Opinion
1 Introduction
Three years after the Gaza war ended, there have been
important new revelations concerning this conflict. The major ones are:
§
The completion of the
Goldstone report
§
An interview of Richard
Goldstone himself about the redaction of this report
§
The Israel Defence Force
own investigation into the conflict
§
Human Right Watch founder criticizing
HRW approach to the conflict
§
Testimonies of Hamas
leaders in Arabic newspapers
In light of these developments, new conclusions may be drawn
about the accusation of war crimes committed by the two belligerents.
Figure 1
The Gaza strip has 5 crossing points with Israel and 1 with Egypt
2 The Long term causes of the war
The Gaza strip has been subjected to 3 different rulers
since the end of the British Mandate over Palestine.
2.1 Egyptian Rule
The partition of Palestine between a Jewish state and an
Arab state was voted by the United Nations on November 29th, 1947
and unanimously rejected by all Arab nations judging it was unfair. The Gaza strip
is a region that was assigned to the Arabs of Palestine under the partition
plan. The war of independence followed from May 1948 to March 1949. At the end
of the first Israeli-Arab conflict, Gaza ended up under the rule of Egypt (and
the West bank under the rule of Jordan). No state of Palestine was ever
created.
Between 1949 and 1967, the Egyptians encouraged Palestinian
infiltrators to commit terrorist acts inside Israel, kidnapping people and
blowing up places (Terrorism preceded the occupation of Palestinian
territories). The infiltrators called themselves the Fedayeen.[i]
The 1956 war was an opportunity for Israel to put an end to these incursions.
It was a military success but a political disaster. The U.N. obtained a cease
fire and placed troops in the Sinai Peninsula to monitor the absence of
military activity in the desert.
2.2 Israeli Rule
In June 1967, after Egyptian Colonel Nasser declared the
blockade of the Straight of Aqaba closing Israeli commercial routes to South
East Asia, and kicked out the U.N. troops from the Sinai Peninsula, the 6 days
war was launched between Israel on one side and Egypt, Syria and Jordan on the
other side. The Gaza strip (the West Bank and the Golan heights) ended up under
the rule of Israel from 1967 until 1985.
Politically, the West Bank population has been a supporter
of the Fatah founded by Yasser Arafat while the Gaza strip has been a supporter
of the more radical Hamas movement founded by Sheikh Ahmad Yassin. The Hamas
does not believe in two states for two
people and vows to combat the existence of the Jewish state until it
disappears. The Hamas was behind most terrorist acts committed during the first
and second intifada. They designed and manufactured the qassam rockets starting
around 2001. The rockets were launched ever since into Israel with the
objective to indiscriminately hit civilian populations.
In 2005 started the Israeli disengagement from the Gaza
strip as Ariel Sharon was prime minister and under pressure from U.S President
Gorge W. Bush. By the end of 2005, all military bases and Jewish settlements
were evacuated from Gaza outside of the armistice line of 1949 (often called
the pre-1967 borders). For the first time, the people of Gaza were free of both
Egyptian and Israeli rulers, and had an opportunity to build their
infrastructures and improve the living conditions of the people in the strip.
The first thing they did was to raze the Jewish settlements and destroy the
green houses that symbolized Jewish occupation. Two weeks after the
disengagement, the qassam rockets started raining into Israel yet again.
2.3 Hamas Rule
In January 2006, the Palestinians held the first legislative
elections under pressure from U.S. Secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice, who
believed strongly in bringing the values of democracy to the Middle-East. The
Hamas won these elections thanks to massive support from the Gaza strip. After
a brief civil war between Fatah and Hamas where the two Palestinians party
fought with the utmost cruelty (militiamen thrown off high-rises, burned alive,
injured combatant finished with a bullet in the head), Hamas took control of
the Gaza strip starting in 2007.
More qassam rockets were fired at Israel. Israel declared a
land air and sea blockade of the Gaza strip. Between the disengagement of 2005
and the rise to power of Hamas in 2007, the Gaza-Egypt border near Rafah was
open and monitored by European Union immigration officers. As soon as the Hamas
took power, the European monitors fled the border and Egypt closed the only
non-Israeli border with Gaza by fear of a massive exodus of the population into
Egypt. Gaza was effectively isolated from the rest of the World by both Israel
and Egypt.
