Greens Engage

For some reason this came up in an alert – Hansard’s Daily Written Answers from the House of Commons, 2nd Nov. It includes a statement on the boycott, the situation for Gazans, the British Government’s response to the flaws of the Goldstone report on Gaza.

Here’s the press statement.

The issue of borders, on Bitter Lemons.

Human Rights Watch, whose contribution to documenting human rights violations in Israel and the occupied territories is hugely valuable, have released a 31-page report, Rockets From Gaza, of their investigation into the role of Hamas and other Palestinian armed groups in Gaza since November 2008.

The report documents the missiles from Gaza which jeopardised and terrorised the 800,000 Israeli citizens who lived within their range, and finds armed groups to have intentionally targeted Israeli civilians, in violation of international law.

The executive summary is informative; as well as providing an overview of the death and damage resulting from the attacks (including to Gazan families), there is a restatement of ethos:

“The purpose of the laws of war is not to create parity between parties to a conflict, or to assess their violations in light of their relevant capacities, but to minimize the harm to the civilian population.  Violations of the laws of war are not measured in the number of civilian casualties, but whether each side is taking all feasible precautions to minimize civilian loss.  Using unsophisticated weapons does not justify failure to respect the laws of war, nor does an adversary’s use of sophisticated weapons provide a pass to its opponents to ignore those laws. Disparities in military capability, however measured, are irrelevant. The taking of civilian life can be minimized only if both parties recognize their legal obligations to abide by the laws of war however sophisticated the weaponry at their disposal.

Human Rights Watch is committed to documenting the worst violations of the laws of war committed by all sides to conflict. It is to promote the principle that civilians may never be the object of attack, regardless of the relative strength of the attacker, that Human Rights Watch has published this report.

The laws of war require parties to a conflict to investigate and take appropriate punitive action against individuals within their control who are implicated in war crimes.  Hamas authorities have failed to take any action against Hamas commanders and fighters responsible for unlawful rocket attacks against Israel.  Hamas has reportedly taken violent steps to prevent other armed groups from firing rockets.  On March 10, the London-based pan-Arab daily Al-Sharq al-Awsat reported the alleged torture by Hamas police of 10 members of Saraya al-Quds, the armed wing of Islamic Jihad.[3] The paper reported that Hamas police detained the 10 men, from Khan Yunis, and tortured them to coerce them to sign pledges that they would not fire rockets at Israel.”

Recommendations follow.

Read the report.

Update:

Besides the BBC, is there any reporting organisation which hasn’t abandoned itself to partisanship on Israel and Palestine?

There are questions to ask about the integrity of Human Rights Watch because of how it raises money.

“An on-line Wall Street Journal op-ed posted two days ago alleged that Human Rights Watch officials went trolling for dollars in Saudi Arabia, and that the organization’s senior Middle East official, Sarah Leah Whitson, attempted to extract money from potential Saudi donors by bragging about the group’s “battles” with the “pro-Israel pressure groups.”

This is a serious allegation, and one I found difficult to believe, because Human Rights Watch has always been moderately careful about the optics of its fundraising efforts. The group’s credibility, of course, rests on its neutrality; playing traditional enemies off each other as a way to collect money from one (or both) sides in a conflict seems beyond the pale. (Let’s put aside for now the queasy-making image of a human rights organization venturing into one of the world’s most anti-democratic societies to criticize one of the Middle East’s most democratic states.)”

Human Rights Watch has since published a report about gunning down of white-flag-waving Palestinians. It was edited by Joe Stork, reported in Commentary to be vehemently anti-Israel, an inaccurate reporter and – far more seriously and untrustworthily for a human rights activist – a supporter of Palestinian terror against Israelis and (from the comments) a diminisher of human rights abuses against Iraqis under Saddam. It would be good to be able to trust HRW reports. It’s discredit if they employ biased editors, and it’s a shame that only the political right seems to be motivated to do homework on these authors. I suppose, from now on, we have to do this too.

The Rockets From Gaza report was authored by a researcher called Bill Van Esveld, based in HRW’s Middle East and North Africa section, where Joe Stork is also based (Esveld also co-authored the white flag report). I can’t see any signs of bias against Palestinians at all.

