Israël valt hulpkonvooi aan #9

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Robert Fisk: Western leaders are too cowardly to help save lives

It is a fact that it is ordinary people, activists, call them what you will, who now take decisions to change events.

Tuesday, 1 June 2010

Has Israel lost it? Can the Gaza War of 2008-09 (1,300 dead) and the Lebanon War of 2006 (1,006 dead) and all the other wars and now yesterday's killings mean that the world will no longer accept Israel's rule?

Don't hold your breath.

You only have to read the gutless White House statement – that the Obama administration was "working to understand the circumstances surrounding the tragedy". Not a single word of condemnation. And that's it. Nine dead. Just another statistic to add to the Middle East's toll.

But it's not.

In 1948, our politicians – the Americans and the British – staged an airlift into Berlin. A starving population (our enemies only three years before) were surrounded by a brutal army, the Russians, who had erected a fence around the city. The Berlin airlift was one of the great moments in the Cold War. Our soldiers and our airmen risked and gave their lives for these starving Germans.

Incredible, isn't it? In those days, our politicians took decisions; our leaders took decisions to save lives. Messrs Attlee and Truman knew that Berlin was important in moral and human as well as political terms.

And today? It was people – ordinary people, Europeans, Americans, Holocaust survivors – yes, for heaven's sake, survivors of the Nazis – who took the decision to go to Gaza because their politicians and their statesmen had failed them.

Where were our politicians yesterday? Well, we had the ridiculous Ban Ki-moon, the White House's pathetic statement, and dear Mr Blair's expression of "deep regret and shock at the tragic loss of life". Where was Mr Cameron? Where was Mr Clegg?

Back in 1948, they would have ignored the Palestinians, of course. It is, after all, a terrible irony that the Berlin airlift coincided with the destruction of Arab Palestine.

But it is a fact that it is ordinary people, activists, call them what you will, who now take decisions to change events. Our politicians are too spineless, too cowardly, to take decisions to save lives. Why is this? Why didn't we hear courageous words from Messrs Cameron and Clegg yesterday?

For it is a fact, is it not, that had Europeans (and yes, the Turks are Europeans, are they not?) been gunned down by any other Middle Eastern army (which the Israeli army is, is it not?) there would have been waves of outrage.

And what does this say about Israel? Isn't Turkey a close ally of Israel? Is this what the Turks can expect? Now Israel's only ally in the Muslim world is saying this is a massacre – and Israel doesn't seem to care.

But then Israel didn't care when London and Canberra expelled Israeli diplomats after British and Australian passports were forged and then provided to the assassins of Hamas commander Mahmoud al-Mabhouh. It didn't care when it announced new Jewish settlements on occupied land in East Jerusalem while Joe Biden, the Vice-President of its erstwhile ally, the United States, was in town. Why should Israel care now?

How did we get to this point? Maybe because we all grew used to seeing the Israelis kill Arabs, maybe the Israelis grew used to killing Arabs. Now they kill Turks. Or Europeans. Something has changed in the Middle East these past 24 hours – and the Israelis (given their extraordinarily stupid political response to the slaughter) don't seem to have grasped what has happened. The world is tired of these outrages. Only the politicians are silent.

Diplomatic storms

*Goldstone report, November 2009

Israel launched Operation Cast Lead in December 2008 with the declared aim of halting rocket fire from Gaza into Israel. More than 1,400 Palestinians were killed in the three-week conflict along with 13 Israelis. The South African jurist Richard Goldstone's report into the conflict found both Israel and the Hamas movement that controls the Strip guilty of war crimes, but focused more on Israel. Israel refused to co-operate with Goldstone and described his report as distorted and biased.

* The al-Mabhouh assassination, January-May 2010

Britain and Australia expelled Israeli diplomats after concluding that Israel had forged British and Australian passports used by assassins to kill a Hamas commander in Dubai. Israel has neither confirmed or denied a role in the killing of Mahmoud al-Mabhouh in his hotel room in January. Britain said such misuse of British passports was "intolerable". Australia said it was not the behaviour of "a nation with whom we have had such a close, friendly and supportive relationship".