3 Highlights of The 2008-2009 War
3.1 One too many qassam
When the Israeli launched their troops into the Gaza strip
in Dec 2008, the Palestinians had launched close to 8000 qassam rockets into
Israel since the disengagement. The salvos had reached a rate of up to 600
rockets per month. Caporal Gilad Shalit had been held in captivity inside the
strip since June 2006. Liberating him was not on the agenda. His body was booby
trapped and he was constantly moved from one place to another as the most
precious bargaining chip the Hamas owned to liberate Palestinian prisoners.
From the Israeli point of view, the motive for this war was to restore security
for the citizens of the country living in the range of the rocket and mortar
shells from Gaza.
Figure 2
Rockets landed in Sderot
3.1.1 No victim no damage
The statement one hears the most about qassam rocket fire
from Gaza into Israel is that “these strikes have caused no victims and no
damage”. This assertion is at the heart
of the accusation of disproportion of the Israeli reaction. The rocket fire
from Gaza is, at most, a nuisance. Therefore a proportionate Israeli response should be at most a nuisance to the
population of Gaza. I have yet to understand how this is achieved…
Nevertheless, rocket damage cannot be measured in casualties
only. The real cost to Israeli society of the constant fire from Gaza is
exemplified by the city of Sderot.
Sderot is the closest Israeli town to the Gaza border. It is
also the one that has received the most rockets and mortar shells. The mayor of
Sderot resigned in December 2007 “over the inability of his government to stop
the rockets from Gaza”.[ii]
The population of Sderot has decreased by 20% since the Hamas took power in the
Gaza strip.
To better understand what the people of Sderot are going
through you may want to try this
exercise at home:
Next time you take a shower, at the very moment your hair is
filled with shampoo, imagine that the siren is roaring to alert you of a rocket
launch from Gaza detected by radar. You now have 30 seconds to leave the
shower, grab your kids and run to the one room in the house that has no
windows. Repeat this exercise up to 5 times a day, how long is it going to take
before you find this life unbearable?
Citizens of Sderot do not listen to the radio or any source
of music, by fear that they are going to miss the siren.
The Hamas has chosen the most effective time to launch their
rockets: when school children are finishing the day and their mother comes to
pick them up: the peak of most efficient terror.
In 2007, millionaire Arcadi Gaydamak spent $30 million to
fortify the streets of Sderot with bunkers at every corner.[iii]
Figure 3
A reinforced bus stop in Sderot
It is worth mentioning that in March 2011, two years after
the war ended, the Israeli deployed for the first time the Iron Dome defense system capable of intercepting qassam rockets, at
an exorbitant cost.
The assertion that “rocket attacks cause no victims and no
damage” completely ignores the psychological damage on the population, the
stress, the exodus, and the million dollars to protect them. It is a clear
attempt at denying Israel the right to self-defence. The bottom line is: 8000
rockets launched in an unprovoked attack is a casus belli, an excellent reason to go to war.
3.1.2 Makeshift rockets
To this day, the media call the qassam rockets makeshift
rockets or crude rockets. I work in Hi Tech and when my company delivers a few
hundreds samples of a product, we no longer call it a prototype, it is a
product release. 8000 rockets are not makeshift rockets. True, they have no
guidance. But their range has increased and their technology improved over
years. They are launched along with longer range grad rockets of all kinds. The
Palestinians have successfully reached Beersheba, Ashkelon and Ashdod. It won’t
be long before they can reach Tel Aviv. The Hezbollah in the North has hit
Haifa several times. All of the largest cities in Israel will soon be in range
of rockets from an Arab faction.
