Israel Must Be Held Accountable For Its International
Law Violations

On June 25, the Palestinians responded to continued,
unrelenting and unjustifiable Israeli Defense Forces
(IDF) attacks against them by striking at an Israeli
military post near Kerem Shalom crossing, southeast of
Rafah, killing two IDF soldiers, injuring several
others, and capturing (not “kidnapping) a third.  It
set off a swift and deadly IDF response of daily
killings and mass destruction in the Occupied
Palestinian Territories (OPT)against defenseless
Palestinians helpless in the face of the relentless
IDF onslaught. 

Events since escalated into a mass conflagration when
Hezbollah resistance fighters captured (again, not
“kidnapped”) two IDF soldiers who apparently illegally
crossed the UN-monitored “blue line” into Lebanon as
they’ve routinely done almost daily after withdrawing
from the country in May, 2000.  Again the IDF
responded with overwhelming force by air and with a
ground invasion in the south causing vast destruction
over a wide area throughout the country including in
Beirut, Tyre and Sidon (Lebanon’s three largest
cities) and now extending to the north in Christian
areas and up to the Syria-Lebanon border.

This scorched-earth blitzkrieg, primarily and
willfully aimed at civilian targets of all types
devastated Lebanon’s major ports, the Beirut
International Airport, much of the country’s essential
infrastructure including over 70 bridges, dozens of
key roads, all the nation’s radars, electrical power
plants, 20 or more gas and fuel stations and the
Jiyyeh power utility plant south of Beirut spilling
about 14,000 metric tons of heavy fuel oil (over
one-third the size of the Exxon-Valdez spill) along
over 90 miles of Lebanon’s and Syria’s Mediterranean
Sea coast posing a serious threat to biodiversity as
well as a heightened risk of cancer because this type
fuel oil contains benzene which is categorized as a
Class 1 carcinogen.  Israel also imposed a land, sea
and air siege on the country resulting in severe
shortages of essential food, medical supplies, fuel
and other necessities, and the IDF has bombed
factories (including for food), warehouses, dams,
civil defense centers, schools, radio and TV stations,
mosques, churches, hospitals, ambulances, humanitarian
aid conveys, the al-Hilwah Palestinian refugee camp at
Sidon, an orphange and funeral on August 8, and
thousands of civilian homes - in total causing damage
exceeding $2 billion and rising daily.  The outrageous
stonewalling US-France proposed UN Security Council
resolution on the conflict is nothing more than a
mandate to “give war a chance” and let Israel finish
the slaughter and mass destruction it’s now inflicting
in violation of international laws as will be
explained below.

It remains to be seen what final UN Security Council
action will actually occur as strong Lebanese
government and Arab League opposition to the proposed
resolution now has made France decide to back down and
support an alternate plan requiring a full IDF
withdrawal from south Lebanon.  In reversing itself,
France has now split with the US which still supports
the original and unacceptable joint proposal
supporting Israel’s right to continue its assault.

That month-long assault also deliberately targeted and
killed many hundreds of innocent Lebanese civilians
(likely at least double the officially reported number
that now exceeds 1,000), injured thousands more (many
seriously), displaced as many as one million others
(about one-fourth of the country’s total four million
population) including over 300,000 children fleeing
north for their lives and being targeted and attacked
in their cars as they do, and created a vast
humanitarian crisis in the country as well as in the
Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPT) still under
attack and occupation since June 25.  Both assaults
are so ferocious, it’s clear they’re intended to
destroy Lebanon as a nation to prevent it from ever
functioning again as it once did as well as forever
ending the Palestinians’ dream of ever having a viable
sovereign state of their own.  As will be discussed
below, they also are intended to destroy the
democratically elected Hamas government in the OPT and
legitimate Hezbollah resistance that now has the
overwhelming support of over 85% of the Lebanese
people including most Maronite and other Christians,
the majority Sunni and Shia Muslims that together
comprise about two-thirds of the population, and
Lebanon’s once pro-Western Prime Minister Fuad Sinora.
They all are now united against their common enemies
- Israel and their complicit US ally.

