Tag: Richard Goldstone

Ireland PSC: Goldstone’s ‘reconsideration’ does not invalidate UN report on Israeli crimes in Gaza

06 April 2011 | Ireland Palestine Solidarity Campaign

Israeli diplomats and pro-Israel lobbyists in the West have seized eagerly upon an article published in the Washington Post on April 1st by Richard Goldstone, the South African judge who chaired the UN Fact-Finding Mission that investigated the Israeli military offensive in Gaza two years ago, codenamed ‘Operation Cast Lead’. Israeli prime minister Benyamin Netanyahu has claimed that “everything we said has been proven true, Israel did not intentionally harm civilians, its investigating bodies are worthy and the fact that Goldstone has retracted should bring the report to be shelved once and for all”, while the Israeli foreign minister Avigdor Lieberman maintained that “the truth has come to light”.

These comments are a transparently dishonest spin on the part of the Israeli government. In fact, nothing that has been said by Richard Goldstone constitutes a “retraction” of the fact-finding mission’s report, or brings into question its conclusions that Israeli forces were responsible for major crimes against the civilian population of Gaza. Those crimes are likely to be repeated if the Israeli spin machine is allowed to whitewash the record of “Operation Cast Lead”.

1) No individual can “retract” the findings of the report

Although Richard Goldstone was the chair of the UN’s fact-finding mission, he was part of a team of four international experts (among them Ireland’s Col Desmond Travers). The report was subsequently endorsed by an overwhelming majority of states – including Ireland – at the UN General Assembly. It is not within the authority of any individual member of the fact-finding mission to “retract” its findings. A brief opinion article in the Washington Post certainly cannot be considered an adequate rebuttal of a five-hundred page report that was exhaustively documented by the UN mission.

2) Richard Goldstone has not retracted any of the central findings contained in the report

In his Washington Post article, Richard Goldstone wrote that “investigations published by the Israeli military … have established the validity of some incidents that we investigated in cases involving individual soldiers, they also indicate that civilians were not intentionally targeted as a matter of policy”.

Yet the original report did not claim that civilians were “intentionally targeted as a matter of policy”. Rather, it described a “repeated failure to distinguish between combatants and civilians [which] appears to the Mission to have been the result of deliberate guidance issued to soldiers, as described by some of them, and not the result of occasional lapses”, and noted that “the instructions given to the Israeli armed forces moving into Gaza provided for a low threshold for the use of lethal fire against the civilian population”. A callous disregard for civilian life is not the same as a policy of “intentionally” killing civilians. It remains a war crime nonetheless. Nothing that was said by Goldstone’s newspaper article brings this finding into question.

This was not the only crime documented by the report. It also described “ a deliberate and systematic policy on the part of the Israeli armed forces to target industrial sites and water installations”, and found evidence that “Israeli troops used Palestinian men as human shields whilst conducting house searches”. It also drew attention to the broader context, describing the illegal occupation of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip as “the fundamental factor underlying violations of international humanitarian and human rights law against the protected population and undermining prospects for development and peace”. Goldstone’s article does not challenge any of these conclusions.

Cedric Sapey, a spokesperson for the UN Human Rights Council (the body that commissioned the report) gave the UN’s official view: “The UN will not revoke a report on the basis of an article in a newspaper. The views Mr Goldstone expressed are his own personal views.” Similarly, Ireland’s Col. Desmond Travers, an expert on international criminal investigations and member of the investigative team continues to endorse the findings saying “the tenor of the report in its entirety, in my opinion, stands”. Hina Jilani, another member of the team, has also said that “ultimately, the UN Report would not have been any different to what it was … no process or acceptable procedure would invalidate the UN Report; if it does happen, it would be seen as a suspect move … The UN cannot allow impunity to remain, and will have to act if it wants to remain a credible international governing body”.

3) Richard Goldstone has been the victim of a hate campaign without parallel

A person reading Richard Goldstone’s article without having read the initial report of the fact-finding mission would still gather the impression that his remarks constitute a significant change of heart: “ If I had known then what I know now, the Goldstone Report would have been a different document.” What has changed since the original report was published? Goldstone refers to internal inquiries carried out by the Israeli army. Common sense and experience in every corner of the globe dictate that no army should be given carte blanche to investigate allegations against itself – unless its investigative procedures have been given a clean bill of health by independent authorities.

Has any such authority endorsed the judicial practices of the Israeli army? Goldstone refers to another UN report chaired by retired US judge Mary McGowan Davis, noting its conclusion that “ Israel has dedicated significant resources to investigate over 400 allegations of operational misconduct in Gaza”. Yet the same report goes on to state that “there is no indication that Israel has opened investigations into the actions of those who designed, planned, ordered and oversaw Operation Cast Lead”. The conclusions of the fact-finding mission did not relate solely to the conduct of individual soldiers on the battlefield: they addressed matters of policy decided at the highest levels of political and military command. Any investigation which neglects those who “designed, planned, ordered and oversaw Operation Cast Lead” is clearly incapable of refuting the allegations made by the UN report. It is impossible to believe that such investigations can have prompted any change of heart by Richard Goldstone.

