Goldstone’s report on the Gaza massacre

25Sep09

Reading through the Goldstone report [.pdf], one theme becomes immediately apparent: the deliberateness of the destruction in Gaza. The authors keep returning to this point throughout the text, in a direct rebuke to those liberal apologists for Israel who insist, contrary to all the evidence, that whatever crimes the IDF committed in Gaza were accidental or, at most, incidental to the attack, the work of a few rogue soldiers.

In fact, reports the Commission, the targeting of industrial sites, water installations, houses, government buildings and other civilian infrastructure was “deliberate and systematic”. The report investigates several cases in detail – the “direct” and “intentional” shelling of Al-Quds hospital with white phosphorous shells; the “intense artillery attacks”, including the use of white phosphorous shells, on Al Wafa hospital; a flechette attack on a crowd of family and neighbours in a condolence tent; the destruction of Gaza’s only working flour mill “for the purposes of denying sustenance to the civilian population”; the “systematic”, “deliberate” and “wanton” destruction of chicken coops housing tens of thousands of chickens, which supplied over 10% of Gaza’s egg market; the “deliberate and premeditated” attack on a sewage lagoon; etc. – and places them in context of “a broader pattern of destruction”, which included the destruction of 280 schools and kindergartens, the “intensive shelling” of residential neighbourhoods “in the absence of any link to combat”, the repeated targeting of hospitals and ambulances, the “systematic destruction of civilian buildings”, the “widespread destruction of private residential houses, water wells and water tanks”, the repeated “intentional attacks on civilians”, the “systematically reckless” use of white phosphorous in densely populated civilian areas, and the wilfull destruction of “a substantial part” of Gaza’s economic infrastructure, including hundreds of factories (17 of 27 cement factories were reportedly destroyed or damaged), nearly one-fifth of Gaza’s greenhouses, its only cement packaging plant and its largest private fish farm (killing 20,000 fish in the process). It has been estimated that in total some 15% of buildings in Gaza were destroyed.

Amnesty International fieldworkers struggled to describe the extent of the destruction:

“Previously busy neighbourhoods have been flattened into moonscapes. Other large areas look like they’ve been hit by earthquakes. There is no lens wide enough to embrace the sheer dimensions of the devastation.

Orchards and road have been churned up by Israeli army tanks and armoured D9 bulldozers; the latter sometimes dragging plough-like hooks which ripped the roads behind them – just one example of wanton destruction. Buildings with no apparent military value have been destroyed in vast numbers.”

“In the industrial areas to the north-east and south-east of Gaza City there is total devastation; each factory has been methodically destroyed. At the cement factory near the Zaitoun district of Gaza City, we found the same. Every single vehicle – trucks, cement mixers, even the car of the factory’s elderly watchman – had been overturned, dragged through the yard and partially crushed”.

In short, as the UN World Food Program reports,

“it was precisely the strategic economic areas that Gaza depends on to relieve its dependency on aid that were wiped out.”

The Palestinian Centre for Human Rights similarly concluded:

“It was obvious that IOF intended to erase any civilization features in the Gaza Strip. They deliberately and systematically destroyed the entire vital facilities to make Gaza go decades back.”

Israel and its apologists have tied themselves into knots trying to justify this colossal devastation on the grounds that every demolished house, factory, farm and chicken coop shielded a Hamas fighter, or a top secret underground Hamas base, or something. The UN report, however, is very clear: “in the destruction by Israeli armed forces of private residential houses, water wells, water tanks, agricultural land and greenhouses there was”, it concludes, “a specific purpose of denying them for their sustenance to the population of the Gaza Strip”.

Moreover “intentional attacks on civilians” were not isolated events but were rather, as the testimonies of IDF soldiers and previous human rights reports have indicated, systematic and reflective of policy. To give one example, large numbers of civilians, including women and children, were rounded-up and

“detained in degrading conditions, deprived of food, water and access to sanitary facilities, and exposed to the elements in January without any shelter. The men were handcuffed, blindfolded and repeatedly made to strip, sometimes naked, at different stages of their detention”.

Some Palestinians were taken to Israel, where they were tortured. In one case in north-western Gaza, Israeli troops

“dug out sand pits in which Palestinian men, women and children were detained. Israeli tanks and artillery positions were located inside the sand pits and around them and fired from next to the detainees.”

The report identifies a “common” feature of interactions between Israeli soldiers and Palestinian civilians:

“continuous and systematic abuse, outrages on personal dignity, humiliating and degrading treatment contrary to fundamental principles of international humanitarian law and human rights law”.

Taken together,

“[t]he conditions of life in Gaza, resulting from deliberate actions of the Israeli forces and the declared policies of the Government of Israel … cumulatively indicate the intention to inflict collective punishment on the people of the Gaza Strip in violation of international humanitarian law”. [my emph.]