*Settlements row, March 2010

Israel announces plans, during visit by US Vice-President Joe Biden, to build 1,600 homes for Jews in an area of the West Bank annexed by Israel. The announcement triggers unusually harsh criticism from the United States. Washington said it damaged its efforts to revive the Middle East peace process. US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said the project was an insult. Netanyahu said he was blindsided by planning bureaucrats and apologised to Biden. Today's meeting with Barack Obama at the White House, called off by Mr Netanyahu so he could return home to deal with the flotilla crisis, was supposed to be another part of the fence-mending between the two allies.


*Nuclear secrecy, May 2010

Israel, widely assumed to have the Middle East's only nuclear arsenal, has faced renewed calls to sign a global treaty barring the spread of atomic weapons. Signatories of the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) last week called for a conference in 2012 to discuss banning weapons of mass destruction throughout the Middle East. The declaration was adopted by all 189 parties to the NPT, including the US. It urged Israel to sign the NPT and put its nuclear facilities under UN safeguards.

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Op dinsdag 1 juni 2010 08:08 schreef Disana het volgende:
De leden van de Veiligheidsraad veroordelen de aanval van Israël en roept op de activisten en schepen onmiddellijk vrij te laten.

http://www.volkskrant.nl/(...)rdelen_aanval_Israel

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Op dinsdag 1 juni 2010 09:31 schreef EdvandeBerg het volgende:
Die filmpjes waarop te zien is wat er werkelijk gebeurt, hebben mij wel doen inzien dat dit helemaal geen pacifistische geitewollensokken waren die de mariniers stonden op te wachten.

Het was niet slim van de Israeliers de boot te enteren, maar de escalatie begon doordat de 'actievoerders' direct vol los gingen op die soldaten en hun wapens afpakten.

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Op dinsdag 1 juni 2010 09:35 schreef Re het volgende:

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wat behoorlijk naief zou zijn van de IDF, toch, als je mensen verdenkt van wapensmokkel

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Op dinsdag 1 juni 2010 09:38 schreef Re het volgende:
maar goed, de schepen zullen nu wel doorzocht zijn ... en de gesmokkelde wapens zullen als triomf aan de wereld worden getoond

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Op dinsdag 1 juni 2010 09:27 schreef Optimistic1 het volgende:

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Er is Goldstone rapport verschenen en de reputatie van de rechter/onderzoeker Goldstone is wereldwijd bekend. In zijn rapport heeft hij meerdere malen Israel beschuldigd van ernstige zaken die hier in Den Haag horen te worden behandeld om de daders te vervolgen. Wat is met zo'n rapport gebeurd? Helemaaaaaaaaaaaal niets.

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The UN Human Rights Council and its recent Goldstone Report are either biased or mistaken respectively in some of their fundamental accusations against Israel, according to the director of one of Israel's main rights groups.

Even so, "Israel has only itself to blame" for its failure to investigate the accusations of abuses during January's Operation Cast Lead that led to the report, according to B'Tselem executive director Jessica Montell.

"There's no question that the HRC, which mandated the Goldstone [fact-finding mission into the Gaza fighting], has an inappropriate, disproportionate fixation with Israel," she said, adding that the Council was "a political body made up of diplomats, not human rights experts, which means that the powerful states are never going to come under scrutiny the way the powerless will. So China, Russia and the US will never have commission of inquiry, regardless of how their crimes rank relative to Israeli crimes."

Furthermore, the Goldstone Report itself, which was presented in its final version to the Human Rights Council on Tuesday, is "disagreeable" and mistaken in some of its gravest accusations against Israel, she believes. These include the claim that Israel intentionally targeted the civilian population rather than Hamas, and the "weak, hesitant way that the report mentions Hamas's strategy of using civilians [in combat]."

But, she added, Israel could have avoided such a report had it conducted "a thorough investigation" of Cast Lead itself, something which B'Tselem continues to urge on Israel's leaders.

The report, she says, bears "the message of the new international legal system: Justice has to be done at home, or else. Israel has only itself to blame that it took the Human Rights Council to tell [Israel] what it should have done eight months ago."

"Before 2000, you had a Military Police investigation every time a Palestinian was killed," Montell related. "You could argue that the Palestinian's word may not have carried the same weight as the soldier's, but the fact that there was an investigation placed limits on [behavior] at roadblocks, etc."