The real cause of his apparent volte-face must be sought elsewhere. Since the fact-finding mission report was published, Richard Goldstone has been targeted by a campaign of vilification that no person should have to endure. He has been described as an “evil man”, a “despicable human being”, a “traitor to the Jewish people”, and compared to Joseph Mengele – the infamous Nazi doctor who conducted experiments on live human beings at Auschwitz. As can be inferred from such remarks, Goldstone is a South African Jew and has been singled out precisely for that reason. Although the other members of the fact-finding mission have also been attacked, none has been subjected to the same kind of vilification that Goldstone has experienced. It reached a peak in 2010 when the South African Zionist Federation threatened to “demonstrate” against Goldstone’s presence at the Sandton Synagogue if he dared to attend his grandson’s bar-mitzvah.

The thinking behind this campaign was overtly anti-Semitic – even though many of its agents consider themselves to be proud Jews. It was based on the premise that any Jew, anywhere in the world, is obliged to give uncritical support to the Israeli state, no matter what it does. This nonsensical doctrine simply turns the old fantasies of European anti-Semitism on its head. The anti-Semitic gangsters and demagogues of twentieth-century Europe claimed that every Jewish person, whatever their nationality, social class or political outlook, was part of a monstrous conspiracy. The modern-day Israel lobby tries to erase the individuality of Jews and force them to adopt a monolithic position of support for “ Israel, right or wrong”. In each case, we find a style of politics that believes ethnicity must dictate behaviour – “we are what we were born to be”. No wonder so many Jewish people have found the pro-Israel lobby repulsive and denied its claim to speak on their behalf.

Richard Goldstone’s Washington Post article is surely best seen as an attempt to protect himself and his family from the unconscionable abuse they have suffered over the past two years. It should not cause us to direct our attention for one second from the crimes committed by the Israeli army against the Palestinian people. The assault on Gaza in January 2009 was merely one episode in a litany of atrocities that spans several decades. If those atrocities are not to continue indefinitely, it is imperative that we study the findings of the UN fact-finding mission – and other sources such as Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International and B’Tselem – and act to protect the victims of wanton violence.

Towards Ending our Ongoing Nakba: Statement by the Palestinian BDS National Committee (BNC)

International Solidarity Movement

20 May 2010

17 May 2010 — For sixty-two years, Palestinians have been denied their dignity and fundamental human rights. The creation and “international” acceptance of Israel in 1948 marked the culmination of a new kind of politics in the region that continues to have devastating consequences. The acceptance of an ethnic Jewish state over the ruins of Palestinian society in a historically pluralistic region meant that indigenous Palestinians were automatically considered superfluous in the land they had inhabited for many generations. Emboldened by external support, Israel carried out its well planned campaign of mass scale ethnic cleansing, dispossessing and uprooting at least 750,000 Palestinians from their homeland. Zionist militias, and later the Israeli army, destroyed 500 Palestinian villages and forcibly emptied 11 urban neighborhoods in this process. The newly formed State of Israel encompassed 78% of Historic Palestine.1

With their lands confiscated, the refugees have been denied their legally guaranteed and UN-sanctioned right of return to their homes of origin. Palestinians remember this massive wave of dispossession as the Nakba (catastrophe).
Israel’s continued occupation, colonization and apartheid represents an ongoing Nakba. It could not have continued without international complicity, particularly by the US and the EU. The decision to allow, unhindered, Israeli accession to the OECD – cynically announced just a few days before the Nakba Commemoration Day – painfully underlines the failure of the international community to hold Israel accountable to international law and human rights principles. The fact that the UN itself condemned in its Goldstone report Israel’s atrocities in Gaza — in its operation “Cast Lead” — as constituting war crimes and possible crimes against humanity had no bearing, it seems, on the OECD states that voted unanimously to accept Israel’s membership.

It is this failure of the “international community” to uphold international law and the pattern of treating Israel as a state above the law that makes civil resistance and solidarity through the global BDS movement all that much more relevant and crucial. As in the boycott campaign against apartheid South Africa, the fast spreading BDS campaigns by international civil society are the most effective form of solidarity with Palestinian rights that promise to end Israel’s impunity and compel it to respect its obligations under international law.

For the past 62 years, Israel has consistently violated international law, including the Fourth Geneva Convention and the International Convention on the Suppression and Punishment of the Crime of Apartheid, with little fear of accountability. With the growing BDS movement, however, Israel is increasingly being perceived as a pariah state at the grassroots level. World public opinion clearly indicates a sharp drop in tolerance of Israel’s continued multi-faceted colonial and racist oppression; many governments that unconditionally support Israel are facing unprecedented stiff opposition from their respective publics.

