Human shields

Back in August, I posted on Jonathan Cook’s discussion of Israeli use of Israeli citizens as human shields in last year’s Lebanon war. In an important new article in yesterday’s Counterpunch, he provides new evidence that it was overwhelmingly Israel and not Hizb’allah that was ‘cowardly blending’ with the civilian population and the inconsistent approach that the Human Rights Watch reports adopted to war crimes.

HRW did made a brief reference to the possibility that Israeli military installations were located close to or inside civilian communities. It cited examples of a naval training base next to a hospital in Haifa and a weapons factory built in a civilian community. Its researchers even admitted to watching the Israeli army firing shells into Lebanon from a residential street of the Jewish community of Zarit.

This act of “cowardly blending” by the Israeli army -- to echo the UN envoy Jan Egeland’s unwarranted criticism of Hizbullah -- was a war crime. It made Israeli civilians a potential target for Hizbullah reprisal attacks.

So what was HRW’s position on this gross violation of the rules of war it had witnessed? After yet again denouncing Hizbullah for its rocket attacks, the report was mealy-mouthed: “Given that indiscriminate fire [by Hizbullah], there is no reason to believe that Israel’s placement of certain military assets within these cities added appreciably to the risk facing their residents.”

In other words, some are guilty unless proven innocent and others are innocent even after proven guilty.

'Cowardly blending'

In his latest article on Counterpunch, Jonathan Cook, conducts a timely review of a few matters that have come to light in the year since Israel’s devastating war on Lebanon last July and August.

Among other things,

Recent reports have revealed that one of the main justifications for Hizbullah's continuing resistance -- that Israel failed to withdraw fully from Lebanese territory in 2000 -- is now supported by the UN. Last month its cartographers quietly admitted that Lebanon is right in claiming sovereignty over a small fertile area known as the Shebaa Farms, still occupied by Israel. Israel argues that the territory is Syrian and will be returned in future peace talks with Damascus, even though Syria backs Lebanon's position. The UN's admission has been mostly ignored by the international media.

Also, far from the unexpected wanton cross border ‘kidnapping’ of innocent Israeli reservists we’ve heard so much about,

Hizbullah had long been warning that it would seize soldiers if it had the chance, in an effort to push Israel into a prisoner exchange. Israel has been holding a handful of Lebanese

Israel had tried to justify its wanton bombing of civilian targets in Lebanon on the grounds that the unscrupulous Hizb’allah combatants were hiding and launching attacks on Israel from areas populated with concentrations of civilians. Doubtless there is much learned opinion on whether ‘international law’ deems this legitimate. As I read it, this is actually a step or two beyond ‘Duh! We didn’t know there’d be civilians there!’. It presupposes a doctrine that non combatants are legitimate targets if they are compelled to serve as human shields – in other words, humans are useless as shields. UN official, Jan Egeland, famously backed up Israel’s claim with his ill considered accusation of Hizb’allah of ‘cowardly blending’.

It turns out, however, that

…Hizbullah had invested much effort in developing an elaborate system of tunnels and underground bunkers in the countryside…Also, common sense suggests that Hizbullah fighters would have been unwilling to put their families, who live in south Lebanon's villages, in danger by launching rockets from among them. [my emphasis]

…According to the UNIFIL, some 33 of these underground bunkers ­ or more than 90 per cent -- have been located and Hizbullah weapons discovered there, including rockets and launchers, destroyed.

…Relying on military sources, Haaretz reported last month: "Most of the rockets fired against Israel during the war last year were launched from the 'nature reserves'." In short, even Israel is no longer claiming that Hizbullah was firing its rockets from among civilians.

Not only were Hizb’allah fighters not hiding among civilians, those levelling the accusation, the Israelis themselves, had in fact ’built many of its permanent military installations, including weapons factories and army camps, and set up temporary artillery positions next to -- and in some cases inside -- civilian communities in the north of Israel’, as Jonathan Cook was himself probably the only one to point out last year during the fighting, notwithstanding the military censor.

The Arab Association for Human Rights, based in Nazareth, has been compiling a report on the Hizbullah rocket strikes against Arab communities in the north since last summer. It is not sure whether it will ever be able to publish its findings because of the military censorship laws.

…The Association has…found that in every case there was at least one military base or artillery battery placed next to, or in a few cases inside, the community. In some communities there were several such sites.

