[Peace-discuss] Richard Falk and Gaza

[C. G. Estabrook]

The important point here is that complaints should be directed not to the puppet 
(Tel Aviv) but to the puppet-master (Washington DC).  Obama has made clear his 
support for this particular crime against humanity. --CGE


Morton K. Brussel wrote:
> As noted yesterday, Richard Falk was just denied permission to enter 
> Israel (or Gaza) as a UN representative; he was detained  in israel at 
> the airport. What follows may be a reason for this.
> 
> /Published on Monday, December 15, 2008 by /_/TruthDig.com/_ 
> <http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/20081215_israels_crime_against_humanity/>
> *Israel’s ‘Crime Against Humanity’*
> *by Chris Hedges*
> 
> Israel's siege of Gaza, largely unseen by the outside world because of 
> Jerusalem's refusal to allow humanitarian aid workers, reporters and 
> photographers access to Gaza, rivals the most egregious crimes carried 
> out at the height of apartheid by the South African regime. It comes 
> close to the horrors visited on Sarajevo by the Bosnian Serbs. It has 
> disturbing echoes of the Nazi ghettos of _Lodz _ 
> <http://www.holocaustresearchproject.org/ghettos/Lodz/lodzghetto.html>and 
> _Warsaw_ <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warsaw_Ghetto>.
> 
> "This is a stain on what is left of Israeli morality," I was told by 
> Richard N. Veits, the former U.S. ambassador to Jordan who led a 
> delegation from the Council on Foreign Relations to Gaza to meet Hamas 
> leaders this past summer. "I am almost breathless discussing this 
> subject. It is so myopic. Washington, of course, is a handmaiden to all 
> this. The Israeli manipulation of a population in this manner is 
> comparable to some of the crimes that took place against civilian 
> populations fifty years ago."
> 
> The U.N. special _rapporteur _ 
> <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rapporteur>for human rights in the 
> occupied Palestinian territory, former Princeton University law 
> professor Richard Falk, calls what Israel is doing to the 1.5 million 
> Palestinians in Gaza "a crime against humanity." Falk, who is Jewish, 
> has condemned the collective punishment of the Palestinians in Gaza as 
> "a flagrant and massive violation of international humanitarian law as 
> laid down in Article 33 of the Fourth Geneva Convention." He has asked 
> for "the International Criminal Court to investigate the situation, and 
> determine whether the Israeli civilian leaders and military commanders 
> responsible for the Gaza siege should be indicted and prosecuted for 
> violations of international criminal law."
> 
> Falk, while condemning the _rocket attacks _ 
> <http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/middle_east/article5158480.ece>by 
> the militant group Hamas, which he points out are also criminal 
> violations of international law, goes on to say that "such Palestinian 
> behavior does not legalize Israel's imposition of a collective 
> punishment of a life- and health-threatening character on the people of 
> Gaza, and should not distract the U.N. or international society from 
> discharging their fundamental moral and legal duty to render protection 
> to the Palestinian people."
> 
> "It is an unfolding humanitarian catastrophe that each day poses the 
> entire 1.5 million Gazans to an unspeakable ordeal, to a struggle to 
> survive in terms of their health," Falk said when I reached him by phone 
> in California shortly before he left for Israel. "This is an 
> increasingly precarious condition. A recent study reports that 46 
> percent of all Gazan children suffer from acute anemia. There are 
> reports that the sonic booms associated with Israeli overflights have 
> caused widespread deafness, especially among children. Gazan children 
> need thousands of hearing aids. Malnutrition is extremely high in a 
> number of different dimensions and affects 75 percent of Gazans. There 
> are widespread mental disorders, especially among young people without 
> the will to live. Over 50 percent of Gazan children under the age of 12 
> have been found to have no will to live."
> 
> Gaza now spends 12 hours a day without power, which can be a death 
> sentence to the severely ill in hospitals. There are few drugs and 
> little medicine, including no cancer or cystic fibrosis medication. 
> Hospitals have generators but often lack fuel. Medical equipment, 
> including one of Gaza's three CT scanners, has been destroyed by power 
> surges and fluctuations. Medical staff cannot control the temperature of 
> incubators for newborns. And Israel has revoked most exit visas, meaning 
> some of those who need specialized care, including cancer patients and 
> those in need of kidney dialysis, have died. Of the 230 Gazans estimated 
> to have died last year because they were denied proper medical care, 
> several spent their final hours at Israeli crossing points where they 