In the Huffington Post, he writes:

“Hamas’ attacks on civilians violate international law, but those violations are no excuse for a blockade that, as Israeli officials have implicitly acknowledged, amounts to collective punishment. “There is no justification for demanding we allow residents of Gaza to live normal lives while shells and rockets are fired from their streets and courtyards” at Israeli communities, then-Prime Minister Ehud Olmert said on January 23, 2008.

After two years of looking the other way, the international community, and especially the United States, should be pressing not only Hamas to end its unlawful attacks on Israeli civilians but also Israel to end its unlawful punishment of 1.5 million Gazans.”

In comment to the BBC:

“HRW’s Bill Van Esveld said last Thursday that a Newsweek report quoted in a recent Israeli Foreign Ministry briefing was “as clear evidence of human shielding [by Hamas] as you’re going to get”.

Journalist Rod Nordland wrote on 20 January: “Suddenly there was a terrific whoosh, louder even than a bomb explosion. It was another of Hamas’ homemade Qassam rockets being launched into Israel – and the mobile launch-pad was smack in the middle of the four [apartment] buildings, where every apartment was full.”

But Mr Van Esveld said he was only aware of evidence of “three or four” such cases, and had seen more evidence of the use of human shields by Israeli troops than by Palestinian militants.”

No more time, but there is no reason to suppose an anti-Palestinian agenda on the part of Van Esveld. Stork’s anti-Israel, pro-terror opinions on the other hand, disredit him.

I fear, given the pursuit of Saudi funds, that HRW will be giving disproportionate focus to exposing the abuses of Saudi’s enemies.

I have frequently drawn on HRW reports and it is unbelievably dispiriting to be writing this update. Greens Engage is more concerned with Israel than (Black) Engage, because we hope that Green international policy makers, currently faced with Green Party anti-Israel bias, will be looking. We try to view Israel as critically and fairly as any other country might expect. How can we do this if deprived of basic facts we can trust?

Update 2: it gets worse for Human Rights Watch. Bias is a particularly disgusting thing in an organisation which purports to stand for human rights. There should never be a good reason for the subject of a negative report to turn round and say “They have it in for us”. But HRW have provided precisely that reason by eagerly publishing allegations based on such flimsy evidence that investigative journalists became interested in the editor, and discovered a past which should have ruled him out of publishing on this subject.

Lest the perhaps-murdered and their families, who should be at the centre of the publicity for the report, are lost in the fallout of Joe Stork’s bias, I would say that it would be good if anybody involved in combat or policing were issued with their own black box, or some way of recording their actions. I can see all kinds of problems with this, but in the end they are small fry problems if you view them in the light of a situation in which men and women in a citizen army (with, it follows, a proportion of bad soldiers) are sent to find and kill enemy combatants in heavily populated areas. To be honest, I would trust Israelis to know what to do with this kind of evidence more than I would trust an organisation like Human Rights Watch and its low standards of evidence. This is not to write off HRW. It’s a salutory reminder not to trust any organisation unreservedly, to search the web for critical responses to such reports before quoting them, and to keep in mind that there may be vested interests at work in writing, crediting and discrediting such a report. Some people want to frame Israel. Some people want to defend Israel’s reputation. Some people want the truth. I hope this blog is concerned with the latter, limited only by time and other resources.

So to end, an analysis of the Rockets From Gaza report from the JTA (discovered by searching for links to the report pages – there wasn’t anything else of substance).

The Times reports.

Iran is Hesbollah’s major funder and arms supplier. If anybody tangles with Iran’s nuclear facilities, the retaliation will come from Hesbollah and will be on Israel. The clerics who prop up Iran’s presumptuous leader Mahmoud Ahmedinejad hate Israel because it is a Jewish state.

But – I can hear it already – Iranian nukes are different from Israeli nukes. Arming Hesbollah is not the same as arming Israel. If we boycott Israel and speak up for Hesbollah, Ahmedinejad and the ayatollahs, that will sort all this out – right?

The Israelis are trouble-makers, they only fight because they can.

An even war field will bring peace to the Middle East.