With the outbreak of the Second Intifada, however, IDF and government lawyers "said the situation is now an armed conflict, and you don't have to open [so many] criminal investigations in an armed conflict. They'll [still] open an investigation on theft complaints or beatings at a checkpoint - things that have no operational connection. But when it comes to gunfire, there are no automatic investigations."

This is a mistake, Montell believes, since "the laws of war are laws. We are asking the IDF to investigate Cast Lead according to the laws of war."

Montell's call for an Israeli investigation is aimed at an Israeli audience, but reflects deep unease both in Israel and abroad over the report's conclusions.

Even the international magazine The Economist, which has stridently criticized Israeli actions in the West Bank and Gaza in the past, said the report's conclusions were unfairly critical of Israel.

"The report takes the very thing it is investigating as its central organising premise," the magazine opined just days after the mid-September publication of the report. "Israeli policy in Gaza, it argues, was deliberately and systematically to inflict suffering on civilians, rather than Hamas fighters. Israel's assertions that, in the difficult circumstances of densely populated Gaza, it planned its military operations carefully and with constant legal advice are taken by the report as evidence not of a concern to uphold international law but of a culpable determination to flout it."

Meanwhile, political commentators such as Tom Gross have blasted the Human Rights Council itself in the wake of the Goldstone report, saying the Council shows little concern for human rights abuses "unless they can blame them on Israel."

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Op dinsdag 1 juni 2010 09:38 schreef Re het volgende:
maar goed, de schepen zullen nu wel doorzocht zijn ... en de gesmokkelde wapens zullen als triomf aan de wereld worden getoond

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Op dinsdag 1 juni 2010 09:39 schreef Stranger het volgende:

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En de daadwerkelijke hulpgoederen zouden de Gaza wel weer niet bereiken.

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Op dinsdag 1 juni 2010 09:31 schreef EdvandeBerg het volgende:
Die filmpjes waarop te zien is wat er werkelijk gebeurt, hebben mij wel doen inzien dat dit helemaal geen pacifistische geitewollensokken waren die de mariniers stonden op te wachten.

Het was niet slim van de Israeliers de boot te enteren, maar de escalatie begon doordat de 'actievoerders' direct vol los gingen op die soldaten en hun wapens afpakten.

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Er is nog een schip (Rachel Corrie, vernoemd naar de overleden activiste) onderweg naar Gaza. Volgens het bericht van een Israëlische legerradiozender zou ook dit schip geforceerd gestopt worden, mocht dat nodig zijn

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Op dinsdag 1 juni 2010 10:09 schreef deedeetee het volgende:

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Nu maar hopen dat de mensen op dit schip zich normaal gedragen.

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Op dinsdag 1 juni 2010 10:02 schreef deedeetee het volgende:

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Aangezien de mensen op de andere schepen geen tegenstand boden -en het eruit zag of dat ook niet verwacht werd - lijkt me dat het toch enigzins anders in en elkaar zat.

De passagiers op het grote schip waren vermoedelijk niet echt iets vreedzaams van plan. Het zou me overgens verbazen als er echt wapens gevonden worden. De bedoeling was het uitlokken van een akelig incident waarbij de uitlokker dus de heilige onschuld moest lijken.
Je snapt dan toch wel dat je beter géén wapens kunt smokkelen die als bewijs tegen je kunnen worden gebruikt toch ?

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Op dinsdag 1 juni 2010 10:05 schreef zarGon het volgende:
Turkse krant Sabah meldt het volgende:

[ afbeelding ]

Even vertaald:
Er is nog een schip (Rachel Corrie, vernoemd naar de overleden activiste) onderweg naar Gaza. Volgens een nieuwsbericht van de Israëlische legerradiozender zou ook dit schip geforceerd gestopt worden, mocht dat nodig zijn.

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Op dinsdag 1 juni 2010 07:23 schreef IHVK het volgende:
Turkse minister: niemand moet van ons verwachten dat de oorlog gaan verklaren aan Israel. Dat gaan we niet doen.

En terecht.

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"Ankara warned that further supply vessels will be sent to Gaza, escorted by the Turkish Navy, a development with unpredictable consequences."

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Op dinsdag 1 juni 2010 10:23 schreef deedeetee het volgende:

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Nou dat ziet er dan weer lekker uit. Goh wat zijn we vreedzaam

Eerst een incident uitlokken en dan met de boel nog ff willen verergeren.