3.2 First Israeli TARGET – The HAMAS POLICE STATION
On December 27th, 2008, the Israeli Air Force hit
the Gaza Police Headquarter killing around 200, mostly policemen and police
cadets. According to Israeli intelligence, the Gaza police force has a dual
function. The same men who patrol the Gaza strip to maintain order are also the
ones commanding squads of rocket launchers against Israel.[iv]
However, all the victims of this strike were counted as civilians by most NGOs
and in particular in the Goldstone report. In its own military report, Israel
has listed the web sites of some of the policemen. In them, they have recorded
videos with their call for jihad and brag about the damage they inflicted to Israel
with their rockets.[v]
[vi]
3.3 The UNRWA school incident
On Dec 31st, 2008, Richard Landes wrote an
article predicting that the Hamas was soon going to need a major “massacre”
committed by the IDF (or invented by the Hamas) in order to trigger
demonstrations throughout the Arab world, and to pressure the U.N. for a
cease-fire with the Israeli side.[vii]
On Jan 6th, 2009 the IDF is accused of having shelled a UNRWA school
in Jabalya where hundreds of civilians were taking refuge from the combats. The
accusation resonates around the world: Israel is targeting a school that
belongs to the U.N. 43 people have been killed. The IDF declares that they have
received shots coming from the direction of that school. On Jan 29th,
the Canadian Globe & Mail runs an in depth investigation and concludes that
not a single IDF shell hit the school but only hit armed militiamen located in
the vicinity of the school. On Feb 3rd, 2009, Maxwell Gaylord, UN
humanitarian coordinator recognizes that not
a single refugee inside the school got killed or wounded. [viii]
Following this episode, a dozen articles described how the
UNRWA organization is infiltrated by Hamas, despite being a U.N. institution,
and how employees are not checked for their membership in a terrorist
organization. However Hamas obtained its massacre and demonstrations throughout
the Arab world followed.
This episode is just one illustration of how Hamas uses
civilian population as human shield and launches its rockets from schools,
hospitals, mosques, or residential areas putting Israel into the awkward
position of having to retaliate against an area densely populated with
civilians. On Jan 20th, 2009 a video was released on YouTube showing
a journalist from Al-Arabiya surprised to learn that a grad racket has just
taken off from below the TV press centre where she is sitting.[ix]
Another video was released showing militiamen carrying rocket launchers jumping
hastily into an ambulance stamped with a United Nations logo.[x]
3.4 HAMAS hiding under hospitals
The Metula News Agency was the first media to reveal on
January 7th, 2009 that the Hamas government led by Ismail Haniyeh
was hiding under the Shifa Hospital during and after the entire war. More
precisely, their bunker has been built precisely beneath the pediatric aisle of the hospital, where children are
cared for.[xi]
[xii]
Days later a reporter from France 2 (against all expectations… the media behind
the Mohammed Al-Dura affair) carrying interviews in the strip, found residents
(not wanting to be recognized) revealing that combat units were hiding inside
hospital.[xiii]
Months later, Mahmoud Abbas, in a speech expressing his anger against the
Hamas, accused it yet again of hiding beneath hospitals during the entire war.
3.5 Israel’s conduct
3.5.1 Carring for civilians
On the other hand, Israel takes cautions not to hit
civilians at a level that no other Western army in the world has taken before,
as U.K. Colonel Richard Kemp has testified over and over.[xiv]
[xv]
[xvi]Prior
to an attack on a building identified as a target sheltering a rocket launcher
or a stockpile of ammunitions, the IDF uses the following warnings before a
strike:
§
launching leaflets from
helicopter
§
using loudspeakers or cell
phone text messages
By doing so, they take the risk of missing the target giving
the enemy time to move the most precious equipment. Cynically, to protect the
target, the Hamas takes advantage of the warnings to gather as many civilians
as possible on the rooftop. The Israeli Air Force sometimes aborts the mission
seconds before launching a missile, when it realizes what is happening.[xvii]
This practise of protecting targets by placing children on rooftops is at least
proving something: the Hamas knows very well that the IDF does not deliberately
take civilians for targets.
3.5.2 Barring journalists
Learning from the World community’s reaction to the Lebanon
war of 2006, Israel took the decision to bar the entry into Gaza to all foreign
journalists. It was also an attempt to discourage Hamas from using journalists
as human shields. The result was a disaster. Having only Hamas officials and
the media’s own fixers[xviii]
in the strip as source of raw data, the one sided accusation of war crimes and
massacres towards Israel was even greater.
