War crimes in Gaza: who you gonna believe?

Israeli-Anglo-Yiddishist poet Karen Alkalay-Gut's blog isn't the easiest to find your way into, but it's always worth making the effort.

Today, she's got this account up of what's likely to have been behind last week's Israeli shelling hit on the Gazan family home at Beit Hanoun, from a recently discharged IDF soldier who fought in this summer's Hizbollah-Israel war, and who objected to Karen's characteristic agonizing over the tragedy.

Karen saw the hit as down to Israeli dehumanization of the Palestinian other. The soldier was having none of it:

I recently discharged from the army and had the dubious pleasure of taking part in the war (I was in AMAN) so I have some experience with these things. The combination of extreme sleepiness, tiredness, irritation and irresponsibility (sadly, a very common trait in the IDF) causes these disasters, not disrespect of human life. Just to state a few examples:

During the previous Lebanese War, 4 Israeli soldiers were killed because a tank gunner didn't bother to check whether he was facing north or south and fired on an Israeli base, one of these soldiers was his childhood friend.

Almost 20 soldiers were lost to so-called "friendly fire" in the 2nd Lebanese War, sometimes because of mistakes exactly like this one, sometimes measuring in the meters.

In fact, my own grandfather was severely hurt in a mortar shelling because during WWII he gave his own coordinates instead of the Romanians' and believe me, he was thinking of the fact that he was a "human being, with motivations and needs and feelings" only he didn't sleep for a few days and was very hungry so it was easy to write 325.221 instead of 279.223...

People often make mistakes, only the mistakes of soldiers (as of doctors, cops, lawyers and drivers) result in death - often of themselves.

You'll find quite another set of perspectives on Beit Hanoun being plugged at The Guardian, which has been publishing article after article on its Comment is Free section arguing that the Israelis deliberately shelled the civilians of Beit Hanoun. They argue that this is a strategy which has been instituted as a result of the recent incorporation of hard-right hardliner Avigdor Lieberman and his Yisrael Beiteinu into the Israeli government. What's more they keep up the line first promoted in Comment is Free that the self-confessed action by Hamas of using women as human shields to spring some of their beseiged gunmen was some sort of spontaneous demonstration by wives and mothers out to keep their menfolk home.

Leading the parade on Thursday was Jameela al-Shanti, actually a Hamas member of the Palestinian parliament, and so a member of a party which advocates the destruction of the state of Israel, and, of course someone who must be fully aware that Hamas itself organized the human shields tactic, itself a war crime under the Geneva Conventions:

Part IV
CIVILIAN POPULATION

Article 13.-Protection of the civilian population

1. The civilian population and individual civilians shall enjoy general protection against the dangers arising from military operations. To give effect to this protection, the following rules shall be observed in all circumstances.

2. The civilian population as such, as well as individual civilians, shall not be the object of attack. Acts or threats of violence the primary purpose of which is to spread terror among the civilian population are prohibited.

3. Civilians shall enjoy the protection afforded by this Part, unless and for such time as they take a direct part in the hostilities.

Jameela's story glosses over the reality of Hamas' aim of using radio broadcasts to get its female supporters out with spare clothes to run the siege and get the gunmen out disguised as women.

Like Sami Abdel-Shafi, whose Comment is Free piece I featured in my last post, she paints a touching picture of wives and mothers fearing for their menfolk, overcoming their fears and braving the Israeli monsters

It is not easy as a mother, sister or wife to watch those you love disappear before your eyes. Perhaps that was what helped me, and 1,500 other women, to overcome our fear and defy the Israeli curfew last Friday - and set about freeing some of our young men who were besieged in a mosque while defending us and our city against the Israeli military machine.

We faced the most powerful army in our region unarmed. The soldiers were loaded up with the latest weaponry, and we had nothing, except each other and our yearning for freedom. As we broke through the first barrier, we grew more confident, more determined to break the suffocating siege. The soldiers of Israel's so-called defence force did not hesitate to open fire on unarmed women. The sight of my close friends Ibtissam Yusuf abu Nada and Rajaa Ouda taking their last breaths, bathed in blood, will live with me for ever.

But Jameela al-Shanti is no ordinary wife or mother. Nor is she any ordinary member of Parliament (unless you count Baroness Jenny Tonge as the norm). As this article from Salon shows, she's a long-time Hamas ideologue and Islamist academic, inspired--if that's the word--by the late Sheikh Yassin, the architect of the Hamas suicide bombing strategies and its underlying determination to destroy Israel and remove the Jews who live there.

Well, that was Wednesday's and Thursday's contributions by the Guardian to the discussion of Beit Hanoun.