Armed and uniformed soldiers are of course a common sight anywhere in Israel. They crowd every bus, every disco, every pizza parlour and felafel stand. But somehow, the hasbara machine has managed to paint the Hizb’allah fighters as those who are ‘cowardly blending’, while the Israelis doing exactly the same thing are heroic. And when a terrorist attacks the soldiers on a bus or at a felafel stand, the spin is always on the ‘collateral damage’, the innocent bystanders. They were the real targets, however many soldiers may have been in range. As far as I’m aware, we have only the hasbara establishment’s word for it that Palestinian terrorists always target civilians and any military losses are the real collateral damage. If that is the sole source, since we already know that they are the ones who would have us believe that the Israeli military never targets civilians and in fact goes to extraordinary lengths to absolutely rule out any accidental harm to civilians, I guess it must be true.

Jonathan was also among the only ones, if memory serves, who took on Human Rights Watch, when they

…argued that, because Hizbullah's basic rockets were not precise, every time they were fired into Israel they were effectively targeted at civilians. Hizbullah was therefore guilty of war crimes in using its rockets, whatever the intention of the launch teams. In other words, according to this reading of international law, only Israel had the right to fire missiles and drop bombs because its military hardware is more sophisticated -- and, of course, more deadly.

The HRW position is simply bizarre. It effectively advocates banning oppressed and occupied people from armed resistance and elevates it to a matter of principle. Meanwhile, with their inaccurate weapons, Hizb’allah managed to hit 119 Israeli soldiers, nearly three times as many as the 43 Israeli civilian victims, 18 of them Arab. And Israel’s precision weaponry killed over 1000 civilians, many times more than the handful of Hizb’allah fighters killed.

Hasbara is quite amazingly effective. The obvious, and obviously correct, interpretation of these data, particularly in historical context, is utterly off the radar. Only bolshie crackpots even consider the possibility either that Israel deliberately targeted civilians or that Hizb’allah might have tried to focus on military targets, even though it was clear at the time that that was precisely the situation. As more and more evidence comes to light, the lunar conspiracy theory will be shown to be as sound as it always has been. By then, unfortunately, the entire population of the civilised world will have fully internalised the myth of ‘cowardly blending’, if we haven’t already, just like we have the myth of ‘wiping Israel off the map’ and the Iranian nuclear weapons program, Saddam’s WMD, the Kosovo genocide, and a long, long list of other outright fabrications swallowed hook, line, and sinker by the vigilant, responsible, independent media.

Anyway, Jonathan, who does not resile from calling it as he sees it, concludes by summarising:

The evidence so far indicates that Israel:

· established legitimate grounds for Hizbullah's attack on the border post by refusing to withdraw from the Lebanese territory of the Shebaa Farms in 2000;

· initiated a war of aggression by refusing to engage in talks about a prisoner swap offered by Hizbullah;

· committed a grave war crime by intentionally using cluster bombs against south Lebanon's civilians;

· repeatedly hit Lebanese communities, killing many civilians, even though the evidence is that no Hizbullah fighters were to be found there;

· and put its own civilians, especially Arab civilians, in great danger by making their communities targets for Hizbullah attacks and failing to protect them.

It is clear that during the Second Lebanon war Israel committed the most serious war crimes

So it is not propitious that

In the meantime, there is every indication that Israel is planning another round of fighting against Hizbullah after it has "learnt the lessons" from the last war.

Birds of a feather

The American Jewish Committee last week honored Colombian President Alvaro Uribe with its Light unto the Nations Award.

“President Uribe is a staunch ally of the United States, a good friend of Israel and the Jewish people, and is a firm believer in human dignity and human development in Colombia and the Americas,” said AJC President E. Robert Goodkind, who presented the award at AJC’s Annual Dinner, held at the National Building Museum in Washington.

“Despite many odds, President Uribe has remained committed to the pursuit of security, peace and broad-based economic growth for all Colombians,” Goodkind said.

According to the CIA factbook, security and peace are evidenced for example by 1.8-3.8 million internally displaced persons, that is, at least 4% and up to nearly 9% of the total population, not nearly as bad as Iraq. As I read it, the fact that they can’t pin it down to within even the nearest two million suggests something really nasty is going on. The economic growth has delivered 49.2% below the poverty line, and as for ‘all Colombians’, some might consider a Gini coefficient of 0.538 evidence of truly gross disparities in economic power and opportunity. But

“Both Colombia and Israel have been forced for decades to face challenges regarding their survival and their citizens have suffered the threat of terror on a daily basis,” he said. “Nevertheless, Colombians like Israelis continue tirelessly to build democratic and prosperous societies, and remain passionate about achieving peace.”

