Olmert on Collective Punishment

21Jan08

“As far as I’m concerned, all the residents of Gaza can walk and have no fuel for their cars, because they have a murderous terrorist regime that doesn’t allow people in the south of Israel to live in peace … We are trying to attack terrorists, but we also show the population that it cannot shed itself of responsibility for the situation. We won’t allow the Palestinians to fire on us and destroy life in Sderot, while in Gaza life is going on as usual.”

Ehud Olmert, explicitly justifying Israel’s collective punishment of the 1.4 million residents of Gaza, over half of whom are children. As Juan Cole points out, collective punishment is a war crime. Still, as I’ve pointed out before, if Olmert wants to take this stance he should at the very least be consistent about it, and come out loudly in favour of Palestinian suicide bombings and Qassam rocket attacks immediately.

It’s worth noting that when it comes to unabashedly justifying collective punishment, Olmert has form. Here’s how he explained away Israel’s collective punishment of Lebanon:

“All the population which is the power base of the Hizbollah in Lebanon was displaced. They lost their properties, they lost their possessions, they are bitter, they are angry at Hizbollah and the power structure of Lebanon itself has been divided and Hizbollah is now entirely isolated in Lebanon”.

As for life in Gaza “going on as usual” – lenin makes the obvious point.


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10 Responses to “Olmert on Collective Punishment”  

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  1. 1 JamieSW on January 21, 2008 said:

    ‘Gaza food will run out by midweek‘:

    “Three days after Defense Minister Ehud Barak ordered the Gaza Strip sealed off to the outside world, defense officials said Sunday that food supplies were running low in Gaza and would dry up by the middle of the week.

    The Palestinians were also facing a major shortage in medicine and medical supplies, the officials said.”

    ‘Palestinian Center for Human Rights: Gaza situation potentially disastrous‘:

    “At approximately 8:00pm on Sunday, 20 January, the Gaza Strip power plant ran out of fuel and shut down, plunging the Gaza Strip into darkness. The closure of the Gaza power plant, in addition to Israel’s continued, tightened siege on the Gaza Strip, will have a catastrophic effect on the 1.5 million residents of Gaza, who are already suffering chronic shortages of fuel, medicine and some basic food stuffs. The director of Gaza’s main hospital, al-Shifa, describes the current situation as “potentially disastrous.”

    Israel is manufacturing a catastrophic humanitarian crisis in the Gaza Strip that is seriously deteriorating every aspect of civilian life. To date, 45 patients have died as a direct result of Israeli Occupying Force (IOF) closure and siege of the Gaza Strip. According to the Director of al-Shifa Hospital Dr. Hassan Khalaf, patients’ lives continue to be at stake, including the lives of 30 premature babies in al-Shifa Hospital, who will die immediately if there is a power cut at the hospital. Gaza’s second major hospital, the European Hospital in Khan Yunis in the southern Gaza Strip, has now suspended all major surgical operations…

    In addition to the dangerous shortage of electricity that threatens the lives of critically ill patients in all of Gaza’s’ hospitals, chronic shortages of petrol and diesel and gas for domestic use have led to panic buying before gas stations in Gaza are forced to close completely. Civilians are also suffering widespread shortages of bread, due to lack of electricity to power the ovens at bakeries across Gaza.

    PCHR condemns the catastrophic humanitarian crisis that is being manufactured by the IOF as collective punishment to the entire population of the Gaza Strip, and calls upon the international community to put immediate pressure on the government of Israel to avert a humanitarian catastrophe in the Gaza Strip. The Centre appeals to the international community to act upon their legal and moral responsibilities to ensure the basic human rights of the citizens of the Gaza Strip are protected.”

    ‘Hospitals, sewage systems use emergency generators as rockets hit southern Israel‘:

    “On 20 January the Gaza power plant said it shut down both of its functioning turbines, as it had no fuel left to produce electricity. While Israel and Egypt still supply Gaza with about half of its basic power needs, many parts of the Strip were plunged into the dark…

    The director of Shifa, the largest hospital in Gaza, said overnight electricity cuts had forced the medical centre to run on its emergency generators.

    “We have a supply of emergency fuel for four days. But we are very concerned about working on generators. There is a chance of technical or mechanical errors with generators,” Hasan Khalaf told IRIN.

    “Should this happen, dozens of people will die, including people in the ICU [intensive care unit] as well as about 30 premature babies who are incubated,” Khalaf said, noting that he had stopped all elective surgeries. Other smaller hospitals have stopped all non-urgent treatments…

    Many bakeries in the Gaza Strip were shut on the morning of 21 January, as they lacked power. The ones that were open had very long queues, residents said.

    Meanwhile, with no imports of cooking gas, officials are concerned that people will not be able to prepare food.

    While there are no significant food shortages yet, Gazans have expressed fear the situation will worsen, and the World Food Programme has said its fuel supplies are low and food distribution will be severely affected in a few days.”

    ‘Israeli food blockade may halt food handouts, warns UN‘:

    “Because of a shortage of nylon for plastic bags and fuel for vehicles and generators, on Wednesday or Thursday we are going to have to suspend our food distribution programme to 860,000 people in Gaza if the present situation continues,” said Christopher Gunness, a spokesman for the UN Relief Works Agency, which distributes food aid to 860,000 Palestinians in Gaza.

    Unwra distributes basic food parcels in Gaza consisting of items such as pulses, flour and packaged milk. The situation in the territory, which has been under a western economic embargo since Hamas took power last June, is already bleak.

