaders".
Gazans inspect the damage after an air strike hit a mosque [GALLO/GETTY]Neve
Gordon, a politics professor at Ben Gurion University, has declared that
Israel's actions in Gaza are like "raising animals for slaughter on a farm" and
represent a "bizarre new moral element" in warfare.
"The moral voice of restraint has been left behind ... Everything is permitted"
against Palestinians, writes a disgusted Haaretz columnist, Gideon Levy.
Fellow Haaretz columnist and daughter of Holocaust survivors, Amira Haas writes
of her late parents disgust at how Israeli leaders justified Israel's wars with
a "language laundromat" aimed at redefining reality and Israel's moral compass.
"Lucky my parents aren't alive to see this," she exclaimed.
Around the world people are beginning to compare Israel's attack on Gaza, which
after the 2005 withdrawal of Israeli forces and settlers was turned literally
into the world's largest prison, to the Jewish uprising in the Warsaw Ghetto.
Extremist Muslims are using internet forums to collect names and addresses of
prominent European Jews with the goal, it seems clear, of assassinating them in
retaliation for Israel's actions in Gaza.
Al-Qaeda is attempting to exploit this crisis to gain a foothold in Gaza and
Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon and Syria, as well as through attacking
Jewish communities globally.
Iran's defiance of both Israel and its main sponsor, the US, is winning it
increasing sympathy with each passing day.
Democratic values eroded
Inside Israel, the violence will continue to erode both democratic values in
the Jewish community, and any acceptance of the Jewish state's legitimacy in
the eyes of its Palestinian citizens.
And yet in the US - at least in Washington and in the offices of the mainstream
Jewish organisations - the chorus of support for Israel's war on Gaza continues
to sing in tight harmony with official Israeli policy, seemingly deaf to the
fact that they have become so out of tune with the reality exploding around
them.
At my university, UCI, where last summer Jewish and Muslim students organised a
trip together through the occupied territories and Israel so they could see
with their own eyes the realities there, old battle lines are being redrawn.
The Anteaters for Israel, the college pro-Israel group at the University of
California, Irvine, sent out an urgent email to the community explaining that,
"Over the past week, increasing amounts of evidence lead us to believe that
Hamas is largely responsible for any alleged humanitarian crisis in Gaza".
I have no idea who the "us" is that is referred to in the appeal, although I am
sure that the membership of that group is shrinking.
Indeed, one of the sad facts of this latest tragedy is that with each claim
publicly refuted by facts on the ground, more and more Americans, including
Jews, are refusing to trust the assertions of Israeli and American Jewish
leaders.
Trap
Even worse, in the Arab/Muslim world, the horrific images pouring out of Gaza
daily are allowing preachers and politicians to deploy well-worn yet still
dangerous and inciteful stereotypes against Jews as they rally the masses
against Israel - and through it - their own governments.
What is most frightening is that the most important of Israel's so-called
friends, the US political establishment and the mainstream Jewish leadership,
seem clueless to the devastating trap that Israel has led itself into - in good
measure with their indulgence and even help.
It is one that threatens the country's existence far more than any Qassam
rockets, with their 0.4 per cent kill rate; even more than the disastrous 2006
invasion of southern Lebanon, which by weakening Israel's deterrence capability
in some measure made this war inevitable.
First, it is clear that Israel cannot destroy Hamas, it cannot stop the rockets
unless it agrees to a truce that will go far to meeting the primary demand of
Hamas - an end to the siege.
Merely by surviving (and it surely will survive) Hamas, like Hezbollah in 2006,
will have won.
Support for the war remains high in Israel[GALLO/ GETTY]Israel is succeeding in
doing little more than creating another generation of Palestinians with hearts
filled with rage and a need for revenge.
Second, Israel's main patron, the US, along with the conservative Arab
autocracies and monarchies that are its only allies left in the Muslim world,
are losing whatever crumbs of legitimacy they still had with their young and
angry populations.
The weaker the US and its axis becomes in the Middle East, the more precarious
becomes Israel's long-term security. Indeed, any chance that the US could
convince the Muslim world to pressure Iran to give up its quest for nuclear
weapons has been buried in Gaza.
Third, as Israel brutalises Palestinians, it brutalises its own people. You
cannot occupy another people and engage in violence against them at this scale
without doing even greater damage to your soul.
The high incidence of violent crimes committed by veterans returning from
combat duty in Iraq is but one example of how the violence of occupation and
war eat away at people's moral centre.
While in the US only a small fraction of the population participates in war; in
Israel, most able-bodied men end up participating.
The effects of the latest violence perpetrated against Palestinians upon the
collective Israeli soul is incalculable; the notion that it can survive as an
"ethnocracy" - favouring one ethnic group, Jews, yet by and large democratic -
is becoming a fiction.
Violence-as- power
Who will save Israel from herself?
Israelis are clearly incapable. Their addiction as a society to the illusion of
violence-as- power has reached the level of collective mental illness.
As Haaretz reporter Yossi Melman described it on January 10, "Israel has
created an image of itself of a madman that has lost it".
Not Palestinians, too many of whom have fallen prey to the same condition.
Not the Middle East Quartet, the European Union, the United Nations, or the
Arab League, all of whom are utterly powerless to influence Israeli policy.
Not the organised Jewish leadership in the US and Europe, who are even more
blind to what is happening than most Israelis, who at least allow internal
debate about the wisdom of their government's policies.
Not the growing progressive Jewish community, which will need years to achieve
enough social and political power to challenge the status quo.
And not senior American politicians and policy-makers who are either unwilling
to risk alienating American Jewish voters, or have been so brainwashed by the
constant barrage of propaganda put out by the "Israel Lobby" that they are
incapable of reaching an independent judgment about the conflict.
During the US presidential race, Barack Obama was ridiculed for being a
messiah-like figure. The idea does not sound so funny now. It is hard to
imagine anyone less saving Israel, the Palestinians, and the world from another
four years of mindless violence.
Update: In a further challenge to the democratic process in Israel, on January
12, the Israeli newspaper Haaretz reported that the Central Elections Committee
had voted overwhelmingly to bar Arab-led parties from participating in the
upcoming parliamentary elections.
Also, there are reports that the claim that extremist Muslims are using the
internet to collect names and addresses of prominent British Jews in order to
attack them, might in fact have been a hoax.
Mark LeVine is a professor of Middle East history at the University of
California, Irvine, and is the author of Heavy Metal Islam: Rock, Resistance,
and the Struggle for the Soul of Islam and the soon to be published An
Impossible Peace: Israel/Palestine Since 1989.
The views expressed by the author are not necessarily those of Al Jazeera.
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