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ISRAELI STATE AS CLEARLY AMERICAN LAWBREAKER
On DN, Phyllis Bennis of the Institute for Policy Studies http://www.ips-dc.org/ , commented on the numerous international violations and crimes against humanity involved in the death of Sharrub’s brothers, and sufferings of Amer Sharrub’s father, who died with his son in his arms.
Bennis noted that “according to US law, the Arms Export Control Act, it is prohibited for Israel or for any country receiving US military equipment—but in this case Israel —it is prohibited to use that equipment, that military equipment, that ammunition, those weapons, outside of very narrow constraints. All of this violates those narrow constraints.”
Moreover, Bennis remarked: “The Israelis have a very particular obligation in Gaza and the West Bank and occupied East Jerusalem as the occupying power. Under the Geneva Conventions, as the occupying power, Israel has the obligation to protect the civilian population. And that has a whole range of specific obligations, starting with no collective punishment, no use of prohibited weapons. The whole range of attacks that we have seen during this period of the three-week war in Gaza constituted a whole host of violations of different articles of the Geneva Conventions, starting with Article 33, that prohibits as an absolute any collective punishment, meaning that the siege of Gaza, which was creating a humanitarian disaster in Gaza even before the military assault began, was itself a violation of the prohibition that says Israel cannot punish anyone in Gaza, let alone the entire population of a million-and-a-half people, half of whom are children under seventeen, cannot punish them for any act they were not personally responsible for.”
In the case of the Sharrub family members who were shot and died on the eve of Israel’s supposed unilateral cease-fire, Bennis summarizes the key points as follows: “So the notion that they could fire on a civilian car, in this case with a father and his two sons, knowing they were civilians who were guilty of nothing, who were accused of nothing, that they could fire on that car, because they felt threatened or for any other reason, is absolutely a violation. Then there’s another violation inherent in the refusal of allowing medical care, refusing to protect the wounded. So the fact that there were medics on the scene who asked, maybe begged, the Israeli commander to treat the wounded, as they are obligated to do under international law, those medics were trying to do what international law says they must do, and they were prevented from doing so by their commander. That makes their commander guilty of another separate war crime, a crime of the violation of international humanitarian law, that requires them to provide aid and medical help to the wounded. So there’s a host of violations here.”
MY EXPERIENCE AS A LONG-TERM STUDENT OF HOLOCAUST
I have been studying Modern Western European history for nearly four full decades.
I am currently in Germany and am surrounded by books, such as Tadeusz Sobolewicz’s BUT I SURVIVED ,http://en.auschwitz.org.pl/m/index.php?page=shop.product_details&category_id=3&flypage=shop.flypage&product_id=31&option=com_virtuemart&Itemid=36&vmcchk=1&Itemid=36
Angelika Ebbinghaus’ VICTIMS AND PERSECUTERS, http://bama.ua.edu/~emartin/publications/mdart.htm
Gudruen Schwarz, THE NATIONAL SOCIALIST CAMPS, http://www.swissbankclaims.com/PDFs_Eng/697499.pdf
and Peter Reichel’s POLITIK MIT DER ERINNERUNG http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/the_tls/article3121515.ece
These books deal with memories of the Holocaust, occupation, and national socialism. As I review what has occurred and reoccurred in the occupied areas of Palestine in recent weeks, I believe the shoes of certain NAZI occupying acts fits what we have been witnessing.
This does not mean Hamas leadership and certain Palestinians have not done bad or horrible things in the past years, but it does mean that Israel as a state is living up to neither its forefathers’ historical promises to not see the past repeated, nor is it living up to bilateral U.S. nor international laws to which it purports to be a democratic and God-fearing member.
For example, in the aforementioned interview on DN by Phyllis Bennis, one hears these appropriate claims: “The kind of weapons that we’re seeing being used, the use of white phosphorus, for instance, which was used not only in civilian areas, which is all of the Gaza Strip, is one giant civilian area. There is nowhere to hide. That’s been the conclusion of Amnesty International, that when Israeli notifications to people in Gaza said, ‘You should flee, because we are going to bomb your home, we are going to attack your neighborhood, there is a Hamas person who lives next door,’ there is nowhere in Gaza to flee in this most densely populated area.”
In short, what if we in 1943, as Americans, had personally witnessed Jews being told to flee a compound or be threatened with certain death—only to see them shot in the back while they were fleeing.
We Americans in 1943 would have stated, “We must do something! Or something must be done!”