    “We are already seeing signs of malnutrition and there have been cases or rickets [a cause of weak bones through a lack of vitamin D],” Gunness said.

    Israel, however, showed little signs of easing what is effectively an economic blockade of Gaza in response to a barrage of rocket fire aimed at its southern towns.

    The Israeli prime minister, Ehud Olmert, said Palestinians in Gaza might have to go without Israeli-supplied petrol for their cars as long as militants continue to fire rockets across the border.

    “As far as I’m concerned, all the residents of Gaza can walk and have no fuel for their cars, because they have a murderous terrorist regime that doesn’t allow people in the south of Israel to live in peace,” Olmert said in a broadcast.”

    ‘Gaza hours from water and sewage crisis as fuel for pumps run dry‘:

    “Gaza’s water and sewage systems are a matter of hours from almost total shut down as stocks of fuel to run vital pumps runs out according to international agency Oxfam.

    Only 37 of the 122 water supply pumps have fuel and most will run out of fuel within hours. Only six water pumps have fuel to run for more than a day. Oxfam fears the risks of an outbreak of water borne diseases if the water and sanitation system shuts down. According to Gaza’s water authority 40 per cent of the population – 600,000 people – is now without running water. The water authority will gradually shut down the system tomorrow (Tuesday 22 January).”

  2. 2 dksu on January 21, 2008 said:

    “… and Hizbollah is now entirely isolated in Lebanon”

    Basically, he seems to have just repeated what Israel’s stated goals were during the war (one of their numerous, ever-changing stated goals), without any orientation whatsoever as to how that actually worked out. Yeah, Hezbollah is now safely ‘isolated’ – he wishes.

  3. 3 JamieSW on January 21, 2008 said:

    Well, initially at least, Israel’s “stated goals” during the war were simply to secure the return of the soldiers. Of course, we now know (and it was obvious at the time) that Israel refused an offer from Hizbullah for a prisoner swap in favour of violence, and that Israel knew “within hours” of the conflict that it would not be able to retrieve the soldiers through violence.

    What Olmert does in this quote is boast about how successful he feels Israel’s collective punishment in Lebanon has been. In other words, the man’s a self-confessed war criminal.

  4. 4 kassandra on January 22, 2008 said:

    Not only is Israel ignoring the Fourth Geneva Convention and its Additional Protocols, by its actions and Olmert’s statements, it is also wilfully ignoring the 1948 UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. Among the many other provisions of that Convention that Israel ignores is “Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part.”

    Those jews caught in the Warsaw Ghetto could hardly have imagined that sixty years on, nazi war criminals would still be hunted and brought to justice. Does the same fate await Olmert and his enablers? The world works in strange ways.

  5. 5 joeturner on January 22, 2008 said:

    Jamie, can you locate the source of this quote by Olmert:

    “We are trying to attack terrorists, but we also show the population that it cannot shed itself of responsibility for the situation. We won’t allow the Palestinians to fire on us and destroy life in Sderot, while in Gaza life is going on as usual.”

    I’ve seen it on several blogs, but can’t find it reported in the news reports linked.

  6. 6 JamieSW on January 22, 2008 said:

    I linked to it above. Unfortunately, Ha’aretz has done that incredibly annoying thing it sometimes does of simply changing an article without warning, completely erasing what used to be there. The article I linked to originally had the quote above in full. Now it only has the first part:

    “But we have no intention of making their lives easier… as far as I am concerned, every resident of Gaza can walk because they have no gasoline for their vehicles, because they have a murderous regime that doesn’t let people in southern Israel live in peace”.

  7. 7 JamieSW on January 22, 2008 said:

    ‘UN: Despite Israel’s promises, West Bank barriers have increased‘:

    “Among [the UN's] findings:

    - Despite the promises to reduce them, the number of fixed physical barriers in the West Bank have increased from 528 to 563.

    - 49 percent of Palestinian households in the West Ban and 79% in the Gaza Strip live in poverty.

    - 34 percent of Palestinians face “food insecurity” (which is defined as households with income and consumption of 1.6 dollars per day).

    - The water supply dropped last year to 75 liters per person a day in the Strip and to 80.5 liters in the West Bank, approximately half the international standard.

    - Some 10,000 Palestinians who live in enclaves west of the West Bank fence are cut off from vital health and education services and from family and social networks.”

    Regarding Israel’s sincerity:

    ‘After every meeting between Abbas and Olmert over the last few months, the Israeli prime minister promised his colleague that he would reduce the number of roadblocks, which are disrupting the lives of West Bank residents. They said it was important to show the Palestinians the difference between Fatahland and Hamastan. But something is happening to the promises on the way from Jerusalem to Nablus. The report confirms the claims of the Palestinians and of the Israeli human rights organizations that only did the situation not improve, it even got worse.

    “Despite repeated pledges by the Israeli authorities to ease the closure regime, the number of physical obstacles in the West Bank increased from 528 to 563 between January and September 2007. These fixed physical obstacles are augmented by flying checkpoints, estimated at 560 per month, as of 6 October. The closure regime, which controls and restricts access to workplaces, markets, health and education services, and impedes normal economic activity, is the main cause of the deteriorating humanitarian situation.”‘

  8. 8 joeturner on January 22, 2008 said:

    Yeah I wondered if that might have happened.

  9. 9 JamieSW on January 22, 2008 said:

    Ynet has the quote up here.


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