August 8, 2024
The defeat of
Cori Bush in her primary election on Tuesday left a lot of advocates for
Palestinian rights in the United States despairing. It’s an understandable
feeling.
Upwards of 400,000 Pro-Palestine protestors take the streets in a
national march in Washington DC to show support for Palestinians and
call for a ceasefire and end the genocide in Gaza, January 13, 2024.
(Photo: Eman Mohammed)
Cori Bush is a
tireless activist, working against injustice, racism, economic oppression,
against apartheid and ethnic cleansing in Palestine, and genocide in Gaza. In
that last fight, she was successful enough to draw the ire of AIPAC. The
pro-Israel lobbying group directly spent at least $11 million between its two
affiliated PACs to defeat Bush.
That is a
stunning amount of money to spend on an election where only a little over
125,000 people voted. AIPAC’s support made up most of the four-to-one spending
advantage to Bush’s opponent, Wesley Bell. Coupled with Jamaal Bowman’s defeat
earlier in his primary, this can be discouraging.
Actually,
Tuesday represented a major step forward for the role of Palestine advocacy in
Democratic politics. Even Bush’s loss had a silver lining around it. AIPAC and
other outside groups poured money into this race, making it the second most
expensive congressional race in history. The first? Jamaal Bowman’s loss in
June.
Between those
two races, AIPAC’s PACs spent more than $25 million to oust two progressive,
Black members of the House who had dared to call Israel’s genocide in Gaza what
it is. These record-shattering numbers show that it has become much more
expensive to maintain Israel’s impunity in the face of a Democratic voter base
that is far less supportive of Israel’s actions than it has been in the past.
AIPAC itself no longer even defends Israel in the campaign ads it buys.
Instead, it attacks candidates it doesn’t like entirely on other issues.
Moreover,
AIPAC’s own tactic is a double-edged sword. They can’t get as much money as
they would need to primary progressive Democrats from Democratic donors. So
they turn to Republican donors, angering even many Democrats who might
otherwise be indifferent to the lobby’s tactics. It may work for the moment,
but this is not a sustainable strategy.
Palestinian
rights in Democratic politics
Another step
forward was Kamala Harris’ decision to choose Minnesota Governor Tim Walz as
her running mate.
Walz was a
relatively late entry in the field competing for the spot alongside Harris, and
by the time his name was really circulating, it looked very likely that
Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro, who has refused to call for a ceasefire in
Gaza, would be the vice presidential candidate.
But Harris
ultimately chose Walz. We should be clear about what this means and doesn’t
mean.
Walz is well
within the mainstream of Democratic elected officials when it comes to Israel
and Palestine. He supports ongoing military aid to Israel, favors a two-state
solution, and spoke at an AIPAC conference in 2010. He called for a permanent
ceasefire in Gaza as far back as March, but has also reinforced the myth that
protests against the genocide there (a term he has never come close to using),
make Jewish students “feel unsafe.”
He has also
defended the right of Palestine activists to protest vociferously and
complimented the Uncommitted movement for being civically engaged. All in all,
a pretty straightforward, liberal, pro-Israel Democrat.
But in that,
Walz is quite different from Josh Shapiro. Defenders of Israel who are trying
to make the bad faith case that rejecting Shapiro as Harris’ running mate is a
reflection of antisemitism in the party, claim that Shapiro’s and Walz’s views
on Israel and Palestine are virtually identical.
But Walz has
never tried to restrict the speech of employees in his state who support
Palestine, as Shapiro did. Nor did he compare anti-genocide protesters to the
Ku Klux Klan, as Shapiro did.
Shapiro was
favored by not only the pro-Israel community, but also by the more conservative
economic wing of the party, and by politically inept strategists who couldn’t
see past the fact that Pennsylvania is one of the key battleground states in
the election while Minnesota is likely a safe Democratic win in November.
The point is not
that Walz is particularly good on Palestine. He isn’t. But Shapiro’s more
extreme views were certain to alienate the very voters that caused enough
concern among Democratic donors and leaders to convince them to press Joe Biden
to step aside.
Palestine was
certainly not the only issue that made Shapiro a bad pick. He also favors
cutting corporate taxes; he supports fracking and other dangerous practices
that threaten to exacerbate, rather than mitigate, climate change; and he has
other issues, like his attempt to cover up a sexual harassment accusation
against one of his aides. None of this would help bring back the voters Biden
had driven away.
