Gaza’s apocalypse “symbolizes utter moral failure” of the post WW II system of international law
The “harvest of terrifying consequences from escalating conflict and the near breakdown of international law” are documented by Amnesty International in its annual The State of the World’s Human Rights report released on April 23, 2024. “What we saw in 2023 confirms that many powerful states are abandoning the founding values of humanity and universality enshrined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights,” writes its Secretary General, Agnès Callamard.
How else can one comprehend the quip of President Biden that this is “a good day for world peace,” as he signed a $95.3 billion weapons package into law? “It’s going to make the world safer,” the President stated. “And it continues America’s leadership in the world, and everyone knows it.”
Tell that to the more than 2,200 students who have been arrested in the weeks since police raided the ‘Gaza Solidarity Encampment’ set up by Columbia University on April 17 and arrested 108 students for ‘trespassing.’ What resonates for them are the words spoken by Howard Zinn when he praised the use of civil disobedience at an anti-Vietnam war rally on the Boston Common 53 years ago (May 5, 1971): “We need to do something to disturb that calm, smiling, murderous president in the White House…they’ll say we’re disturbing the peace, but there is no peace. What really bothers them is that we are disturbing the war.”
Encampments for Gaza
While Netanyahu termed the campus protests “horrific” and declared that “antisemitic mobs have taken over leading universities,” students at more than 80 tented camps around the country have denounced Israel’s genocidal war and demanded that their institutions divest from companies doing business with Israel. At MIT, students are demanding an end to research contracts with the Israeli army which include “engineering of coordinated drone swarms, machine learning for enhanced surveillance and microbial bioengineering.”
Brown University has agreed to put divestment up to a vote (in October) in return for students taking down their tents. Barry Sternlicht, a real estate billionaire, ‘paused’ his donation to the school as a result. Following the removal of their encampment, students, faculty and staff at The New School voted by a wide margin for divestment from 13 companies that are implicated in Israel’s war, among them Boeing, Caterpillar, Elbit Systems, Hewlett-Packard, Lockheed Martin, Motorola Solutions, Raytheon and Northrop Grumman. Students at Rutgers, Northwestern, the University of Minnesota and Northwestern have removed tents in response to negotiations with their administrations and Evergreen State College agreed to create a task force to look into “divestment from companies that profit from gross human rights violations and/or the occupation of Palestinian Territories.” Rachel Corrie was in her senior year at Evergreen when she went to Gaza as part of the International Solidarity Movement. She was crushed by a Caterpillar bulldozer on March 16, 2003 while standing outside a house in Rafah in the effort to prevent its demolition by Israel.
The encampments are the climax of nearly seven months of student organizing against the war, which university administrations have tried to suppress through the imposition of new rules on protests, flat-out censorship, and suspension of student groups. Worried about losing donors and their jobs, university presidents have notably not encouraged teach-ins and the kind of open debate that one could expect in a university setting. Neither have they, as Chris Hedges points out, had a single word to say about Israel’s annihilation of all six of Gaza’s universities.
Students have largely been determined to resist provocation by counter-protestors and have not been deterred by threats of suspension, expulsion, doxxing and sometimes brutal treatment at the hands of police using chemical sprays, rubber bullets and other projectiles, tasers, clubs, and armored vehicles. Police raids have caused injuries to students and some faculty members at Washington University in St. Louis, Emerson, Northeastern, Portland State University, the University of Wisconsin at Madison and other campuses. Among those arrested at Dartmouth was Annelide Orleck, the 65-year-old Jewish head of the Jewish Studies program who was pushed to the ground and dragged while trying to protect pro-Palestinian students. At Indiana University, the Indiana State Police in riot gear made two raids on a peaceful encampment and “images of a police sniper observing from a nearby roof alarmed many on campus.” The NYPD clad in riot gear arrested legal observers and pepper sprayed a student reporter. NYPD officers inflicted concussions on students when, on April 30, they dispersed protestors at the City College of New York and used a BearCat tactical armored vehicle, stun grenades and physical violence to remove the occupiers of Columbia University’s Hamilton Hall which had been taken over the day before. A gun was “accidentally fired” by an officer during the operation. See this triumphant video that the NYPD made of its operation. On May 3, the NYPD cleared out student protestors at The New School and NYU, and additional arrests and police raids took place around the country as graduation ceremonies became a focus for protests.
While the mainstream media has said little about the violence perpetuated by police and counter-protestors and rarely challenged the ’antisemitic’ label that opponents have pinned on the encampments, Democracy Now! has presented a very different version of events. Its May 2 coverage shows video footage (also in the May 4th New York Times) of the hundred-strong pro-Israel gang that assaulted the UCLA encampment for hours, spraying students with chemical substances and beating them with wooden batons while the campus police stayed out of sight. Twenty-four hours later, the California Highway Patrol unleashed flash bangs, and sound and smoke bombs as officers arrested 200 UCLA students and pulled down their tents.