The massive scope of the Nakba 62 commemoration, both in historic Palestine and internationally, is reflective of the pace at which popular resistance and protest against the ongoing Israeli colonisation is growing. Rallies and other commemoration events in Jerusalem, the Galilee, Hebron, Ramallah and Nablus have been matched with events across the world. Activists across the UK held protests inside supermarkets that called for the banning of the sale of produce from illegal Israeli settlements in occupied Palestinian Territory and a boycott of all Israeli produce. In Rome, over 50 activists gave out information about the BDS movement and displayed items barred entry to Gaza by the Israeli siege including chocolate, toys and fishing poles in order to demonstrate the callousness of the siege. Similar actions took place in towns and cities all over the world.

The 2005 Palestinian civil society call for BDS includes all three constituencies of the Palestinian people – those living in the Occupied Palestinian Territories, those living inside Israel, and the millions of Palestinian refugees who form the great majority of the Palestinian people. Nakba awareness and the call for the right to return are a key part of the BDS movement; both the National Committee for the Commemoration of the Nakba and the Right of Return, Global ROR Coalition are important members of the BNC.

The BNC fully endorses the 15 May call of the National Committee for the Commemoration of the Nakba, which included:

For the Palestinian leadership to:

– Adopt a coherent strategy towards a just and permanent solution for the Palestinian refugees and IDPs, based on their right to return and in accordance with international law, universal principles of justice and UN resolutions 194 (1948) and 237 (1967);
– Halt all negotiations, whether direct or indirect, until Israel completely halts settlement expansion, population transfer (“Judaization”), and construction of the Wall and other infrastructure of colonization and apartheid, such as roads and the so-called Jerusalem Light Rail connecting illegal Jewish colonies to West Jerusalem;
– Ensure national reconciliation and unity as a matter of urgency, and rebuild the PLO as a legitimate and credible platform representing the entire Palestinian people and its political organizations;
– Support and activate popular resistance in all forms permitted under international law;
– Establish a consultative mechanism with professional civil society organizations to support the efforts of the PLO in international forums.

To the public in Palestine and abroad to:

– Build and expand the civil society-led movement for boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) against Israel until it complies with international law, and exert stronger pressure on states to implement sanctions and adopt decisions and resolutions which support the global BDS Campaign;
– Redouble efforts for investigation of Israeli war crimes and crimes against humanity and prosecution and punishment of those responsible, as well as efforts to prevent Israel’s accession and integration into international and regional organizations.
– Only through effective, sustainable and persistent efforts to hold Israel accountable to international law can there be hope to establish a just peace and end Israel’s ongoing Nakba against the entire Palestinian people.

1 Survey of Palestinian Refugees and Internally Displaced Persons 2008-9, BADIL Resource Center

Israel crushes local dissent, attacks global criticism

Mel Frykberg | Inter Press Service

19 January 2009

Israel is lashing out at international criticism and attempting to crush local dissent in what appears to be
growing sensitivity to reproach of its policies.

Several recent incidents have dominated media headlines, including the arrest of a Jewish-American journalist on the grounds of security, threats by an Israeli minister against international diplomats and the arrest of Israeli and Palestinian peace activists.

The raid on a foreign activist´s home in Ramallah, supposedly under full Palestinian control, by a large Israel Defence Forces (IDF) contingent allegedly for a visa infringement, and her subsequent arrest at gunpoint and deportation has also raised eyebrows.

“We will not allow a situation where every country will kick us. If there will be an attack on Israel, we will leave all options open, including the expulsion of ambassadors,” Israel´s deputy foreign minister Danny Ayalon said on Saturday.

“We do not want to argue with anyone, but we will not sit idly by,” he added. Ayalon´s outburst followed, amongst other incidents, a much publicized political confrontation with Turkey over a Turkish TV programme critical of Israel.

This outburst led Israeli analyst and journalist Zvi Barel to comment acerbically in the Israeli daily Haaretz, “Britain wants to boycott Israeli goods? We’ll summon the British ambassador and have him sit on a bed of nails.”

“The United States handles the settlements unfairly? We’ll point an unloaded gun at the American ambassador’s head and pull the trigger, just to scare him. We’re not murderers. We’re just trying to frighten, which, as is well known, creates respect. Just ask the Godfather,” was Barel’s scathing comment.

Furthermore, Haaretz recently broke a story over the extent of Israel’s political blackmail of the Palestinian Authority (PA) over last year’s Goldstone report, which has received unanimous support internationally, and highlighted how sensitive the Jewish state is to negative publicity.

Justice Richard Goldstone was sent by the U.N. to the region to investigate war crimes committed by both Palestinian resistance groups and the IDF during Israel’s military assault on Gaza last year.

His report overwhelmingly criticised Israel’s deliberate targeting of Palestinian civilians and its disproportionate use of force.

Goldstone’s report was due to be transferred from the U.N. General Assembly to the Security Council after receiving overwhelming support from the U.N. Human Rights Council.

To everybody’s surprise, not least the Palestinians, PA President Mahmoud Abbas asked for a vote on the report’s recommendations to be postponed until March this year.