But Palestine
was as significant in the VP calculus as any of those issues. That marks a
historic step forward. The idea that a candidate for the vice presidency in a
major party could be rejected not because he was perceived as “anti-Israel” but
because of anti-Palestinian views is a first. I’m old enough to remember the
passionately pro-Israel sentiments of the VP candidates of 2012, 2008, (both
Joe Biden) and, especially in 2000 when Joe Lieberman—whose views on Israel
were distinctly to the right even of Shapiro’s—was the Democratic VP nominee.
These were choices made specifically to please pro-Israel donors and voters.
In the 2024
primary season, Palestine was as big a reason as any for Joe Biden stepping
aside and now for Kamala Harris rejecting Josh Shapiro as her running mate.
Again, it was not at all the only reason, and, in both cases, if Palestine was
the only issue, neither of these political shocks would have occurred.
Politics shift
slowly. That is especially true in the case of Palestine. The pro-Israel lobby
was decades in the making before it became particularly influential. For most
of that time, advocacy for Palestine was ineffective, scattered, and sometimes
divided against itself. Indeed, those problems have not been entirely overcome.
But in 2024, the
movement for Palestinian rights has far more unity, diversity, and political
strategy, and it has become far more politically efficient. That is only now
starting to show in terms of political power to make change, but this is how it
starts.
That is a change
that must not be underestimated. The Israel lobby built its strength, in great
measure, on the fact that the opposition to it was politically insignificant
for so long. That is simply not the case anymore.
Of course, it’s
not enough. That is especially distressing now, as we watch the devastation of
Israel’s genocide in Gaza proceeding apace, with a death toll that is rising
far faster than official tallies would indicate. And, as the election grows
nearer, Gaza falls even further from the headlines, and the ethnic cleansing on
the West Bank gets hardly a mention.
It’s not enough
when we see Harris, the replacement for Genocide Joe, accuse demonstrators in
Michigan of supporting Donald Trump because they sent a message to her, through
their protest, that she still has to earn their votes by acting to stop
Israel’s genocidal onslaught.
But pushing Josh
Shapiro aside and massively raising the price tag to defeat a Jamaal Bowman or
a Cori Bush are the results of years of movement building, political
organizing, and a new combination of passionate, grassroots activism and
professional political messaging and lobbying. For the first time, advocates
for Palestinian rights have the foundation to build a force for political
change. We have the activists, we have the educational nonprofits, and we have
the lobbying groups working together. And we’re starting to see results.
It’s hard to
keep the perspective that these were real victories and that they matter, when
so many thousands of Palestinian children are dying, so many Palestinians of
all ages in Gaza and the West Bank are continuing to live through hell on
earth, and are all accumulating traumas on top of traumas, even if they are
lucky enough to keep their lives and limbs intact.
But this is what
progress looks like. We can and should keep searching for ways to be more
impactful sooner because apartheid and genocide are escalating. But part of
that is recognizing what is working and building on it. As frustrating as it is
to know that Cori Bush and Jamaal Bowman will not be in Congress in January, we
are finally moving forward in changing the unjust conditions that have stopped
us from creating real change in Palestine and Israel. It matters.
Jonathan Cook
There should be nothing surprising
about the revelation that troops at Sde Teiman, a detention camp set up by
Israel in the wake of Hamas’s 7 October attack on southern Israel, are
routinely using rape as a weapon of torture against Palestinian inmates.
Last week, nine soldiers from a
prison unit, Force 100, were arrested for gang-raping a Palestinian inmate with
a sharp object. He had to be hospitalised with his injuries.
At least 53 prisoners are known to
have died in Israeli detention, presumed in most cases to be either through
torture or following the denial of access to medical care. No investigations
have been carried out by Israel and no arrests have been made.
Why should it be of any surprise
that Israel’s self-proclaimed “most moral army in the world” uses torture and
rape against Palestinians? It would be truly surprising if this was not
happening.
After all, this is the same military
that for 10 months has used starvation as a weapon of war against the 2.3
million people of Gaza, half of them children.
It is the same military that since
October has laid waste to all of Gaza’s hospitals, as well as destroying almost
all of its schools and 70 percent of its homes. It is the same military that is
known to have killed over that period at least 40,000 Palestinians, with a
further 21,000 children missing.
It is the same military currently on
trial for genocide at the International Court of Justice (ICJ), the highest
court in the world.
