Israel does its best to protect its civilians from Hamas attack
AND HAMAS WAS TRUE TO ITS WORD
* Alan Johnson (Daily Telegraph): When Israel left Gaza in 2005 the Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon said: “We desire a life living side-by-side, in understanding and peace. Our goal [in disengaging] is that the Palestinians will be able to live in dignity and freedom in an independent state.”
The Hamas bomb-making chief Muhammed Deif replied instantly: “I thank Allah the exalted for his support in the Jihad of our people. To the Zionists we promise that tomorrow all of Palestine will become hell for you.”
And he was true to his word: as soon as Israel withdrew, Hamas quadrupled its rocket fire into Israel. In this way the terms were set for the Israel-Hamas relationship, and the appalling suffering of civilians on both sides.
***
* Mahmoud Abbas, the sometimes moderate, often ineffectual leader of the Palestinian Authority, just asked his rivals in Hamas a question that other bewildered people are also asking: “What are you trying to achieve by sending rockets?”
* Jeffrey Goldberg (Bloomberg News): “An answer to Abbas’s question: Hamas is trying to get Israel to kill as many Palestinians as possible. Dead Palestinians represent a crucial propaganda victory for the nihilists of Hamas. It is perverse, but true. It is also the best possible explanation for Hamas’s behavior, because Hamas has no other plausible strategic goal here. The men who run Hamas, engineers and doctors and lawyers by training, are smart enough to understand that though they wish to bring about the annihilation of the Jewish state and to replace it with a Muslim Brotherhood state, they are in no position to do so... There is no doubt that Hamas could protect Palestinian lives by ceasing its current campaign to end Israeli lives. The decision is Hamas’s.”
* The Israeli military has the operational capability to level the entire Gaza Strip in a day, if it so chooses. It is constrained by international pressure, and by its own morality.
* Even the most accommodationist (to the Palestinians) European governments know that Israel is within its right to hunt down the people trying to kill its citizens.
* Barham Salih, the former prime minister of the Kurdistan Regional Government, said: “Compare us to other liberation movements around the world. We are very mature. We don’t engage in terror. We don’t condone extremist nationalist notions that can only burden our people. Please compare what we have achieved in the Kurdistan national-authority areas to the Palestinian national authority. … We have spent the last 10 years building a secular, democratic society, a civil society.” What, he asked, have the Palestinians built?
* In 2005, the Palestinians of Gaza, free from their Israeli occupiers, could have taken a lesson from the Kurds -- and from David Ben-Gurion, the principal Israeli state-builder -- and created the necessary infrastructure for eventual freedom. Gaza is centrally located between two large economies, those of Israel and Egypt. Europe is just across the Mediterranean. Gaza could have easily attracted untold billions in economic aid. (The Israelis did not impose a blockade on Gaza right away. That came later, after the rocket and terror attacks.)
***
THE MEDIA REPORTS THE EXACT OPPOSITE OF WHAT INTERNATIONAL LAW SAYS
* Prof. Laurie Blank (The Hill): “International law has quite a lot to say about the latest violence that has flared up between Israel and Hamas. So do the media. Unfortunately, they rarely match, leading to unfortunate – and sometimes egregious – misrepresentations. In an age when both real and perceived violations of international law have a substantial effect on the legitimacy of state action, getting it wrong is way more than just bad journalism.
* The core purpose of the law of war – a centuries-old framework regulating conduct during wartime – is to protect civilians and minimize suffering during wartime. In any conflict, all parties – states, rebel groups, terrorist organizations – have obligations to minimize harm to civilians. Specifically, the law also criminalizes the use of civilians as human shields.”
* “It is particularly disheartening, therefore, when perversions of this law, through biased or faulty media coverage, effectively promote the very opposite result.”
* “Reports (in the New York Times and elsewhere) have described Israel’s comprehensive system of warnings to civilians before launching strikes in Gaza as ‘contentious’ and suggest that it is motivated solely by the desire to evade potential war crimes charges. Under the law of war, warnings are designed to protect civilians by giving them the opportunity to leave an area of hostilities and seek safety. Examples of such warnings include radio announcements, leaflets, or other generalized communications. Israel’s use of individualized, specific warnings by phone and text goes far beyond what the law requires – it is hard to imagine how they could possibly be described as ‘contentious,’ instead of unprecedented or protective.”
* “At the same time, the law of war does not require warnings before targeting enemy personnel – indeed, the law authorizes the use of lethal force as a first resort against enemy fighters and military objects. Imagine the absurdity of a system that required soldiers to give the enemy a chance to hide or plan an ambush by giving a warning before attacking: The United States did not warn German or Japanese soldiers before attacking them in World War II, nor should it have.”