The Assault on the Occupied Palestinian Territories
(OPT) Now Under the Radar

While world attention focuses on Lebanon, the daily
killings and destruction go on unabated and now under
the radar in the OPT.  Since the unwarranted assault
began against the defenseless Palestinians on June 25,
Israel, against two countries, has deliberately and
flagrantly violated international law stipulated in
the 1949 Geneva Convention Relative to the Protection
of Civilian Persons in Time of War including article
33 under it that prohibits reprisals against protected
persons and property.  Below is an account of what the
IDF has done as of early August in the OPT in an
undisguised act of illegal collective punishment:

—The Palestinian Centre for Human Rights reports 200
Palestinians, mostly civilians, including about 44
children and at least 10 women have been killed
through August 9.  The Israeli human rights monitoring
group B’Tselem reports the number killed in July in
Gaza alone to be 163, and the Palestinian Red Crescent
Society reports 210 Gaza and West Bank killings from
July 1 through August 7.  At least 6 of those killed
were executed extra-judicially.

The Palestinian Centre for Human Rights on the ground
in the OPT also reports:

—The IDF wounded nearly 800 Palestinian civilians
(many seriously), including 218 children and 24 women
through August 9.

—It fires hundreds of artillery shells and many
dozens of air-to-surface missiles into the OPT daily
against civilian and so-called military targets that
are usually just ordinary buildings Israel without
evidence claims are occupied by “militants.”

—It conducts mock air raids, and its aircraft (US
made and supplied advanced F-16 fighter jets)
routinely break the sound barrier (often late at
night) at low altitudes deliberately inflicting
eardrum shattering and terrifying sonic booms against
helpless people.

—It forced many families to leave or evacuate their
homes in Rafah, Beit Hanoun, Beit Lahia and elsewhere,
some of them being warned in Gaza by phone their homes
would be attacked. 

—It made dozens of incursions into OPT areas killing
civilians, destroying agricultural land, buildings,
homes and infrastructure and expropriating land Israel
intends to keep.

—It imposed a tightened seige throughout the OPT
including curfews, greatly restricting movement and
the Palestinians’ access to food, fuel, medical
attention and other essential goods and services and
thus created a humanitarian disaster that’s becoming
worse.

—It destroyed the electricity plant providing about
45% of the electricity needs of the Gaza Strip and
also repeatedly attacks electricity networks and
transmitters in Gaza.

—It destroyed the main pipe providing water for the
Nusairat and al-Boreij refugee camps.

—It destroyed 6 important bridges linking Gaza City
with central Gaza thus preventing transportation from
moving normally to provide essential goods and other
needs to the people.

—It destroyed a number of key roads in Gaza.

—It destroyed the buildings of the Palestinian
Ministries of Justice, Foreign Affairs, National
economy and government compound in Nablus as well as
the office of the Palestinian Prime Minister.

—It uprooted many hundreds of donums of vital
agricultural land and destroyed many dozens of homes
used only as residences.

—Israel continued building its annexation/separation
wall throughout this period and razed and expropriated
Palestinian land in al-Sawhra as-Gharbiya village,
east of Jerusalem, to complete one section of it in
that area.  It also razed other agricultural land in
Jourat al-Shama village, south of Bethlehem, to
construct another section southeast of “Efrat”
settlement.

—The IDF arrested hundreds of Palestinian civilians
and is holding them without charge.  It also arrested
eight government ministers, 26 members of the
Palestinian Legislative Council (PLC) and now on
August 6 besieged the home of Dr. Aziz Dweik, PLC
Speaker, forced him to surrender and placed him under
detention without charge.  All this is part of an
illegal attempt to undermine and destroy the
democratically elected Hamas government because Israel
can’t control and co-opt it to serve its interests -
meaning act as its enforcer and not as a legitimate
government.  Also, on August 6, unknown masked
assassins shot and killed Major Mohammed Mousa
al-Mousah, chief of Palestinian Military Intelligence,
in the northern Gaza Strip.

Israel’s Assaults on Lebanon and the OPT Were Planned
Long Before They Began

It’s now known that both Israeli assaults were jointly
planned many months earlier with their US allies that
aided the Israelis with their support, funding, supply
and replenishment of weapons as needed, and satellite
tracking and intelligence information from National
Security Agency (NSA) intercepts.  Retired US General
Wesley Clark also revealed in his book Winning Modern
Wars that in late 2001 (after 9/11 and the attack on
Afghanistan began) the Pentagon was planning to attack
Lebanon as part of a five year campaign targeting
seven countries beginning with Iraq, then going on to
Syria, Lebanon, Iran, Somalia and Sudan. 

It’s all part of the US imperial plan to redraw the
map of the strategically important Middle East and its
vast oil and scarce water reserves, establish client
states throughout the region, remove independent
leaders standing in the way, and replace them with
more receptive ones willing to sacrifice their
nations’ sovereignty in service to the de facto ruler
of the world.  Israel is part of the scheme as well
and has its own imperial aims.  It’s the only country
in the world without declared borders because it’s
plan is to extend them beyond where they are now to
wherever it’s able to lay claim and get away with it.

