Criminals walk free

Yesterday Eli Stephens at Left I on the news made this insightful observation,

…imagine an admittedly improbable circumstance - a Hamas rocket firing squad has managed to infiltrate Sderot, and fires their rocket from in front of a school or hospital in Sderot. Do you really think for one second that the Israelis would fire on those people, knowing that the dozen or so civilians they would be killing at the sam time would be Israelis rather than Palestinians? Of course they wouldn't. Because they value Israeli lives, while to them, the lives of innocent Palestinians are worth nothing. That's genocide.

I don’t agree that evidence of a racist approach to targeting noncombatants alone demonstrates genocidal intent. ‘But in a non-legal sense, "genocide" involves the killing of people because of their religion or nationality. Which is precisely what is going on in Gaza right now,’ Eli writes. Again, genocide does typically involve such killing, what makes it genocidal is the intent.

But then, that’s hardly at issue. For reference, here’s the definition from Article 2 of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, which Israel has ratified [emphasis added].

In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:

1. Killing members of the group;
2. Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
3. Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
4. Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
5. Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.

Israel claims, and will doubtless continue to claim, that it never targets civilians. And by and large the world’s ‘leaders’ will echo them. But it’s got to the point now where even the media are forced to question this, if only sporadically, when the IOF guides its precision guided weaponry pretty consistently at hospitals, schools, and private homes and fully a third of those killed are kids. When they can no longer sustain the illusion that that’s all just unfortunate but unavoidable collateral damage, they will resort to the worn out casuistry, ‘But the Palestinians didn’t exist as a distinct “national, ethnical, racial or religious group” until we came’. Even if the sophists of the hasbara establishment could prove such a thing, they are one now.

In fact, even before the ‘outbreak of hostilities’ whose consequences we are now witnessing with horror and rage, the siege of Gaza certainly qualifies as ‘Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part’.

Eli also observes that ‘international law is pretty much of a joke anyway. War crimes trials are reserved for the weak and the defeated, while far bigger war criminals walk free.’ This is not only empirically the case, but actually inherent in the nature of international law. Consider a scenario where the long sought Security Council veto wielded by the US, UK, France, Russia and China is abolished and a resolution was passed under Chapter 7 of the UN Charter calling, for instance, on the US to cease its aggression against Iraq. A UN force would need to be assembled capable of taking on and defeating the US military. Even if all other member states contributed to the force, it would be a big ask, if not downright impossible. But since it is inconceivable that countries embroiled in military alliances with the US or dependent upon the US economically or politically would participate, is is simply out of the question. Ultimately, international law is only enforceable against the weak, as Eli says, and therefore can only serve as some kind of moral guidance for states. As you’ve probably noticed, states have never exhibited a proclivity to act in accordance with the kinds of moral principles that sometimes guide individual human beings’ actions.

So despite the incontrovertible evidence that confronts us every minute that Israel is in breach of its obligations under the Convention, I’m not expecting to see Tzipi Livni et al. in the dock at the Hague any time soon.

In another penetrating insight I came across yesterday, Jonathan Cook writes,

In September 2007, the international media reported that 69 Israeli soldiers had been wounded when Palestinian militants fired a rocket into the Zikim army base near the Gaza Strip. The rocket struck a tent where the soldiers were sleeping.

It is worth noting the details of the attack. Israeli officials related that, of the 69 wounded, 11 had moderate or severe injuries and one was critically injured. A few more had light wounds. The rest, probably 50 or more, were injured in the sense that they were suffering from shock.

So, if we apply the same standard to Gaza, that would mean 1.5 million Gazans have been wounded. Or is there still some doubt about whether the weeks of bombardment of Gaza, one of the most densely populated places on earth, have left the entire civilian population in a deep, and possibly permanent, state of shock?

I’m not holding my breath for the mainstream media to start reporting 1.5 million casualties. The press is not sensitive to accusations of double standards and racism. After all, they are the paragon of professional, objective, dispassionate reporting.