Little could be more convincing of a commitment to democracy and prosperity than similarity to ‘Israelis’. And it goes without saying that it is perfectly appropriate for the American Jewish Committee to confer awards on those who resemble Israelis, because as everybody knows, Israel represents all the Jewish people and, in the immortal words of the EU Monitoring Commission Working Definition of Anti-Semitism, the Jewish people are ‘collectively responsible for actions of the state of Israel’.

And nothing supports democracy like human rights. According to Maria McFarland Sánchez-Moreno, Principal Specialist on Colombia, Human Rights Watch in her 24 April briefing of the United States House of Representatives Committee on Foreign Affairs, Subcommittee on the Western Hemisphere,

Today, Colombia presents the worst human rights and humanitarian crisis in the Western Hemisphere… Extrajudicial executions of civilians by the Colombian military are on the rise.

Colombia is currently the murder capital of the world for trade unionists. Those who are not killed are often threatened, attacked or kidnapped…72 killed in 2006 up from 70 the year before. These killings are not random casualties of Colombia’s conflict, as the Colombian government claims. Trade unionists are especially targeted when exercising their rights to organize and bargain collectively.

Colombia, Israel, the AJC…birds of a feather.

US credibility undermined

On Friday, Human Rights Watch released its World Report 2007,

With US credibility undermined by the Bush administration’s use of torture and detention without trial, the European Union must fill the leadership void on human rights, Human Rights Watch said today...

So what’s wrong with this picture?

For one thing, this is the same organization that just last month was forced to retract it’s 22 November statement criticizing Palestinian non violent resistance. Although Norman Finkelstein and others called them on their innocent mistake, I thought Jonathan Cook offered the most cogent critique.

It’s going to take a lot more than a retraction to clean their tarnished image. They have made a pretty good start by debunking the Qana ambulance hoax myth. And they have more recently criticized the trial and execution of Saddam Hussein. But I think it’s worth examining the mentality they had to adopt to condemn nonviolent resistance in the first place. And I think it’s obvious where it comes from.

First of all, groups like HRW and Amnesty believe that they have to maintain an ‘apolitical’ appearance. It would be ‘political’ to assert that there is no symmetry between the violence of the oppressor, the occupier, the coloniser...and the resistance. So they have to adopt the fallacious 'even handed' approach.

In a more recent example, in the media release for the new report itself,

Israel launched indiscriminate attacks in Lebanon and littered southern Lebanon with cluster bombs during its war with Hezbollah. For its part, Hezbollah attacked Israeli cities without distinguishing between military and civilian objectives.

They start off by accepting Israeli claims at face value, as if it weren’t patently obvious that Israel’s war was not against Hizb’allah, but Lebanon. And they must immediately follow their criticism of Israel with criticism of some Arab entity. According to all reports, Hizb’allah, using comparatively primitive rockets that are difficult to target, somehow managed to hit military targets with considerably more consistency than the Israeli military, equipped with all the latest gadgetry. Unless the Israeli military are really quite exceptionally incompetent with all their toys, it seems that the attacks they launched were not indiscriminate at all. They deliberately targeted civilians. And ambulances. And those fleeing at the Israelis’ own behest. As for the cluster bombs, there is no doubt who they were intended to harm.

At a more venal level, these organisations rely a great deal on donations. I believe they are rather acutely aware of what happened to the American Civil Liberties Union in 1977, when they defended the Nazis' right to march through the predominantly Jewish Chicago suburb of Skokie and lost some 25% of their membership and a third of their funding base. Arieh Neier, now president of the Soros Foundation of all things, was then the ACLU boss. He went on to found and direct...guess what...HRW.

Obviously, there is no real parallel between Nazis with an ideological principle of exterminating Jews and Palestinians fighting for the most basic rights against an implacable colonial oppressor. But Zionists have spent the last six decades trying, with considerable success, to create the widespread impression that the Jewish people and the Jewish religion are indistinguishable from the Zionist state, and that any threat – even mild criticism of a specific policy – is tantamount to a new Holocaust. So human rights groups concerned to retain their existing levels of donations are probably prudent to adopt the pretense of ‘balance’. And we are absolutely right not to let them get away with it.

So the first question is who the hell are these hypocrites to get up on a high horse and evaluate not just the human rights performance of individual states – and non state actors, when they feel the need – but also which states provide ‘leadership’ on human rights issues.

