Israel Becoming a Pariah as Atrocities Come to Light

by Gerry Foley / August 2009

The Zionist regime continues to become more discredited and isolated internationally, as the new Israeli government adopts a more openly right-wing character. Israeli soldiers involved in the assault on Gaza have themselves denounced the indiscriminate terror inflicted on the entire Palestinian population of the area.

For example, a McClatchy news dispatch reported July 14: “Two soldiers from the Givati brigade who served in Zeitoun told the story of shooting an unarmed civilian without warning him. The elderly man was walking with a flashlight toward a building where Israeli forces were taking cover. The Israeli officer in the house repeatedly ignored requests from other soldiers to fire warning shots as the man approached, the soldiers said. Instead, when he got within 20 yards of the soldiers, the commander ordered snipers to kill the man. The soldiers later confirmed that the man was unarmed.

“The soldiers told [us] that they were ordered to violate a code imposed by the Israeli Supreme Court itself: In the Ezbt Abd Rabbo neighborhood, Israeli combatants said they forced Palestinians to search homes for militants and enter buildings ahead of soldiers in direct violation of an Israeli Supreme Court ruling that bars fighters from using civilians as human shields.

“Sometimes a force would enter while placing rifle barrels on a civilian’s shoulder, advancing into a house and using him as a human shield,” said one Israeli soldier with the Golani Brigade. ‘Commanders said these were the instructions, and we had to do it.’”

The soldiers confirmed that white phosphorus shells were used against civilian targets. “According to the soldiers, the Israeli military fired white phosphorus mortars and artillery shells to set suspicious buildings ablaze and destroyed scores of Palestinian homes for questionable reasons. The white phosphorus supplied by the U.S. is supposed to be used to illuminate targets or provide smoke cover for advancing troops. “‘Phosphorus was used as an igniter, simply to make it all go up in flames,’ one soldier said.”

White phosphorus is an atrocious weapon when used against people. It can literally melt flesh. The most shocking photo from the Vietnam War, one that helped inspire the U.S. antiwar movement, was a picture of a young girl hideously mutilated by white phosphorous.

The Israeli soldiers described a deliberate policy of destroying buildings in Gaza—supposedly to prevent them from being used for launching small Qassam rockets into Israel. “‘In practical terms, this meant taking a house that is not implicated in any way, that its single sin is the fact that it is situated on top of a hill in the Gaza Strip,’ said one soldier. Of course, the more dwellings destroyed, the harder it is for Palestinians to continue to live in Gaza. And the Israeli long-term goal is to force the Palestinians to emigrate.

“‘In a personal talk with my battalion commander he mentioned this and said in a sort of sad half-smile, I think, that this is something that will eventually be added to “my war crimes”’ he added.” The officer in question obviously knew what he was doing and he anticipated the consequences.

The soldiers’ testimony was collected in a thick document accompanied by video clips. But the Israeli officials still tried to dismiss it. In the British Guardian of July 17, the organization that compiled the soldiers’ testimony, an Israeli human rights organization called Breaking the Silence, responded that “it is somewhat difficult to provide the accusations that Breaking the Silence has conducted a biased investigation with a dignified reply, when the only official investigation of the events of Operation Cast Lead has been conducted by an organisation whose involvement in the operation is anything but minor—the IDF [Israeli Defense Force].”

The Israeli government has refused the request of the UN Human Rights Council to allow an investigation of the Gaza campaign.

The spokesman for Breaking the Silence, Oded Na’aman, commented in the Guardian on the attitude of the Israeli authorities: “Only the guilty turn their eyes away from their actions while filling the air with cries of their innocence.”

On July 22, a petition signed by prominent intellectuals in Israel, including Amos Oz, one of the best known Israeli writers, demanded that the government accept an independent inquiry in the Gaza war atrocities: “We, citizens of the State of Israel, whose army is the IDF, demand to know the truth regarding the fighting carried out in our names, our money and at the price of danger to the lives of our loved ones,” said the text of the petition., according to the liberal Zionist paper Haaretz of July 22.

The genocidal brutality of the Israeli military forced even the government of Britain—the imperialist power that originally sponsored the establishment of a Zionist settlement in Palestine and the closest ally of the U.S., which is Israel’s main supporter—to withdraw licenses for exporting military equipment to the Zionist state.

The current British regime is not a major military supplier of the Zionist state. But the symbolic value is considerable. It is an implicit rebuke to the U.S, which supplied the white phosphorous, and a barometer of Israel’s growing international pariah status.

The root of the Zionist authorities’ ruthlessness is that they generally consider all of Palestine as their land, which the Palestinian people have to be cleared from. The most concrete expression of this is their policy of supporting the extension of Zionist settlements throughout Palestine.

The settlement policy is becoming an acute embarrassment to the U.S. government, which is hoping to be able to sponsor some sort of deal with the Palestinians that would mitigate the opprobrium it suffers in the Muslim and third world in general because of its backing of the colonialist Zionist state.

The current White House, seeking to refurbish its image, has warned the Israelis to limit the settlements. Haaretz of July 26 reported: “The U.S. administration has issued a stiff warning to Israel not to build in the area known as E-1, which lies between Jerusalem and the West Bank settlement of Ma’aleh Adumim. Any change in the status quo in E-1 would be ‘extremely damaging,’ even ‘corrosive,’ the message said.”

The Zionist rulers have wanted to carry out this extension for a long time but U.S. warnings have held them back. “The United States has always vehemently opposed this plan,” Haaretz noted, “fearing it would deprive a future Palestinian state of territorial contiguity, cut the West Bank in two and sever East Jerusalem from the rest of the West Bank—all of which would thwart any hope of signing a final-status agreement and establishing a Palestinian state.” Even the Bush administration opposed the project.

The new right-wing Israeli government pledged to finally do it. “Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has vowed in the past to finally build the controversial E-1 housing project—as have several premiers before him, though none has done so due to American pressure. He opened his recent election campaign with a visit to Ma’aleh Adumim, in which he declared: ‘I will link Jerusalem to Ma’aleh Adumim via the Mevasseret Adumim neighborhood, E-1. I want to see one continuous string of built-up Jewish neighborhoods.’”

Of course, the U.S. has the power to force Netanyahu to comply. Israel is entirely dependent on U.S. aid. But the U.S. is in a bind. It needs Israel as its fortress in the Middle East, yet it also wants to limit the costs it has to pay in the Muslim world for supporting the Zionist state. This creates an eternal tug of war.

The Palestinians have never in the past gained substantially from the U.S. pressure on Israel. However, this tug of war is likely to become tenser as Israel becomes more isolated politically and the costs the U.S. has to pay for supporting it increase. This gives increasing leverage to democratic and progressive protests in the United States itself against U.S. complicity in the Zionist genocide. It is a new indication that eventually the Zionist project will prove nonviable.

The only prospect for peace and prosperity for both the Jewish settler community and the Palestinians is the ending of the idea that a state can be maintained only for Jews. Jews and Palestinians have to be able to live in equality on the entire land of Palestine.