* Using human shields is not a romanticized effort at neighborhood defense – it is a war crime. Using hospitals as munitions depots or sites for rocket launchers endangers every civilian who needs medical treatment, because once the hospital is used for military purposes, it loses its protection from attack.”
Tom Gross writes: This is another in an ongoing series of dispatches about the current conflict between Hamas and Israel. I attach three articles below, but for those who don’t have time to read them in full, I attach extracts above.
For those who missed them, other dispatches include:
* The song Israeli schoolchildren sing to deal with rocket attacks (& Hamas admit to using human shields)
* Video dispatch 26: Intensifying conflict as more rockets aimed at Tel Aviv
* BBC admits Gaza airstrike photos are fabricated (& Swastikas by the Western Wall)
* Let’s hope John Kerry and the EU don’t insist on their early release
* “From Gibraltar to the Khyber Pass, the U.S. shares values only with one country”
They can all be viewed here.
***
You can see these and other items that are not in these dispatches if you “like” this page: www.facebook.com/TomGrossMedia.
CONTENTS
1. “Is Hamas trying to get Palestinians killed?” (By Jeffrey Goldberg, Bloomberg, July 11, 2014)
2. “Getting the law right on the Israel-Hamas conflict” (By Laurie R. Blank, The Hill, July 11, 2014)
3. “Gaza: the ethical dilemmas of fighting terrorism” (By Alan Johnson, Daily Telegraph, July 12, 2014)
ARTICLES
HAMAS AIMS TO CREATE MANY MORE PALESTINIAN “MARTYRS”
Is Hamas Trying to Get Palestinians Killed?
By Jeffrey Goldberg
Bloomberg
July 11, 2014
Mahmoud Abbas, the sometimes moderate, often ineffectual leader of the Palestinian Authority, just asked his rivals in Hamas a question that other bewildered people are also asking: “What are you trying to achieve by sending rockets?”
The Gaza-based Hamas has recently fired more than 500 rockets at Israeli towns and cities. This has terrorized the citizenry, though caused few casualties, in large part because Israel is protected by the Iron Dome anti-rocket system.
In reaction to these indiscriminately fired missiles, Israel has bombarded targets across Gaza, killing roughly 100 people so far. Compared with violent death rates in other parts of the Middle East, the number is small. (More than 170,000 people have been killed in the Syrian civil war to date.) But it is large enough to suggest an answer to Abbas’s question: Hamas is trying to get Israel to kill as many Palestinians as possible.
Dead Palestinians represent a crucial propaganda victory for the nihilists of Hamas. It is perverse, but true. It is also the best possible explanation for Hamas’s behavior, because Hamas has no other plausible strategic goal here.
The men who run Hamas, engineers and doctors and lawyers by training, are smart enough to understand that though they wish to bring about the annihilation of the Jewish state and to replace it with a Muslim Brotherhood state (Hamas is the Palestinian branch of the Brotherhood), they are in no position to do so. Hamas is a militarily weak group, mostly friendless, that is firing rockets at the civilians of a powerful neighboring state.
The Israeli military has the operational capability to level the entire Gaza Strip in a day, if it so chooses. It is constrained by international pressure, by its own morality and by the understanding that the deaths of innocent Palestinians are not in its best political interest. The men who run Hamas -- the ones hiding in bunkers deep underground, the ones who send other people’s children to their deaths as suicide bombers -- also understand that their current campaign will not bring the end of Israel’s legitimacy as a state.
I’ve been struck, over the last few days, by the world’s indifference to Gaza’s fate. Perhaps this conflict has been demoted to the status of a Middle East sideshow by the cataclysms in Iraq and Syria. Perhaps even the most accommodationist European governments know that Israel is within its right to hunt down the people trying to kill its citizens. Regardless of the cause, Israel seems under less pressure than usual to curb its campaign.
There is no doubt that Hamas could protect Palestinian lives by ceasing its current campaign to end Israeli lives. The decision is Hamas’s. As the secretary-general of the United Nations, Ban Ki-moon, said yesterday, “We face the risk of an all-out escalation in Israel and Gaza, with the threat of a ground offensive still palpable -- and preventable only if Hamas stops rocket firing.”
I understand that this latest round in the never-ending Israel-Gaza war was, in many ways, a mistake. Israel was uninterested in an all-out confrontation with Hamas at the moment, and Hamas, which is trying to manage a threat to its control of Gaza from -- believe it or not -- groups even more radical and nihilistic than it is, is particularly ill-prepared to confront Israel.