Most important to the Israelis is their plan to
include as part of Israel the ancient lands of “Judea”
and “Summaria,” the West Bank biblical parts of Israel
comprising the OPT the Palestinians justifiably claim
as their homeland.  In addition, the most extreme
Zionists in the country, who have great influence on
policy, want all the land of “Eretz Israel,” the total
biblical Jewish homeland they believe God gave to the
12 tribes of Israel which includes all of present-day
Israel and the OPT, Lebanon, most of Syria, part of
Egypt and a large part of Jordon.  Israel already
controls the choicest parts of the West Bank including
50% of its fresh water resources and all of Gaza any
time it chooses to enter and reoccupy it, the Syrian
Golan Heights that supply it with one-third of its
total water, and the 25 kilometer Shebaa Farms area of
South Lebanon it never relinquished after seizing it
as well in the 1967 war. 

Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and his Likudnik
right-wing spin-off allies in his Kadima party
apparently want still more territory seized and under
its control well within the timetable they set to
declare permanent Israeli borders in 2007.  South
Lebanon has long been one such area Israel covets.  It
seized and occupied this land for 22 years but failed
to keep it and was finally driven out by a determined
Hezbollah resistance that was born out of the second
Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982 and the oppressive
occupation that followed. 

Why Israel Attacked Lebanon

Israel claims this area is important to it for
so-called security reasons, but its greatest value is
as a source of fresh water from the Litani River in
South Lebanon and also the Wazzani springs that feed
directly into the Hasbani River which is a tributary
of the Jordan River.  The Hisbani flows into Israel
two miles downstream from the Wazzani and runs into
the Sea of Galilee that’s Israel’s largest source of
fresh water.  Lebanon wants to pump about 350,000
cubic feet of water daily from the Wazzini to supply
its villages in the south which it has every right to
do, of course, but Israel opposes that plan and now
effectively stopped it since invading the country. 

The prime motive of Israel’s assault on Lebanon and
invasion in the south is to seize, occupy and then
annex the 20 mile stretch of territory into the
country up to the Litani to be able to use for its own
needs what now supplies a major portion of Lebanon’s
fresh water.  The Litani’s annual flow is estimated at
about 920 million cubic meters.  If Israel can
incorporate and control South Lebanon up to the
Litani, it would augment its annual fresh water supply
by up to 800 million cubic meters or nearly 40% of its
annual consumption.  That amount would be in addition
to the one-third of its supply now gotten from the
Golan Heights Israel seized from Syria in the 1967
war, never returned for obvious reasons, and never
intends to.  And, as mentioned above, Israel also
controls half the fresh water resources of the West
Bank it uses for its own needs and denies them to the
Palestinians for theirs.

There’s no mystery about what the US interest is in
the Middle East.  In the words of its high-level
officials in the 1940s, the energy resources there
were seen as “a stupendous source of strategic power
(and) one of the greatest material prizes in world
history.”  But Israel also has an oil-related motive
driving its current policy of aggression it and the US
may extend next to Syria and Iran.  Israel gets a
large amount of its oil from the Caspian Basin which
will be made all the easier by the opening of a new
pipeline from that region to the Eastern
Mediterranean.  Israel needs the oil, and the US needs
a strong military ally it can depend on in the Middle
East to assure it maintains control of the oil there
and from the Caspian and that US and European Big Oil
giants are guaranteed handsome profits from it.  It’s
all part of a new “Great Game” to dominate these two
vital energy-rich regions that instead of pitting the
old British Empire against Tsarist Russia that lasted
nearly 100 years until the early 20th century (when
the issue wasn’t over oil) now finds the US with
Israel’s help challenging Russia and China. 

As part of its plan to make it work, Israel (and the
US) wants to depopulate South Lebanon to control it
and likely eventually build permanent settlements
there just as it did in Gaza and now continues to do
illegally in the West Bank and the Golan.  To do it,
it’s now warning the civilian population there to
“ethnically cleanse” itself voluntarily or the IDF
will terror-bomb it out forcibly which it’s doing
daily.  It’s all part of Israel’s long-standing policy
made clear by its leaders since its first prime
minister David Ben-Gurion first stated it - that all
means will be used including war to “redeem the land”
occupied by the Palestinians and other Arabs in the
way for “the chosen people.”  Current Prime Minister
Ehud Olmert made that position very clear when he
addressed the US Congress joint session on May 24,
2006 saying “I believe and to this day still believe
in our people’s eternal and historic right to this
entire land.”  Unstated by the prime minister was
exactly what he claims that “entire land” to be.
World leaders though understand Israel’s aims well
enough and thus know what its assault against Lebanon
and Palestine is all about.  It’s why they haven’t
challenged it, aren’t likely to beyond the meaningless
and customary pro forma disingenuous calls for
“restraint on both sides,” and thus are aiding the
Jewish state accomplish its land-grab in the short
run.  Over time, however, it’s quite another matter.