3.5.3 White Phosphorous bombs
Israel uses any modern weaponry available to protect the
lives of its soldiers. White Phosphorous bombs are used to produce a smoke
screen and also to light up a target at night.[xix]
They are very incendiary and cause severe burns. Yet they are not illegal to
use.[xx]
[xxi]White
Phosphorous bombs have been abundantly used in Iraq and Afghanistan. The only
country that has used white phosphorous against combatants to inflict burns are
the U.S.A. in Fallujah.[xxii] [xxiii]
3.6 Civilians versus combatant casualties
Wikipedia lists the casualty figures according to both sides
and to other NOGs.[xxiv]
Palestinian casualties according to Palestinian sources:
1417
The Hamas government has not disclosed the number of
combatants killed. The Palestinian Centre for Human Rights counts 926 civilians
and therefore 491 combatants.
Palestinian casualties according to Israeli sources: 1166
including 709 combatants and 295 civilians
3.6.1 An asymMetric Conflict
This conflict is clearly asymmetric. On one side, Israel is
the 5th most powerful army in the world. On the other side we have a
conglomerate of terrorist groups: Hamas, Islamic Jihad, Qassam brigades who
believe in Jihad, in martyrdom, who believe that the land of Palestine is part
of Daar Al-Islam, the land of Islam, and should be ruled by a Caliphate
imposing the sharia law, where minorities like Jews and Christians should be
treated like dhimmis, having to respect the superior rules of Islam. Their
weaponry is much weaker than their Israel’s. They don’t measure up. For those
reasons, the Palestinian casualties are expected to be much higher. Civilians
are used as human shield. The terrorists value death and martyrdom.
On the other side the attitude is opposite. Israelis value
life. Urban warfare is challenging for a modern army. They will do everything
possible to protect the lives of their civilians and their enemies’ civilians.
The Hamas triggered a war it cannot win by harassing the Jewish state with
ineffective rockets. For Israel it is a matter of re-establishing deterrence.
The cost of launching rockets must be so high that it is not worth it. In fact
there should be no Jewish casualties in order for the government to restore
credibility with its citizens and peace inside its territory.
3.6.2 The CremoneSi approach
Lorenzo Cremonesi is
an Italian journalist from Corriere della
Sera. On Jan 21st, 2009 he released an article showing his own
investigation on the war casualties.[xxv]
His article was translated on several sites including Richard Landes[xxvi].
It was also quoted by many other media.[xxvii]
[xxviii]
Cremonesi starts by showing once again how the combat units use the Palestinian
population as human shield using residential area, schools, hospitals and UN
buildings to hide their rocket launching pads.
But as he was touring hospitals, a doctor under anonymity,
declared to him that there can be no
more than 500 or 600 killed. Hamas deliberately inflates the number of
victims and Western NGOs report them without verifying. Cremonesi made the
first hand observation that many hospital beds were empty. He later mentioned
in an interview a rule of thumb that he uses. In every war, one finds 5 persons
wounded for every person killed. Count the number of wounded patients in
hospitals and you get a rough estimate of the number killed. He also noticed
that most patients were male between 16 and 40. He saw very few women and
children.
One thing that Cremonesi did not account for that could
explain the discrepancy between his figures and the Israeli or the Palestinian
figures was revealed on January 12th. [xxix]
[xxx]
The second in command of the Hamas military wing Ahmad Al-Jabari has given
orders to the militiamen not only to combat without their uniform so that, if
killed, they are counted as civilians but also to bury hastily on the spot their comrades so as to lower the
combatant to civilian casualties ratio.
Figure 4
Mahmoud Al-Zahar left and Ahmad Al-Jabari right
Finally in November 2010, almost two years after the facts,
Hamas Interior Minister Fathi Ahmad gave an interview to Al-Hayat daily where
he admitted that Hamas had lost 600-700
armed militiamen in the war. The truth always finds a way and more likely
in a newspaper in Arabic language that Westerners don’t bother reading.[xxxi]
3.7 The ending of the war
Israel put an end to this war when it estimated it had
destroyed enough rockets and rocket launchers, killed the most notorious
militia leaders and above all, when it realized it would not be able to
overthrow the Hamas government hiding under the Shifa hospital. Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian President,
was furious.[xxxii]
For years he begged the Israeli to overthrow the Hamas government. He accused
them of maintaining Hamas in power as a cynical move to delay the creation of a
Palestinian state. Israel released the tape of a conversation with Abbas where
he was yelling at them for not continuing the war. His popularity went tumbling
down as he seemed to care less about the civilian casualties than did the
Israeli.
