Thursday, January 22, 2009
Hamas, a party of religious fascists, editorial from Riposte Laïque
Several years ago, I was interested in a public meeting in Paris suburbs, by the League of Human Rights. The theme was peace in the Middle East, what works? Hoping to learn things, I was in the audience, surrounded by 500 people. At the forum, among others, sat the host of this debate, Daniel Mermet, the then President of the LDH, Michel Tubiana, Leila Shahid, Palestinian Authority representative in France, Bernard Ravenel representing the Committee on Palestine and a representative of the French Jewish Union for Peace (UJFP), speaking with a strong English accent.
The forum took the floor for two and a half hours. I was amazed at the oneness of all speeches. Israel was the evil aggressor, and Palestinians innocent victims. Daniel Mermet adding to each transition in this Manichean vision. He apologized after the last speech from the hall and explained that very little time for debate, therefore asked the potential stakeholders to be very brief. I pounce on the microphone, and asked for five minutes.
Irritated, Mermet gave me three. A little upset, I begin by saying that the conflict was fueled by two extremes, the far-right Jewish religious and right-wing religious Islamist. I explained that people wanted a greater Israel, freed of the Palestinians, and that others wanted to remove the State of Israel from the map. So I did express my surprise at the fact we have not yet decided once the name of Hamas. I say what really quickly Hamas and the political line he defended. At the forum, it started to jiggle nervously, and tried to interrupt me Mermet. I him a minute to conclude.
I added that I appreciated in France, Jews and Arabs have been able to work together against the National Front, in SOS Racism, and that the solution to the Middle East, could see the day when each side isolate religious extremists and his defending a secular society. I conclude by saying that I wanted more balanced meetings, from the LDH, for greater credibility of the goal: peace. A great silence accompanied my intervention and was succeeded by a few long seconds where we could hear a fly fly.
Apparently angered by my words, Mermet passed the floor to Tubiana. It began to say that the rise of Islamophobia and racism in France was serious. I interrupted the room telling him that I had not uttered the word Islamophobia, and I prayed to respond to what I said. While Mermet had announced that the meeting was to end in the minutes that followed, various speakers took the floor again an hour to meet me, often painstakingly, and justify their silence on Hamas.
Why start this first editorial of the year by that old story? Because it illustrates the drift of a section of the Left, political, associative and association, on the Palestinian question. To be published in Issue 69, the charter of Hamas, and have described as racist, sexist and of totalitarian and for not having married compassionate politically correct speech, our newspaper (see abundant letters ) has been extremely strong reactions, and sometimes abuse, from some opponents.
According to some, we would monsters indifferent to the suffering of the people of Gaza, and would be tolerant of the massacres of the State of Israel, colonialist, racist, fascist, who wants to exterminate the Palestinians as Hitler wanted to do away with Jews (for short).
As would be comfortable if the world were so simple. We would like to say that the fascists who killed the communists. Unfortunately, the facts are stubborn, Stalin killed more communists and Hitler, for example, there is evidence that 8000 Polish officers were executed in Katyn forest, with a bullet in the head, not by the Nazis as has long claimed the official version, but by the Red Army, which does not detract from the horror of the Nazi regime.
Since it would be comfortable today, in the same spirit, for many activists, to explain the woes of the Arab peoples by the sole fault of the Hebrew state. Of course, Palestinians killed in Israeli assaults which, remember, the politico-military targets Hamas. Any civilian casualties, even a child, is still a victim too. But can we hide the fact that the Hamas claim of using women and children as human shields? Has it existed historically, war clean, even for just causes and progressive?
Need I remind the other hand, thousands of Palestinians killed during Operation "Black September" in the 1970s by the Jordanians, the dead by the thousands, Shiites or Sunnis in Iraq and elsewhere, response to suicide bombings, also espoused by Hamas, killing several hundred activists of the Palestinian Authority, lynched without trial at the putch Hamas in Gaza, are not the result of the Zionist state? The tragedy of Darfur is not the fact of U.S. imperialism and its ally Israel, but the Islamist militias. Write it in no way detracts from the criminal attitude of the United States against Iraq, but requires a vision of the history a little less biased and compassionate.
Furthermore, a reading of the geo-political world, as written in 2005 by General Gallois is also useful for understanding the global context in which this conflict takes place.
