[E-rundbrief] Info 792 - Avnery: Black Flag (trial against Israeli military)

[Matthias Reichl]

E-Rundbrief - Info 792 - Uri Avnery (Israel): Black Flag (Trial against
Israeli political and military personalities on suspicion of war crimes
and crimes against humanity)

Bad Ischl, 31.1.2009

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Black Flag

Uri Avnery

31.1.09				

A SPANISH JUDGE has instituted a judicial inquiry against seven Israeli
political and military personalities on suspicion of war crimes and
crimes against humanity. The case: the 2002 dropping of a one ton bomb
on the home of Hamas leader Salah Shehade. Apart from the intended
victim, 14 people, most of them children, were killed.

For those who have forgotten: the then commander of the Israeli Air
Force, Dan Halutz, was asked at the time what he feels when he drops a
bomb on a residential building. His unforgettable answer: "A slight bump
to the wing." When we in Gush Shalom accused him of a war crime, he
demanded that we be put on trial for high treason. He was joined by the
Prime Minister, Ariel Sharon, who accused us of wanting to "turn over
Israeli army officers to the enemy". The Attorney General notified us
officially that he did not intend to open an investigation against those
responsible for the bombing.

I should be happy, therefore, that at long last somebody is ready to put
that action to a judicial test (even if he seems to have been thwarted
by political pressure.) But I am sorry that this has happened in Spain,
not in Israel.


ISRAELI TV VIEWERS have lately been exposed to a bizarre sight: army
officers appearing with their faces hidden, as usual for criminals when
the court prohibits their identification. Pedophiles, for example, or
attackers of old women.

On the orders of the military censors, this applies to all officers,
from battalion commanders down, who have been involved in the Gaza war.
Since the faces of brigade commanders and above are generally known, the
order does not apply to them.

Immediately after the cease-fire, the Minister of Defense, Ehud Barak,
promoted a special law that would give unlimited backing by the state to
all officers and soldiers who took part in the Gaza war and who might be
accused abroad of war crimes. This seems to confirm the Hebrew adage:
"On the head of the thief, the hat is burning".


I DO NOT object to trials abroad. The main thing is that war criminals,
like pirates, should be brought to justice. It is not so important where
they are caught. (This rule was applied by the State of Israel when it
abducted Adolf Eichmann in Argentina and hanged him in Israel for
heinous crimes committed outside the territory of Israel and, indeed,
before the state even existed.)

But as an Israeli patriot, I would prefer suspected Israeli war
criminals to be put on trial in Israel. That is necessary for the
country, for all decent officers and soldiers of the Israeli army, for
the education of future generations of citizens and soldiers.

There is no need to rely on international law alone. There are Israeli
laws against war crimes. Enough to mention the immortal phrase coined by
Justice Binyamin Halevy, serving as a military judge, in the trial of
the border policemen who were responsible for the 1956 massacre in Kafr
Kassem, when dozens of children, women and men were mown down for
violating a curfew which they did not even know about.

The judge announced that even in wartime, there are orders over which
flies "the black flag of illegality". These are orders which are
"manifestly" illegal -- that is to say, orders which every normal person
can tell are illegal, without having to consult a lawyer.

War criminals dishonor the army whose uniform they wear -- whether they
are generals or common soldiers. As a combat soldier on the day the
Israeli Defense Army was officially created, I am ashamed of them and
demand that they be cast out and be put on trial in Israel.

My list of suspects includes politicians, soldiers, rabbis and lawyers.


THERE IS not the slightest doubt that in the Gaza war, crimes were
committed. The question is to what extent and by whom.

Example: the soldiers call on the residents of a house to leave it. A
woman and her four children come out, waving white handkerchiefs. It is
absolutely clear that they are not armed fighters. A soldier in a
near-by tank stands up, points his rifle and shoots them dead at short
range. According to testimonies that seem to be beyond doubt, this
happened more than once.

Another example: the shelling of the United Nations school full of
refugees, from which there was no shooting -- as admitted by the army,
after the original pretexts were disproved.

These are "simple" cases. But the spectrum of cases is far wider. A
serious judicial investigation has to start right from the top: the
politicians and senior officers who decided on the war and confirmed its
plans must be investigated about their decisions. In Nuremberg it was
laid down that the starting of a war of aggression is a crime.

An objective investigation has to find out whether the decision to start
the war was justified, or if there existed another way of stopping the
launching of rockets against Israeli territory. Without doubt, no
country can or should tolerate the bombing of its towns and villages
from beyond the border. But could this be prevented by talking with the
Gaza authorities? Was our government's decision to boycott Hamas, the
winner of the democratic Palestinian elections, the real cause of this
war? Did the imposition of the blockade on a million and a half Gaza
Strip inhabitants contribute to the launching of the Qassams? In brief:
were the alternatives considered before it was decided to start a deadly
war?

The war plan included a massive attack on the civilian population of the
Strip. The real aims of a war can be understood less from the official
declarations of its initiators, than from their actions. If in this war
some 1300 men, women and children were killed, the great majority of
whom were not fighters; if about 5000 people were injured, most of them
children; if some 2500 homes were partly or wholly destroyed; if the
infrastructure of life was totally demolished -- all this clearly could
not have happened accidentally. It must have been a part of the war plan.