Israel tried before and failed in 1978 and again in
1982 to seize and permanently occupy South Lebanon
hoping eventually to annex the territory as it did the
Golan and the parts of the OPT it wanted.  Now it’s
trying again in Lebanon and wants to annex more land
in the OPT.  It’s plan is to seize this land, destroy
the resistance in it, crush both nations politically
and succeed this time unlike before when Hezbollah
forced it out of South Lebanon and the Palestinian
resistance in part prevented its annexation of all
areas of the OPT it wants for settler development.

It’s using a new strategy in Lebanon this time calling
for a robust international military force, likely a
NATO one(under US control) to replace the ineffective
United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL)
that’s been there since 1978.  It wants this force to
serve as so-called “peacekeepers” once it’s completed
its land-grab, finished its assault on and destruction
of the country, and it allows it to come in.  Israel’s
earlier failed 22 year occupation cost it dearly in
lives lost, shekels spent, and the reputation of its
vaunted military machine with all its US supplied
modern weapons tarnished by a determined Hezbelloh
guerilla resistance that finally drove it it from the
country. 

Israel wants no repeat of that this time and thinks it
can have the land it wants and avoid being expelled
trying to hold on to it through a proxy force it can
control - this time a NATO-led one it’s allied with
militarily and which it knows will serve its interests
and not those of the Lebanese people.  It wants NATO
there to act as its enforcers, engage Hezbollah or
other resistance that may challenge it, have it do its
killing and dying for it, and relieve Israel of the
burden of funding a long and costly operation or being
humiliated again if it fails, which almost certainly
will happen in time.

Israel’s Aim in the OPT

So far in the OPT, Israel is going it alone handling
the dirty job of crushing a defenseless people, so it
hasn’t asked for an international military force to
come in as its enforcers there.  Once it ends its
assault, Israel ideally wants the Palestinians to be
their own enforcers as was the arrangement agreed to
by Yasser Arafat under the 1993 Oslo Accords and later
related agreements.  The Israelis know current Fatah
party leader and Palestinian National Authority (PNA)
President Mahmoud Abbas is willing to take on the job
for them as he proved his Israel-friendly bona fides
at Oslo and in the 1990s.  Will the Palestinian
people and its Hamas leadership submit to their
subjugation any more this time than in the past when
they eventually resisted it?  And will Hezbollah and
the Lebanese people be any less resistant? There’s
little chance of it in both countries and thus every
chance the carnage now ongoing may ebb and flow but
will continue unending until the people of both lands
win the freedom they’re unlikely never to stop
fighting for.

Israel Must Finally Be Held to Account For Its
Criminal Acts

Israel’s crimes so far have gone unchallenged because
most world leaders have supported them overtly or
tacitly.  In so doing, these leaders and other
officials are guilty criminal accomplices under
Article 6 of the Nuremberg Charter that states:
“Leaders, organizers, instigators and accomplices
participating in the formulation or execution of a
common plan or conspiracy to commit any of
the….crimes (listed in Articles 6b or 6c of the
Charter) are responsible for all acts performed by any
persons in execution of such plan.”  By this standard,
the entire US Senate and all but eight members of the
US House are also criminal accomplices by result of
their votes during the week of July 17 to
unconditionally support Israel’s “supreme
international crime” of illegal aggression against
Lebanon and Palestine unjustifiably claiming Israel
has the right of self-defense guaranteed it under
Article 51 of the UN Charter. 

It’s long past time that Israel no longer be allowed
to get away with its crimes and for its officials
responsible for them to be held to account for them.
Since world leaders on their own won’t act (especially
as they’re guilty co-conspirators), mass worldwide
public protest and action must do it for them and
demand either the International Criminal Court (ICC)
in the Hague indict and prosecute Israeli officials
responsible for what they’ve inflicted on Lebanon and
the OPT or the UN General Assembly must act in its
stead to establish an International Criminal Tribunal
for Israel.  It has the authority to do it under
Article 22 in the UN Charter and twice before used it
for Yugoslavia and Rwanda. 