According to Haaretz, Abbas’ request to the U.N. Human Rights Council to delay the vote followed a meeting with Yuval Diskin, the head of Israel’s domestic intelligence agency, the Shin Bet.

Abbas was warned by Diskin that “if he did not ask for a deferral of the vote on the critical report on last year’s military operation, Israel would turn the West Bank into a ‘second Gaza’.” A senior IDF officer is alleged to have made similar threats to the PA at around the same time.

Diskin, who reports directly to Israeli Prime Minister Benyamin Netanyahu, also warned the Palestinians that the easing of restrictions on movement within the West Bank would be revoked as well as permission to operate a second mobile phone company Wataniya.

The PA would have lost tens of millions of dollars in compensation payments to the company.

Israeli sensitivity to its critics was highlighted again several weeks ago in the early hours of the morning when the Ramallah apartment of Czech national Eva Novakova, 28, was raided by Israeli soldiers after they broke her door down.

Israeli armed personnel carriers surrounded the area while about 20 heavily armed soldiers took up positions on surrounding rooftops.

Novakova was forced at gunpoint to dress and was subsequently arrested and deported to Prague on the grounds she had overstayed her visa. She was denied access to a lawyer.

As Ramallah is supposedly under full Palestinian control, this kind of military operation is usually reserved for arresting armed Palestinian resistance fighters who are suspected of involvement in attacks against Israelis.

Critics allege Novakova’s political involvement in peaceful protests against Israel’s separation barrier, which expropriates Palestinian farmland illegally for the benefit of Israeli settlers primarily, and the international support received for the protests, is a more likely explanation for the overkill.

In a further crackdown on an increasingly critical media, the arrest and detention of Jared Malsin, a Jewish-American journalist and English editor at the Palestinian news agency Maan, at Tel Aviv’s Ben Gurion airport last week has sparked outrage.

Malsin, who has been based in the West Bank for two years, was accused of being a security threat for writing reports hostile to Israel and reporting from within the Palestinian territories.

On Friday, the International Federation of Journalists (IFJ) called for Malsin’s deportation order to be revoked while The Committee to Protect Journalists called for his immediate release.

“We condemn this intolerable violation of press freedom,” said Aidan White, IFJ general secretary. “The ban of entry in this case appears to be a reprisal measure for the journalist’s independent reporting and that is
unacceptable.”

Meanwhile, in another development Hagai Elad, the Israeli head of the Association for Civil Rights in Israel, was amongst a group of 13 activists arrested last week for a peaceful assembly in East Jerusalem against
Palestinian home demolitions and expulsions.

War on Gaza: Operation Cast Lead One year later

Jeremy R. Hammond | Palestine Chronicle

27 December 2009

One year ago today, Israel launched ‘Operation Cast Lead’, a murderous full-scale military assault on the small, densely populated, and defenseless Gaza Strip. The operation resulted in the massacre of over 1,300 Palestinians, the vast majority civilians, including hundreds of children.

This includes only those killed directly by military attacks. The actual casualty figure from Israel’s policies towards Gaza, including the number of deaths attributable to its ongoing siege of the territory, is unknown.

The official pretext for the operation given by Israel and parroted unquestioningly in the Western media is that Israel had to respond with force as an act of self-defense against to an onslaught of rocket attacks against southern Israel from Hamas and other militant groups in Gaza.

Even if this were true, nations acting in self-defense against armed attacks must respect international law designed to protect civilians in time of war. Israel flagrantly violated the Geneva Conventions and other relevant treaties governing the use of force during the course of its operation, committing numerous war crimes.

But the stated pretext itself does not stand up to scrutiny. Six months prior to the assault on Gaza, Israel and Hamas had agreed to a cease-fire. Under the terms of the truce agreement, Hamas would end its rocket attacks against Israel and Israel would similarly cease attacks against Palestinians in Gaza and lift its siege on the territory.

Hamas, for its part, lived up to its obligations under the truce. It fired no rockets into Israel and actively pressured other groups to similarly refrain from launching attacks.

Israel, on the other hand, never lived up to its obligations under the truce. From the beginning, Israel declared a “security zone” on Gaza’s side of the border and Israeli soldiers repeatedly violated the truce by firing at Palestinians, guilty of merely trying to access their own land.

Israel also never eased its siege of Gaza. Israel controlled (and continues to control) the borders of Gaza, its airspace, and its coast, and implementing a near total blockade, including preventing by force the delivery of humanitarian goods into the territory.

Rather than easing the siege, Israel continued to let in only minimal amounts of humanitarian supplies (a practice that also continues today), just enough to prevent a total humanitarian catastrophe, thus keeping the population of Gaza in a state of despair and on the verge of human limits, with untold consequences on the health and mental well-being of the Palestinians.

The complete breakdown of the truce agreement came on November 4, when Israel launched airstrikes and a ground incursion into Gaza, killing four Palestinians. This violation of the cease-fire resulted in its effective undoing.

Israel’s official reason for the attack was its claim that militants were digging a tunnel under the border. The more credible explanation, however, was that Israel wanted to provoke Hamas into launching rockets and thus to claim a pretext for the full-scale military assault that Israel had, at that time, by its own account, already been planning.

