War on Gaza - Operation Pillar of Defense

“The Israelis launched their attack shortly after the US elections and shortly before the US was about to swear in a president at the inauguration in January and just before Israeli elections were scheduled as well. So there is no question that it has everything to do with Israeli politics.” /Phyllis Bennis, director of the Institute for Policy Studies

If you just look at the casualties’ figures of that horrific three weeks of the Israeli assault on Gaza in 2008 – there were more than 1,400 Palestinians killed, the majority of them civilians. And there were 13 Israelis, of whom seven were civilians and five of them were killed in friendly fire. So the disparity of casualties, and we’re seeing it again now is enormous.

It’s going to result first of all in enormous human cost to the people of Gaza, who since 2008-09 Operation Cast Lead have been able to rebuild very, very little of what was destroyed in that operation, in those three weeks of assaults. Gazans still don’t have electricity 24 hours a day. It’s still on only for a few hours. If bombing this time goes at the electrical generators again, as it did four years ago, it will be another period of years before that could be rebuild. So there is a devastating human impact. The purpose behind this is clear: as Interior Minister Eli Yishai said, “The goal of the operation is to send Gaza back to the Middle Ages."

Hypocrisy of slaughter

Israel’s assault on Gaza raises doubts that it has any interest in finding the lasting peace settlement it proclaims to want. Does the campaign have an alternative objective as part of a strategy to engineer a strike on Iran? It’s probably the world’s most tragic never-ending story. For almost 65 years now, Israel has been bombing, maiming and humiliating the Palestinians, bulldozing their homes and placing Gaza in lock-down mode turning it into the world’s largest concentration camp. On Wednesday 14th, an Israeli helicopter attack killed Hamas military wing leader Ahmed Jabari, triggering a violent reaction from Hamas which rained little rockets over southern Israeli towns, which in turn brought in more Israeli air attacks killing 19, injuring 100 and leaving six children dead.

Dejá-vù: it’s January 2009’s “Operation Cast Lead” revisited; this time they’re dubbing it “Operation Pillar of Defense.”

(In response to a sharp increase in the number and frequency of rocket attacks into Israel prior to and following the expiration of Hamas' agreed period of "calm" on December 19, 2008, the Israeli Air Force launched Operation Cast Lead, consisting initially of airstrikes on December 27 against Hamas security installations, personnel, and other facilities in the Gaza Strip, followed on January 3 by ground operations. Hostilities between Israeli forces and Hamas fighters continued through January 18, and the Israeli withdrawal of troops was completed on 21 January 2009.)

Clearly, Israel’s right-wing leaders do not want a peaceful agreement with the Palestinians.That’s why they’ve systematically sabotaged all possibility of reaching a two-state solution. The last honest Israeli who tried to bring peace was Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, until he was gunned down in the streets of Tel-Aviv in November 1995; not by an Islamic fanatic, not by some mad Neo-Nazi, but by one Ygal Amir: an ultra-right-wing Zionist fanatic linked to both the fundamentalist Settlers’ Movement and Israel’s security agency Shin-Beth.

Bodies for Ballots
by Yousef Munayyer, an Executive Director of The Jerusalem Fund and its educational program, The Palestine Center.

Israeli forces have launched dozens of airstrikes on Gaza City, targeting governmental and civilian facilities and other objects mostly located in densely-populated areas. The targets have included the building of the Council of Ministers in the west of the City, which was completely destroyed and a number of nearby houses damaged; the building of the police command in the center of the City, which was completely destroyed and a number of nearby houses damaged; the building of the Civil Department of the Ministry of Interior in the south of the City, which was attacked for the second time, causing damage to al-Quds Hospital and a number of public and UNRWA school; and Palestine Stadium in al-Remal neighborhood in the center of the City, which was extensively damaged...

They say when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. But when you are a politician and all you have is a hammer, you must convince voters every problem looks like a nail. This is the only thinking that can explain Israel’s behavior in escalating bombardment of Gaza. The Israeli spin machines are out in full force in the hopes of convincing Israelis and the rest of the world that the attacks on Gaza are in self-defense. But anyone following the situation closely and over time will tell you that cannot be the case. For context, consider this: more Palestinians were killed in Gaza yesterday than Israelis have been killed by projectile fire from Gaza in the past three years. The problem Gaza presents for Israel is that it won’t go away—though Israel would love it if it would. It is a constant reminder of the depopulation of Palestine in 1948, the folly of the 1967 occupation, and the many massacres which have happened since then. With Israeli elections around the corner, the right-wing Israeli government chose the counter-productive path of escalation even though civilians would pay the price and their domestic opposition rallied behind them.