Contrast that with this quotation from an article in the Egyptian newspaper Al Ahram which quotes Hamas itself as acknowledging that the women involved (including presumably the tender-hearted Jameela) were actually members of Hamas' military wing, Al-Qassam, and act as part of their military intelligence operation:

Meanwhile Al-Qassam, Hamas' military wing, and Islamic Jihad announced through official statements they were firing at the Israeli forces inside Beit Hanoun, and were launching rockets into Israel. Hamas claims they were holding fire before 25 June, and had lost five or six fighters over the past week.

There is a special women's unit within Hamas that is trained and works to support Hamas. According to a senior Hamas official, the women's rescue mission was a decision taken by the military wing. "The women who participated were from Al-Qassam," said the Hamas official, adding "We have intelligence regarding the movement of Israeli tanks, and fighters move according to this information. Women are part of this intelligence apparatus."

Now The Guardian has offered us Soumaya Ghannousi as its latest apologist for the women of the Al Qassam military wing of Hamas, led by its courageous leader Jameela.

Soumaya Ghannousi is an altogether different phenomenon. Pursuing a doctorate into Christian "orientalist" attitudes towards Muslims in the time of the Crusades, she's been active in attacking the underlying demonisation of Islam and veil-wearing women that followed Jack Straw's recent pronouncements. On that particular topic, she and I have some quite similar positions.

But in Saturday's Comment is Free article, she resorts to lambasting Western reporters and media (no explicit evidence actually cited) for their supposed obsessions with the Islamic dress worn by the women of Beit Hanoun. Here, she too delivers the myth of the so-called protest demonstration led by Jameela al-Shantyia, and celebrates what she sees as their moral victory:

Whatever I do these days, I seem unable to shake off the scenes of the women confronting the Israeli army unarmed in the occupied Palestinian town of Beit Hanoun. I do not know what it is about them that intrigues me so much, and keeps their images engraved in my memory. Perhaps it is the thought of women defying the soldiers of the fourth largest army in the world unarmed, perhaps it is the fascinating collective power these women exuded, or the poignant imbalance of their situation. Although the soldiers had the upper hand in material terms, with their sophisticated armour and deadly weaponry, it was the women who won the moral case.....

It was interesting to hear journalists report on the Beit Hanoun protest where two women were murdered in cold blood and many more injured. With all the talk of "robes", "abayas" and "scarves" one would have thought the reporters were commenting on a fashion show, as though these women had defied the Israeli curfew for the sole purpose of exhibiting their costumes. With all the emphasis on the women's dress the reporters stressed their difference, dehumanizing them, obscuring their womanhood, reducing them to a piece of cloth. It was as though what these women wore lent a measure of justification to the soldiers' crimes against them.

That's the women of the military wing of Hamas she's talking about, engaged on Hamas' own admission on a mission involving the use of their Islamic dress to disguise and shelter the escape of their gunmen.

Sameela Ghannoush seems oblivious to the irony of her bemoaning the supposed indifference of the western media to the "liberationist" activities and tragedies of the women of Beit Hanoun in the third article to harp on this topic in four days. During which time there appear to have been zero Comment is Free articles discussing the applicability of the Geneva War Crimes convention to the actions of the military wing of Hamas.

Finally, the irrepressible Mahmoud al-Zahar, Foreign Minister of the elected Hamas Palestinian government, is http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?c=JPArticle&cid=1162378380219&pagename=JPost%2FJPArticle%2FShowFullabout the meaning of all the ambiguous references to "not giving up our lands" which pepper the articles of Sami Abdel-Shafi and Jameela al-Shantiya

"All of Palestine is our land," Zahar told the London-based Asharq al-Awsat. "When any part of it is liberated, any Palestinian and Muslim will have the right to come."

"The withdrawal of Israeli troops from Gaza and the evacuation of the settlements is an important historical event. It will shape the Palestinian conflict the Arab and Islamic worlds and the rest of the world," Zahar said.

When asked if the PA intended to enter the settlements, Zahar declared that the Palestinians would "sully the dignity of Israel with our feet." Zahar indicated that Hamas and the Palestinian Authority were in agreement on the management of lands evacuated by Israeli settlers during the disengagement from the Gaza Strip in 2005.

However, Hamas still refuses steadfastly to recognizes Israel, Zahar insisted. "We do not and will not recognize a state called Israel. Israel has no right to any inch of Palestinian land … This is a holy land. It is not the property of the Palestinians or the Arabs. This land is the property of all Muslims in all parts of the world."

Comments

[ModernityBlog]

I did enjoy your point about Comment is Free, originally I had high hopes for it, but it has degenerated into such a mess and the writers, almost instinctively and without reason, bash Israel no matter the facts or the context, it is all very shoddy thinking by Guardian columnists.

You should write more often!

[Sergeant S.W. Foster]

Interesting. I don't think either side is right or wrong...it's just war.

Sergeant S.W. Foster
US Army
Cedar Rapids, Iowa
www.DesertVets.org
www.IraqfromtheWindow.com
www.SgtScorpion.com