> were refused entry into Israel. The statistics gathered on children-half 
> of Gaza's population is under the age of 17-are increasingly grim. About 
> 45 percent of children in Gaza have iron deficiency from a lack of fruit 
> and vegetables, and 18 percent have stunted growth.
> 
> "It is macabre," Falk said. "I don't know of anything that exactly fits 
> this situation. People have been referring to the Warsaw ghetto as the 
> nearest analog in modern times."
> 
> "There is no structure of an occupation that endured for decades and 
> involved this kind of oppressive circumstances," the rapporteur added. 
> "The magnitude, the deliberateness, the violations of international 
> humanitarian law, the impact on the health, lives and survival and the 
> overall conditions warrant the characterization of a crime against 
> humanity. This occupation is the direct intention by the Israeli 
> military and civilian authorities. They are responsible and should be 
> held accountable."
> 
> The point of this Israeli siege, ostensibly, is to break Hamas, the 
> radical Islamic group that was elected to power in 2007. But Hamas has 
> repeatedly proposed long-term truces with Israel and offered to 
> negotiate a permanent truce. During the last cease-fire, established 
> through Egyptian intermediaries in July, Hamas upheld the truce although 
> Israel refused to ease the blockade. It was Israel that, on Nov. 4, 
> initiated an _armed attack _ 
> <http://www.greenleft.org.au/2008/775/39991>that violated the truce and 
> killed six Palestinians. It was only then that Hamas resumed firing 
> rockets at Israel. Palestinians have launched more than 200 rockets on 
> Israel since the latest round of violence began. There have been no 
> Israeli casualties.
> 
> "This is a crime of survival," Falk said of the rocket attacks. "Israel 
> has put the Gazans in a set of circumstances where they either have to 
> accept whatever is imposed on them or resist in any way available to 
> them. That is a horrible dilemma to impose upon a people. This does not 
> alleviate the Palestinians, and Gazans in particular, for accountability 
> for doing these acts involving rocket fire, but it also imposes some 
> responsibility on Israel for creating these circumstances."
> 
> Israel seeks to break the will of the Palestinians to resist. The 
> Israeli government has demonstrated little interest in diplomacy or a 
> peaceful solution. The rapid expansion of Jewish settlements on the West 
> Bank is an effort to thwart the possibility of a two-state solution by 
> gobbling up vast tracts of Palestinian real estate. Israel also appears 
> to want to thrust the impoverished Gaza Strip onto Egypt. There are now 
> dozens of tunnels, the principal means for food and goods, connecting 
> Gaza to Egypt. Israel permits the tunnels to operate, most likely as 
> part of an effort to further cut Gaza off from Israel.
> 
> "Israel, all along, has not been prepared to enter into diplomatic 
> process that gives the Palestinians a viable state," Falk said. "They 
> [the Israelis] feel time is on their side. They feel they can create 
> enough facts on the ground so people will come to the conclusion a 
> viable state cannot emerge."
> 
> The use of terror and hunger to break a hostile population is one of the 
> oldest forms of warfare. I watched the Bosnian Serbs employ the same 
> tactic in Sarajevo. Those who orchestrate such sieges do not grasp the 
> terrible rage born of long humiliation, indiscriminate violence and 
> abuse. A father or a mother whose child dies because of a lack of 
> vaccines or proper medical care does not forget. A boy whose ill 
> grandmother dies while detained at an Israel checkpoint does not forget. 
> All who endure humiliation, abuse and the murder of family members do 
> not forget. This rage becomes a virus within those who, eventually, 
> stumble out into the daylight. Is it any wonder that 71 percent of 
> children interviewed at a school in Gaza recently said they wanted to be 
> a "martyr"?
> 
> The Israelis in Gaza, like the American forces in Iraq and Afghanistan, 
> are foolishly breeding the next generation of militants and Islamic 
> radicals. Jihadists, enraged by the injustices done by Israel and the 
> United States, seek to carry out reciprocal acts of savagery, even at 
> the cost of their own lives. The violence unleashed on Palestinian 
> children will, one day, be the violence unleashed on Israeli children. 
> This is the tragedy of Gaza. This is the tragedy of Israel.
> 
> © 2008 TruthDig.com
> 
> /Chris Hedges writes a regular column for /_/Truthdig.com/_ 
> <http://www.truthdig.com/>/. Hedges graduated from Harvard Divinity 
> School and was for nearly two decades a foreign correspondent for The 
> New York Times. He is the author of "/_/American Fascists: The Christian 
> Right and the War on America./_ 
> <http://www.amazon.com/dp/0743284437?tag=commondreams-20/ref=nosim>/"/