September 17,
2024
Ann Arbor
(Informed Comment) – On Monday, Israeli bombardments killed 38 people in Gaza.
Based on past experience, we can expect a majority of those killed to have been
women and children — at least 21 and maybe more. Photographs and video coming
out of Gaza show dead children being carried in burial shrouds. For intance, Al
Jazeera reports that an Israeli bombardment of the Sabra neighborhood of Gaza
City killed 3 people, and that a child and a woman are among the dead. Several
others were injured.
The Israelis dropped bombs on a residential neighborhood
because they believed a member of the Hamas paramilitary, the al-Qassam
Brigades, was present there. But International Humanitarian Law does not allow
reckless disregard for the lives of civilians in military operations, which is
what we see from the Israelis every day in Gaza.
Others among the
victims of Monday’s bombardments were innocent male noncombatants, though note
that the genocidal discourse in Israel alleges that there are no innocent
Palestinians. The Israeli military is likely counting as Hamas militants all
the able bodied males killed. As this carnage has become daily and routine, it
has ceased being reported as significant news. As far as I can tell, US cable
news simply ignores Gaza most of the time, with rare exceptions.
Although we
concentrate on the estimate of at least 41,226 people killed in Gaza by Israeli
bombs (and this is a gross underestimate) we often forget about the 95,413
wounded.
The World Health
Organization estimates that 25% of of the wounded have undergone severe trauma
(loss of limbs, severe burns, etc.) and require rehabilitative health care.
That is, their injuries are life-changing.
The estimate is
based on records from Emergency Medical Teams on the ground in Gaza in the
first half of this year
Injuries to
major extremities — feet and hands — constitute a significant proportion of
these injuries. WHO writes, “the majority are likely to be lower limb injuries,
including complex fractures with peripheral nerve injuries.” There are on the
order of 15,500 of these.
Then there are
amputations (often done without anesthetic).
At one point in
the war last winter, ten children a day had to have a limb amputated.
Who observes,
“It is reasonable to expect that there are between 3105 and 4050 limb
amputations.” At the upper range, that would be 22 amputations a day for the
first half of this year.
Then, as the
horror movie unfolds, WHO informs us that there have likely been 2000 or so
spinal cord and severe traumatic brain injuries. That’s likely a lot of
paralyzed or partially paralyzed people.
A similar
number, about 2,000, have been badly burned.
One physician
who worked in Gaza reported that 80% of the victims she saw were children.
Under ordinary
circumstances, providing rehabilitative care for a nearly 25,000 people would
be a challenge. You’d need crutches and other prophylactics, wheel chairs, neck
braces, spine braces, whirlpool baths for the burned to remove dead skin. Such
things are now rare in Gaza or don’t even exist. The longer a patient with
severe trauma goes without treatment, the greater the danger is that the
injuries will never heal properly or will get worse. Israel keeps exiling
Palestinians in Gaza from one place to the next. That would be hard on the ones
with spine injuries or amputated legs. The ones with spine injuries could well
be killed by such a move.
People ask me
how they can help. Well, first chew out your Congressman and Senators for
allowing this carnage to proceed. But here’s a link for UNICEF’s Gaza effort.
Medea Benjamin & Nicolas J.S.
Davies
On September 18th, the UN General
Assembly is scheduled to debate and vote on a resolution calling on Israel to
end “its unlawful presence in the Occupied Palestinian Territory” within six
months. Given that the General Assembly, unlike the exclusive 15-member UN
Security Council, allows all UN members to vote and there is no veto in the
General Assembly, this is an opportunity for the world community to clearly
express its opposition to Israel’s brutal occupation of Palestine.
If Israel predictably fails to heed
a General Assembly resolution calling on it to withdraw its occupation forces
and settlers from Gaza, the West Bank and East Jerusalem, and the United States
then vetoes or threatens to veto a Security Council resolution to enforce the
ICJ ruling, then the General Assembly could go a step further.
It could convene an Emergency
Session to take up what is called a Uniting For Peace resolution, which could
call for an arms embargo, an economic boycott or other UN sanctions against
Israel – or even call for actions against the United States. Uniting for Peace
resolutions have only been passed by the General Assembly five times since the
procedure was first adopted in 1950.
