WSJ Editorial Accuses Israel of Committing War Crimes in Gaza
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An editorial published by the Wall Street Journal is accusing Israel of violating international law and committing war crimes in its offensive against the Gaza Strip. George Bisharat writes that “Israel’s current assault on the Gaza Strip cannot be justified by self-defense.” He adds that the Gaza offensive “involves serious violations of international law, including war crimes. Senior Israeli political and military leaders may bear personal liability for their offenses, and they could be prosecuted by an international tribunal, or by nations practicing universal jurisdiction”.
Bisharat argues that while Hamas has also violated the laws of war, “[its] misdeeds do not justify Israel’s acts”. A key part of the criticism seems to be that Israel’s offensive could ultimately undermine its own security, which is in part guaranteed by the force with which other nations abide by international law’s protections for the sovereignty of nations and the right for a society to live free of attacks on civilians.
Bisharat, a law professor in California, acknowledges that the UN Charter preserves the right of states to retaliate against armed attack, but argues that an armed attack on a sovereign state must include “serious violations of the peace”, not minor or even persistent “border skirmishes”. He argues that such security problems are not enough to warrant the unilateral resort to armed conflict, in part because they are so common, in so many parts of the world, that minor actions by rogue elements could lead to the vast expansion of armed conflict and the effective negation of any international bans on staging armed invasions or military actions.
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Noting the history of the ongoing conflict, the editorial reports that:
Since firing the first Kassam rocket into Israel in 2002, Hamas and other Palestinian groups have loosed thousands of rockets and mortar shells into Israel, causing about two dozen Israeli deaths and widespread fear. As indiscriminate attacks on civilians, these were war crimes. During roughly the same period, Israeli forces killed about 2,700 Palestinians in Gaza by targeted killings, aerial bombings, in raids, etc., according to the Israeli human rights group B’Tselem.
The truce entered into last summer by Israel and Hamas was meant to end that ongoing “low-intensity conflict”. Both sides technically violated terms of the truce. Hamas did not disarm and eventually resumed its rocket attacks into Israel, while Israel failed to reach the provisions of the truce in easing its blockade of Gaza, keeping Gazans in an untenable state of food, water, medical and electricity deprivation.
Both sides argue their reluctance to follow the truce 100% was either an effort to urge the other side to cooperate more or a retaliation against perceived security breaches against its people by the other side. Israel’s ongoing policy of unilateral raids and/or “targetted killings” in the West Bank, where the Israel-Hamas truce did not apply, prompted Hamas to escalate its use of rocket attacks as retaliation. The truce was effectively a partial truce the entire time, and Bisharat argues that there was no single “armed attack” that altered or diminished Israel’s security, which led to the Gaza offensive.
The leadership of the Kadima national unity party, led at present by Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, and soon to be taken over by PM-candidate Tzipi Livni, has sought what appears to be an “innovative” approach to retaliatory armed strikes on security grounds: essentially, that the situation cannot go on seems to be the guiding principle.
It is as if the logic of the Gaza offensive —as seen through the lens of international law— were that having continued to fail to cease all attacks by 27 December 2008 were the moment of a fundamental violation of human decency, the proverbial “straw that broke the camel’s back”. What is not clear is whether it can be demonstrated that at that particular moment, Israel’s security in fact suffered any grave and traceable deterioration, or whether it was simply a threshold moment, psychologically, politically or tactically, and whether any of those specific qualities amounts to a significant “armed attack” on a sovereign state.
Bisharat accuses Israel of having “failed to adequately discriminate between military and nonmilitary targets.” He points to the destruction of “mosques, the education and justice ministries, a university, prisons, courts and police stations”, all institutions of “civilian infrastructure”, and so generally considered not legitimate military targets.
He goes on to accuse Israel, on the basis of these attacks on civil service infrastructure of deliberate action against civilians: “Deliberate attacks on civilians that lack strict military necessity are war crimes.” Legally speaking, it is also necessary to attempt to assess what the reasoning is behind a given act of violence, whether legitimate or not, and Bisharat notes that employees of a government led by an unsavory ideological movement cannot be stripped of basic protections solely because they may or may not share that ideology:
Civilian employees in the Hamas-led government deserve the protections of international law like all others. Hamas’s ideology — which employees may or may not share — is abhorrent, but civilized nations do not kill people merely for what they think.
There are mounting fears that Olmert’s wars, grouping the 2006 Lebanon invasion with the current Gaza invasion, may have an extreme adverse effect on Israel’s long-term security, strengthening its enemies, sowing massive resistance in the youngest generation of Palestinians or southern Lebanese, and undermining the likelihood of any real political solution that permits Israel’s rivals to accept its terms.
After more than two decades of insistent and aggressive support for the settler movement, Ariel Sharon acknowledged that the concept had been designed to work as a military strategy, to get a security foothold in territory “the enemy” wanted to control, and that it had failed to deliver and settlements would have to be dismantled, by force if necessary, if the security promised by a viable two-state solution is to become a reality.
Now, we are looking at the possibility that Olmert is very deliberately organizing and implementing an aggressive security posture that is having literally catastrophic consequences for any hope of a viable two-state solution, dismantling the entire infrastructure and apparatus of civil society in Gaza, creating the conditions for a prolonged situation of chaos, disorder, and economic and political malaise. Some analysts fear it could be the end of the two-state solution, which most pro-Israel pragmatists believe is an unqualified necessity for Israel’s long-term security.
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