Of course, the secular can not be found in certain positions in the State of Israel, and the pressure exercised what some religious circles. How can a democratic country can accept the need to marry abroad to see a civil marriage recognized? But if secularism is the freedom of conscience, there is no comparison between the democratic system in place in Israel, and the totalitarian logic of Hamas. Remember that for him the only solution in Palestine is the submission to Allah, the destruction of Israel, the extermination of the Jews and the imposition of sharia law, women in particular. For a woman, a homosexual, to a layman, for a progressive, is it better to live according to the principles applied in Israel, or the rules in force today in Gaza?
The fascination of a part of the left to totalitarian models yesterday Stalinism today Islamism, rebellion still those of us who believe that the social struggle can not hide a vision of society where, in addition to freedom of conscience and democratic rights, equality between men and women is a value with which we can not compromise.
However, in the name of a Marxist who is among the colonized peoples and colonizers, who yesterday showed complacency with criminal bureaucrats Stalinists, Trotskyites or many orphans who seem wall, repeated today, Today this appalling mistake, some even in light of Hamas, Hezbollah in the past, representatives of the poor and oppressed, as the novelist Thierry Jonquet in a magnificent published two years ago.
It is also curious that this blindness that led to the left fringe to have fought, sometimes with virulence, the campaign for a law against religious symbols in schools. They are also the ones who close their eyes, every day, before the offensive of Islam in France and Europe, against secularism, the Republic and the rights of women. What can they respond to Sarkozy when he defends secularism positive, they defend this thesis with Islam for 20 years! Have you noticed that we hear very little about the provocations Dieudonné giving the floor to Faurisson?
Some believe that the essential divide in a democratic society, would be the social and wealth distribution. They believe that the claim of religion of the poor and oppressed the right to take any liberties with our Republican principles. Well, no!
We can not have a society with people who accompany the offensive Islamist fascists, even if the activists say things just on the distribution of wealth and scandalous social inequality.
We do not want to live in a country where Muslim enclaves are becoming more and develop on our territory propaganda of Hamas, and its draft fascist society.
We do not want to see mosques invade more and more public space, much less when they are paid with our sub!
We do not want to hear religious Jews claim arrangements for the Saturday school, or other churches claim reasonable accommodations with secular principles and the law of 1905.
We note that those who now accuse Israel of war crimes and demonstrate against this (without worrying about the windfall that it is crazy for Allah), are not in the street when suicide bombings cause thousands of deaths, the United States, Britain, France, Spain, Algeria, Morocco, Tunisia, Egypt, Iraq, Indonesia, and throughout the world where the culture of rampant death, on behalf of the prophet. Too bad for Muslims and Arab peoples, first victims of religious fascism, we should not distract the masses of the one true battle: the one against U.S. imperialism and its Zionist ally. Hence the events where the flags of Hamas alongside those of the PCF (ie: French Communist Party) or the LCR! (Ed.: Revolutionary Communist League)
Yesterday, he had shut the realities of Stalinist regimes, not to despair Billancourt, and not divert the masses of the struggle against the bourgeois state. At another time, on behalf of revolutionary defeatism, it should not fight against Nazi Germany, when it was France, because it was promoting its own imperialism!
When a little common sense and the recognition that the defense of secular values, feminist, humanistic, democratic have more importance than ideological visions of the world where we end up defending religious fascists because they represent the oppressed (they also have nothing to do, their only prospect is to impose the jihad in the world).
As recently wrote Henri Guaino decidedly sometimes prevent labels of thinking.
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Labels: Gaza, Israel, Palestine, Terrorism
Sunday, January 11, 2009
Did Israel Use "Disproportionate Force" in Gaza?, by Dore Gold
Israeli population centers in southern Israel have been the target of over 4,000 rockets, as well as thousands of mortar shells, fired by Hamas and other organizations since 2001. Rocket attacks increased by 500 percent after Israel withdrew completely from the Gaza Strip in August 2005. During an informal six-month lull, some 215 rockets were launched at Israel.
The charge that Israel uses disproportionate force keeps resurfacing whenever it has to defend its citizens from non-state terrorist organizations and the rocket attacks they perpetrate. From a purely legal perspective, Israel's current military actions in Gaza are on solid ground.
According to international law, Israel is not required to calibrate its use of force precisely according to the size and range of the weaponry used against it.
Ibrahim Barzak and Amy Teibel wrote for the Associated Press on December 28 that most of the 230 Palestinians who were reportedly killed were "security forces," and Palestinian officials said "at least 15 civilians were among the dead." The numbers reported indicate that there was no clear intent to inflict disproportionate collateral civilian casualties. What is critical from the standpoint of international law is that if the attempt has been made "to minimize civilian damage, then even a strike that causes large amounts of damage - but is directed at a target with very large military value - would be lawful."
