This is so Orwellian. From Inter Press Service:
Shalom Kital, an aide to Israeli defence minister Ehud Barak, said that Israel would not release a share of the radio frequency it had promised the PA unless the latter dropped its efforts to put Israeli soldiers and officers in the dock over the Gaza attacks.
"It’s a condition. We are saying to the Palestinians that if you want a normal life and are trying to embark on a new way, you must stop your incitement," said Kital.
I’m waiting to see how Zionists — especially ones like Richard Witty — rationalize this.
Thank you Mr Kital for explaining so clearly what Israel really means when it says there is no peace because of Palestinian “incitement”.
Next time Israel repeats the claim that the problem between Israelis and Palestinians isn’t about land or dispossession or ethnic-religious favoritism, but is simply mindless Jew-hatred based on “incitement” by intrinsically hateful Muslims, remember what “incitement” consists of in the mind of that Israeli spokesperson: not Palestinians lying about Jews, but Palestinians telling embarassing truths about Israeli soldiers.
“We are saying to the Palestinians that if you want a normal life and are trying to embark on a new way, you must stop your incitement.”
Never mind that occupying their land, bulldozing their homes, enthnic cleansing and bockading Gaza are all incitements.
The key word is “on the dock”.
That is a scale of “accountability”, in the manner that activists propose to use it, that would make Israeli defense impossible, and likely Israeli governance.
If that is your goal, to make Israeli defense impossible, then continue at this thread, in the manner of putting Israeli soldiers “on the dock”.
By extension, the application of human rights law in comparable cases, would put every military except for actually genocidal militias accountable.
Are you really claiming that Israelis would have no reasonable opportunity to defend themselves from the charges? If so, what nonsense, RW. Your claim is based on a phrase “in the dock” that you carelessly change to “on the dock” that was used either by the reporter or by Kital himself. (As far as I know, the phrase means only charged with criminal activity anyway.) There is absolutely no reason to believe that such proceedings would be anything but fair. As for your complaint that human rights law should not be applied here because other militaries have gotten away with other violations, you are factually correct but analytically wrong. No system of meting out justice is complete, and people get away with doing terrible things all the time. That is no reason to give up entirely. No criminal defendant can avoid prosecution by complaining that others have gotten away with similar, or even worse, crimes. If Israelis intentionally killed innocent civilians, there should be accountability. If you are concerned that prosecuting Israelis might deter other militaries from committing similar offenses, one can only hope so.
Concise and logically and morally compelling argument. Excellent post.
I guess you mean “in the dock.”
Witty has taken the last words of Hermann Goering right out of the fat guy’s dead mouth.
Why shouldn’t every military be subject to being in the dock under Nuremberg’s standards
of accountability? Otherwise, what was the purpose there? Victor’s justice? Witty sounds as progressive as Stalin–he didn’t want to establish, for the first time,
the international legal accountability of sovereign states. BTW, non-state militias can be held accountable via UN Security Council recommendation.
Did you miss the part where the Israeli government is threatening the Palestinians, “Shut up and hide our war crimes for us or we will make your people live like animals”?
That is precisely why the Occupation is so awful. When Israelis want to punish Gazans for their electoral choices, they drastically reduce their necessities of life — food, water, medicine, fuel. When Israelis want to reward the West Bank for not throwing out Fatah in favor of Hamas, they greatly ease restrictions and make life much better for them than for Gazans. “See what you get when you listen to us?” Now, when the Palestinians as a whole “threaten” to press charges against Israel, even against their own Hamas people as well, Israel threatens collective punishment once again. Israel’s control over how Palestinians live, even when they “reward” some for “good conduct,” is utterly intolerable. People who think that 42 years of this madness is not so bad (and there are plenty of them out there, even among my friends and acquaintances who I consider to be reasonably intelligent human beings) should try living 42 days under a foreign military dictatorship.
that would make Israeli defense impossible, and likely Israeli governance.
And that would be a GOOD thing.
Israel’s historical abuse of the claim of “self defense” to war aggressive war has eroded its right to self-defense. Israel should be disarmed. That would be a GOOD thing.
“By extension, the application of human rights law in comparable cases, would put every military except for actually genocidal militias accountable.”
I’ve been wondering if Witty would get around to using this one. It’s a popular argument at other blogs–if Israel is prosecuted then the US could be next on the list. But that’s a good thing, and it’s also why it’s extremely unlikely that there will be any prosecution of high-ranking Israeli officials–the precedent it would set would be very bad for US policymakers, who also want the freedom to target civilians and inflict suffering in order to teach a lesson. Human rights law is only supposed to apply to our enemies or to dictators who are not useful to us–it shocks Western government officials and their acolytes to imagine that they could be brought to justice in the same way. Strict adherence to human rights law would not rule out self-defense–it would rule out some of the actions our government likes to take and it would mean Western officials would have to think twice before they decided to inflict blockades or launch air strikes, let alone invasions of entire countries.
As for self-defense, leave aside (as Witty always does) the trivial fact that Israel was killing civilians in larger numbers even when Palestinians were firing rockets at southern Israel. They are only Palestinians and you need at least 100 Palestinian deaths for every Israeli before Witty will notice (and then he will still put at least half the blame on Hamas). Leave aside the blockade–it’s not as if Israeli films are being boycotted. Leave aside who violates ceasefires. Just stick to the very narrow question of how to prevent rocket attacks if you don’t want to treat Gazans as human beings. Then you do carefully targeted strikes at people you know are firing rockets.
The goal is not to make Israeli defense impossible, but force Israeli accountability,k which Israel seems to believe, is the same thing.
Jonathan Cook has a report with details on the radio frequency deal at link to jkcook.net
. Cook’s building a reference site there, hope he’s got a good backup scheme.
This is typical fo how Israel and the powerful get to re-write history. They force history to be revised to suit their needs, and then use it to prove their case.
“We are saying to the Palestinians that if you want a normal life and are trying to embark on a new way, you must stop your incitement.”
When Israelis do it it’s called “demanding justice.” When the Palestinians do it it’s called “incitement.”
God bless Libya. Seems like they have the balls Abbas is missing. I’m sorry to say, that if the Palestinians drop the matter again – for the sake of more minutes on their mobiles – then I will no longer support their cause.
“A normal life” is clearly not a right if you are a Palestinian.
Human Rights Watch has a new statement condemning the blockade of Gaza as illegal and immoral–
link
(Found the link at the Angry Arab’s blog).
This is Witty’s cue to explain why it is okay for Israel to do this and how it is all Hamas’s fault and why, though defensible when Israel does it to Palestinians, a much less stringent boycott imposed on Israel would be a horrific act of coercion, not at all conducive to peace. And while he is at it, he can accuse HRW of being Hamas supporters (a line he has used on me several times, after I had explained to him several times that I agree that Hamas is guilty of war crimes and terrorism and repression against their own people.)