Trading bodies for ballots is an equation Israeli leaders are happy to be engaged in, especially since all the ballots are Israeli and the bodies are almost always Palestinian.

‘Don’t worry about America…’

Former Israeli PM Ariel Sharon is infamously quoted as yelling to his colleagues during a heated debate in Israel’s Knesset in October 2001, that they need not worry about American reaction to Israel’s Palestine-bashing because “we the Jewish people control America!"

Watching how US politicians file through powerful Pro-Israel lobbies, think tanks and organizations like AIPAC – American Israeli Public Affairs Committee -, the ADL and others, competing to give their most impassioned and dramatic pro-Israel speeches, one is tempted to believe Mr. Sharon’s candid words.

During the recent US presidential campaign both Barack Obama and Mitt Romney each tried to give their most convincing Joe Biden-like “I-am-a-Zionist” speeches, to win over not just the Jewish vote and money in America, but also the Zionist vote which is represented by many non-Jewish born-again Christians.

So, when earlier this week US Ambassador to the UN Susan Rice openly supported Israel and condemned Hamas’ retaliatory attacks describing them as “violence that Hamas and other terrorist organizations are employing against the people of Israel", one can hardly be surprised.

It doesn’t really matter who sits in the Oval office; whether Democrat or Republican, the US will always unthinkingly and unreservedly support Israel every time it decides to play a new round of Palestine-bashing. (read more)

Gaza Blockade

"The idea is to put the Palestinians on a diet, but not to make them die of hunger," Dov Weisglass said in 2006.

The Israeli military meticulously and callously calculated the number of calories Gaza residents would need to consume in order not to starve, and used those calculations to inform how to impose a harsh economic blockade on the Palestinians, according to newly released documents. The overwhelming blockade Israel imposed on Gaza, tightening restrictions on the movement of people and goods, was supposedly punishment for having Hamas in power. “The official goal of the policy was to wage ‘economic warfare’ which would paralyze Gaza’s economy and, according to the Defense Ministry, create pressure on the Hamas government,” the Israeli human rights group Gisha, which fought the legal battle that led to the document’s release, said in a statement. Israel’s general policy towards Gazans was summed up by Dov Weisglass, an adviser to former Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, years before the document was written. 

Israel imposed a naval blockade on Gaza in 2009, saying it was needed to prevent the smuggling of arms to the Islamic militant group Hamas, which governs the Palestinian enclave, and to jihadist groups operating there. More than a dozen ships had tried to break the blockade since 2010, when Israeli commandos killed nine pro-Palestinian activists after encountering resistance during a raid on a six-ship flotilla led by the Turkish vessel the Mavi Marmara. The episode led some of the restrictions on imports to Gaza to be relaxed, but also caused a deep rift in relations between Israel and Turkey, which has indicted four Israelis for their roles.

Land blockade: The Israel and Egypt–Gaza Strip barrier, built by Israel between 1994 and 2005 when it had full control of the Gaza Strip, separates the Gaza Strip from both Egypt and Israel; the Israeli Defense Forces maintain a presence at all border crossings and regularly patrol along the fence. All humanitarian aid bound for Gaza via Israel is transferred through four border crossings: The Kerem Shalom, Karni, Erez, and Sufa crossings. All aid first undergoes security inspection before being transferred by truck into Gaza. Additionally, the Egypt-Gaza barrier was built underground by Egypt starting in 2009. The stated aim was to block smuggling tunnels. According to the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs at various times, Israel has blocked goods including wheelchairs, dry food items, and crayons, Stationery, soccer balls, and musical instruments. International aid group Mercy Corps said it was blocked from sending 90 tons of macaroni and other foodstuffs. Israel was also reported to have prevented aid groups from sending in other items, such as paper, crayons, tomato paste and lentils. Because of an Israeli ban on the importation of construction materials (such as cement and steel) for fear of Hamas using them to build bunkers and fortified positions from which to shell villages in Israel, the UN Relief and Works Agency built at least one mud brick home, and planned to build up to 120. Food waits on trucks and in warehouses, and many basic items are rejected by Israel as "luxuries" or are turned down for unexplained reasons. Tin cans are banned because "the tin might be melted down and used to build weaponry or structures by Hamas", making it hard for Gazan farmers to preserve their vegetables. Cement, glass, steel, bitumen, wood, paint, doors, plastic pipes, metal pipes, metal reinforcement rods, aggregate, generators, high voltage cables and wooden telegraph poles are "high priority reconstruction materials currently with no or highly limited entry into Gaza through official crossings.

