Gaza – Israel’s Concentration Camp
The phrase “the elephant in the room” is commonly applied when illustrating religious dogma, and what more dogmatic entity than that which colonises Palestine, and terms itself ‘Israel’. But the elephant, in this case, is not Zionist delusion – tempting though that is to write about – but Gaza. What is being done to the people of Gaza is one hell of a big elephant that the world’s politicians seem not to have noticed.
Gaza is Palestine’s lethal open prison. Rather than reinvent the wheel, I would urge anyone reading this post to just take a look at this short BBC News article entitled “Life in the ‘open prison’ of Gaza“. The article is sickening.
The collective punishment of Gaza citizens by the Israeli government is not only morally repugnant, but illegal under the most important laws of the 20th Century – those that sought to limit the savagery of human warfare so that non-combatants were afforded (at least in principle) some degree of protection. I have argued this in earlier writing, but the case is made most clearly and eloquently in a petition served to the Supreme Court of Israel by bodies including “The Public Committee Against Torture in Israel” (homepage).
The petition demands a halt to plans by the Israeli Defense Minister and Prime Minister to cut power and fuel supplies to the inhabitants of Gaza, and the specific ‘war crimes’ aspect of this may be found on page 11, from which I quote below:
The actions of the Respondents are subject to humanitarian law by force of the Regulations
concerning the Laws and Customs of War on Land annexed to the Hague Convention of 1907,
which apply directly in Israeli law, being part of customary law (heretofore: “the Hague Regulations”),
as well as the Fourth Geneva Convention relative to the Protection of Civilian Persons in Time of
War (heretofore: the Fourth Geneva Convention) (HCJ 393/82 Jamaiyat Iskan vs. the commander of
IDF Forces, v. 37(4) 785, 792 (heretofore: the “Jamaiyat Iskan affair”); HCJ 4764/04 Physicians for
Human Rights vs. the commander of IF forces in Gaza, v. 58(5) 385, 393 (heretofore: the Physicians
for Human Rights Affair) and see also Orna Ben Naftali and Yuval Shani, International Law –
Between Peace and War (Ramot 2006), p.243 (heretofore: Ben Naftali and Shani).The basic instruction of humanitarian international law, starting with the commencement of warfare,
is that the local residents “…are under all circumstances entitled to respect for their persons, their
honour, their family rights, their religious convictions and practices, and their manners and customs.
They shall at all times be humanely treated, and shall be protected especially against all acts of
violence or threats thereof…” (Article 27 of the Fourth Geneva Convention. See also article 46 of the
Hague Regulations).
But then what would one expect from a State that inflicts torture (BBC) and false imprisonment on those whose land it so brutally confiscated? When senior investigators in the United Nations compare Israel’s actions to those of the Nazi’s, well, perhaps they’re just anti-semitic, or terrorist-lovers, or some such nasty thing.
Filed under: Delusions on April 16th, 2008