If there are no red lines for Israel
when it comes to brutalising Palestinian civilians trapped inside Gaza, why
would there be any red lines for those kidnapped off its streets and dragged
into its dungeons?
Sexual violence
I documented some of the horrors
unfolding in Sde Teiman in these pages back in May.
Months ago, the Israeli media began
publishing testimonies from whistleblowing guards and doctors detailing the
depraved conditions there.
The International Committee of the
Red Cross has been denied access to the detention camp, leaving it entirely
unmonitored.
The United Nations published a
report on 31 July into the conditions in which some 9,400 captive Palestinians
have been held since last October. Most have been cut off from the outside
world, and the reason for their seizure and imprisonment was never provided.
The report concludes that “appalling
acts” of torture and abuse are taking place at all of Israel’s detention
centres, including sexual violence, waterboarding and attacks with dogs.
The authors note “forced nudity of
both men and women; beatings while naked, including on the genitals;
electrocution of the genitals and anus; being forced to undergo repeated
humiliating strip searches; widespread sexual slurs and threats of rape; and the
inappropriate touching of women by both male and female soldiers”.
There are, according to the
investigation, “consistent reports” of Israeli security forces “inserting
objects into detainees’ anuses”.
Last month, Save the Children found
that many hundreds of Palestinian children had been imprisoned in Israel, where
they faced starvation and sexual abuse.
And this week B’Tselem, Israel’s
main human rights group monitoring the occupation, produced a report – titled
“Welcome to Hell” – which included the testimonies of dozens of Palestinians
who had emerged from what it called “inhuman conditions”. Most had never been
charged with an offence.
It concluded that the abuses at Sde
Teiman were “just the tip of the iceberg”. All of Israel’s detention centres
formed “a network of torture camps for Palestinians” in which “every inmate is
intentionally condemned to severe, relentless pain and suffering”. It added
that this was “an organized, declared policy of the Israeli prison
authorities”.
Tal Steiner, head of the Public
Committee Against Torture in Israel, which has long campaigned against the
systematic torture of Palestinian detainees, wrote last week that Sde Teiman
“was a place where the most horrible torture we had ever seen was occurring”.
Can of worms
In short, it has been an open secret
in Israel that torture and sexual assault are routine at Sde Teiman.
The abuse is so horrifying that last
month Israel’s high court ordered officials to explain why they were operating
outside Israel’s own laws governing the internment of “unlawful combatants”.
The surprise is not that sexual
violence is being inflicted on Palestinian captives. It is that Israel’s top
brass ever imagined the arrest of Israeli soldiers for raping a Palestinian
would pass muster with the public.
Instead, by making the arrests, the
army opened a toxic can of worms.
The arrests provoked a massive
backlash from soldiers, politicians, Israeli media, and large sections of the
Israeli public.
Rioters, led by members of the
Israeli parliament, broke into Sde Teiman. An even larger group, including
members of Force 100, tried to invade a military base, Beit Lid, where the
soldiers were being held in an attempt to free them.
The police, under the control of
Itamar Ben Gvir, a settler leader with openly fascist leanings, delayed
arriving to break up the protests. Ben Gvir has called for Palestinian
prisoners to be summarily executed – or killed with “a shot to the head” – to save
on the costs of holding them.
No one was arrested over what
amounted to a mutiny as well as a major breach of security.
Bezalel Smotrich, Israel’s finance
minister, helped whip up popular indignation, denouncing the arrests and
describing the Force 100 soldiers as “heroic warriors”.
Other prominent cabinet ministers
echoed him.
Already, three of the soldiers have
been freed, and more will likely follow.
The consensus in Israel is that any
abuse, including rape, is permitted against the thousands of Palestinians who
have been seized by Israel in recent months – including women, children and
many hundreds of medical personnel.
That consensus is the same one that
thinks it fine to bomb Palestinian women and children in Gaza, destroy their
homes and starve them.
Rape permitted
Such depraved attitudes are not new.
They draw on ideological convictions and legal precedents that developed
through decades of Israel’s illegal occupation. Israeli society has completely
normalized the idea that Palestinians are less than human and that any and
every abuse of them is allowed.
Hamas’s attack on 7 October simply
brought the long-standing moral corruption at the core of Israeli society more
obviously out into the open.
In 2016, for example, the Israeli
military appointed Colonel Eyal Karim as its chief rabbi, even after he had
declared Palestinians to be “animals” and had approved the rape of Palestinian
women in the interest of boosting soldiers’ morale.