In a move with far-ranging free speech implications, Congress has construed antisemitism as the motivating force behind the student actions and used it to galvanize passage through the House of the Antisemitism Awareness Act on May 1. It compels the Department of Education to use the controversial International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition conflating much criticism of Israel with antisemitism when deciding whether speech violates Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. In the words of The Intercept’s Natasha Lennard, “Antisemitism allegations are cynically deployed against anti-Zionist speech and twisted to permit every manner of authoritarian abuse — including a genocidal war.” Her comment could also be applied to the May 5 seizure of Al Jazeera’s broadcast equipment in Jerusalem as Israel silenced the organization Netanyahu had termed an “incitement channel.”
US shrugs off need for accountability
The increasingly shrill focus on ‘antisemitism’ by Members of Congress and the White House coincides with the Administration’s effort to keep what is happening in the Gaza Strip largely hidden from public view. Although four different government bureaus reported to Secretary of State Blinken that Israel’s assurances that it is complying with international humanitarian law in Gaza were “neither credible nor reliable” and raised “serious questions” about the use to which US offensive weapons are being put, the Administration has repeatedly claimed that Israel has not violated international law. National Security Memorandum-20 issued by the President on February 8 requires the Secretary of State to report to Congress by May 8 on the credibility of those assurances.
While finding that five Israeli military units were responsible for “gross violations of human rights” before the war on Gaza, the Biden Administration has said sanctions will not be imposed on four of them given “remediation” measures they have adopted. As it awaits Israeli assurances of similar “remediation” in the fifth case, believed to be the Netzah Yehuda brigade, the US seems prepared to keep the Leahy Law on the back burner as far as Israel is concerned.
At the same time, the Biden administration is reportedly doing what it can to block the International Criminal Court (ICC) from issuing arrest warrants for war crimes for Netanyahu, the Defense Minister and army Chief of Staff. Netanyahu called the report that the ICC was considering issuing such warrants an “outrageous assault on Israel’s inherent right of self-defense” and an “antisemitic hate crime.” Without mentioning Israel by name, the ICC’s head, Public Prosecutor Karim Khan, warned on May 3 that the court’s “independence and impartiality are undermined when individuals threaten to retaliate against the Court or against Court personnel, should the Office, in fulfillment of its mandate, make decisions about investigations of cases falling within its jurisdiction.”
Facts on the ground
By May 5, the Gaza Ministry of Health reported that 34,654 Palestinians have been killed (not counting an estimated 7,000–10,000 believed under collapsed buildings) and 77,908 wounded. With a health care system that has largely been destroyed, treatment seems unlikely to reach most of them. Only 12 of Gaza’s 36 hospitals are partially functioning.
The ICC has reportedly been investigating as possible war crimes the mass graves discovered in late April at two of Gaza’s largest hospitals, Al-Shifa and Nasser Hospital, where hundreds of bodies were found, women and children among them. Some bodies had bound hands and others were attached to medical tubes. On May 2, it was reported that one of Gaza’s leading surgeons, Adnan al-Bursh, who had been the head of the orthopaedic unit at al-Shifa Hospital, had been “killed by torture” on April 19 while being detained in Israel’s Ofer prison.
The UN’s OCHA meanwhile reports that Israeli bombardments are continuing across the Gaza Strip from land, air and sea, including in Rafah where at least 600,000 children are among the more than a million displaced people who are defenseless before Netanyahu’s promised ground invasion. Egging on the prime minister is his finance minister Bezalel Smotrich, who spoke at the end of Passover about the need to “blot out the remembrance of Amalek from under heaven” and totally annihilate Rafah, Deir al-Balah, and Nuseirat, saying “there are no half measures.” Smotrich has declared he will bring down Netanyahu’s coalition government if the invasion of Rafah does not take place. On May 1, UNICEF head Catherine Russell warned that such an operation “would bring catastrophe on top of catastrophe.”
The war crime of deliberate starvation may also be under ICC consideration. If so, evidence can be culled from a recent B’tselem report, “Manufacturing Famine: Israel is Committing the War Crime of Starvation in the Gaza Strip.” The report states: “Driven by a thirst for revenge over the crimes committed by Hamas on October 7, Israel’s conduct ignores any fundamental moral standard and grossly violates its obligations under international law. Of the multitude of unacceptable measures Israel is using, starving the population of Gaza is particularly horrifying….The moral stain, as well as the criminal responsibility created by the Israeli conduct in the last months, cannot be erased.”