Indeed, from the beginning of the truce, it appeared Israel’s intent was to provoke a violent response in order claim a pretext for its military assault. While Hamas scrupulously observed the cease-fire, Israel took deliberate actions to undermine it. Besides those already noted, Israel also stepped up operations against Palestinians in the West Bank, such as the assassination of members of Islamic Jihad shortly after the announcement of the truce.

Islamic Jihad militants in Gaza responded to that incident by firing rockets into Israel, but Hamas criticized the attacks and pressured Islamic Jihad to cease, including with the threat of arrests, and the tenuous truce continued to hold, for a time.

A greater and more provocative action was necessary in order to completely undermine the truce, and Israel’s November 4 attack proved to be that action. From that day forward, the so-called “cease-fire” consisted of tit-for-tat attacks on a daily basis, with Israel launching repeated attacks on Gaza and Hamas and other militant groups launching rockets into Israel.

Israel had achieved the pretext it was looking for in order to gain the political cover necessary to wage its assault on the civilian population of Gaza.

And make no mistake; Operation Cast Lead was a war on a civilian population, an extremely murderous act of collective punishment.

The death toll itself stands as an undeniable testament to that, but the manner in which Israel waged its operation also leaves no doubt as to its true objective.

As already noted, Israel claims its operation was designed to end rocket attacks. In truth, it was Israel that deliberately violated and undermined the truce.

Israel also claims its operation was aimed at militants. As evidence of its respect for international law and extraordinary efforts to prevent the loss of innocent life, Israel notes the fact that it dropped thousands of leaflets on Gaza prior to its operations warning civilians to flee the oncoming assault.

But the fact is this is not evidence of Israel’s respect for innocent life, but rather strong evidence that its killing of civilians was deliberate and intended. For starters, civilians, told to flee, had nowhere to go. No place in Gaza was safe from Israel’s attacks. Furthermore, in some cases civilians were told to go to city centers, and, after many had done so, those same locations were then purposefully bombed by Israel.

Israel’s claimed respect for innocent life is also belied by its means of indiscriminate warfare. Israel heavily bombarded civilian population centers. It deliberately and systematically targeted civilian locations with protected status under international law, including schools and hospitals.

Israel also used indiscriminate weaponry, including white phosphorus munitions. The use of white phosphorus is permitted under international law for illuminating the battlefield or creating smokescreens. However, its use as an incendiary weapon (it is also a chemical weapon, in that its incendiary effect is the result of a chemical reaction) is a violation of international law and a war crime, particularly when used indiscriminately against populated areas and civilian locations such as schools, as it was in Gaza.

Moreover, Israel, demonstrated extreme contempt for and defiance to the United Nations and the international community by deliberately targeting U.N. sites within Gaza. It targeted U.N. clinics, schools, and other compounds.

Israel attacked humanitarian convoys attempting to deliver much needed supplies to the desperate people of Gaza, and in other cases prevented medical teams, including from the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) from reaching victims of its assault, also a war crime.

Israel also deliberately targeted a U.N. warehouse where humanitarian supplies were being stored, attacking the site with white phosphorus munitions, resulting in the warehouse and goods inside catching fire and nearly burning to the ground.

All of these actions by Israel, all well documented and incontrovertible, constitute grave war crimes under the Geneva Conventions and other relevant treaties of international law.

The U.S. Role

Israel’s contempt for innocent life, for the international community, and for international law is perhaps matched only by the U.S. willingness to support Israel’s crimes against the Palestinian people.

Simply stated, without U.S. support, none of this could go on.

The U.S. supports Israel financially. Aid to Israel is on the order of $3 billion a year. This money is given, unlike aid to other countries, with no strings attached, and with little to no oversight about how it is to be used.

Even if it is not used directly to finance Israeli policies and activities in violation of international law, such as its ongoing occupation of the Palestinian territories, construction of settlements in the West Bank, construction of a its “separation barrier” within the West Bank, destruction of Palestinian homes and other property, killing of Palestinian civilians, etc., U.S. financial support allows Israel to free up other funding for these illegal activities. It effectively rewards Israel for criminal actions.

The U.S. supports Israel militarily. And military equipment provided by the U.S. is used by Israel for actions constituting war crimes under international law. The massacre in Gaza was carried out with the help of U.S.-provided Apache helicopter gunships, U.S.-provided F-16 fighter bombers, and U.S.-provided munitions, including white phosphorus and cluster munitions.

This military support to Israel is not only a violation of international law and relevant U.N. Security Council resolutions calling on member states not to provide material support for Israeli crimes, but it is also a violation of U.S. law. Besides international treaties such as the U.N. Charter and the Geneva Conventions constituting “the supreme Law of the Land” under the U.S. Constitution, U.S. law forbids the exporting of military equipment to countries that routinely violate international law and commit offenses against human rights. Yet U.S. military support for Israel continues unabated.

