551 Palestinian children were killed by Israeli forces last summer
One year on from the tragic events in Gaza last summer, and the British Israel lobby is still trying to distract us from Israel’s crimes by highlighting perceived wrongdoing by other sides.
In her piece for Left Foot Forward, Jennifer Gerber makes a number of claims which require refutation: Hamas’ responsibility for provoking ‘the conflict’; the use of ‘terror tunnels’; Hamas use of human shields; and finally what Gerber laughably calls, ‘Israel’s attempt to avoid civilian casualties’.
But the worst distortion of all is the narrative which Gerber is seeking to peddle from her position as director of Labour Friends of Israel – which is that whatever violence its occupation of the Palestinians metes out, whatever injustice is done, Israel is somehow beyond reproach. It is never Israel’s fault.
Gerber writes that ‘the lives of all those civilians – Palestinian and Israeli – who died during the conflict are of equal value’ but doesn’t care to mention that the numbers of Palestinian and Israeli dead were 2,251 to 72; or that just six of those Israeli casualties were civilian.
Gerber seeks to situate the ‘conflict’ – if that is what one can call such a one-sided massacre – with, ‘the teenagers’ abduction and brutal murder which triggered the war’.
By using what some historians call ‘emplotment’, Gerber creates a narrative that starts not with Israel’s blockade of Gaza in 2007, nor when its occupation of Palestine began in 1967, nor even the ethnic cleansing of Palestine in 1947-9. It starts with a Hamas killing in 2014.
Let’s take Gerber’s other claims in turn.
If ‘terror tunnels’ were the main justification for Israel’s attack, then why did tanks operate a no-go zone in 44 per cent of the Gaza strip and shell schools, hospitals and houses?
These tunnels cannot explain the Israeli occupying forces’ murder of Khalil Anati, the 10-year-old boy shot dead by Israeli forces in al-Fawwar refugee camp in the West Bank, or 14-year-old Yousef al-Shawamrah, killed picking plants.
On human shields, Amnesty International have found no evidence of Palestinians using them, but evidence has emerged of Israeli troops forcing groups of up to sixty Palestinians to stay in residences and act as human shields.
In fact, Israel has a well-documented history of systematically using Palestinian civilians as human shields, particularly children.
What Gerber misses out from the report is damning of Israel. Not only did Israel repeatedly deny entry to the Human Rights Council, but they did not reply to any questions from the commission.
It details how the blockade has been ‘strangling the economy in Gaza and imposed severe restrictions on the rights of the Palestinians’.
Of the 2,251 Palestinians killed, 299 were women and 551 children. 18,000 housing units were destroyed in whole or in part; much of the electricity network and of the water and sanitation infrastructure were incapacitated; and 73 medical facilities and many ambulances were damaged.
At one point, 28 per cent of the population of Gaza, around half a million Palestinians, were internally displaced by the bombing.
Most disturbingly, but unsurprising to those acquainted with Israel’s tactics in ‘conflict’, the report, ‘identified patterns of strikes by Israeli forces on residential buildings’, and, ‘found that the fact that precision-guided weapons were used in all cases indicates that they were directed against specific targets and resulted in the total or partial destruction of entire buildings.’
Is it any wonder that Labour Friends of Israel is so keen to draw our attention to the half a dozen Israeli civilians killed by Hamas in the midst of all this death and destruction that was rained down on Gaza?
For too long Labour Friends of Israel has been taken at face value, and been granted platforms which it constantly uses to whitewash the war crimes of Israel. It is a losing battle.
Last year, Labour’s biggest trade union Unite, which represents over a million and a half workers, voted to support the Boycott Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) campaign in solidarity with Palestine, while the National Union of Students has twice voted since the 2014 massacre in Gaza to support BDS.
I wonder whether Labour Friends of Israel will long remain a voice that is taken seriously in debates around the Middle East while its whitewashing is unpicked by countless pages of human rights reports, journalism and documentation of the war crimes of the state they believe can do no wrong.
James Elliott is deputy editor of Left Futures and a member of the NUS National Executive Council. Follow him on Twitter
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32 Responses to “Labour Friends of Israel continues to whitewash war crimes”
joelsk44039
So, what’s the “justification” for the existence of the UK? Hmmm?
damon
I don’t agree with your analagy about the Nazis. It’s too much of a jump to make.
By about a thousand times. But there were certainly some atrocities carried out by Israeli or Jewish forces in 1948. Having had huge rows and even been banned one time from the passionately pro Israel site ”Harry’s Place” I’m not going to defend Israel completely, but I just can’t stand the other pro Palestinian side.
The George Galloway types. Israel did commit war crimes in Gaza last summer in my opinion, but Hamas are an awful fascist enemy to have.
Even though it is Israel which drops the bombs, Hamas wills the slaughter of their own people to further their fundamentalist cause.
Israel is responsible for being so block headed that it has made such die-hard enemies, but still, they aren’t quite as bad as the sorounding Arab countries who will happily drop barel bombs on their own civilians. Or encourage genocide like Sudan has done.
You don’t get too many of the pro Palestinian supporters who go on protests across the world, getting too worked up about what Sudan was doing in its civil war with the south, or in Darfur.
RebeccaFHardy
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Paul 保羅 باول Billanie
OK maybe the Nazi analogy was a bit harsh, but what they are doing to Palestinians is awful. ‘Hamas is an awful Facist enemy’ but you make the same analogy of Hamas, and although they do some very wrong things these could be seen as an attempt at a ‘defence’ against the attacks from Israel that has seen so much land stolen from them. If Israel hadn’t been grabbing so much, Hamas and other groups would never have come to be.
‘But there were certainly some atrocities carried out by Israeli or Jewish forces in 1948.’ They still are carrying out these though. The theft of land from Palestinians is shocking and deplorable and nobody is doing anything to stop them and force them to hand the stolen land back.
I personally am neither pro or against either side in this conflict but when you consider the changing map in the graphic I posted you can see why the Palestinians are fighting so hard. Would you be able to say you wouldn’t if the country you live in faced the same?
damon
I’m glad to see you can be reasonably open minded about Israel/Palestine.
Most people it seems are very much for one or the other and are pretty blinkered with the way they view things. I’ve had some big rows (online) with Israel supporters who find it unacceptable that I call Israel quite callous in the way it bombs so hard in areas where civilians are trapped. And that I find the Israeli spokesmen that you see on the news justifying everything the IDF does as being repugnant. As you might guess, for that I have been called an antisemitic.
However, I have to push back against the other side too in their support for the Palestinian side. They have terrible leadership in Hamas, and in Gaza they are the biggest obstacle to preventing war. They sacrifice their own people as pawns in a sick strategy of making gains by making Israel look so bad. Israel would much rather that Gaza was quiet and peaceful, whoever unjust their overall strategy with Palestine is more generally. They’d rather that the Lebanon border was a tranquil and benign one too, but Hezbollah don’t want that and prefer to keep that a hot border too.
Why would Israel want to have a hostile situation with Lebanon? It would make no sense at all, as it just makes them vulnerable in that end of the country and costs so much to have the army stationed up their in strength.
It’s the same with Gaza in the south. Hamas provoke the trouble with their rocket firing in times of peace.
But Israel’s dilemma is much of it’s own making because it was never able to get beyond the use of force in dealing with Arabs.
It’s kind of tough on the Israelis because what they do is hardly the worst in the region.
In 1982 in Syria, the government there killed 20,000 to put down an uprising, and every Arab country from Morocco to Saudi Arabia is quite barbaric.
But people focus on Israel so closely and ignore the wrongs done by others that it makes me side with Israel a bit.