Religious extremists, let us note,
increasingly predominate among combat troops.
In 2015, Israel’s supreme court
dismissed a compensation suit from a Lebanese prisoner that his lawyers
submitted after he was released in a prisoner swap. Mustafa Dirani had been
raped with a baton 15 years earlier in a secret jail known as Facility 1391.
Despite Dirani’s claim being
supported by a medical assessment from the time made by an Israeli military
doctor, the court ruled that anyone engaged in an armed conflict with Israel
could not make a claim against the Israeli state.
Meanwhile, human and legal rights
groups have regularly reported cases of Israeli soldiers and police raping and
sexually assaulting Palestinians, including children.
A clear message was sent to Israeli
soldiers over many decades that, just as the genocidal murder of Palestinians
is considered warranted and “lawful”, the torture and rape of Palestinians held
in captivity is considered warranted and “lawful” too.
Understandably, there was
indignation that the long-established “rules” – that any and every atrocity is
permitted – appeared suddenly and arbitrarily to have been changed.
On a precipice
The biggest question is this: why
did the Israeli military’s top legal adviser approve opening an investigation
into the Force 100 soldiers – and why now?
The answer is obvious. Israel’s
commanders are in panic after a spate of setbacks in the international legal
arena.
The ICJ, sometimes referred to as
the World Court, has put Israel on trial for committing what it considers a
“plausible” genocide in Gaza.
Separately, it concluded last month
that Israel’s 57-year occupation is illegal and a form of aggression against
the Palestinian people. Gaza never stopped being under occupation, the judges
ruled, despite claims from its apologists, including western governments, to
the contrary.
Significantly, that means
Palestinians have a legal right to resist their occupation. Or, to put it
another way, they have an immutable right to self-defense against their Israeli
occupiers, while Israel has no such right against the Palestinians it illegally
occupies.
Israel is not in “armed conflict”
with the Palestinian people. It is brutally occupying and oppressing them.
Israel must immediately end the
occupation to regain such a right of self-defense – something it demonstrably
has no intention to do.
Meanwhile, the chief prosecutor of
the International Criminal Court (ICC), the ICJ’s sister court, is actively
seeking arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his
defense minister, Yoav Gallant, for war crimes.
The various cases reinforce each
other. The World Court’s decisions are making it ever harder for the ICC to
drag its feet in issuing and expanding the circle of arrest warrants.
Both courts are now under enormous,
countervailing pressures.
On the one side, massive external
pressure is being exerted on the ICJ and ICC from states such as the US,
Britain and Germany that are prepared to see the genocide in Gaza continue.
And on the other, the judges
themselves are fully aware of what is at stake if they fail to act.
The longer they delay, the more they
discredit international law and their own role as arbiters of that law. That
will give even more leeway for other states to claim that inaction by the
courts has set a precedent for their own right to commit war crimes.
International law, the entire
rationale for the ICJ and ICC’s existence, stands on a precipice. Israel’s
genocide threatens to bring it all crashing down.
Stalling the ICC
Israel’s top brass stand in the
middle of that fight.
They are confident that Washington
will block at the UN Security Council any effort to enforce the ICJ rulings
against them – either a future one on genocide in Gaza or the existing one on
their illegal occupation.
But arrest warrants from the ICC are
a different matter. Washington has no such veto. All states signed up to the
ICC’s Rome Statute – that is, most of the West, minus the US – will be
obligated to arrest Israeli officials who step on their soil and to hand them
over to The Hague.
Israel and the US had been hoping to
use technicalities to delay the issuing of the arrest warrants for as long as
possible. Most significantly, they recruited the UK, which has signed the Rome
Statute, to do their dirty work.
It looked like the new UK government
under Keir Starmer would continue where its predecessor left off by tying up
the court in lengthy and obscure legal debates about the continuing
applicability of the long-dead, 30-year-old Oslo Accords.
A former human rights lawyer,
Starmer has repeatedly backed Israel’s “plausible” genocide, even arguing that
the starvation of Gaza’s population, including its children, could be justified
as “self-defence” – an idea entirely alien to international law, which treats
it as collective punishment and a war crime.
But now with a secure parliamentary
majority, even Starmer appears to be baulking at being seen as helping
Netanyahu personally avoid arrest for war crimes.
The UK government announced late
last month that it would drop Britain’s legal objections at the ICC.