The U.S. supports Israel diplomatically. The principle means by which the U.S. does so is through the use of its veto power in the U.N. Security Council. While Israel was using U.S. military hardware to murder innocent Palestinians, the U.S. was actively trying to stall a cease-fire resolution to give Israel more time to carry out its assault. A watered-down version of the resolution was finally found acceptable to the U.S., which reportedly was ready to vote in favor, but after receiving a call from Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, while not going so far as to cast a veto, instead abstained rather than casting a vote for a resolution rightfully critical of Israel.

The Role of the U.S. Media

The U.S. mainstream corporate media also play a significant role in the Israeli-Arab conflict, and reporting on Operation Cast Lead provides a useful case study into the nature of its role. To describe U.S. media accounts of Israel’s ongoing atrocities in Gaza as “biased” would be a sore understatement.

Take the reporting of the New York Times, America’s “newspaper of record” reporting “all the news that’s fit to print”. Arguably the most widely read and important newspaper in the world, what the Times reports is regularly picked up by other major media, with the newspaper effectively serving as a trend-setter for the news Americans consume. Its impact on the perceptions Americans have of conflicts such as Israel’s war on the civilian population of Gaza is enormous.

The New York Times’ reporting on Israel’s assault was reminiscent of its reporting on Iraq with respect to that nation’s alleged possession of weapons of mass destruction and ties to terrorist organizations, including Al Qaeda, prior to the initiation of the U.S. war of aggression against that country based on such lies and deceptions as then reported matter-of-factly by the Times.

Propaganda devices employed by the Times in this case, as in the case of Iraq, included the use of euphemisms and the selective reporting of facts.

For instance, although the Times did report initially on Israel’s November 4 violation of the truce, it exercised selective amnesia in its subsequent reporting and described only the “breakdown” of the cease-fire and thus failing to inform readers of the single identifiable causal factor for that “breakdown”.

Moreover, the Times accepted without scrutiny and parroted the official line from Israeli officials that its operation was launched in response to rocket attacks and the violation by Hamas of the truce, thus implicitly and falsely attributing the failure of the cease-fire to its violation by Hamas.

The Times repeatedly and consistently downplayed the true nature of Israel’s assault on Gaza. In one notable example, the Times’ Jerusalem bureau chief Ethan Bronner wrote in an article that Palestinians had “claimed” that Israel was using white phosphorus munitions, employing this propaganda device to intentionally cast doubt in the mind of the reader as to the veracity of the so-called “claim”.

The truth is that Bronner knew perfectly well this was not a “claim”, but a known fact. He could just as well have written at that time that human rights organizations had criticized Israel for its known use of white phosphorus, rather than attributing it as mere a Palestinian “claim”.

By this time, although reporters were banned from entering Gaza, there was no question that Israel was doing so, including proof in photographs showing the unmistakable smoke trails and incendiary projectiles of white phosphorus being used over residential neighborhoods.

Remarkably, the same day Bronner’s article appeared, another article also appeared, written by his Palestinian colleague Taghreed El-Khodary, the Times’ only correspondent actually reporting from inside of Gaza, who reported on finding white phosphorus casings with markings showing that they were U.S.-made.

In El-Khodary’s reports from Gaza, one could find a more reliable account of what was actually happening on the ground, but even her articles were heavily edited and/or rewritten by the Times’ editorial staff, and it was the dishonest and propagandistic reporting of Bronner and his Jerusalem-based British-Israeli colleague Isabel Kershner that generally typified the nature of the Times’ reporting on the massacre.

Countless other examples abound, but it’s beyond the scope of this article and would be superfluous to continue to list them.

The Role of the American People

In short, Americans reading about the violence in U.S. newspapers or watching it on TV received a heavily distorted account of what was going down.

But this is no excuse for ignorance. The facts are known and available to every American with access to the internet. One may turn to the healthy alternative media in the U.S. One may turn to international media sources, including Israeli sources like the Jerusalem Post, Haaretz, or Ynet (Yedioth Ahronoth online). One may turn to human rights organizations such as Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, Physicians for Human Rights, or the Israeli group B’tselem.

One may also turn to the report of the U.N. Human Rights Council inquiry into the violence, headed up by the respected international jurist Richard Goldstone, who himself happens to be Jewish (a fact worthy of mention due to Israeli and U.S. charges that the report is biased; in another example of U.S. diplomatic support for Israeli crimes, the U.S. has actively sought to block implementation of its recommendations or any Security Council follow-up actions).

Goldstone himself has concluded that Israel’s actions were targeted at the civilian population of Gaza as an act of collective punishment, and his conclusion is well supported by his final report and the evidence it presents.

The facts are beyond dispute. The conclusions are obvious and incontrovertible. It is well past time that the American people wake up to the realities on the ground in the Palestinian territories. Many Americans already demonstrate the modicum of moral integrity required to speak out against their government’s support for Israeli crimes, but it is not enough.