Hague Tribunal - Trojan horse for tyrannical world government

An appeals court on Friday overturned the conviction of the most senior Croatian military officer charged with crimes during the Balkan wars of the 1990s. The court ordered the immediate release of Ante Gotovina, who was commander in the Split district of the Croatian army, who had been sentenced to 24 years in prison, and of Mladen Markač, a Croatian police commander, overturning his 18-year sentence.

Two Croatian military leaders have been convicted at The Hague of atrocities against Serbs during a 1995 campaign of ethnic cleansing. Many Croats denounced the verdict.

Judges at the International War Crimes Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia sentenced Ante Gotovina and Mladen Markač who were found guilty of crimes including murder, persecution and plunder. The rulings came after a three year trial investigating Operation Storm, a Croatian offensive carried out in 1995 to reclaim the republic of Krajina from Serb control. 

The defendants were accused of having failed to prevent their forces from killing hundreds of people and forcing thousands from their home. What’s more, the judges ruled that Croatia’s political leadership, including the late president, were also guilty by association. What is the most sensitive aspect of the verdict is this joint criminal enterprise point, implying that it was not just Gotovina himself, but what happened during the Operation Storm happened in collusion and in a way in collaboration with the highest ranks of Croatia's political and military leadership.

The prosecution claims the trio (Gotovina, along with Ivan Čermak, the Knin garrison commander, and Mladen Markač) implemented a calculated policy of expulsion ordered by the Tudjman regime aimed at permanently ridding Croatia of the large Serbian minority community that had been resident there for centuries. After the "victory", Croatian forces went on the rampage, torching the homes of elderly Serbs who had not fled.

Croats consider Gotovina and Markac national heroes. The influential Roman Catholic church has been calling for prayers and fasting in the hope of an acquittal. The decisive political leaders such as president Franjo Tudjman, defence minister Gojko Šušak, and army chief Janko Bobetko all died before they could face trial. The Gotovina case has served as a substitute. For many Croats, the generals symbolize the country's independence and the beginning of the operation is celebrated as a public holiday called Victory Day. The Hague-based International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia said Gen Ante Gotovina and Gen Mladen Markac should be released immediately after ruling in favour of their appeal. The case closed as the former Yugoslav republic prepares to join the European Union next July and struggles to recover after three years of recession or stagnation. The verdict will be a judgment not only on the generals, but on all the veterans and also on the Croatian state - the future EU member.

The Hague Tribunal farce

Not many eyebrows will be raised at the revelation that there is a prison, in a small foreign country, where you can be indefinitely incarcerated without trial, or where you can be delivered on the orders of an ad-hoc "court" which sets its own rules as it goes along, and sometimes issues warrants only after politically motivated arrests had been performed.

Some may be surprised, however, that this "far-away country" is not North Korea, Bourkina Fasso or Syria, but the civilized tittle Holland. The prison is in the North Sea resort of Scheveningen, a wind-swept melange of belle epoque hotels and 1960s concrete tower blocks. The court in question is ten miles away, in The Hague, and it goes by the name ofThe International Tribunal for the Prosecution of Persons Responsible for Serious Violations of International Humanitarian Law Committed in the Territory of the Former Yugoslavia Since 1 January 1991. The Hague Tribunal (ICTFY) was established by the Security Council of the United Nations in 1993 on the basis of Chapter VII of the U.N. Charter (Resolution 827), with the "jurisdiction" for crimes committed after January 1,1991. The U.N. Genocide Convention could not, in any case, provide the basis for the Tribunal. It is an international treaty, approved by the General Assembly and ratified by member-states, which does not endow the U.N. with radical new powers. In fact, the Security Council acted illegally in setting up the Tribunal; it had no authority to do so. Boutros-Ghali himself declared that, "in asking the Secretary- General to consider this project, the Security Council has given itself an entirely new mandate." It is noteworthy that the Tribunal has not been established by convention in the General Assembly, which would have then required accession by treaty ratification of each member. Invocation of Article 29 in the resolution establishing the Tribunal gives the game away: The Security Council may establish such subsidiary organs as it deems necessary for the performance of its functions. This amounts to an admission that the Tribunal is not an "independent court of law," but a "subsidiary organ" of its political masters. The obvious question is why only "the former Yugoslavia," and why only the past five years? A cynic might say that one possible reason was that the United States did not want to put its generals on trial for killing Vietnaimese civilians. As Noam Chomsky put it, "I think, legally speaking, there's a very solid case for impeaching every American president since the Second World War. They've aIl been either outright war criminals or involved in serious war crimes ".