This echoes the conclusions of the Arab League inquiry [.pdf] into the massacre, chaired by John Dugard, which characterised it as a “vigorous exercise of collective punishment designed either to compel the population to reject Hamas as the governing authority of Gaza or to subdue the population into a state of submission”.

In other words, as was clear at the time, there was no “war on Hamas”. There was a massacre of a civilian population, which involved the systematic commission of war crimes possibly amounting to a “crime against humanity”. This is an important point, so I’ll just repeat it: there was no “war” in Gaza. What we had was the world’s third or fourth ranking military power raining down shells, missiles and white phosphorous uninterrupted and effectively unopposed on a trapped civilian population for three solid weeks. Gaza has no anti-aircraft weaponry to speak of, so the IAF just bombed at will, conducting some 3,000 sorties in three weeks with no damage to even a single plane. Entire neighbourhoods were levelled. 35-60% of Gaza’s agricultural sector was destroyed. Thousands of homes were “systematically” demolished. Hundreds of buildings, including schools, clinics, UN facilities, government ministries and hospitals, were destroyed. People were instructed to leave, and when they did so they were killed. In one instance – described by the UN mission as a “wilful killing” and a “war crime” – over 100 members of the same family were told to gather in a building, which was then repeatedly shelled, while relief workers who tried to gain access to the dead and the wounded were fired on. What the UN report describes is not a “war”, it’s the terrorising and collective punishment of a civilian population.

The ‘Dahiya doctrine’

A couple of other points about the report are worth mentioning. Firstly, it explicitly and repeatedly accuses Israel of practicing terrorism:

“the treatment of these civilians constitutes the infliction of a collective penalty on those persons and amounts to measures of intimidation and terror. Such acts are grave breaches of the Geneva Conventions and constitute a war crime”

“the rounding-up of large groups of civilians and their prolonged detention under the circumstances described in this Report constitute a collective penalty on those persons … [and] amounts to measures of intimidation or terrorism prohibited by article 33 of the Fourth Geneva Convention”

“[Israel] viewed disproportionate destruction and creating the maximum disruption in the lives of many people as a legitimate means to achieve not only military but also political goals [i.e. terrorism]“

Needless to say, this makes a mockery of the Quartet’s refusal to engage Hamas on grounds that it remains committed to “terrorism”.

Secondly, the report draws a parallel between the Gaza massacre and the 2006 Lebanon war, noting that the “Dahiya doctrine” of disproportionate destruction of civilian infrastructure, named after the poor, densely populated suburb of Beirut flattened by Israel during the war, was clearly “put into practice” in Gaza. In Lebanon, the IAF inflicted “destruction on a catastrophic scale”, reducing “entire neighbourhoods to rubble”. “Entire families were killed” while fleeing the violence, while “Red Cross and other rescue workers” were prevented from accessing the dead and injured. The vast majority of casualties were civilians, around a third of them children. The “extensive destruction of public works, power systems, civilian homes and industry” was, far from being incidental to the assault, a “deliberate and … integral part of the military strategy”. As in Lebanon, so in Gaza [.pdf].

Other parallels with the Lebanon war also suggest themselves, the flimsiness of the justifications offered for the attacks not least among them. Two years ago Israel saturated southern Lebanon with cluster bombs, 90% of which were fired in the last 72 hours of the conflict when both sides knew a ceasefire was imminent. Similarly, in Gaza,

“Israeli forces engaged in another wave of systematic destruction of civilian buildings during the last three days of their presence in Gaza, aware of the imminence of withdrawal”.

In both cases the aim was to maximise destruction, to send a message to the civilian populations under attack and to ensure a long and costly reconstruction process (which in Gaza has barely begun [.pdf] due to the closure).

As in Lebanon, Israel’s propaganda during the Gaza massacre has been exposed as not merely fraudulent but, in many cases, projection. In Lebanon, Israel justified the killing of civilians on the grounds that Hizbullah was using them as “human shields”. Human rights organisations subsequently refuted the claim, finding that if anyone was guilty of “hiding behind civilians”, it was Israel. Similarly, the Goldstone mission found “no evidence” that Hamas had used Palestinians as human shields, unlike Israel, which forced “blindfolded and handcuffed” Palestinian men to “enter houses ahead of Israeli soldiers” – a “war crime”.

During the massacre, Israel maintained for a long period that it was not using white phosphorous, even when doctors begun reporting unusual burns that went right down to the bone and newspapers published photos of white phosphorous being fired on schools and UN facilities. At one point Israel went so far as to accuse Hamas of using WP. The Goldstone report concludes that Israel was “systematically reckless” in its use of white phosphorous in “built-up areas”, including in attacks on hospitals, schools and UN facilities, as discussed above.