The things said during the war by politicians and officers make it clear
that the plan had at least two aims, which might be considered war
crimes: (1) To cause widespread killing and destruction, in order to
"fix a price tag". "to burn into their consciousness", "to reinforce
deterrence", and most of all -- to get the population to rise up against
Hamas and overthrow their government. Clearly this affects mainly the
civilian population. (2) To avoid casualties to our army at (literally)
any price by destroying any building and killing any human being in the
area into which our troops were about to move, including destroying
homes over the heads of their inhabitants, preventing medical teams from
reaching the victims, killing people indiscriminately. In certain cases,
inhabitants were warned that they must flee, but this was mainly an
alibi-action: there was nowhere to flee to, and often fire was opened on
people trying to escape.

An independent court will have to decide whether such a war-plan is in
accordance with national and international law, or whether it was ab
initio a crime against humanity and a war-crime.

This was a war of a regular army with huge capabilities against a
guerrilla force. In such a war, too, not everything is permissible.
Arguments like "The Hamas terrorists were hiding within the civilian
population" and "They used the population as human shields" may be
effective as propaganda but are irrelevant: that is true for every
guerrilla war. It must be taken into account when a decision to start
such a war is being considered.

In a democratic state, the military takes its orders from the political
establishment. Good. But that does not include "manifestly" illegal
orders, over which the black flag of illegality is waving. Since the
Nuremberg trials, there is no more room for the excuse that "I was only
obeying orders".

Therefore, the personal responsibility of all involved - from the Chief
of Staff, the Front Commander and the Division Commander right down to
the last soldier - must be examined. From the statements of soldiers one
must deduce that many believed that their job was "to kill as many Arabs
as possible". Meaning: no distinction between fighters and non-fighters.
That is a completely illegal order, whether given explicitly or by a
wink and a nudge. The soldiers understood this to be "the spirit of the
commander".


AMONG THOSE suspected of war crimes, the rabbis have a place of honor.

Those who incite to war crimes and call upon soldiers, directly or
indirectly, to commit war crimes may be guilty of a war crime themselves.

When one speaks of "rabbis", one thinks of old men with long white
beards and big hats, who give tongue to venerable wisdom. But the rabbis
who accompanied the troops are a very different species.

In the last decades, the state-financed religious educational system has
churned out "rabbis" who are more like medieval Christian priests than
the Jewish sages of Poland or Morocco. This system indoctrinates its
pupils with a violent tribal cult, totally ethnocentric, which sees in
the whole of world history nothing but an endless story of Jewish
victimhood. This is a religion of a Chosen People, indifferent to
others, a religion without compassion for anyone who is not Jewish,
which glorifies the God-decreed genocide described in the Biblical book
of Joshua.

The products of this education are now the "rabbis" who instruct the
religious youths.  With their encouragement, a systematic effort has
been made to take over the Israeli army from within. Kippa-wearing
officers have replaced the Kibbutzniks, who not so long ago were
dominant in the army. Many of the lower and middle-ranking officers now
belong to this group.

The most outstanding example is the "Chief Army Rabbi", Colonel Avichai
Ronsky, who has declared that his job is to reinforce the "fighting
spirit" of the soldiers. He is a man of the extreme right, not far from
the spirit of the late Rabbi Meir Kahane, whose party was outlawed in
Israel for its fascist ideology. Under the auspices of the army
rabbinate, religious-fascist brochures of the ultra-right "rabbis" were
distributed to the soldiers.

This material includes political incitement, such as the statement that
the Jewish religion prohibits "giving up even one millimeter of Eretz
Israel", that the Palestinians, like the Biblical Philistines (from whom
the name Palestine derives), are a foreign people who invaded the
country, and that any compromise (such as indicated in the official
government program) is a mortal sin. The distribution of political
propaganda violates, of course, army law.

The rabbis openly called upon the soldiers to be cruel and merciless
towards the Arabs. To treat them mercifully, they stated, is a
"terrible, awful immorality". When such material is distributed to
religious soldiers going into war, it is easy to see why things happened
the way they did.


THE PLANNERS of this war knew that the shadow of war crimes was hovering
over the planned operation. Witness: the Attorney General (whose
official title is "Legal Advisor to the Government") was a partner to
the planning. This week the Chief Army Attorney, Colonel Avichai
Mandelblut, disclosed that his officers were attached throughout the war
to all the commanders, from the Chief of Staff down to the Division
Commander.

All this together leads to the inescapable conclusion that the legal
advisors bear direct responsibility for the decisions taken and
implemented, from the massacre of the civilian police recruits at their
graduating ceremony to the shelling of the UN installations. Every
attorney who was a partner to the deliberations before an order was
given is responsible for its consequences, unless he can prove that he
objected to it.

The Chief Army Attorney, who is supposed to give the army professional
and objective advice, speaks about "the monstrous enemy" and tries to
justify the actions of the army by saying that it was fighting against
"an unbridled enemy, who declared that he 'loves death' and finds
shelter behind the backs of women and children". Such language is,
perhaps, pardonable in a pep-talk of a war-drunk combat commander, like
the battalion chief who ordered his soldiers to commit suicide rather
than be captured, but totally unacceptable when it comes from the chief
legal officer of the army.


WE MUST pursue all the legal processes in Israel and call for an
independent investigation and the indictment of suspected perpetrators.
We must demand this even if the chances of it happening are slim indeed.

If these efforts fail, nobody will be able to object to trials abroad,
either in an international court or in the courts of those nations that
respect human rights and international law.

Until then, the black flag will still be waving.

http://gush-shalom.org/

http://www.uri-avnery.de/


-- 

Matthias Reichl, Pressesprecher/ press speaker,
Begegnungszentrum fuer aktive Gewaltlosigkeit
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