The September 18 resolution comes in
response to an historic ruling by the International Court of Justice (ICJ) on
July 19, which found that “Israeli settlements in the West Bank and East
Jerusalem, and the regime associated with them, have been established and are
being maintained in violation of international law.”
The court ruled that Israel’s
obligations under international law include “the evacuation of all settlers
from existing settlements” and the payment of restitution to all who have been
harmed by its illegal occupation. The passage of the General Assembly
resolution by a large majority of members would demonstrate that countries all
over the world support the ICJ ruling, and would be a small but important first
step toward ensuring that Israel must live up to those obligations.
Israel’s President Netanyahu
cavalierly dismissed the court ruling with a claim that, “The Jewish nation
cannot be an occupier in its own land.” This is
exactly the position that the court had rejected, ruling that Israel’s
1967 military invasion and occupation of the Occupied Palestinian Territories
did not give it the right to settle its own people there, annex those
territories, or make them part of Israel.
While Israel used its hotly disputed
account of the October 7th events as a pretext to declare open season for the
mass murder of Palestinians in Gaza, Israeli forces in the West Bank and East
Jerusalem used it as a pretext to distribute assault rifles and other
military-grade weapons to illegal Israeli settlers and unleash a new wave of
violence there, too.
Armed settlers immediately started
seizing more Palestinian land and shooting Palestinians. Israeli occupation
forces either stood by and watched or joined in the violence, but did not
intervene to defend Palestinians or hold their Israeli attackers accountable.
Since last October, occupation
forces and armed settlers in the West Bank and East Jerusalem have now killed
at least 700 people, including 159 children.
The escalation of violence and land
seizures has been so flagrant that even the U.S. and European governments have
felt obligated to impose sanctions on a small number of violent settlers and
their organizations.
In Gaza, the Israeli military has
been murdering Palestinians day after day for the past 11 months. The
Palestinian Health Ministry has counted over 41,000 Palestinians killed in
Gaza, but with the destruction of the hospitals that it relies on to identify
and count the dead, this is now only a partial death toll. Medical researchers
estimate that the total number of deaths in Gaza from the direct and indirect
results of Israeli actions will be in the hundreds of thousands, even if the
massacre were to end soon.
Israel and the United States are
undoubtedly more and more isolated as a result of their roles in this genocide.
Whether the United States can still coerce or browbeat a few of its traditional
allies into rejecting or abstaining from the General Assembly resolution on
September 18 will be a test of its residual “soft power.”
President Biden can claim to be
exercising a certain kind of international leadership, but it is not the kind
of leadership that any American can be proud of. The United States has muscled
its way into a pivotal role in the ceasefire negotiations begun by Qatar and
Egypt, and it has used that position to skillfully and repeatedly undermine any
chance of a ceasefire, the release of hostages or an end to the genocide.
By failing to use any of its
substantial leverage to pressure Israel, and disingenuously blaming Hamas for
every failure in the negotiations, U.S. officials are ensuring that the
genocide will continue for as long as they and and their Israeli allies want,
while many Americans remain confused about their own government’s
responsibility for the continuing bloodshed.
This is a continuation of the
strategy by which the United States has stymied and prevented peace since 1967,
falsely posing as an honest broker, while in fact remaining Israel’s staunchest
ally and the critical diplomatic obstacle to a free Palestine.
In addition to cynically undermining
any chance of a ceasefire, the United States has injected itself into debates
over the future of Gaza, promoting the idea that a post-war government could be
led by the Fatah-led Palestinian Authority, which many Palestinians view as
hopelessly corrupt and compromised by subservience to Israel and the United
States.
China has taken a more constructive
approach to resolving differences between Palestinian political groupings. It
invited Hamas, Fatah and 12 other Palestinian groups to a three-day meeting in
Beijing in July, where they all agreed to a “national unity” plan to form a
post-war “interim national reconciliation government,” which would oversee
relief and rebuilding in Gaza and organize a national Palestinian election to
seat a new elected government.