The politics of the moment are fascinating and dreadful, but what really interests me currently is a counterfactual: What if, nine years ago, when Israel withdrew its soldiers and settlers from Gaza, the Palestinians had made a different choice. What if they chose to build the nucleus of a state, rather than a series of subterranean rocket factories?
This thought is prompted by something a pair of Iraqi Kurdish leaders once told me. Iraqi Kurdistan is today on the cusp of independence. Like the Palestinians, the Kurds deserve a state. Unlike most of the Palestinian leadership, the Kurds have played a long and clever game to bring them to freedom.
This is what Barham Salih, the former prime minister of the Kurdistan Regional Government, told me years ago: “Compare us to other liberation movements around the world. We are very mature. We don’t engage in terror. We don’t condone extremist nationalist notions that can only burden our people. Please compare what we have achieved in the Kurdistan national-authority areas to the Palestinian national authority. … We have spent the last 10 years building a secular, democratic society, a civil society.” What, he asked, have the Palestinians built?
So too, Massoud Barzani, the president of the Kurdistan Regional Government, once told me this: “We had the opportunity to use terrorism against Baghdad. We chose not to.”
In 2005, the Palestinians of Gaza, free from their Israeli occupiers, could have taken a lesson from the Kurds -- and from David Ben-Gurion, the principal Israeli state-builder -- and created the necessary infrastructure for eventual freedom. Gaza is centrally located between two large economies, those of Israel and Egypt. Europe is just across the Mediterranean. Gaza could have easily attracted untold billions in economic aid.
The Israelis did not impose a blockade on Gaza right away. That came later, when it became clear that Palestinian groups were considering using their newly liberated territory as a launching pad for attacks. In the days after withdrawal, the Israelis encouraged Gaza’s development. A group of American Jewish donors paid $14 million for 3,000 greenhouses* left behind by expelled Jewish settlers and donated them to the Palestinian Authority. The greenhouses were soon looted and destroyed, serving, until today, as a perfect metaphor for Gaza’s wasted opportunity.
If Gaza had, despite all the difficulties, despite all the handicaps imposed on it by Israel and Egypt, taken practical steps toward creating the nucleus of a state, I believe Israel would have soon moved to evacuate large sections of the West Bank as well. But what Hamas wants most is not a state in a part of Palestine. What it wants is the elimination of Israel. It will not achieve the latter, and it is actively thwarting the former.
***
* Tom Gross adds: For a photo essay on the burning of the greenhouses, please see here.
THE MEDIA MISREPORTS INTERNATIONAL LAW
Getting the law right on the Israel-Hamas conflict
By Laurie R. Blank
The Hill (Washington)
July 11, 2014
International law has quite a lot to say about the latest violence that has flared up between Israel and Hamas. So do the media. Unfortunately, they rarely match, leading to unfortunate – and sometimes egregious – misrepresentations. In an age when both real and perceived violations of international law have a substantial effect on the legitimacy of state action, getting it wrong is way more than just bad journalism.
The core purpose of the law of war – a centuries-old framework regulating conduct during wartime – is to protect civilians and minimize suffering during wartime. In any conflict, all parties – states, rebel groups, terrorist organizations – have obligations to minimize harm to civilians. For each party, these obligations take two primary forms: protecting civilians in the areas where it is attacking, and protecting its own civilians from the consequences of attacks by the enemy party. Attacking parties must 1) attack only enemy personnel and objects; 2) refrain from any indiscriminate attacks; 3) refrain from attacks in which the expected civilian casualties will be excessive in light of the military value of the target; and 4) provide warnings for civilians of attacks where feasible. In their own territory, militaries and armed groups must refrain from locating military objectives in densely populated areas and take other steps to keep civilians out of harm’s way. Specifically, the law also criminalizes the use of civilians as human shields.
It is particularly disheartening, therefore, when perversions of this law, through biased or faulty media coverage, effectively promote the very opposite result. Consider media coverage of Israeli strikes on targets in Gaza, of Hamas and Islamic Jihad’s rocket attacks on Israel, and of Hamas’s actions in Gaza.
First, reports have described Israel’s comprehensive system of warnings to civilians before launching strikes in Gaza as “contentious” and suggest that it is motivated solely by the desire to evade potential war crimes charges. Under the law of war, warnings are designed to protect civilians by giving them the opportunity to leave an area of hostilities and seek safety. Examples of such warnings include radio announcements, leaflets, or other generalized communications. Israel’s use of individualized, specific warnings by phone and text goes far beyond what the law requires – it is hard to imagine how they could possibly be described as “contentious,” instead of unprecedented or protective.