That has suddenly left both
Netanyahu and the Israeli military command starkly exposed – which is the
reason they felt compelled to approve the arrest of the Force 100 soldiers.
Under a rule known as
“complementarity”, Israeli officials might be able to avoid war crimes trials
at The Hague if they can demonstrate that Israel is able and willing to
prosecute war crimes itself. That would avert the need for the ICC to step in
and fulfill its mandate.
The Israeli top brass hoped they
could feed a few lowly soldiers to the Israeli courts and drag out the trials
for years. In the meantime, Washington would have the pretext it needed to
bully the ICC into dropping the case for arrests on the grounds that Israel was
already doing the job of prosecuting war crimes.
International isolation
The patent problem with this
strategy is that the ICC isn’t primarily interested in a few grunts being
prosecuted in Israel as war criminals, even assuming the trials ever take
place.
At issue is the military strategy
that has allowed Israel to bomb Gaza into the Stone Age. At issue is a
political culture that has made starving 2.3 million people seem normal.
At issue is a religious and
nationalistic fervour long cultivated in the army that now encourages soldiers
to execute Palestinian children by shooting them in the head and chest, as a US
doctor who volunteered in Gaza has testified.
At issue is a military hierarchy
that turns a blind eye to soldiers raping and sexually abusing Palestinian
captives, including children.
The buck stops not with a handful of
soldiers in Force 100. It stops with the Israeli government and military
leaders. They are at the top of a command chain that has authorized war crimes
in Gaza for the past 10 months – and before that, for decades across the
occupied territories.
This is why observers have totally
underestimated what is at stake with the rulings of the ICC and ICJ.
These judgments against Israel are
forcing out into the light of day for proper scrutiny a state of affairs that
has been quietly accepted by the West for decades. Should Israel have the right
to operate as an apartheid regime that systematically engages in ethnic
cleansing and the murder of Palestinians?
A direct answer is needed from each
western capital. There is nowhere left to hide. Western states are being
presented with a stark choice: either openly back Israeli apartheid and
genocide, or for the first time withdraw support.
The Israeli far-right, which now
dominates both politically and in the army’s combat ranks, cares about none of
this. It is immune to pressure. It is willing to go it alone.
As the Israeli media has been
warning for some time, sections of the army are effectively now turning into
militias that follow their own rules.
Israel’s military commanders, on the
other hand, are starting to understand the trap they have set for themselves.
They have long cultivated fascistic zealotry among ground troops needed to
dehumanize and better oppress Palestinians living under Israeli occupation. But
the war crimes proudly being live-streamed by their units now leave them
exposed to the legal consequences.
Israel’s international isolation
means a place one day for them in the dock at The Hague.
War machine cornered
The ICC and ICJ rulings are not just
bringing Israeli society’s demons out into the open, or those of a complicit
western political and media class.
The international legal order is
gradually cornering Israel’s war machine, forcing it to turn in on itself. The
interests of the Israeli military command are now fundamentally opposed to
those of the rank and file and the political leadership.
The result, as military expert Yagil
Levy has long warned, will be an increasing breakdown of discipline, as the
attempts to arrest Force 100 soldiers demonstrated all too clearly.
The Israeli military juggernaut
cannot be easily or quickly turned around.
The military command is reported to
be furiously trying to push Netanyahu into agreeing on a hostage deal to bring
about a ceasefire – not because it cares about the welfare of Palestinian
civilians, or the hostages, but because the longer this “plausible” genocide
continues, the bigger chance the generals will end up at The Hague.
Israel’s zealots are ignoring the
pleas of the top brass. They want not only to continue the drive to eliminate
the Palestinian people but to widen the circle of war, whatever the
consequences.
That included the reckless,
incendiary move last week to assassinate Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh in Iran –
a provocation with one aim only: to undermine the moderates in Hamas and
Tehran.
If, as seems certain, Israel’s
commanders are unwilling or incapable of reining in these excesses, then the
World Court will find it impossible to ignore the charge of genocide against
Israel and the ICC will be compelled to issue arrest warrants against more of
the military leadership.
A logic has been created in which
evil feeds on evil in a death spiral. The question is how much more carnage and
misery can Israel spread on the way down.
Jonathan Cook is the author of three
books on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and a winner of the Martha Gellhorn
Special Prize for Journalism. His website and blog can be found at
www.jonathan-cook.net. This originally appeared in the Middle East Eye.
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