John Feffer
Netanyahu
is about to escalate, yet again, his war crimes in Gaza.
( Foreign
Policy in Focus ) – Maybe you remember an incident like this from your
schooldays. Someone in your class has done something wrong, like pass around a
caricature of the principal, and the teacher decides to punish the whole class
by taking away your recess. Maybe this is done to force the culprit to confess,
or to pressure you and your classmates to point the finger. It’s a clever
method of drafting students to help police the classroom.
Such tactics of
collective punishment have fallen out of favor for obvious reasons. They’re
unfair. They don’t change behavior. They teach all the wrong lessons and make
kids hate school.
Oh, and such
tactics are also against the Geneva Conventions. According to an article of the
Conventions related to the status and treatment of protected persons, “No
protected person may be punished for an offence he or she has not personally
committed. Collective penalties and likewise all measures of intimidation or of
terrorism are prohibited.”
It might seem
ridiculous to apply the Geneva Conventions to the classroom, even if some
schools resemble warzones. But there has been a recent trend to condemn the
tactics of collective punishment at schools and reference the principles
designed to safeguard civilians.
Even as the
classroom becomes more respectful of children’s rights, the world of
geopolitics has continued to embrace principles of collective punishment. What
is war, ultimately, but the punishment of the entire population for the actions
of the few? Economic sanctions, even the supposedly “smart” variety, end up
hurting people who have nothing to do with the policies of their leaders. And
all those “beautiful” tariffs end up raising prices for millions of consumers
who are not connected in the least to the practices of government or
corporations.
But there is no
more egregious example of collective punishment in the world today than the
tragedy currently unfolding in Gaza.
Ongoing
Violations
On October 7,
2023, Hamas carried out a horrifying attack on Israel that left over a thousand
dead and over 200 in captivity. Israel almost immediately declared war on
Hamas. It then set about forcing all the residents of Gaza to pay for the
crimes of a few.
The punishment
has been appalling. More than 52,000 people have been killed by Israeli forces,
according to the Gaza health ministry. But this number is probably an
undercount by 40 percent, according to an article in The Lancet, if all
war-related deaths like those from a ravaged health system are included. The
vast majority of these tens of thousands of deaths—around 70 percent—are women
and children.
These casualty
numbers must now reflect deaths by starvation, as Israel has blocked all
humanitarian aid to Gaza for the last two months. Israel has deployed this
tactic to pressure the Palestinian population to force Hamas to capitulate and
release the couple dozen Israeli hostages it continues to hold. No food, no
medicine, and no fuel has made it into the enclave. In addition to starvation,
people are dying because they don’t have access to common life-saving drugs.
The New York
Times
reports that the “only food available to many Gazans — particularly those among
the 90 percent of the population that is displaced and mostly living in tents —
comes from local charity kitchens, some of which have been looted as the hunger
crisis deepens.” Compounding the tragedy is the fact that food and medicine is
readily available nearby, but Israel is blocking its delivery.
The Israeli
government claims that it is only targeting Hamas. But it continues to kill
civilians indiscriminately in air strikes, including this week at a crowded
restaurant and a school. It claims that Hamas fighters are hiding in hospitals,
which justifies the destruction of the entire medical infrastructure of the
area. Even if this assertion were true, and Israel has provided little in the
way of proof, all of the civilian deaths would still qualify as collective
punishment. It would still be a war crime.
Clayton Dalton
was part of a medical mission that visited Gaza during the two-month ceasefire
that began in January. In The New Yorker, he described this scene at a ruined
hospital in northern Gaza.
“We entered a large storage room in
the corner of the I.C.U. which was crammed with medical devices: ultrasound
machines, I.V. pumps, dialysis machines, blood-pressure monitors. Each had
apparently been destroyed by a bullet—not in a pattern one would expect from
random shooting but, rather, methodically. I was stunned. I couldn’t think of
any possible military justification for destroying lifesaving equipment.”
Visiting
doctors also started documenting another horrifying statistic: the number of
children shot in the head, as if deliberately executed. There have been dozens
of such casualties, some of the children just a few years old. Adam Hamawy, a
plastic surgeon from New Jersey, told This American Life:
“These are little children that are
being shot, and these aren’t stray bullets. These are aimed. They’re precise.
So a stray bullet will explain one or two of them. It’s not going to explain
the string of precise, targeted shootings that are being done on children since
October.”
The Geneva
Conventions do not seem to apply to school-age children in Gaza. They, along
with so many other Palestinians, are the victims of collective punishment.
Naming and Not
Shaming
Israel has been
cited numerous times for war crimes in Gaza. Human rights organizations—Human
Rights Watch, Amnesty International—have published periodic reports on Israeli
violations. The United Nations has condemned Israel for crimes against
humanity. The International Criminal Court has issued arrest warrants for both
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his former defense minister Yoav
Gallant.
If anything,
the Netanyahu government has only increased its violations in the face of these
condemnations. This week, it announced an escalation in its post-ceasefire
campaign to defeat Hamas. Israel has called up more soldiers to invade Gaza,
push inhabitants to a small enclave in the south, and occupy most of the strip.
More extremist members of Netanyahu’s cabinet call for the expulsion of all
Palestinians from Gaza, and it’s beginning to look as if this is the unstated
goal of the Israel government.
Although
Netanyahu faces increased protests from its own citizenry—including thousands
of reservists and the former head of the Mossad spy agency—several powerful
countries are standing with the Israeli leader. Even as it has axed a huge
amount of U.S. foreign aid, the Trump administration has used executive powers
to skirt Congress and transfer billions of dollars of military assistance to
Israel. India, too, has ignored global public opinion to continue to send
weapons and technology to Israel. Other far-right wing leaders—Javier Milei in
Argentina, Viktor Orban in Hungary—have also maintained good relations with
Netanyahu.
Which means
that Israel continues to act with impunity in its punishment of Palestinians.
Much has been
written about the proper terms to describe Israeli actions in Gaza. The Israeli
government defends its campaign as a “just war” against Hamas. Critics have
accused the government of committing genocide.
The actual
conditions on the ground—the starvation, the toddlers shot in the head, the
widespread displacement and destruction of communities—stand by themselves.
Lawyers and politicians can throw terms at each other, “just war” versus
“genocide,” but there is no getting around the plain, brutal facts. Even the
term “collective punishment,” in its abstraction, fails to capture the horror.
In J.M.
Coetzee’s novel Elizabeth Costello, the eponymous character must give a paper
at a conference on evil. She’s been reading a work of fiction about the failed
effort to assassinate Hitler and the cold-blooded execution of the plotters.
She is taken aback by the details in the book about the manner of the
execution. Why is it necessary to read these horrible details, she wonders?
There is no good reason for the novelist to imagine this manifestation of evil
for it is, in a word, “obscene.”
“Obscene because such things ought
not to take place, and then obscene again because having taken place they ought
not to be brought into the light but covered up and hidden for ever in the
bowels of the earth, like what goes on in the slaughterhouses of the world, if
one wishes to save one’s sanity.”
The details of
what’s happening in Gaza are similarly obscene. But, like the facts of the Nazi
atrocities, they must not be ignored. The Israeli government has banned
journalists from visiting Gaza. The Trump administration is helping out by
penalizing the airing of these details and the campus protests against the U.S.
facilitation of these crimes, all under the guise of preventing
“anti-Semitism.” These are outrages.
In this age of
“alt news” and rampant disinformation, presidential fabrications and threats to
defund public media, facts still matter. The world must face the facts of
Israeli atrocities in Gaza, not despite but because they are obscene.
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