Simple.

Bob From Brockley links to Geoffrey Alderman writing in the Jewish Chronicle which ends:

“A media analysis recently published by justjournalism.com reports that, across the five major daily broadsheets, war crimes allegations against Israel were featured earlier this year twice as often as similar allegations in relation to Sri Lanka.

If the Tamils had been Arabs, and the Sri Lankans had been Jews, you can rest assured that no such imbalance would have resulted.”

If your gut instinct is to accuse him of whataboutery, stop for a moment and think about why there should have been such a dodgy imbalance in the attention the media (I include bloggers) encouraged the British public to give the casualties, fatalities and aggressors in each of these two conflicts.

In the left-wing Israeli daily, Ha’aretz, the leader of Hamas Khaled Meshal pronounces ‘No’ to two states.

Sometimes Hamas hints indirectly – when it refers to the 1967 borders – it will accept two states, more often and more unequivocally it says never, and on with the killing.

From Gisha via email:

The Association for Civil Rights, Gisha, The Public Committee Against
Torture in Israel, Center for the Defense of the Individual, Yesh Din,
Adalah, Physicians for Human Rights are Israeli human rights organisations. They have presented the Goldstone team – the UN investigation into “all human rights and humanitarian law violations committed in the context of the conflict which took place between 27 December 2008 and 18 January 2009″ - with a grave report:

It is crucial to investigate alleged violations of law of war.

This week, seven Israeli human rights organizations presented their
report to the UN team investigating allegations of war crimes during
operation Cast Lead in Gaza, led by Richard Goldstone. The signatories
of the report – The Association for Civil Rights, Gisha, The Public
Committee Against Torture in Israel, The Center for the Defense of the
Individual, Adalah – The Legal Center for Arab Minority Rights in
Israel, and Physicians for Human Rights-Israel – believe the Goldstone
Committee’s mission of seeking the truth is of critical importance,
partly due to Israel’s attorney general refusal of the signatories’
request to order a local, independent, and impartial inquiry into the
Gaza events.

The report presents the Goldstone Committee with detailed findings
concerning violations of laws of war that the Israel military
allegedly committed during its attack on the Gaza Strip, dubbed
Operation Cast Lead, which should be investigated, referring mainly to
policies of collective punishment used against the civilian population
of the Gaza Strip. The report mentions comprehensive Israeli assault
strategies that failed to discriminate between combatants and
civilians, wrongful damages caused to civilian government buildings to
promote political goals, attacks on medical rescue teams, damage to
infrastructures, holding detainees under conditions that conflict with
Israeli and international laws, and collective punishment. The authors
stressed that, acting as Israeli human rights organizations, it is
their duty to report on issues under Israel’s responsibility. At the
same time, they demanded that suspicions that Hamas also violated the
laws of war be investigated.

In the introduction of the report, the organizations stated that
conducting a reliable, thorough, and impartial investigation is an
essential tool for the protection of human rights and for extending
maximal protection to civilian populations in wartime. In view of
this, the organizations also asked the Israeli Government to cooperate
with the inquiry team. The organizations pointed out that the events
of Operation Cast Lead cannot be viewed independently of the closure
imposed on the Gaza Strip for almost two years before and since, and
thus asked the team to additionally review the policy of closing the
Gaza border passages before, during, and after the military operation.

Read the full report.

Main Points of the Document:

Background: Even before the military offensive started, the prolonged
closure policy that the State of Israel imposed on the Gaza Strip led
to a grave humanitarian crisis there. Ever since 1967, and as part of
the established policy, Gaza Strip’s civilian Palestinian systems -
including medical infrastructures and power plants – became totally
dependent on the State of Israel.

The Offensive Strategy: Public remarks made and the manner in which
the offensive was carried out give rise to suspicions that Israel
adopted a disproportionate assault strategy that mainly aimed at
hurting civilians and causing deliberate destruction, for the purpose
of deterrence and punishment, and not at specific military targets. If
this is the case, a heavy cloud of suspicion hangs over the legality
of the entire operation.