3.8 The Goldstone Report
The Goldstone report was requested by the UNHRC at the
demand of Saudi Arabia, a nation greatly respectful of human rights…absolutely
not. Its objective was to record whether the rules of war were respected by
each side and decide if one or both belligerents should be condemn for war
crimes. The English version has 575 pages. 10 of them are dedicated to Hamas’
conduct and the rest to Israel’s conduct during the war. The report was put
together by a team of 4. They invited "all interested persons and
organizations to submit relevant information and documentation that will assist
in the implementation of the Mission's mandate." In other words, NGOs such
as Human Right Watch or Amnesty International could submit their own findings.
The members of the fact finding mission, when touring the Gaza strip to gather
evidence, were constantly accompanied with a member of the Gaza government.
They were not allowed to conduct an interview in private. A citizen of Gaza who disagrees with the
government is basically a target for assassination.
The mission requested both sides to submit their own
investigation. Israel complied.[xxxv]
The Hamas did not. Israel also put together a web site publicly available with
its own findings.[xxxvi]
The mission concluded that both sides committed war crimes
to the same extend. In particular, it stated that Israel deliberately targets
civilians. The mission did not find any conclusive evidence that the Hamas uses
the Gaza population as a human shield. [xxxvii]
3.9 The Goldstone Interview
On April 1st, 2011 in a letter to the Washington
Post followed by various interviews, Richard Goldstone reconsidered its
statement that Israel deliberately targets civilians.[xxxviii]
[xxxix]
He also said that in a criminal court,
the Goldstone report would have little value as none of the testimonies
obtained had been cross-checked.[xl]
He expressed outrage in the way the report has been used to delegitimize the
State of Israel.
3.10 The reaction of Human Right Watch founder
On October 19th, 2009, Robert Bernstein, the
founder of HRW wrote an editorial in the New York Times condemning the attitude
of Human Right Watch during the war.[xli] He denounces the way HRW puts Hamas and
Israel side by side as if they were equivalent when one is an islamo-fascist
theocracy and the other is a vibrant democracy with plurality of political
parties, independent press and so on. He regrets the disproportion between the
number of reports criticising Israel and the complete silence over human right
violations throughout the Arab world, over the usage of human shield by Hamas
and Hezbollah. The selective indignation
of Human Right Watch is such that it has lost all moral credibility.
4 Conclusion
There is only one aspect of the war that was
disproportionate. It’s the amount of criticism towards Israel compared to the
criticism of Hamas, illustrated by the number of institutions who fell for the
Palestinian victimhood and have lost all common sense of right from wrong. This
war was the logical response to a 4 years aggression by Palestinian factions on
Israeli territory using ineffective weaponry. For years, Israel delayed its
reaction hoping that targeted killings of terrorist leaders would eventually
discourage them. Eventually they had to
resort to a ground invasion.
It is worth mentioning that the 2009 Gaza war is an exact repeat of the 2006 war against
Hezbollah in South Lebanon on every point of view: the usage of Lebanese
civilian populations as human shield, the indiscriminate targeting of Israeli
civilians, the reaction of the World community and the biased counting of
combatant to civilian casualty ratio.[xlii]
In fact Hamas leaders admit that they learned a lot from their Hezbollah
brothers in arms.
The systematic condemnation of Israel by the U.N., the
media, and the Goldstone report along with the silence or trivializations of
the constant shelling from Gaza are an attempt to deny Israel’s right of self defense. The institutions have a role
to play in order to avoid a repeat of these wars taking place every 3 to 5
years: have zero tolerance on unprovoked aggression, even minor, pressure the
authorities (Palestinian Hamas and PLO and even the Lebanese government) to
face their responsibilities towards terrorism within the territory under their
jurisdiction. The claim that they have no control on lawless parts of their
territory is a lame excuse, or evidence that they are not ready for statehood.
The population density of Gaza is lower than Hong-Kong and
Singapore. It’s up to the Palestinians to turn it into a thriving society or
let it remain a pariah territory. If they choose the first one, they’ll see the
blockade immediately lifted and Israeli investors willing to make risky
investments for peace. The first step
should be to put an end to the culture of hatred that defines the Palestinian
identity by opposition to the State of Israel.[xliii] That culture starts in kindergarten and is
all over Palestinian television. [xliv]
[xlv]