Luis Moreno-Ocampo, the Chief Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, explained that international humanitarian law and the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court "permit belligerents to carry out proportionate attacks against military objectives, even when it is known that some civilian deaths or injuries will occur." The attack becomes a war crime when it is directed against civilians (which is precisely what Hamas does).
After 9/11, when the Western alliance united to collectively topple the Taliban regime in Afghanistan, no one compared Afghan casualties in 2001 to the actual numbers that died from al-Qaeda's attack. There clearly is no international expectation that military losses in war should be on a one-to-one basis. To expect Israel to hold back in its use of decisive force against legitimate military targets in Gaza is to condemn it to a long war of attrition with Hamas.
Israel is currently benefiting from a limited degree of understanding in international diplomatic and media circles for launching a major military operation against Hamas on December 27. Yet there are significant international voices that are prepared to argue that Israel is using disproportionate force in its struggle against Hamas.
Israeli Population Centers Under Rocket Attack
There are good reasons why initial criticism of Israel has been muted. After all, Israeli population centers in southern Israel have been the target of over 4,000 rockets, as well as thousands of mortar shells, fired by Hamas and other organizations since 2001. The majority of those attacks were launched after Israel withdrew completely from the Gaza Strip in August 2005. Indeed, rocket attacks increased by 500 percent (from 179 to 946) from 2005 to 2006.
Moreover, lately Hamas has been extending the range of its striking capability even further with new rockets supplied by Iran. Hamas used a 20.4-kilometer-range Grad/Katyusha for the first time on March 28, 2006, bringing the Israeli city of Ashkelon into range of its rockets for the first time. That change increased the number of Israelis under threat from 200,000 to half a million. Moreover, on December 21, 2008, Yuval Diskin, Head of the Israel Security Agency, informed the Israeli government that Hamas had acquired rockets that could reach Ashdod, Kiryat Gat, and even the outskirts of Beersheba. The first Grad/Katyusha strike on Ashdod, in fact, took place on December 28. There had been no formal cease-fire between Israel and Hamas, but only an informal six-month tahadiya (lull), during which 215 rockets were launched at Israel. On December 21, Hamas unilaterally announced that the tahadiya had ended.
Critical Voices
On December 27, 2008, UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon's spokesmen issued a statement saying that while the Secretary-General recognized "Israel's security concerns regarding the continued firing of rockets from Gaza," he reiterated "Israel's obligation to uphold international humanitarian and human rights law." The statement specifically noted that he "condemns excessive use of force leading to the killing and injuring of civilians [emphasis added]."
A day later, Navi Pillay, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights "strongly condemned Israel's disproportionate use of force." French President Nicolas Sarkozy, who holds the rotating presidency of the European Union, also condemned Israel's "disproportionate use of force," while demanding an end to rocket attacks on Israel. Brazil also joined this chorus, criticizing Israel's "disproportionate response." Undoubtedly, a powerful impression has been created by large Western newspaper headlines that describe massive Israeli airstrikes in Gaza, without any up-front explanation for their cause.
Proportionality and International Law: The Protection of Innocent Civilians
The charge that Israel uses disproportionate force keeps resurfacing whenever it has to defend its citizens from non-state terrorist organizations and the rocket attacks they perpetrate. From a purely legal perspective, Israel's current military actions in Gaza are on solid ground. According to international law, Israel is not required to calibrate its use of force precisely according to the size and range of the weaponry used against it (Israel is not expected to make Kassam rockets and lob them back into Gaza).
When international legal experts use the term "disproportionate use of force," they have a very precise meaning in mind. As the President of the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in The Hague, Rosalyn Higgins, has noted, proportionality "cannot be in relation to any specific prior injury - it has to be in relation to the overall legitimate objective of ending the aggression." In other words, if a state, like Israel, is facing aggression, then proportionality addresses whether force was specifically used by Israel to bring an end to the armed attack against it. By implication, force becomes excessive if it is employed for another purpose, like causing unnecessary harm to civilians. The pivotal factor determining whether force is excessive is the intent of the military commander. In particular, one has to assess what was the commander's intent regarding collateral civilian damage.
What about reports concerning civilian casualties? Some international news agencies have stressed that the vast majority of those killed in the first phase of the current Gaza operation were Hamas operatives. Ibrahim Barzak and Amy Teibel wrote for the Associated Press on December 28 that most of the 230 Palestinians who were reportedly killed were "security forces," and Palestinian officials said "at least 15 civilians were among the dead." It is far too early to definitely assess Palestinian casualties, but even if they increase, the numbers reported indicate that there was no clear intent to inflict disproportionate collateral civilian casualties.