In a confidential report with the memo subject line “Famine Inevitable, Changes Could Reduce but Not Stop Widespread Civilian Deaths,” USAID warns that the “deterioration of food security and nutrition in Gaza is unprecedented in modern history” and without an immediate ceasefire and sustained humanitarian access there will be mass starvation. According to OCHA, during the month of April, 55 percent of humanitarian aid deliveries to the north of Gaza were permitted by Israel while the rest were blocked. In the south of the Gaza Strip, 80 percent were permitted entry. While an Israeli official claimed in late April that 400 trucks were entering daily, the UN put the number at a daily average of 189, and said that some were only half full. Israeli settlers continue to try to stop aid from reaching Gaza. According to the Jordanian Foreign Ministry, on May 1 two convoys from Jordan were attacked by settlers near the settlement of Ma’ale Adumim. In a May 3rd interview Cindy McCain, director of the World Food Program, stated that some areas of the Gaza Strip are now experiencing “full-blown famine” and that “it’s moving its way south.” That movement may be quite rapid given the closure of the Kerem Shalom crossing on May 5 following a missile attack by Hamas on Israeli forces in the area that reportedly killed three soldiers and wounded eleven.
In its May 3 update OCHA did have some positive news to report. After 200 days of shutdown, an Israeli water line serving some 300,000 people in the north has resumed operations, and in the south, power provided by Egypt has permitted a wastewater treatment plant to operate, preventing overflowing sewage from crossing the Egyptian border.
Meanwhile, UNRWA remains under Israeli/US-imposed constraints despite the results of an independent review led by French Foreign Minister Catherine Colonna. The review found that Israel had presented no evidence linking any of its employees to Hamas and that it had regularly provided lists for Israel to vet. While stating that UNRWA’s neutrality practices were stronger than those of any other UN agency, it made recommendations on how they could be further improved. The report concludes that “UNRWA remains pivotal in providing life-saving humanitarian aid and essential social services, in health and education, to Palestinian refugees in Gaza, Jordan, Lebanon, Syria and the West Bank. As such, UNRWA is irreplaceable and indispensable to Palestinians’ human and economic development. In addition, many view UNRWA as a humanitarian lifeline.” Israel rejected the report’s findings, and in the recently-passed foreign aid bill giving Israel an additional $26 billion ($9 billion of which is for ‘humanitarian aid’) Congress stipulated that the US — which has been UNRWA’s biggest funder — cannot resume its funding for at least a year. UNRWA’s current funds will run out in June.
The mysterious floating pier
Instead of supporting UNRWA, the organization that is best placed to distribute aid to Gaza’s starving population, and instead of insisting that Israel open all of its seven land crossings into Gaza and allow trucks to enter unimpeded, the US has embarked on a project that is so elaborate and so inefficient when it comes to saving Palestinian lives that one has to wonder if it isn’t ultimately intended for something else — such as the removal of Palestinians from Gaza in coordination with the ground invasion of Rafah, or possibly, in the longer term, the facilitation of the delivery of the natural gas off the shore of Gaza.
According to The New York Times (April 26), a thousand troops and at least 14 ships are involved in the $320 million project of building a large platform and floating pier eight feet wide and up to 40 feet long which will originally accommodate 90 trucks a day and at full capacity enable 150 truckloads per day of humanitarian aid to reach Gaza — considerably less than the 500 trucks that entered Gaza on a daily basis before the war. It supposedly will work like this: supplies will be shipped to Cyprus where they will be screened by Israel, and then take a day, or two, or three (depending on the kind of boat and weather) to reach the platform that will be anchored two or so miles off-shore. There, the cargo will be off-loaded, and put on smaller boats to be transported to the pier where it will be again off-loaded, and then loaded onto trucks driven by ‘humanitarian partners’ that will convey the contents along the ‘temporary’ pier to reach the shore. The plan is to use the World Food Program, and not UNRWA, to then deliver the aid across Gaza, keeping US boots off the ground. In the words of US Joint Chiefs of Staff General CQ Brown, Israel will help out by “building a buffer zone or bubble around the distribution in the pier, to keep the threat away from our forces.” Simple!
At least one retired US military officer, Col. Lawrence Wilkerson, has spoken out forcefully against the US-Israel partnership in what he calls the “outright extermination and evacuation” underway in Gaza. He states that the US is linked to Israel “in a way that is so debilitating, so against our national security interest, so against our humanitarian and reputational interest, that it makes your heart hurt to be in Washington and see it happening.” No doubt students praised by Sen. Bernie Sanders as being “on the right side of history” would agree.