Without massive public opposition to the U.S. policy of supporting Israeli crimes against the Palestinian people, the crimes will continue. Israel will continue to act with impunity and continue to violate international law under U.S. cover.

The fact of the matter is that the American people have more power in their hands than any other body to bring about an end to the violence and to create the conditions for a just and sustainable peace in the Middle East.

Americans themselves may not realize this truth, but the international community well recognizes it. And the world is watching, and waiting.

Will the American people continue to turn their heads away and wash their collective hands of the affair, deceiving themselves into believing they have no responsibility for what goes on “over there” and that they have no influence to change things, anyway?

Or will the American people cast away ignorance and apathy and demonstrate intellectual honesty, moral integrity, compassion, and strength of will by standing up and acting to pressure their government to change its policies?

The answer to these questions remains to be seen. Only time will tell. In the meantime, the Palestinian people continue pay the price for the willingness of Americans to allow their government to pursue criminal policies contrary to their own interests and antithetical to the very principles of justice and humanity every American would like to think their country stands for.

Jeremy R. Hammond is an independent journalist and editor of Foreign Policy Journal, an online source for news, critical analysis, and opinion commentary on U.S. foreign policy. He was among the recipients of the 2010 Project Censored Awards for outstanding investigative journalism, and is the author of “The Rejection of Palestinian Self-Determination”, available from Amazon.com. He contributed this article to PalestineChronicle.com.

Family who lost 29 members in Gaza war: We envy the dead

Amira Hass | Ha’aretz

18 October 2009

Richard Goldstone visited the Gaza City neighborhood of Zaytoun in late June to tour the compound of the extended Samouni family, the subject of coverage here in recent weeks (“‘I fed him like a baby bird,'” September 17; “Death in the Samouni compound,” September 25). Twenty-nine members of the family, all of them civilians, were killed in the Israel Defense Force’s winter assault – 21 during the shelling of a house where IDF soldiers had gathered some 100 members of the family a day earlier.

Salah Samouni and the owner of the house that was shelled – Wael Samouni – took Goldstone around the farming neighborhood, showing him its devastated homes and uprooted orchards. In a telephone conversation this week, Salah described how he had shown Goldstone a picture of his father, Talal, among the 21 killed in the house. He told the Jewish South African judge and head of the United Nations inquiry team into Operation Cast Lead, that his father “had been employed by Jews” for nearly 40 years and that whenever he was sick, “the employer would call, ask after his health, and forbid him to come to work before he had recovered.”

The Samounis were always confident that, in the event of any military invasions into Gaza, they could always manage to get along with the Israeli army. Until 2005, before Israel’s disengagement from the Strip, the Jewish settlement of Netzarim was located right next door, and several family members worked there from time to time. When the joint Israeli-Palestinian patrols were active, Israeli soldiers and Palestinian security officials sometimes asked the Samounis to “lend” them a tractor to flatten a patch of land or repair the Salah al-Din Road (for example, when a diplomatic convoy needed to pass through). While Samouni family members worked on their tractors, gathering sand, the soldiers would watch them.

“When the soldiers wanted us to leave, they would fire above our heads. That’s what experience taught me,” recalls Salah Samouni, who lost a 2-year-old daughter in the IDF attack, along with uncles and both of his parents. The older men of the family, among them his father and two uncles who were killed by IDF soldiers on January 4 and 5, worked in Israel until the 1990s in different localities, including Bat Yam, Moshav Asseret (near Gedera) and the “Glicksman Plant.” They all believed that the Hebrew they had learned would assist and if necessary save them during encounters with soldiers.

As was reported here last month – on January 4, under orders from the army, Salah Samouni and the rest of the family left their home, which had been turned into a military position, and moved to the other, the home of Wael, located on the southern side of the street. The fact that it was the soldiers who had relocated them, had seen the faces of the children and the older women, and the fact that the soldiers were positioned in locations surrounding the house just tens of meters away, instilled in the family a certain amount of confidence – despite the IDF fire from the air, from the sea and from the land, despite the hunger and the thirst.

On the morning of Monday, January 5, Salah Samouni walked out of the house and shouted in the direction of another house in the compound that he thought other family members were still in. He wanted them to join him, to be in a safer place, closer to the soldiers. Nothing prepared him for the three shells and the rockets the IDF fired a short time later.

“My daughter Azza, my only daughter, two and a half years old, was injured in the first hit on the house,” Salah told Haaretz. “She managed to say, ‘Daddy, it hurts.’ And then, in the second hit, she died. And I’m praying. Everything is dust and I can’t see anything. I thought I was dead. I found myself getting up, all bloody, and I found my mother sitting by the hall with her head tilted downward. I moved her face a little, and I found that the right half of her face was gone. I looked at my father, whose eye was gone. He was still breathing a little, and then he stopped.”

When they exited the house – injured, confused, dazed, fearing the fourth shell or rocket would soon land – determined to get themselves to Gaza despite the soldiers’ shouts from nearby positions to go back, they believed only corpses remained in the house. They did not know that under the dust and rubble in one large room, nine family members remained alive: the elderly matriarch and five of her grandchildren and great-grandchildren – the youngest of whom was three years old, the eldest 16 – along with another kinsman and his son. They had passed out, some of them beneath corpses.