During the Second Lebanon War, Professor Michael Newton of Vanderbilt University was in email communication with William Safire of the New York Times about the issue of proportionality and international law. Newton had been quoted by the Council on Foreign Relations as explaining proportionality by proposing a test: "If someone punches you in the nose, you don't burn down their house." He was serving as an international criminal law expert in Baghdad and sought to correct the impression given by his quote. According to Newton, no responsible military commander intentionally targets civilians, and he accepted that this was Israeli practice.
What was critical from the standpoint of international law was that if the attempt had been made "to minimize civilian damage, then even a strike that causes large amounts of damage - but is directed at a target with very large military value - would be lawful." Numbers matter less than the purpose of the use of force. Israel has argued that it is specifically targeting facilities serving the Hamas regime and its determined effort to continue its rocket assault on Israel: headquarters, training bases, weapons depots, command and control networks, and weapons-smuggling tunnels. This way Israel is respecting the international legal concept of proportionality.
Alternatively, disproportionality would occur if the military sought to attack even if the value of a target selected was minimal in comparison with the enormous risk of civilian collateral damage. This point was made by Luis Moreno-Ocampo, the Chief Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, on February 9, 2006, in analyzing the Iraq War. He explained that international humanitarian law and the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court "permit belligerents to carry out proportionate attacks [emphasis added] against military objectives, even when it is known that some civilian deaths or injuries will occur." The attack becomes a war crime when it is directed against civilians (which is precisely what Hamas does) or when "the incidental civilian injuries would be clearly excessive in relation to the anticipated military advantage." In fact, Israeli legal experts right up the chain of command within the IDF make this calculation before all military operations of this sort.
Proportionality as a Strategic Issue
Moving beyond the question of international law, the charge that Israel is using a disproportionate amount of force in the Gaza Strip because of reports of Palestinian casualties has to be looked at critically. Israelis have often said among themselves over the last seven years that when a Hamas rocket makes a direct strike on a crowded school, killing many children, then Israel will finally act.
This scenario raises the question of whether the doctrine of proportionality requires that Israel wait for this horror to occur, or whether Israel could act on the basis of the destructive capability of the arsenal Hamas already possesses, the hostile declarations of intent of its leaders, and its readiness to use its rocket forces already. Alan Dershowitz noted two years ago: "Proportion must be defined by reference to the threat proposed by an enemy and not by the harm it has produced." Waiting for a Hamas rocket to fall on an Israeli school, he rightly notes, would put Israel in the position of allowing "its enemies to play Russian Roulette with its children."
The fundamental fact is that in fighting terrorism, no state is willing to play Russian Roulette. After the U.S. was attacked on 9/11, the Western alliance united to collectively topple the Taliban regime in Afghanistan; no one compared Afghan casualties in 2001 to the actual numbers that died from al-Qaeda's attack. Given that al-Qaeda was seeking non-conventional capabilities, it was essential to wage a campaign to deny it the sanctuary it had enjoyed in Afghanistan, even though that struggle continues right up to the present.
Is There Proportionality Against Military Forces?
And in fighting counterinsurgency wars, most armies seek to achieve military victory by defeating the military capacity of an adversary, as efficiently as possible. There clearly is no international expectation that military losses in war should be on a one-to-one basis; most armies seek to decisively eliminate as many enemy forces as possible while minimizing their own losses of troops. There are NATO members who have been critical of "Israel's disproportionate use of force," while NATO armies take pride in their "kill ratios" against the Taliban in Afghanistan. Moreover, decisive military action against an aggressor has another effect: it increases deterrence. To expect Israel to hold back in its use of decisive force against legitimate military targets in Gaza is to condemn it to a long war of attrition with Hamas.
The loss of any civilian lives is truly regrettable. Israel has cancelled many military operations because of its concern with civilian casualties. But should civilian losses occur despite the best efforts of Israel to avoid them, it is ultimately not Israel's responsibility. As political philosopher Michael Walzer noted in 2006: "When Palestinian militants launch rocket attacks from civilian areas, they are themselves responsible - and no one else is - for the civilian deaths caused by Israeli counterfire."
International critics of Israel may be looking to craft balanced statements that spread the blame for the present conflict to both sides. But they would be better served if they did not engage in this artificial exercise, and clearly distinguish the side that is the aggressor in this conflict - Hamas - and the side that is trying to defeat the aggression - Israel.
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Labels: Gaza, Israel, Palestine
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