Is it too much to ask to hear your grandchildren’s giggle as they chase butterflies in fields while your mind’s eye journeys back to olive groves seeded for time immemorial by winds of warmth?
Is it too much to ask to joyfully dance Al-Sha’rawiyya or Dabke niswaniyyah while flirting with Ai’sha or Mohamed as they peek away in blush? Is it too much to ask for children to be left uncaring to chase waves in peace while the sun sets over the shore and mussakhan readies for them to adore in the tabun?
This is Palestine … in all its shining beauty …. in all its history … in all its age-old smile and gift.
Today in Gaza: With Israel having fired some 30,000 air-to-ground munitions, 50% unguided and some 15000 tank shells lobbed into its residences, hospitals, schools, Masjids, churches, shelters, and refugee camps: 25,000 civilians (or 1 out of every 100) slaughtered, including all members of over 600 families; 12,500 plus children slaughtered; 57,000 plus wounded; 10,000 missing; 250-plus attacks on healthcare workers, vehicles and facilities with 600 medical workers slaughtered; more than 105 journalists slaughtered; 100-plus employees of UNRWA slaughtered; 1.9 million people displaced … 85 percent of the population; 100,000-plus buildings and residences damaged or completely destroyed; 50,000-plus housing units destroyed; 234,000 homes damaged; 28 of 35 hospitals damaged, destroyed or closed;
More than a thousand children given amputations without anesthesia; 70 percent of school buildings damaged or destroyed; 200-plus registered heritage or archeological sites damaged or destroyed; 200-places of worship, Masjids and Byzantine churches, damaged or destroyed; Northern Gaza leveled, isolated from the rest of the territory; unemployment of 85 percent; 50% experiencing severe hunger; 400,000 cases of infectious diseases; and with destruction of health care and essential infrastructure systems, tens perhaps hundreds of thousands will grow seriously ill, possibly die of infectious diseases.
Described by experts in the field of urban warfare and damage as “among the most destructive in history” Corey Scher of the CUNY Graduate Center and Jamon Van Den Hoek of Oregon State University, have noted “It’s just the sheer speed of the damage … All of these other conflicts that we’re talking about Ukraine, Syria, Yemen are years long. This is a little over two months. And the sheer tempo of the bombing — not just the scale of it but the sheer tempo — there’s nothing that tracks this in such a short timeframe.” They conclude by noting the bomb tonnage dropped by Israel on Gaza had surpassed that dropped on London during the Blitz, and the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima with the percentage of damaged and or destroyed buildings having already surpassed that of the German cities destroyed in World War II.
Rising from the remains of 38,000,000 civilians who lost their lives in WWII to little more than wrong place … wrong time … or wrong faith, color or culture, an international tribunal emerged to hold the primary political leaders of the Third Reich and Japan responsible for unspeakable war crimes. The Nuremberg Tribunal which went on to try and convict several dozen war criminals relied on the testimony of the accused and hundreds of their victims; hundreds of thousands of exhibits; forensic evidence; numerous public declarations; and documented records of the accused’ individual activity. Although there are many thousands of pages of judgments, judicial opinions and findings one paragraph stands out in summing up, at least as to Nazis, the horrors they unleashed and the harms they brought:
“The evidence relating to war crimes has been overwhelming, in its volume and its detail. It is impossible for this Judgment adequately to review it, or to record the mass of documentary and oral evidence that has been presented. The truth remains that war crimes were committed on a vast scale, never before seen in the history of war. They were perpetrated in all the countries occupied by Germany, and on the High Seas, and were attended by every conceivable circumstance of cruelty and horror. There can be no doubt that the majority of them arose from the Nazi conception of ” total war “, with which the aggressive wars were waged. For in this conception of ” total war”, the moral ideas underlying the conventions which seek to make war more humane are no longer regarded as having force or validity. Everything is made subordinate to the overmastering dictates of war. Rules, regulations, assurances and treaties all alike are of no moment, and so, freed from the restraining influence of international law, the aggressive war is conducted by the Nazi leaders in the most barbaric way. Accordingly, war crimes were committed when and wherever the Fuehrer and his close associates thought them to be advantageous. They were for the most part the result of cold and criminal calculation.”