When they regained consciousness, 16-year-old Ahmad Ibrahim and his 10-year-old brother Yakub saw the corpses of their mother, four of their brothers and their nephew. Mahmoud Tallal, 16, had lost his toes; bleeding, he saw that his parents – Tallal and Rahma – had been killed. Three-year-old Omar, Salah’s son, was buried unconscious under 24-year-old Saffa’s dead body, explaining why they hadn’t found him during the terrible moment of panic as they left the house. Ahmad Nafez, 15, recalled how when little Omar woke up and pulled himself out from under the corpse, he spotted his grandfather Tallal and started shaking him, crying: “Grandpa, Grandpa, wake up.”

The previous day Amal, a nine-year-old girl, had witnessed soldiers bursting into her home and killing her father, Atiyeh. She had taken shelter in her Uncle Tallal’s home and together with other family members was moved to Wael’s house. She did not know that her brother Ahmad was bleeding to death in his mother’s arms, in another house in the neighborhood.

The children found some scraps of food in the kitchen and ate. Later, Ahmad Nafez told his relatives how Ahmad Ibrahim had gone from corpse to corpse – his mother, his four brothers and his nephew among them – shaking them, hitting them, telling them to get up. Perhaps from the blows, Amal regained consciousness, her head bloody and her eyes rolling in their sockets. She kept crying out “water, water,” said she wanted her mother and father, and beat her head on the floor, her eyes rolling the whole time.

It is too dangerous to remove the shrapnel embedded in her head – that is even what the doctors at a Tel Aviv hospital say. Now everything hurts her and will continue to hurt her: when it’s cold, when it’s hot, when she’s in the sun. She will not be able to concentrate on her studies.

No one can reconstruct how the hours passed for them in Wael’s bombarded house; some remained in a state of exhaustion and apathy. The first to recover was actually Shiffa, the 71-year-old grandmother. On the morning of Tuesday, January 6, she realized that no one was coming to rescue them anytime soon. Not the soldiers positioned just meters away, not the Red Cross nor the Red Crescent nor other relatives. Perhaps they didn’t even know they were alive, she concluded. Her walker had been bent and buried in the house, but she managed to leave with two of her grandchildren – Mahmoud (his legs bleeding) and little Omar.

They hobbled out and started walking – along the silent street, among the vacated houses, realizing some were occupied by soldiers. “The Jews saw us from above and shouted to us to go into the house,” related Shiffa. That was when they were walking down the street and passed by her sister’s home. They went inside, but didn’t find a living soul. The soldiers – firing into the air – came in after them. “We begged them to let us go home. ‘Where is your home?'” they asked. She told them “over there” and pointed east, toward the home of one of her sons, Arafat, located closer to Salah al-Din Road. The soldiers let them continue on. “We saw people coming out of Arafat’s house and Hijjeh’s house. Everyone was a bit injured and the soldiers were shooting overhead.”

At Hijjeh’s house she found everyone crying, each with his own story of those dead or wounded. “I told them what had happened to us, how everyone had fallen on everyone else, in heaps, the dead and the wounded.” She remained there with the rest of the injured for another night. Omar remembers this house fondly: He was given chocolate there.

Only on Wednesday, January 7, did the IDF allow Red Cross and Red Crescent crews to enter the neighborhood. They attest that they’d been asking to enter since January 4, but the IDF would not let them – whether by shooting in the direction of the ambulances that tried to get closer or by refusing to approve coordination. The medical teams, which were allowed to go in on foot and had to leave the ambulances a kilometer or a kilometer and a half away, thought they were going to rescue the injured from Hijjeh’s house. But then the grandmother told them about the wounded children who remained behind, among the dead, in Wael’s house. The medical team set out to rescue them, totally unprepared for the sight they found.

On January 18, after the IDF left the Gaza Strip, the rescue teams returned to the neighborhood. Wael’s house was found in ruins: IDF bulldozers had demolished it entirely – with the corpses inside.

In a general reply to questions from Haaretz regarding the behavior of the military forces in the Samouni family’s neighborhood, the IDF Spokesman said that all of the claims have been examined. “Upon completion of the examination, the findings will be taken to the military advocate general, who will decide about the need to take additional steps,” the spokesman said.

Salah Samouni, during the telephone conversation, said: “I asked [Richard] Goldstone to find out just one thing: Why did the army do this to us? Why did they take us out of the house one at a time, and the officer who spoke Hebrew with my father verified that we were all civilians – [so] why did they then shell us, kill us? This is what we want to know.”

He feels that Goldstone, in his report, lent the victims a voice. He did not expound on his frustration upon learning that the debate on the report had been postponed, but sought a way to describe how he feels nine months after the fact. “We feel [we are] in an exile, even though we are in our homeland, on our land. We sit and envy the dead. They are the ones who are at rest.”