Mustafa Barghouti, the
secretary-general of the political movement called the Palestinian National
Initiative, hailed the Beijing Declaration as going “much further” than
previous reconciliation efforts, and said that the plan for a unity government
“blocks Israeli efforts to create some kind of collaborative structure against
Palestinian interests.” China has also called for an international peace
conference to try to end the war.
As the world comes together in the
General Assembly on September 18, it faces both a serious challenge and an
unprecedented opportunity. Each time the General Assembly has met in recent
years, a succession of leaders from the Global South has risen to lament the
breakdown of the peaceful and just international order that the UN is supposed
to represent, from the failure to end the war in Ukraine to inaction against
the climate crisis to the persistence of neocolonialism in Africa.
Perhaps no crisis more clearly
embodies the failure of the UN and the international system than the
57-year-old Israeli occupation of the Palestinian territories it invaded in
1967. At the same time that the United States has armed Israel to the teeth, it
has vetoed 46 UN Security Council resolutions that either required Israel to
comply with international law, called for an end to the occupation or for
Palestinian statehood, or held Israel accountable for war crimes or illegal
settlement building.
The ability of one Permanent Member
of the Security Council to use its veto to block the rule of international law
and the will of the rest of the world has always been widely recognized as the
fatal flaw in the existing structure of the UN system.
When this structure was first
announced in 1945, French writer Albert Camus wrote in Combat, the French
Resistance newspaper he edited, that the veto would “effectively put an end to
any idea of international democracy… The Five would thus retain forever the
freedom of maneuver that would be forever denied the others.”
The General Assembly and the
Security Council have debated a series of resolutions calling for a ceasefire
in Gaza, and each debate has pitted the United States, Israel, and occasionally
the United Kingdom or another U.S. ally, against the voices of the rest of the
world calling in unison for peace in Gaza.
Of the UN’s 193 nations, 145 have
now recognized Palestine as a sovereign nation comprising Gaza, the West Bank
and East Jerusalem, and even more countries have voted for resolutions to end
the occupation, prohibit Israeli settlements and support Palestinian
self-determination and human rights.
For many decades, the United States’
unique position of unconditional support for Israel has been a critical factor
in enabling Israeli war crimes and prolonging the intolerable plight of the
Palestinian people.
In the crisis in Gaza, the U.S.
military alliance with Israel involves the U.S. directly in the crime of
genocide, as the United States provides the warplanes and bombs that are
killing the largest numbers of Palestinians and literally destroying Gaza. The
United States also deploys military liaison officers to assist Israel in
planning its operations, special operations forces to provide intelligence and
satellite communications, and trainers and technicians to teach Israeli forces
to use and maintain new American weapons, such as F-35 warplanes.
The supply chain for the U.S.
arsenal of genocide criss-crosses America, from weapons factories to military
bases to procurement offices at the Pentagon and Central Command in Tampa. It
feeds plane loads of weapons flying to military bases in Israel, from where
these endless tons of steel and high explosives rain down on Gaza to shatter
buildings, flesh and bones.
The U.S. role is greater than
complicity – it is essential, active participation, without which the Israelis
could not conduct this genocide in its present form, any more than the Germans
could have run Auschwitz without gas chambers and poison gas.
And it is precisely because of the
essential U.S. role in this genocide that the United States has the power to
end it, not by pretending to plead with the Israelis to be more “careful” about
civilian casualties, but by ending its own instrumental role in the genocide.
Every American of conscience should
keep applying all kinds of pressure on our own government, but as long as it
keeps ignoring the will of its own people, sending more weapons, vetoing
Security Council resolutions and undermining peace negotiations, it is by
default up to our neighbors around the world to muster the unity and political
will to end the genocide.
It would certainly be unprecedented
for the world to unite, in opposition to Israel and the United States, to save
Palestine and enforce the ICJ ruling that Israel must withdraw from Gaza, the
West Bank and East Jerusalem. The world has rarely come together so unanimously
since the founding of the United Nations in the aftermath of the Second World
War in 1945. Even the catastrophic U.S.-British invasion and destruction of
Iraq failed to provoke such united action.
But the lesson of that crisis,
indeed the lesson of our time, is that this kind of unity is essential if we
are ever to bring sanity, humanity and peace to our world. That can start with
a decisive vote in the UN General Assembly on Wednesday, September 18, 2024.
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