“A searing indictment of the brutality and atrocities inflicted on the Palestinians of Gaza and the collaboration of powerful nations in their murder.”
BLOWING UP EVERYTHING IS BEAUTIFUL:
ISRAEL’S EXTERMINATION OF GAZA
IS OUT NOW
“I CANNOT TOO STRONGLY state,” Lord Maugham said in 1943, “that delay will mean the escape of the guilty.” There was a sense, at Church House in Westminster in the last two days, that the guilty have already escaped. We live in their hysteria, their will, their ruins. Carnage reigns. The hand we hold against its spread strains to be more than symbol or sign. Truth is a poorer weapon than a jet-bomber; blast-pressure chokes testimony. Yet the fact of defiance is its own virtue; to defy on behalf of another who cannot is nobler still. The acts so wrenchingly detailed by twenty-nine expert witnesses at the Gaza Tribunal are not only evidence of themselves, but of a general anarchy and the collapse of what was built eighty years ago from the upstairs offices of this same building. We feel it as both an urgent demand, and a weakness.
From below comes the demand for slaughter to cease; from on high the silence and denials which are the necessary field for grim work. Jeremy Corbyn’s bill for a full public inquiry into Britain’s collaboration in Israeli crimes has, since June, been slumping through the Commons, that place where encumbered paces drift towards insignificant ends. If public restraint is the order of the day, private judgement will have to do. On Thursday morning and through Friday afternoon, the Gaza Tribunal tried in compact and abbreviated form to place a fist of pressure on the government. When the mechanisms of state rush to their own defence, it falls to us to run an interrupting wedge through their gears.
The problem is not that the law is absent. The problem is that the law is being openly defied. Of what use then is the law?
Tribunals like this—non-state, of the people—have their own honourable tradition. In 1966, Bertrand Russell and Jean-Paul Sartre formed a panel to judge the United States’ obliteration of Indochina. The same model was followed in other tribunals on political repression in South America, on the Armenian Genocide, the Iraq War, and, a decade ago now, on Palestine. There is underway another, wider Gaza Tribunal, meeting next in Istanbul, whose last communiqué was the powerful Sarajevo Declaration.
Impartiality and objectivity are not the same thing. Forget it at our peril. There was, here in Hoare Hall—oak-panelled, lamp-lit, live-streamed—no pretence to emulate the cool functions of an official court. Professors Neve Gordon and Shahd Hammouri, in their closing statements, rehearsed the arguments that will appear in their full report. They will not be impartial; they will be objective.
It was in Hoare Hall, here in this room, that the Commons sat for a time after Nazi bombs guttered its chamber. Churchill announced the Bismarck’s sinking from its floor. Yet there was a more resonant echo. If I had wanted to draw the wrath of an usher or CofE-security-man, I could have entered the lift and gone up two floors. There in the soft victorious summer of 1945, the Allies decided the final shape of the International Military Tribunal that would sit, a few months later, at Nuremberg. The third floor of Church House was the headquarters of the War Crimes Commission. From this base Robert Jackson travelled to Cambridge to see Hersch Lauterpacht, who gently encouraged the Supreme Court Justice to include the new idea of Crimes Against Humanity in the indictment. And it was from these rooms, above us, that the Crime of Aggression was decided to be premiere sin from that contained the accumulated whole of all sins done in war.
One storey below, on the second floor, housed the staff of the British War Crimes Executive. That same summer, they confessed their confusion when they first heard of Raphael Lemkin’s concept of genocide. Too “fancy” and “outlandish,” they said, worrying nobody would understand what it meant. Now everyone knows what genocide means. The word is only matched in its power by its impotence today, in crisis, to call the cavalry over the hill on our behalf.
