 "Photo: Flickr user Toban Black")
One year after the Israeli onslaught on Gaza, the territory is still strangled by a comprehensive, tightening siege. And the consequences of last winter’s war, which ran from December 27th to January 18th, have been few. Despite the horrific outcomes and images of civilian death and destruction caused by Israel, war criminals are still at large, and numerous reports by well-known human rights organizations and independent international bodies have done little to effect accountability and freedom.
Egypt has started to build a seven-mile-long underground steel wall with the assistance of the United States Army Corps of Engineers. Israel has further defied international norms by dismissing the UN’s Goldstone Report on abuses of humanitarian law during the conflict offhand. It refuses to conduct an independent inquiry into the Report’s findings. Israel has also been trying to prevent foreign judicial inquiries into such crimes.
The defenders of Israel’s strategy continue to employ the same mundane arguments they have used in the past. These arguments divert the discussion from substance to procedure by claiming bias and selectivity on the part of international bodies, or by using ad hominem attacks. This time, however, the attacks won’t work as they have in the past.
The internationally-revered jurist and self-proclaimed Zionist Judge Richard Goldstone headed the United Nations fact finding mission on the Gaza onslaught, which produced the Report that bears his name. He insisted that the mandate of his committee be expanded to include crimes committed by both Israelis and Palestinians. The Report is not only explicit in its criticisms of both Israel and Hamas, it even assumes that Israel acted in self-defense. Considering this, it is difficult to believe that the Israeli government’s allegations of bias and its reasons for refusing to engage with the Report are sincere.
But critics of the Goldstone Report trivialize the gravity of the war crimes it documents by claiming that civilian deaths and destruction of infrastructure were not a matter of policy, but of the misconduct of a minority of soldiers. This explanation is dubious for several reasons. First, while one soldier who stole a credit card from a Palestinian home was prosecuted, no soldiers were punished for killing Palestinians. The Israeli military has failed to publicly hold these so-called “rogue soldiers” accountable. Second, the large numbers of casualties, the enormous and wanton destruction of property and the targeting of civilian infrastructure by the Israeli army in the 2006 war on Lebanon and the onslaught on Gaza indicate that these attacks are deliberate. As the Report mentions, many statements by Israeli officials support this conclusion. The Israelis have even codenamed their strategy: the Dahiya Doctrine.
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Yet legitimate complaints that Israeli aggression against Gaza has been disproportionate or is counter-productive are not effective rebuttals to the Israeli government’s self-justifications. In fact, these lines of argument presuppose that Israel was, at least in part, justified in its “defensive security operation”. When focused on these objections, the dispute revolves around the numbers of Palestinian civilians Israel would have been “justified” in killing.
Israel was not justified in its aggression for more profound reasons than these arguments reveal, regardless of the horrendous outcome of the onslaught. (Around 1400 Palestinians killed were and 5320 wounded and thousands of houses destroyed or damaged.) Israel is not a peace-seeking state acting in self-defense and Hamas is not an irrational fundamentalist or terrorist movement that wants to annihilate Israel. As I will argue below, both perceptions are, at base, crucially misleading.
Israel has proven throughout its history that it has an expansionist plan to control as much Arab land as possible. Israel never acknowledged its status as an occupier and thus refused to apply the Geneva Conventions, claiming that the Palestinian territories are contested areas. It even refers to Palestinian territories by their Biblical names: Judea and Samaria. Israeli settlements (121, plus those in East Jerusalem) and their “natural growth” (479,000 settlers) aim at creating facts on the ground that enable Israel to control as much land as possible. Credible estimates suggest Israel has invested $100 billion in developing Jewish-only infrastructure inside the West Bank. A state that intends a temporary occupation would hardly make such investments.
As historian Avi Shlaim demonstrated in his book The Iron Wall, Israeli governments have worked under a strategy according to which time is on the Zionists’ side: the natives will be overwhelmed by the power of the settlers, ultimately internalizing their subjugation and capitulating to the new reality of power. This means there is no need for peace agreements, and explains Israel’s rejection of numerous peace deals through its history. Israel’s refusal to engage with the Arab peace proposal emerging from the Beirut summit in 2002 was only one of the most recent examples of this policy.
The history of Palestine, then, is the story of the escalation of Israeli power. The International Court of Justice recognized this in its July 2004 ruling on the construction of Israel’s “separation wall”. The ICJ considered the wall part of an Israeli policy to alter the demographic composition of the Occupied Territories, a policy tantamount to a de facto annexation. The ICJ emphasized the detrimental effects of these policies on the right of the Palestinian people to self-determination. Israeli policies make the prospects for the realization of this right unrealistic.
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Even the withdrawal from Gaza in 2005, the so-called disengagement plan, sought to entrench the colonization of the West Bank. Then Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s senior adviser, Dov Weisglass, described the withdrawal from Gaza, in an interview with Haaretz in August 2004, as “the freezing of the political process”: “And when you freeze that process, you prevent the establishment of a Palestinian state and you prevent a discussion about the refugees, the borders and Jerusalem. Effectively, this whole package that is called the Palestinian state… has been removed from our agenda indefinitely. And all this with [President Bush’s] authority and permission... and the ratification of both houses of Congress.”
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