Another thing I finally got around to reading yesterday was the 7 January MERIP report, ‘Birth Pangs of a New Palestine’ by Mouin Rabbani.

A is for Alienation

This morning, Ratbert made this profound observation.

Which reminded me of Alex Glasgow’s classic song. It’s actually on Rick Kuhn’s Marxism page, but Google took me to this other page first.

The Socialist ABC
(by Alex Glasgow) (PRS)

When that I was and a little, tiny boy,
Me daddy said to me,
'The time has come, me bonny, bonny bairn,
To learn your ABC.'

Now Daddy was a lodge chairman
In the coalfields of the Tyne
And his ABC was different
From the Enid Blyton kind.

He sang, 'A is for Alienation
That made me the man that I am, and

B's for the Boss who's a Bastard,
A Bourgeois who don't give a damn.

C is for Capitalism,
The bosses' reactionary creed, and

D's for Dictatorship, laddie,
But the best proletarian breed.

E is for Exploitation
That workers have suffered so long, and

F is for old Ludwig Feuerbach,
The first one to say it was wrong.

G is all Gerrymanderers,
Like Lord Muck and Sir Whatsisname, and

H is the Hell that they'll go to
When the workers have kindled the flame.

I's for Imperialism,
And America's kind is the worst, and

J is for sweet Jingoism,
That the Tories all think of the first.

K is for good old Kier Hardy,
Who fought out the working class fight, and

L is for Vladimir Lenin,
Who showed him the left was all right.

M is of course for Karl Marx,
The daddy and the mommy of them all, and

N is for Nationalisation -
Without it we'd tumble and fall.

O is for Overproduction,
That capitalist economy brings, and

P is for all Private Property,
The greatest of all of the sins.

Q's for the Quid pro quo,
That we'll deal out so well and so soon, when

R for Revolution is shouted and
The Red Flag becomes the top tune.

S is for Sad Stalinism
That gave us all such a bad name, and

T is for Trotsky, the hero,
Who had to take all of the blame.

U's for the Union of Workers -
The Union will stand to the end, and

V is for Vodka, yes, Vodka,
The vun drink that vont bring the bends.

W's for all Willing Workers,
And that's where the memory fades,

For X, Y, and Zed,' my dear daddy said,
'Will be written on the street barricades.'

Now that I'm not a little tiny boy,
Me daddy says to me,
'Please try to forget those thing that I said,
Especially the ABC.'

For daddy is no longer a union man,
And he's had to change his plea.
His alphabet is different now,
Since they made him a Labour MP.

And that inevitably reminded me that:

I hate the capitalist system,
And I’ll tell you the reason why:
It has caused me so much suffering,
And my dearest friends to die.

Well, I know you all are wondering
What it has done to me.
Well I am going to tell you
That my husband has TB.

Brought on by hard work and low wages,
And never enough to eat,
From going cold and hungry,
With no shoes upon his feet.

My husband was a coal miner
Who worked hard and risked his life,
Just trying to support three children,
Himself, his mother and wife.

Well I had a blue-eyed baby
Was the darling of my heart.
But from my little darling
Her mother had to part.

While the rich and mighty capitalist
Goes dressed goes dressed in jewels and silk,
My darling blue-eyed baby
Has died for the want of milk.

Well they call this the land of plenty,
And for them I guess it’s true,
For the rich and mighty capitalist,
Not for workers like me and you.

Well what can we do about it
To these men of power and light?
Well I tell you, Mr Capitalist,
We are going to fight, fight, fight!

(Words and music by © 1965 Sara Ogan Gunning)

Those are the lyrics I transcribed from the liner notes of Barbara Dane’s eponymous 1965 album. Sarah Ogan Gunning’s original lyrics for a version she recorded entitled, ‘I hate the company bosses’, are also online.

Eli Stephens has been posting some ancient classic songs from his amazing collection of vinyl over at Left I on the news. If you’ve never heard these songs, watch his blog. Maybe he’ll put the audio up some time.