Protecting Civilians: The fact that initiated attacks hit targets
located within a civilian population, coupled with data concerning the
large number of civilian fatalities and casualties, gives rise to
serious suspicions of gross violations of international and
humanitarian laws by Israel. Many of the Gaza offensive casualties had
their limbs amputated and maimed (some 12-15% of the total wounds),
some of whom were injured by previously unknown weapon types.

Bombing Civilian Buildings and Institutions: Israel systematically
and methodically attacked civilian institutions, deviating from the
principle that bans attacks against civilian targets in an attempt to
attain political achievements: 68 government buildings were destroyed,
more than 4,000 residential houses were totally demolished, and some
17,000 were partly ruined, leaving tens of thousands homeless.

Damaging Health and Rescue Services: The Gaza health system nearly
collapsed. During the week’s fighting, local hospitals had to perform
while coping with erratic power supply, and with the fact that 16
medical crew members were killed and 25 were wounded while evacuating
casualties; in addition, 34 medical institutions and 29 ambulances
were damaged. The Israeli Army avoided – in advance, knowingly, and
deliberately – extending direct aid to the Palestinian casualties and
even prevented Palestinian rescue services from doing that.

Detainees: Palestinians who were captured in the Gaza Strip and
placed under detention there were kept under cruel conditions, as
soldiers and interrogators used violence against them. The detainees
were held in 2- to 3-meters deep ditches, exposed to the cold weather,
handcuffed, and often blindfolded. Some of those ditches were dug in
what clearly were combat zones, each holding some 70 individuals on
average. The army failed to carry out its duty to notify the
detainees’ families of their detention and location, and even failed
to report their whereabouts to external bodies.

Power, Water, and Sewage Infrastructures Crashed: Despite the fact
that the IDF had had precise information as to the location of every
water, power, and sewage facility in the Gaza Strip, Israel bombed
them and left the strip without its vital infrastructures. The Gaza
power plant was out of order for 12 out of the 21 days of fighting.
The strip received merely 25% of its required power consumption for
several days during the operation. Some 800,000 civilians were cut off
the supply of running water, and the shortage of power and cooking gas
seriously impaired on the supply of bread there.

The Crossings Issue and Rehabilitation of the Gaza Strip: Israel’s
control over the Gaza Strip border crossings before and during the
operation remains in effect, and the absolute closure imposed there
almost totally prevents the individuals’ freedom of movement and the
importation of goods. As long as Israel bans the introduction of
concrete, cement, and other materials needed for the Gaza Strip
rehabilitation, it would be impossible to make use of the billions of
dollars that the international community raised for the Gaza Strip
rehabilitation and reconstruction.

Although I haven’t been there for a couple of decades, Israel is a fascinating place to visit, I feel a connection with it, and it’s on the small list of far-off places I’ll be taking in before I die. So at Bank yesterday, on the Central Line east-bound platform, this promotion from Israel’s Ministry of Tourism, which you can click on for a bigger version, caught my eye:

After I’d half-written this I found out that I was not the only person to notice that the Occupied Palestinian Territories and the Golan had been brazenly subsumed into Israel and in fact I was slow off the blocks and Israel’s Ministry of Tourism had admitted to a “mistake” this time last week. Transport for London received 600 complaints, the Advertising Standards Authority, 342, and these were upheld. But after a week, the posters are still there.

The strange thing is, if you look really closely at the blown-up version of this bad picture I took (there were staff close-by and you know, it’s not permitted to snap on the London Underground system so I was shooting from the hip) only then will you see faint, skinny white-on-yellow lines demarcating some borders (not the Golan). I think the graphic designer probably understood what white-on-yellow means in the mustardy light of a London Underground platform, and was showing what the Israeli Ministry of Tourism, ThinkIsrael and co-sponsors want shown.

This kind of wishful-thinking, under-carpet-sweeping, white-washing denial is very stupid and very wrong. It’s not the first time somebody played with a map for political reasons, and it won’t be the last.

Press TV, the English language station funded by the Iranian government also pretends the state of Israel doesn’t exist, in keeping with ominous calls to wipe it off the map.

Hamas likes to present a world without Israel, in keeping with its hatred of Jews.

