Israel's chickens coming home to roost

I'm reading the Goldstone Report (warning: relatively big PDF) a 600-page document that details the findings of a panel investigating the attack on Gaza last winter. It's an astounding document. Not only is it an interesting and immensely readable introduction to the contemporary situation in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the oppression of the Palestine people, it is also simply an exquisitely convincing argument. Meticulous, detailed and balanced. It is the objective document that critics on both sides have argued for. It doesn't hesitate to show the full force of Palestinian in-fighting and unlawful attacks on Israel by mortar and Qassam rockets, but it also does not hesitate to shove Israel's face in what they've done. And they have done so very, very much.

It details and substantiates the allegations of deliberate attacks on civilians. I mean, some people might have gotten the impression that those allegations came from crazy, Kalashnikov-toting jihadists. No, those allegations came from so many credible sources that they can no longer be denied. The Goldstone Report documents a pattern of systematic attack on a defenceless civilian population. The Israeli army committed crimes against humanity, and war crimes. The people responsible need to lose their jobs, then they have to be tried and convicted and spend the rest of their lives in prison.

I've read a few documents like The Goldstone report when I was a member of Amnesty and a couple of times afterwards, as well. There is always some detail that gets you. Some ridiculous little piece of information or a telling story that is the convincing detail in the argument being made. It might be the story of how a political activist was shot in front of his children in Chile or the story of how the police routinely administered beatings to 12-years in the US. In the Goldstone Report, for me, it was the chickens:

The chicken farms of Mr. Sameh Sawafeary in the Zeitoun neighbourhood south of Gaza City reportedly supplied over 10 per cent of the Gaza egg market. Armoured bulldozers of the Israeli forces systematically flattened the chicken coops, killing all 31,000 chickens inside, and destroyed the plant and material necessary for the business. The Mission concludes that this was a deliberate act of wanton destruction not justified by any military necessity and draws the same legal conclusions as in the case of [a similar destruction of a flour mill a few days before].

For some reason the image of Israeli soldiers bringing the roof down on 31.000 chickens, for no good military reason other than just to fuck with the civilian population of Gaza; for spite, out of malice, is the detail that really got me.

The Goldstone Report is, in short, mandatory reading for anyone looking for an understanding of the contemporary situation in Gaza and Israel/Palestine. It is readable, well-documented and convincing. As Klassekampen's reviewer Espen Stueland said of another recently published book on Gaza, I know of no words of greater significance that could be read right now.

(Norwegians will find that Mads Gilbert and Erik Fosse's book Øyne i Gaza (Gyldendal, 2009) makes a wonderful supplement to the report.)

Non Habeas Corpus

Sure, we have these people locked up already, so who cares about building a case against them. Or, y'know, keeping records about them:

President Obama's plans to expeditiously determine the fates of about 245 terrorism suspects held at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and quickly close the military prison there were set back last week when incoming legal and national security officials -- barred until the inauguration from examining classified material on the detainees -- discovered that there were no comprehensive case files on many of them.

Instead, they found that information on individual prisoners is "scattered throughout the executive branch," a senior administration official said. The executive order Obama signed Thursday orders the prison closed within one year, and a Cabinet-level panel named to review each case separately will have to spend its initial weeks and perhaps months scouring the corners of the federal government in search of relevant material.

Several former Bush administration officials agreed that the files are incomplete and that no single government entity was charged with pulling together all the facts and the range of options for each prisoner. They said that the CIA and other intelligence agencies were reluctant to share information, and that the Bush administration's focus on detention and interrogation made preparation of viable prosecutions a far lower priority.

Which, I suppose, leads one to wonder exactly how they knew these people were evil terrorist illegal enemy islamofascist non-human pond scum. If there weren't any records being kept, or for that matter being collected. How did they do reviews and inventories to make sure that all the cases were properly overseen? That their judgment in each case was correct? How did they even know who they were dealing with?

But lest we forget, these were "very bad people". Terrorists and bombers and "responsible for 9-11". Man, they really locked up some perverters of democracy. Good going, guys.

Which reminds me of something William Gibson said, back at the end of the halcyon days of the first Bush administration.

One actually has to be something of a specialist, today, to even begin to grasp quite how fantastically, how baroquely and at once brutally fucked the situation of the United States has since been made to be.

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Oh, completely unrelated - a really weird Google ad in this article:

Nordics Are Israelites
4,000 English Books Say So! Free Saxon-Israel Books & Magazines
ChristsAssembly.com

Bombing a school

Remember seeing those shots of bombs hitting Gaza which sort of flew along and then broke up into many little bombs? I wondered at first if those were cluster bombs (which it would be madness to use in a densely populated area like Gaza). It turns out that at least some of them were white phosphorus.

White phosphorus, as you know Bob, is not a little illegal. First off, the Geneva Convention bans all attacks on civilians. Then, the Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons bans the use of incendiary weapons. White phosphorus is an incendiary weapon - basically burning phosphorus which cannot be put out by water. It just burns and burns and burns. If you get it on your skin, it will keep burning your skin until removed or until you completely choke it off from oxygen with a fire blanket (which is hard to do with someone who is on fire).

Now, in addition to all that, white phosphorus is also poisonous. Not just does it burn you, it causes heart, kidney and liver failure because your body absorbs the phosphorus. So it's more deadly than ordinary incendiary devices like napalm. That means that by any serious interpretation (i.e. of anyone except the US, Russia and Israel) of the Chemical Weapons Convention, it's a chemical weapon, which means it is specifically banned.

So yeah, here it is being used. Here it is being used on a school. Here it is being used on a school full of children and full of refugees. A school which the UN has converted into a makeshift refugee shelter. A school full of 1600 (civilian) children and refugees. A school which the Israeli Defence Force had the GPS coordinates to. The pictures, through some act of God, do not contain images of unspeakable horror. Nobody gets hurt on screen. But you get to see what white phosphorus looks like up close, as it rains down on a school full of children and other civilians. Somebody please tell me how this is not a war crime. Somebody tell me how Israel has a right to defend itself against all these children.

Number crunching

According to the Al-Jazeera Gaza Twitterbot, Hamas is reporting that 48 of its fighters were killed in the Gaza bombings and the subsequent invasion. 

According to Gaza Body Count, 1203 dead have been confirmed so far. Those 1203 are 98,93 % of the casualties, with the remaining 1.07 % - 13 dead - on the Israeli side. 

If that's true, then 3.99 %, almost 4 % of those killed on the Palestinian side were legitimate targets. The remaining 96 % were innocent bystanders. 

Or, well, "bystanders" is maybe the wrong word, seeing as how they were locked inside a territory they couldn't escape from. Maybe "terror victims" or "murder victims" are a better phrase.

Whatever we call them, I believe that percentage is far higher than most wars in the 20th century. I have top people getting the numbers now. In the meantime, let's suffice to say that there is no way that this can be adequately described as a war on Hamas aggression. Reading purely from the numbers, this was a war on Palestinian civilians which happened to hit some Hamas fighters. I'm sure you could pretty much carpet bomb Gaza and get the same percentage. I wonder if they were even aiming. 

Update: My top people. Well... Mikkel, actually, has gotten hold of the numbers. They're in comments.