The second question is where on earth did they get the impression that the US has ever been in a position to provide such leadership? Leaving aside such little matters as the brutal ‘white man’s burden’ Philippine war and the Indian wars and stuff that they carried out before the invention of human rights in 1948, it takes considerable imagination to place the mantle of human rights leadership on the country that oversaw, just to take a few examples, the Pinochet dictatorship, the counterinsurgencies in Guatemala and El Salvador, the Contra war against Nicaragua…the genocidal sanctions on Iraq. HRW seems to think that the US could provide human rights leadership by training the hemisphere’s torturers at the School of the Americas – now renamed to the innocuous sounding ‘Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation’ (WHISC) – since 1946. And now, all of a sudden, the victims of Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib have blotted the US’s copybook. The victimization of Jose Padilla is a human rights issue that has deprived the US of the credibility it retained while victimizing Mumia abu Jamal and Leonard Peltier?

The third question is: the EU? Wasn’t the EU one of those unscrupulous and hypocritical mobs who, along with Russia and the UN, signed on to Bush’s bogus ‘road map’? Isn’t that the same EU that has cut off funding to the PA on the grounds that the electorate voted for the wrong candidates, making their very own little contribution to starving the Palestinians into submission? And they have the credibility to provide ‘leadership’ on human rights? Yeah, right!

There is a solution, after all!

In case you were wondering what to do about all those Qassam rockets terrorizing the innocent Israelis whose precious lives American Friends of MDA enjoin us to save, Evelyn Gordon has the answer. In today’s Jerusalem Post, she writes,

…a military solution not only exists; it is already being successfully employed in the West Bank: a Defensive Shield-type operation followed by a long-term deployment aimed at achieving comprehensive territorial control.

Sderot residents can’t relax yet, though,

Israel must prepare for a military operation …the government must begin preparing the diplomatic case for such an operation. Currently, most of the world views the rocket attacks as a mere annoyance, and one does not launch a major invasion in response to a minor annoyance.

That shouldn’t be too difficult, considering the ‘world’ response to the Beit Hanoun slaughter.

Human Rights Watch has now come out against people protecting each other’s houses from Israeli Air Force attacks. They would be right if someone were actually forcing people to act as human shields, but how can it be a war crime for people to do a courageous thing and for their elected representatives to praise them for it?

Even if the houses were not legitimate military targets, added HRW, it was still a violation of international humanitarian law to call on civilians to protect them.

Of course HRW must always be and appear to be even handed.

At the same time, HRW demanded that Israel explain what its military objective was in seeking to destroy the houses.

And once they have the explanation of the military objective, it will be ok, then.

The cynicism and hypocrisy sometimes reaches shocking proportions. Today’s NYT editorializes, in the wake of the murder of Falangist politician, a member of a party inspired by Franco and directly responsible for Sabra and Shatila, ‘Lebanon’s pro-Western government’ is in danger of collapse. Obviously, the Times reckons that would be a bad thing, although I’m not convinced it goes without saying.

In a Middle East plagued by constant tragedy and defeat, Lebanon’s Cedar Revolution and the ousting of Syrian troops last year was a rare and precious victory. The United States and the international community must now rally to support Prime Minister Fouad Siniora — with cash, security advisers, and anything that might help him and his government survive.

Clearly it won’t do to speculate on the sources of the tragedy and defeat. Nor about why it wasn’t so important for the US and the ‘international community’ to rally in support of the Cedar Revolution in July, when it wasn’t just one politician, but over a thousand regular people who were being murdered.

Damascus must also be told that it will pay a high price — in scorn, isolation and sanctions — if it is found to have ordered Mr. Gemayel’s death, or the deaths or maiming of a half-dozen other anti-Syrian politicians and journalists.

It’s curious that Syria will have to pay a price if accusations of involvement in half a dozen murders turn out not to be entirely baseless, while another of Lebanon’s two neighbours, about whose culpability there has never been any doubt for far far graver crimes, has only rewards to look forward to – a blank check to replace their cluster bombs, carte blanche to shell civilian areas of Gaza, the right to violate the ceasefire and Lebanese airspace at will with impunity, not to mention all the other privileges, and international law get out of jail free cards they have always enjoyed. The Times editorialists haven’t entirely forgotten about July, though.

We would urge Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice to go immediately to Beirut, except we’re not sure she would be welcome after President Bush’s failure last summer to restrain Israel’s disastrous air war.

Failure? Or refusal? Sometimes I think I’d like to see the expression on their faces as they write this stuff, but I’m afraid I’d find out they actually take themselves seriously.

For a more informed account of Friedman's work than I could hope to offer, check this link. Also, a fawning encomium, cynically entitled ‘The Great Liberator’ by none other than the disgraced former President of Harvard, Lawrence Summers.

For more on Altman, David Walsh in WSWS.