So does (did) the RESPECT coalition, in keeping with Iran and Hamas.

Update: with shameless hypocrisy, the Palestine Solidarity Campaign, which took the lead in objecting to the Israeli Ministry of Tourism map, also expunges Israel from its map.

I’m not sure these are equivalent, by the way.

The Israeli Ministry of Tourism responded about the poster:

“The map in the London Underground advertisement reflects a map that gives a tourist perspective to the region. It is not to be confused with a political map, but rather the advertisement highlights those areas within Israel which are particularly attractive to the U.K. market”

“Tourism is one of the major engines for economic growth in Israel, benefiting all its residents. 2008 was a record year for tourism in Israel and in the Palestinian Authority and it is hoped that the recent pilgrimage of Pope Benedict XVI to Israel, Jordan and the Palestinian Authority will serve to encourage pilgrimages to the Holy Land and bring economic benefits to the entire region”

So Gaza’s going great guns with the tourism then? Pun intended. The only people I know of who are going in there are Hamas supporters, by boat. And how about when BMI flew passengers to the Mediterranean with maps omitting Israel – the Israeli Transport Minister was very assertive about his country’s right to recognition:

“Doing business with Israel has its advantages and disadvantages, but we will not agree to a situation where they hide the existence of Israel but want to do business with Israel”

Along the Central Line you can find other posters promoting Morocco and Dubai as tourist destinations so warm, golden and peaceful that you could hardly imagine that the grave human rights abuses in those countries could exist, or that, for example, Morocco could be involved in an occupation of its own (its promoters wisely steer clear of maps). After all, if you want prospective visitors to forget that they will be visiting an occupying country, you leave the map out.

Of course tourism ministries like to minimise their blemishes and big up their assets. Sadly it doesn’t go without saying that the Israeli Tourism Ministry and co-sponsors are far from the only or worst culprit. But they must face up to the fact that the three smaller regions on that poster, with their vanishingly faint but critically important demarcations, are occupied and settled by ugly force, and that diverting attention from this also involves a pretence that the ongoing oppression of the people who live there does not exist.

Update: Philip Meier reviews  Mark Monmonier’s book How To Lie With Maps.

Bitter Lemons is a weekly publication of two Israeli points of view and two Palestinian points of view on a given topic of the day. This week’s topic is outgoing Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert.

See also previous editions.

Gisha is an Israeli human rights organisation which campaigns for freedom of movement. With Physicians for Human Rights they have produced a 184 page report (in pre-final draft form at time of writing) on the political motivations of Israel, Egypt and the Palestinian Authority for closing the Rafah crossing (between Gaza and Egypt). I haven’t read it properly yet – here it is. It’s a painstaking, clearly-sourced, careful consideration of rights and responsibilities.

The report says that the principal responsibility for (not cause of) the closure is Israel’s.

Alongside analyses of the roles of Israel, the Palestinian Authority, the US and the EU (read these) I want to draw attention to the section on the interests of the Hamas regime on p168, including its responsibility for rights in Gaza as an armed group with a political structure and control over the residents of the territory, including:

“Under the present circumstances, Hamas’ objection to Israeli involvement in operating the Gaza border crossings constitutes an obstacle to them opening.

Hamas’ declarations as to its willingness to allow the PA to operate Rafah crossing are not unambiguous.

… Rafah crossing is used as a battleground in the conflict between Hamas and the PA, and the victims are the residents of the Gaza Strip, whom Hamas controls directly and for whom it is responsible.”

Ditto much else of what Hamas says with regards to these negotiations – which, rather than official statements, comes in the form of interview remarks. I think it would be a significantly positive development if Hamas were to put the people of Gaza first and allow this involvement. I also find it illustrative of Hamas’ stated aims to obliterate Israel and its Jewish residents that it has not. Hamas is a difficult enemy to negotiate with because it is theocratic. Hamas, which claims to answer to a higher authority, is not currently known for giving a toss about human rights. When adults and children die in explosions at its bomb-making works, Hamas calls them martyrs. It must be difficult to get the point about human rights across to Hamas.

I digress from the report, which you should read.

To come: post on current state of the new Israeli governing coalition.