I respect Amnesty International. Immensely. They are one of the few organizations in the world truly concerned about human rights abuses regardless of the ideology or politics of the individuals and governments responsible for those abuses. And I wish them well in all their endeavors. But they have a snowball’s chance in hell of getting President Obama to agree to their latest request, no matter how justified it may be by the actions of the Israeli government and its military.
Detailed evidence has emerged of Israel’s extensive use of US-made weaponry during its war in Gaza last month, including white phosphorus artillery shells, 500lb bombs and Hellfire missiles.
In a report released today, Amnesty International listed the weapons used and called for an immediate arms embargo on Israel and all Palestinian armed groups. It called on the US president, Barack Obama, to suspend military aid to Israel. […]
The US has long been the largest arms supplier to Israel; under a 10-year agreement negotiated by the Bush administration the US will provide $30bn (£21bn) in military aid to Israel.
“As the major supplier of weapons to Israel, the USA has a particular obligation to stop any supply that contributes to gross violations of the laws of war and of human rights,” said Malcolm Smart, Amnesty’s Middle East and North Africa programme director. “To a large extent, Israel’s military offensive in Gaza was carried out with weapons, munitions and military equipment supplied by the USA and paid for with US taxpayers’ money.”
For their part, Palestinian militants in Gaza were arming themselves with “unsophisticated weapons” including rockets made in Russia, Iran and China and bought from “clandestine sources”, it said. About 1,300 Palestinians were killed and more than 4,000 injured during the three-week conflict. On the Israeli side 13 were killed, including three civilians. Amnesty said Israel’s armed forces carried out “direct attacks on civilians and civilian objects in Gaza, and attacks which were disproportionate or indiscriminate”.
It probably doesn’t need to be said here, but the pro-Israel lobby in the United States is in all likelihood the most powerful extra-governmental influence on American politics, dwarfing the effectiveness of organizations like the NRA, labor unions and industry lobbyists of all stripes. Short of a first strike nuclear attack on another country, I don’t believe that any US administration, Republican or Democrat, would agree to eliminate military aid to Israel, even though Israel has used the weapons it acquires to kill thousands of Palestinians and Lebanese civilians in the last two years. And the recent <a href="http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/7905320.stm"effects of those weapons on human life in Gaza was nothing short of horrendous.
… Amnesty International has concluded that some Israeli attacks “were directed at civilians or civilian buildings”, while “others were disproportionate or indiscriminate”.
As well as the way Israeli forces used white phosphorous in the conflict, which Amnesty has dubbed a war crime, the organisation has also raised concerns about other weapons and their use.
These range from the firing of high explosive artillery shells, which have a large margin of error, in populated areas, to concerns that Israeli forces were trigger-happy in their use of more precise weapons such as tank shells. […]
Israel says the blame for civilian casualties lies with Hamas for using such tactics.
But Mr Garlasco – echoing the views of several other human rights groups – says this “in no way justifies what Israel did”.
“The violations of one side do not allow the other side to fight in an illegal manner.”
It’s odd. In the 50’s Americans were terrified of the “Red Menace” whether from the Soviets, the Red Chinese or their surrogates. Yet now we know that international communism was never as dangerous or coherent a threat as we had been led to believe. In the 80’s we went gaga over the supposed economic threat Japan posed to our nation, with many pundits and bad political novelists positing a plot to takeover our government from within, ruling over us as a shadow power with money used to buy and sell our political elites (“Rising Sun” ring any bells).
Yet the one country which has acquired enormous power over our domestic and international politics is never mentioned. Anyone who criticizes it is browbeaten (by a multitude of voices in the media) as antidemocratic at best, and antisemitic, at worst. Politicians of both parties make an annual pilgrimage to its major lobbying organization to prove their fealty and devotion to the cause of Israel. Perhaps at one time such loyalty to Israel’s cause was justified. But today, its ability to manipulate our political elites for its own benefit is damaging American interests, and, far worse, making the US an accomplice in Israel’s acts of barbarism and ethnic cleansing.
Does this mean I defend the actions of Hamas? No. Neither does Amnesty International which condemns their use of missiles targeted against Israeli civilians as war crimes and their tactics of operating from within urban enclaves as as having endangered the Gazan civilians who lived there. But there can be no question as to the nature of the threat Hamas poses to Israel. One need only look at the casualties incurred by both sides to see that Israel’s actions were far worse, killing and maiming thousands while suffering the loss of only three civilians and ten members of its military. Israeli leaders knew what would happen as a result of their use of such destructive weaponry against Gaza’s civilian population. They knew, and they went ahead anyway. Apparently they adopted the attitude that the only good Arab in Gaza is a dead Arab.
Drafted into the Israeli military in 2000, I served in the artillery corps as a gunner in artillery crew M109. The bombs we used, which are also being used today in Gaza, have a 50 meter kill radius. Anybody caught within 200 meters is likely to be wounded. Because these bombs are imprecise, our military regulations prohibited firing them to within a 350 meter radius of fellow soldiers in an open area (or within 250 meters if they were in an armored vehicle). To fire these shells into a heavily populated area like Gaza City carries a known risk of injuring and killing civilians within this range.
Experts reviewing the evidence have also concluded that soldiers in Gaza have also fired white phosphorus shells, which were in the arsenal when I served in the army as well. These shells contain 116 small wafers of phosphorus. To maximize their effect, the shells explode some tens of meters before they hit the ground, sending 116 flaming wafers over an area up to 250 meters.
And even before that, Israel’s blockade of Gaza after Hamas won the elections held there limited critical food and medical supplies from reaching the civilian population. That was a form of collective punishment prohibited by international law. And for what? For voting the wrong party into power. How many young and old alike died as the result of that action? How many children suffered and incurred developmental injuries from malnutrition and lack of proper medical care? We may never know.
What we do know is that Israel’s government continues to sanction settlements in the West Bank. It continues to treat the Palestinian people as less than fully human, subjecting them to cruel and demeaning hardships from its military occupation of Gaza and the West Bank that, if the shoe was on the other foot, the Israelis would loudly condemn as atrocities, war crimes and — yes — genocide.
I doubt there is anything that can be done to bring a peaceful resolution to the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians, and certainly not after the recent elections in Israel which handed power to the most radical right wing parties and politicians there. But there is no justification for the United States to continue arming Israel as if its very existence was endangered and its population in dire threat of extinction, for such is not the case.
Yet we will. We will. And therein lies the seeds of future slaughters and human catastrophes, including additional terrorist attacks here on our own soil.