At the same time, the law of war does not require warnings before targeting enemy personnel – indeed, the law authorizes the use of lethal force as a first resort against enemy fighters and military objects. Imagine the absurdity of a system that required soldiers to give the enemy a chance to hide or plan an ambush by giving a warning before attacking: The United States did not warn German or Japanese soldiers before attacking them in World War II, nor should it have. Hamas militants are fighters, not civilians, and therefore are not entitled to protection from attack, just as Israeli soldiers are not protected from attack during conflict. It is the civilians of Gaza and Israel and every other conflict zone that the law seeks to protect, through a comprehensive web of protections and obligations.
Second, Hamas has announced that it is launching rockets at Haifa, at Tel Aviv, at Jerusalem and other Israeli cities. Not at military bases, army units, communication networks or any other military target, but at cities populated by hundreds of thousands, even millions of civilians. The law of war requires that parties distinguish between military and civilian targets and only attack military personnel and targets. Deliberate attacks on civilians and indiscriminate attacks – attacks that are incapable of distinguishing between legitimate targets and civilians – are prohibited and are war crimes.
Hamas and Islamic Jihad fire their rockets with either no regard for the distinction between military and civilian objects or with direct intention to harm civilians and civilian infrastructure. There is no question of taking precautions to protect civilians, whether through warnings or other required measures; rather, every single rocket attack violates the law’s most fundamental obligation to protect civilians. And yet the word “indiscriminate” rarely appears in descriptions of such rocket attacks.
Third, Hamas’s use of civilians and civilian buildings in Gaza as a shield is well known. Media reports tell of rockets being launched from residential buildings and schoolyards, munitions stored in houses, mosques and hospitals, Hamas leaders using civilian homes as command posts, and civilians being encouraged to go up on their roofs as human shields. These reports unfortunately rarely, if ever, mention that such conduct violates the law and, even more important, puts civilians at ever greater risk of death and injury.
Using human shields is not a romanticized effort at neighborhood defense – it is a war crime. Using hospitals as munitions depots or sites for rocket launchers endangers every civilian who needs medical treatment, because once the hospital is used for military purposes, it loses its protection from attack. Using houses for all manner of military activity amounts to using the civilian population as a shield and risks the life of every civilian in the neighborhood. This conduct demonstrates that Hamas not only views every civilian and every city in Israel as a target – which is wholly illegal – but that it also views every civilian and every neighborhood in Gaza as an expendable pawn in a propaganda war, a tragic and equally illegal approach.
Facilitating that conduct is an unfortunate and deadly consequence of media coverage that feeds misperceptions about how Israel and Hamas are fighting. Legitimizing lawful conduct would be far better, because law has an essential role to play in war; indeed, adherence to the law is a matter of life and death.
(Blank is clinical professor of law and director of the International Humanitarian Law Clinic at the Emory University School of Law.)
THE ETHICAL DILEMMAS OF FIGHTING TERRORISM
Gaza: the ethical dilemmas of fighting terrorism
By Alan Johnson
(London) Daily Telegraph (online)
July 12, 2014
-- “Our job is preventing terror. Yet we face a tragic dilemma. Whatever we decide when fighting terror, some innocent people are going to get hurt.” Amos Yadlin, former deputy commander of the Israel Air Force, now head of the Institute for National Security Studies, writing in 2004.
When Israel left Gaza in 2005 the Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon said: “We desire a life living side-by-side, in understanding and peace. Our goal [in disengaging] is that the Palestinians will be able to live in dignity and freedom in an independent state.”
The Hamas bomb-making chief Muhammed Deif replied instantly: “I thank Allah the exalted for his support in the Jihad of our people. To the Zionists we promise that tomorrow all of Palestine will become hell for you.”
And he was true to his word: as soon as Israel withdrew. Hamas quadrupled its rocket fire into Israel. In this way the terms were set for the Israel-Hamas relationship, and the appalling suffering of civilians on both sides.
The rockets held by Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad have become ever more potent: from the short-range and crude Qassams fired into Sderot in 2005 to the sophisticated Iranian-supplied Fajr-5, R160 and M-302 rockets of 2014, capable of reach Tel Aviv, Jerusalem and Zichron Ya’akov, 100 miles from Gaza.
Israel, then, cannot avoid grappling with an excruciating dilemma: how to use force against the terrorists of Gaza, without that force endangering the civilians of Gaza. It has developed three responses. None are foolproof.