(wanna know more?)

"The tribunal is a sick and very expensive joke, along with its clones the Rwandan tribunal and the International Criminal Court set up by the Rome Treaty of 1998 and wisely boycotted by the United States." - Gerald Warner explains (Gerald Warner is an author, broadcaster, columnist and polemical commentator at The Telegraph). 

"International tribunals are Trojan horses for tyrannical world government. They have no legitimacy. Only sovereignty confers the right to put people on trial and there is no international sovereignty. This tribunal is a convenient cop-out for states like Serbia. If Serbia tried and convicted Karadzic that would testify to its fitness to take its place among the nations. The tribunal is a charade."

Millions of words can be spoken about the mistakes of leaders of the Balkan state, but external forces played the major role in the collapse of Yugoslavia. It was preventing the creation of a more malleable Europe in which NATO and Brussels movers and shakers could dominate. Serbs constituted the pivot of the Yugoslav nation and it was precisely they who tried vainly to keep the country’s unity, and it has now transpired that they, more than any other nationality, are guilty for the calamities that befell Yugoslavia. At any rate, it is being demonstrated by the Hague Tribunal’s activity, a Tribunal set up putatively to objectively look into the whys and causes of the bloody Balkan tragedy. Alas, objectivity can’t be found in the Tribunal’s dictionary. The few Bosnian and Croat criminals brought before the Tribunal have all but been allowed to go scot-free; laughable prison terms have either been slapped on them or sentenced to prison term conditionally. Three quarters of those who got real prison terms have been Serbs, reducing the Tribunal to an instrument of pressure by the West on Belgrade. 

Moscow has minced no words in vowing that it will never again vote for an extension of the mandate of the International Tribunal for former Yugoslavia, since its work is characterized more by farce than substance. It’s time to move from ad hoc judicial bodies to working on a universal basis, on the basis of judicial procedure, thrashed out via international conventions.

Other Croatian atrocities that went unpunished

After Germany and its Axis allies invaded Yugoslavia in April 1941, the Nazis permitted the fascist and terrorist Ustaša organization to found the Independent State of Croatia. The new regime was highly dependent upon German support for survival. The territory of the Independent State of Croatia included two constituent units of former Yugoslavia, Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina, with a total population of about 6.3 million. More than half of the population, or 3.3 million, were ethnic Croats, most of them Catholic. The 1.9 million Serbs were the largest ethnic minority. Most of them were Serbian Orthodox and some were of the Uniate faith. Other minorities included approximately 700,000 Muslims, 40,000 Jews, and 30,000 Roma (Gypsies). During the spring and summer of 1941, the Ustaša regime enacted racial laws aimed at Jews and Roma and launched a brutal campaign to dispossess, persecute, and murder large numbers of Serbs. Ustaša units, often encouraged by Catholic clergy, carried out a program of compulsory conversion of Orthodox Serbs to Catholicism; resistance often resulted in murder. Some Serbs, particularly members of the elite, were not even offered the option of conversion to avoid being killed. The Ustaša authorities established numerous concentration camps in Croatia between 1941 and 1945. These camps were used to isolate and murder Serbs, Jews, Roma, Muslims, and other non-Catholic minorities, as well as Croatian political and religious opponents of the regime. The largest of these centers was the Jasenovac complex, a string of five camps on the bank of the Sava River, about 60 miles (97 kilometers) south of Zagreb. Between 1941 and 1945, Germans and Ustaša killed approximately 32,000 Jews from Croatia. The precise number of Jews murdered in Jasenovac is not known, but estimates range between 8,000 and 20,000 victims. These numbers do not include Jews whom the Ustaša authorities turned over to the Germans for deportation to Auschwitz and other camps. Due to differing views and lack of documentation, estimates for the number of Serbian victims in Croatia range widely, from 25,000 to more than one million. The estimated number of Serbs killed in Jasenovac ranges from 25,000 to 700,000. The most reliable figures place the number of Serbs killed by the Ustaša between 330,000 and 390,000, with 45,000 to 52,000 Serbs murdered in Jasenovac.

Opening First-ever Thematic Debate on Global Criminal Justice

Obraćanje Predsednika Srbije pred GS UN (srb) - video

UN Debate on Global Criminal Justice - video