To justify its targeting of ambulances, hospitals and UN facilities, Israel typically claimed that Hamas fighters were firing from within the buildings. In one case, Israel even claimed that Hamas had turned a hospital into its headquarters. The UN mission “did not find any evidence to support the allegations that hospital facilities were used … to shield military activities and that ambulances were used to transport combatants or for other military purposes”. It similarly rejects the claim that UN shelters shelled by Israel, including with white phosphorous, were used to launch attacks against Israeli forces.

Israel’s Sharpeville?

The Goldstone report contains little new information, for the most part merely confirming the conclusions of previous studies. It is, however, the most authoritative account of the massacre published to date. What makes it particularly significant is Richard Goldstone’s Jewish, Zionist and liberal background which, along with his status as an internationally respected legal figure, makes Israel’s reflexive dismissal of critical reports as “biased” and “antisemitic” even harder to sustain than usual (not that it hasn’t tried). As Gideon Levy writes, “the messenger is propaganda-proof. No one can seriously claim that Goldstone, an active and ardent Zionist, with deep links to Israel, is an anti-Semite.”

This is significant not because the inquiry’s recommendation that Israeli war criminals be prosecuted, whether through referral to the ICC or using universal jurisidiction, is likely to be implemented. We’re not at that stage yet, particularly given the Obama administration’s predictable and baseless denunciations of the report. The report will, however, further undermine public support for Israel in the US and Europe, boost the growing BDS campaign (we’ve already had a major success on that front, with the Trades Union Congress voting to condemn the Gaza massacre and support a boycott of goods produced in the settlements; meanwhile, Spain yesterday expelled a group of Israeli scientists from a state-funded competition on the grounds that their university is located in the illegal settlement of Ariel) and, crucially, make it increasingly difficult for American liberals and Jews to square their progressive values with support for the Israeli state. As Norman Finkelstein observes,

“It’s like the Sharpville massacre in South Africa. Now, Sharpville is not Soweto, but Sharpville was a turning point … Jews are overwhelmingly liberal in their sentiment. Seventy-nine percent of Jews in the last election voted for Obama. And what you’re seeing now is the breakup of Jewish support for Israel.

You saw during the Gaza massacre you had some of the old-timers like Alan Dershowitz, Michael Walzer, characters—Martin Peretz, characters like that, you know, kind of comical figures coming out supporting Israel. But if you looked at the younger Jewish—the younger Jewish constituency—bloggers like Matt Yglesias, Glenn Greenwald and so forth—they all opposed the Gaza massacre from almost like day one or day two. And then you had significant defections, like Andrew Sullivan, who—not Jewish, but still a significant figure, who also came out against the Gaza massacre.

So I think now what you’re seeing, especially with the Goldstone report, especially with his stature, especially because he’s Jewish, especially because he’s a liberal, what it’s signaling now, is the breakup of Jewish support and liberal support—and those are basically the same thing—the breakup of liberal Jewish support for Israel.”

This analysis is perhaps overly optimistic – particularly given the American liberal-left’s continued faith that Obama, his record thus far notwithstanding, is secretly planning to reverse decades of official policy and apply real pressure on Israel to end its rejectionism – but it is clear that the momentum of public opinion is swinging decidedly against Israel. Israeli propaganda just isn’t working anymore, and however many bogus diplomatic crises Israel contrives, however shamelessly the ‘new antisemitism’-mongers peddle their distractions, the now substantial and consistent body of literature condemning the Gaza massacre as a gross war crime isn’t going away.

A final point: Gaza is still suffering under an illegal siege [.pdf]. Thanks to years of neglect, overuse of the aquifer, the blockade and the January invasion, it is facing a critical water crisis, with high levels of sewage contamination and declining quality of drinking water (already, only 5-10% of water extracted from the aquifer meets international safety standards). The territory is undergoing an unprecedented economic collapse, with unemployment approaching 50% (some estimates place it closer to 70%) and 90% of the population living in poverty. Reconstruction has been extremely limited because Israel refuses to allow concrete and other building materials into the Strip. Three-quarters of the population – over half of which are children – are food insecure. 10% of the population has no electricity, while the other 90% experience power cuts of 4-8 hours per day. Thousands of people still have no access to running water. There is plenty we can do to ameliorate this situation, starting by demanding that our representatives endorse the recommendations of the Goldstone report and work to bring the siege to an end. I also recommend getting involved with the Gaza Freedom March, which has been endorsed by a long list of international and Palestinian figures and organisations.

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Filed under: Israeli / Palestinian   |  16 Comments
Tags: Cast Lead, Dahiya doctrine, Gaza, Goldstone report, hasbara, Lebanon, Obama, Richard Goldstone, UN, war crimes