At the Gaza Tribunal, there could not have been a greater contrast between the facts of the legal order crafted then and the facts of destruction now. It fell to the lawyer-professor Ralph Wilde to note the absolutes of the law. If fell to others to note the breaking of that law absolutely. Wilde represented the Palestinian rights group Al-Haq at the International Court of Justice last year. The judgement won from that court set finally in granite what had been declared by UN Resolution 242 in 1967—that Israel’s occupation of Palestinian lands was illegal, that any land at all cannot be won by conquest. Thus, Wilde argued, any action whatsoever against Gaza (or the West Bank) is unlawful. The prohibition is utter and total. Control of the borders or the sea, control of food, control of movement—these are individual crimes as well as general ones. Just as the Nuremberg prosecutors and judges considered that the Crime of Aggression was the font from which all other individual atrocities flowed, so the Occupation is the ultimate origin of every rib which shows through the skin of a Palestinian child.
Or every Palestinian amputee who wakes from a desperate operation in a bombed clinic without analgesic. The plastic surgeon Victoria Rose, speaking without notes in a plain and unrelenting tone, described the cries of the newly limbless, the cruelly limbless, starting at dawn and not stopping until 3pm for want of the kind of pills any of us can get easily from a corner store. Gazans are killed and pained; they are not allowed painkillers. Among the goods Gaza’s medics begged Dr Rose to smuggle in with her were soap, shampoo, and toothpaste. Not even the doctors, pearls of Gaza’s bravery, are given wages enough to keep themselves clean. And these British doctors who testified this week—Dr Rose, along with Dr Nick Maynard—have not been dignified by their own government with a full and frank reply for why they shall carry in their trained and expensive minds the memory of needless horrors until their end of days.
“The international system has never dealt with genocide in an appropriate way.” Anyone with only a passing knowledge of the twentieth century would agree with this opinion. But this opinion was given extra weight for being that of Richard Falk, one our eminences, one of our sages. At 96, he is not quite old enough to have shared the prosecutor’s rostrum with Benjamin Ferencz or Telford Taylor at Nuremberg. But Falk is old enough to have joined Taylor in 1970 in Washington DC at the Congressional Conference on War and National Responsibility, where America’s invigilation of Vietnam was declared to be a violation of the same rules against aggression and atrocity established, in part, by Taylor; the same rules drafted and sealed in the rooms above.
Eyal Weizman is a mensch. I wish he could have been given a day to himself. His testimony was the broadest and most specific of all, and given with a fluency and command of many decades’ study, many decades’ experience. We do not say loudly enough that several of Gaza’s towns and cities have been razed from the earth. Rafah is gone. Much of Khan Younis is gone. The triangle of Beit Hanoun-Jabalia-Beit Lahia is gone. Weizman calls it “desertification”—one of those slightly grating academic terms that nonetheless stresses how little of Gaza will be left if Israel’s impunity is not interrupted. Dunes and dust. It is not just the buildings, but all signs of urban or rural life that are being erased. A featureless landscape, Weizman says, a “tabula rasa.” He pointed out that every one of the “reconstruction” plans proposed by Israeli settlers, or Egypt, or Boston Consulting Group takes for granted the gouges the IDF have already carved into the soil. Each plan includes the buffer zone the army has flattened in the east; each allows for the military access corridors of Netzarim, Morag, and Philadelphi. The military logic of occupation is being baked-in to Gaza’s future, even when the fact that Gaza has a future at all is not certain.
Impartiality and objectivity are not the same thing.
Forget it at our peril.
It is important to remember that the system of international law—litigation, judgement, and above all, enforcement—has been far from reticent in the face of Gaza’s wreckage. The International Court of Justice moved as quickly as it could on three separate occasions to issue urgent measures and prohibitions against Israel. The prosecutor of the International Criminal Court defied extreme lobbying and pressure from outside to issue his arrest warrants. The system is doing precisely what it is supposed to do, however slowly and however inhibited. The problem is not that the law is absent. The problem is that the law is being openly defied. Of what use then is the law?
When the Gaza Tribunal’s report is published, and whether or not Jeremy Corbyn succeeds in his parliamentary vote to get a fuller, wider inquiry, the worth of the last few days will be to hold up a thick dossier of complicity to the face of British government and say We know what you did, you cannot hide, you should fear a reckoning. The Tribunal’s other achievement—if that is the right word—has been to flash a torch into the abyss between righteousness and reality; to show how clear and vivid the evidence is, and how far from shore is the justice such evidence demands.