First, intelligence. Each target is selected following long-term intelligence efforts indicating a direct link to terrorist infrastructure. I have sat with IAF spotters responsible for monitoring Gaza from the skies and seen how intimate and “real-time” is the relationship between intelligence and the use of force, and how dedicated those young soldiers are to getting it right. (The opening of the documentary The Gatekeepers captured this work and the dilemmas it throws up.)
Second, warning. Israel uses a variety of methods, each constantly refined, to avoid strikes causing civilian causalities. These methods include: leaflet drops, texting, phone calls to buildings that are going to be bombed, the use of pin point precision rockets, the use of the “knock on the roof” tactic – where Israel deploys a “scare” bomb which only makes noise in order to warn civilians leave the targeted area. Missions are aborted or altered, when they may cause civilian deaths, sometimes at huge cost to Israel. Amos Yadlin, former deputy commander of the Israel Air Force, recalls:
“In August 2002 we had all the leadership of Hamas in one room and we knew we needed a 2,000-pound bomb to eliminate all of them. Think about having Osama bin Laden and all the top leadership of al-Qaeda in one house. However, use of a 2,000-pound bomb was not approved – we used a much smaller bomb – and they all got up and ran away.”
Third, self-limitation. While the international law of war elevates military necessity in such a way it can be invoked to justify almost everything, Israel has deliberately limited its invocation of military necessity, requiring in addition:
“Purpose – the action must really help to defend Israeli citizens.
Intelligence and Proof – malicious intent and capacity must be confirmed and action must really save lives. (For example, when terrorists tried to use wire cutters to break through the fence but were unable to do so, they were monitored but ignored. When they came back the next night with better equipment, and broke through, they were engaged.)
Effectiveness – when there will be a lot of collateral damage, an alternative is taken.”
The fruits of these three responses to the dilemma – intelligence-gathering, warning civilians, and self-limitation – were seen in the 2008-9 round of conflict in Gaza, which took place before Israel had developed many of the methods used today to avoid casualties. As British Colonel Richard Kemp noted about that conflict:
“A United Nations study shows that the ratio of civilian to combatant deaths in Gaza was by far the lowest in any asymmetric conflict in the history of warfare. The UN estimate that there has been an average three-to one ratio of civilian to combatant deaths in such conflicts worldwide. Three civilians for every combatant killed. That is the estimated ratio in Afghanistan: three to one. In Iraq, and in Kosovo, it was worse: the ratio is believed to be four-to-one. Anecdotal evidence suggests the ratios were very much higher in Chechnya and Serbia. In Gaza, it was less than one-to-one.”
In the 2012 Gazan conflict. 1,600 Israeli strikes against long-range missiles and terror infrastructure caused 60-70 Palestinian civilian deaths. Each was a tragedy. Absolutely. But the ratio of combatant to non-combatant deaths was without precedent in modern warfare.
So why, despite those efforts, do civilian casualties still happen, if there is an absence of intent?
First, it is in the very nature of what the military theorist Carl von Clausewitz famously called “the fog of war” – intelligence is always incomplete, sometimes mistaken, while soldiers and planners are not just subject to human limit like anyone else but have to act in a fevered and terrifying climate.
For example, the deaths of eight non-combatants in an Israel Air Force strike in Khan Yunis on the house of a terrorist leader on Tuesday was a tragic case of the fog of war. Israeli security forces told family members by phone that the house was going to be bombed. The IAF also carried out a “knock on the roof”, sending a small missile, without an explosive warhead, onto the building’s roof to warn the strike was imminent. They family left, but seem to have returned to the house just as the missile meant to destroy the home was fired. ‘There was nothing to be done, the munition was in the air and could not be diverted,” said a senior air force officer. “Although you see [the family members] running back into the house, there was no way to divert the missile.’
Second, the awesome destructive power of modern munitions means that their sustained use within urban settings in which combatants and non-combatants are co-mingled, will always – despite every effort – produce civilian casualties.
Third, Hamas engineers the co-mingling of combatants and non-combatants. It consistently and intentionally uses the people of Gaza as human shields and deliberately locates rockets in populated areas, inside housing complexes, mosques, hospitals and schools. Hamas is even using the IDF’s early warnings to encourage civilians to gather on buildings being targeted as human shields, whilst its commanders hide underground. (It may be that Hamas urged a return to the house in Khan Yunis.)
David Cameron has been talking this week about the dilemma he faces balancing security and human rights. Whatever position one takes on the proposed legislation he feels is needed, the dilemma he identifies is real. This dilemma faces democratic societies the world over, and Israel has reckoned with it for a lot longer. In a world departing from the norms of human behaviour by the day, the Israeli experience is one we can’t afford to ignore.