With these words, the Nuremberg Tribunal offered the world a terrifying vision of what most had long known but refused to accept, let alone act upon until it was far too late. That falter left millions dead and as many wishing they were for little more than their faith, their culture, their presence. Then it was Jews, here and now … Palestinians.
In a just world, we are born into a dream of a healthy, long and peaceful journey; one filled with aspiration, love and personal chase … an opportunity built of equality- with no one life or community more important than any other. A chant that defies oath, anthem and flag. An unspoken talisman that every parent holds near and dear and close to their heart while beaming at what they have brought into being.
War crimes: namely, violations of the laws or customs of war, such violations shall include, but not be limited to, murder, ill-treatment or deportation to slave labor or for any other purpose of civilian population of or in occupied territory, murder or ill-treatment of prisoners of war or persons on the seas, killing of hostages, plunder of public or private property, wanton destruction of cities, towns, or villages, or devastation not justified by military necessity.
With these words, academics, scholars and jurists alike have spent careers teaching, writing, and litigating across the globe in the hope of humanity and the pursuit of justice. With no shortage of Conventions, Treaties and potential sanctions, those of us who pursue justice would like to think that with each generation that travail grows less daunting … that it becomes more powerful and consistent. It is, after all, a terrible trek to chase what is always just beyond our reach unless the victim is of the right faith, skin tone or politics. Then it applies. Once again, in Palestine, supremacy and privilege have swallowed law and numbed justice.
Although politicians, journalists and wannabe pundits alike continue to ramble on describing with blurred defective shouts what happened on October 7th but several miles from the massive Gaza Gulag, I am not one. I was not there. Nor were they. What began with bogus allegations of mass execution and wholesale civilian rape, with incinerated babies and hundreds of vehicles, buildings and homes bombed by the Qassam Brigades, has with the passage of time surely begun to whittle away as largely convenient political chant and useful fuel for retaliatory genocide and Western applause.
With increasing evidence, it appears the majority of those killed were in fact active-duty or military reservists, armed settlers or security personnel and thus potential legitimate targets under international law. So, too, firsthand accounts from Israeli civilians, various military sources and uncovered forensic evidence further dispel the calculated rewrite of what in fact occurred on October 7th. To be sure, having survived Israeli censors, there are now numerous verified reports of multiple instances where civilians lost their lives not to Palestinian execution, but reckless Israeli gunfire including tank artillery, helicopter auto-cans and rockets. Photos of destroyed buildings serving as military and security outposts and hundreds of wrecked vehicles, including heavy-duty Israeli ground combat equipment, clearly establish carnage the result of Israeli shells not Palestinian rifle fire.
But let’s assume civilians were in fact killed or assaulted by members of the Qassam Brigades or by unaffiliated armed fighters who apparently broke through the barbed wire doors of Gaza as well. If established by direct proof, not political prance, at an independent trial these would be clear violations of the law of war and those responsible should be held accountable. On this point, it bears noting, that years ago the Palestinian State and its various resistance movements, including Hamas, agreed to the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court and to abide by any of its findings following a full and fair trial based upon evidence, not chant; facts … not made-to-order fiction. If possessed of direct evidence of Palestinian crimes on October 7th why does Israel flee, as it always does, an independent judicial process and investigation resting instead not on a reliable search for truth, but on bombs and bombast driven by a relentless flow of shrill detoured deception?
Fueled by public screams for revenge, Israel, now in its third month of an unrestrained raging assault upon all of Gaza and all its population, is no doubt in clear violation of Article 33 of the Fourth Geneva Convention relative to the Protection of Civilian Persons in Time of War 1949, under which no civilian may be punished for an offense they have not personally committed. More specifically, Common Article 33 of the Fourth Geneva Convention and Article 4 of the Additional Protocol II criminalize any and all collective punishment imposed against civilians and or their property. Guilty as charged.
Stanley L. Cohen is lawyer and activist in New York City.
Source: CounterPunch
