[Peace-discuss] Chomsky on Israeli/US crimes

[C. G. ESTABROOK]

"Israel ... can commit such crimes with impunity because the United States 
tolerates them and Europe generally follows the U.S.’s lead ... International 
law cannot be enforced against powerful states, except by their own citizens..."

    	The Real Threat Aboard the Freedom Flotilla
	By Noam Chomsky
	June 08, 2010
	In These Times

Israel’s violent attack on the Freedom Flotilla carrying humanitarian aid to 
Gaza shocked the world.

Hijacking boats in international waters and killing passengers is, of course, a 
serious crime.

But the crime is nothing new. For decades, Israel has been hijacking boats 
between Cyprus and Lebanon and killing or kidnapping passengers, sometimes 
holding them hostage in Israeli prisons.

Israel assumes that it can commit such crimes with impunity because the United 
States tolerates them and Europe generally follows the U.S.’s lead.

As the editors of The Guardian rightly observed on June 1, “If an armed group of 
Somali pirates had yesterday boarded six vessels on the high seas, killing at 
least 10 passengers and injuring many more, a NATO task force would today be 
heading for the Somali coast.” In this case, the NATO treaty obligates its 
members to come to the aid of a fellow NATO country — Turkey — attacked on the 
high seas.

Israel’s pretext for the attack was that the Freedom Flotilla was bringing 
materials that Hamas could use for bunkers to fire rockets into Israel.

The pretext isn’t credible. Israel can easily end the threat of rockets by 
peaceful means.

The background is important. Hamas was designated a major terrorist threat when 
it won a free election in January 2006. The U.S. and Israel sharply escalated 
their punishment of Palestinians, now for the crime of voting the wrong way.

The siege of Gaza, including a naval blockade, was a result. The siege 
intensified sharply in June 2007 after a civil war left Hamas in control of the 
territory.

What is commonly described as a Hamas military coup was in fact incited by the 
U.S. and Israel, in a crude attempt to overturn the elections that had brought 
Hamas to power.

That has been public knowledge at least since April 2008, when David Rose 
reported in Vanity Fair that George W. Bush, National Security Adviser 
Condoleezza Rice and her deputy, Elliott Abrams, “backed an armed force under 
Fatah strongman Muhammad Dahlan, touching off a bloody civil war in Gaza and 
leaving Hamas stronger than ever.”

Hamas terror included launching rockets into nearby Israeli towns — criminal, 
without a doubt, though only a minute fraction of routine U.S.-Israeli crimes in 
Gaza.

In June 2008, Israel and Hamas reached a cease-fire agreement. The Israeli 
government formally acknowledges that until Israel broke the agreement on Nov. 4 
of that year, invading Gaza and killing half a dozen Hamas activists, Hamas did 
not fire a single rocket.

Hamas offered to renew the cease-fire. The Israeli cabinet considered the offer 
and rejected it, preferring to launch its murderous invasion of Gaza on Dec.27.

Like other states, Israel has the right of self-defense. But did Israel have the 
right to use force in Gaza in the name of self-defense? International law, 
including the U.N. Charter, is unambiguous: A nation has such a right only if it 
has exhausted peaceful means. In this case such means were not even tried, 
although — or perhaps because — there was every reason to suppose that they 
would succeed.

Thus the invasion was sheer criminal aggression, and the same is true of 
Israel’s resorting to force against the flotilla.

The siege is savage, designed to keep the caged animals barely alive so as to 
fend off international protest, but hardly more than that. It is the latest 
stage of longstanding Israeli plans, backed by the U.S., to separate Gaza from 
the West Bank.

The Israeli journalist Amira Hass, a leading specialist on Gaza, outlines the 
history of the process of separation: “The restrictions on Palestinian movement 
that Israel introduced in January 1991 reversed a process that had been 
initiated in June 1967.

“Back then, and for the first time since 1948, a large portion of the 
Palestinian people again lived in the open territory of a single country — to be 
sure, one that was occupied, but was nevertheless whole. …”

Hass concludes: “The total separation of the Gaza Strip from the West Bank is 
one of the greatest achievements of Israeli politics, whose overarching 
objective is to prevent a solution based on international decisions and 
understandings and instead dictate an arrangement based on Israel’s military 
superiority.”

The Freedom Flotilla defied that policy and so it must be crushed.

A framework for settling the Arab-Israeli conflict has existed since 1976, when 
the regional Arab States introduced a Security Council resolution calling for a 
two-state settlement on the international border, including all the security 
guarantees of U.N. Resolution 242, adopted after the June War in 1967.

The essential principles are supported by virtually the entire world, including 
the Arab League, the Organization of Islamic States (including Iran) and 
relevant non-state actors, including Hamas.

But the U.S. and Israel have led the rejection of such a settlement for three 
decades, with one crucial and highly informative exception. In President Bill 
Clinton’s last month in office, January 2001, he initiated Israeli-Palestinian 
negotiations in Taba, Egypt, that almost reached an agreement, participants 
announced, before Israel terminated the negotiations.

Today, the cruel legacy of a failed peace lives on.

International law cannot be enforced against powerful states, except by their 
own citizens. That is always a difficult task, particularly when articulate 
opinion declares crime to be legitimate, either explicitly or by tacit adoption 
of a criminal framework — which is more insidious, because it renders the crimes 
invisible.

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