The ICC was established in 2002 in accordance with the
Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court in
1998.  It’s authorized by its signatories to act as a
permanent tribunal to prosecute individuals for
genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity as
defined by the 1945 Numerberg Charter drafted by the
US and its main WW II allies to try Nazi war
criminals.  The court was established to adjudicate in
the kinds of cases Israeli officials should be brought
to book for.  However, while Israel signed the final
act of the Rome conference creating the ICC, it voted
against the statute to remain free of its authority.
People demanding justice thus may have no other
recourse than to have the UN General Assembly act to
establish a special International Tribunal for Israel
that will use its authority to prosecute culpable
Israeli officials in the Hague if they can be brought
there or in absentia if they’re not. 

Israel has a long history of criminal and abusive
acts.  Long before the June 25 incident near Kerem
Shalom crossing that began the current conflict, the
UN Human Rights Commission held that Israel had
violated nearly all 149 articles under the Fourth
Geneva Convention that governs the treatment of
civilians in war and under occupation and in so doing
is guilty of war crimes according to international
law.  The Commission also determined Israel as an
occupier in the OPT has committed “crimes against
humanity” as defined under the 1945 Nuremberg Charter.
By its actions since June 25 against the Palestinians
and especially after July 12 in Lebanon, Israel has
compounded its crimes by committing many more of them.

It remains for an international court of law to name
those individuals culpable for these crimes and to
state the specific charges.  But the one accusation
above all others should be that Israel violated the
most important of all binding international laws under
the UN Charter to which Israel is a signatory.  The
Charter authorizes a nation to use force only under
two conditions: when authorized to do it by the
Security Council or under Article 51 that allows the
“right of individual or collective self-defense if an
armed attack occurs against a Member….until the
Security Council has taken measures to maintain
international peace and security.”  In other words,
necessary self-defense is permitted. 

Israel’s extreme responses following the capture of
three of its soldiers, known in both cases to have
been planned well in advance awaiting only convenient
pretext to initiate them, are no acts of self-defense.
They’re acts of premeditated illegal aggression and,
as such, are what the Nuremberg Tribunal that tried
the Nazis called “the supreme international crime.”
The Nazis found guilty of it were hanged and justice
was served.  Under Article 6b of the Nuremberg
Charter, Israel also committed the flagrant war crimes
of “plunder of public (and) private property, wanton
destruction of cities, towns or villages, (and)
devastation not justified by military necessity.”
Under Article 6c, it’s guilty of the “crimes against
humanity (of) murder…, deportation and other
inhumane acts committed against (the Lebanese and
Palestinian) civilian population(s), before (and)
during the war.”

The Nuremberg Tribunal set a high standard which it
followed based on the principles of the 1928
Kellogg-Briand Pact signed by 63 nations after WW I to
renounce war as an instrument of foreign policy.  The
Pact didn’t prevent WW II, but what it stipulated
formed the basis for “crimes against peace.”  The
Nuremberg Charter described those crimes as “the
planning, preparation, initiation or waging of a
premeditated war of aggression or a war in violation
of international treaties.” It prosecuted the Nazis
for what they did including the ones charged with this
supreme crime.  The UN is surely authorized to act to
establish an international criminal court just as the
victorious US, UK and USSR allies acted on their joint
authority during and after WWII to establish the
Nuremberg Tribunal to try Nazi war criminals.

Israel also has a long and disturbing record of
flagrantly violating or ignoring international laws
and norms.  In its past conflicts as well as the
current ones, besides committing “the supreme
international crime” of illegal aggression, it’s using
weapons banned under the Hague Convention of 1907, the
1925 Geneva Protocol and succeeding Geneva Weapons
Conventions that outlaw the use in war of chemical,
biological or any other “poison or poisoned weapons.
In the 1973 war and currently, Israel is using
depleted uranium (DU) weapons that are radioactive and
chemically toxic and thus clearly fit the definition
of poisonous weapons banned under the 1907 Hague
Convention. 

It’s also suspected of using other illegal weapons
including chemical agents, white phosphorous bombs and
shells against civilian targets that burn flesh to the
bone and can’t be extinguished by water that only
makes the burning worse when used, cluster bombs, and
a terror weapon called “flashettes” which explode and
shoot out 1000s of nails in all directions.  In
addition, the IDF is reportedly testing in real time
some new terror weapons (using the helpless Lebanese
and Palestinians as their lab rats) including a
thermobaric solid fuel-air explosive bomb able to
penetrate buildings, underground shelters and tunnels
creating a blast pressure great enough to suck all the
oxygen out of spaces struck and the lungs of all those
in the vicinity.  All these weapons are either
questionable or illegal under Hague and/or Geneva
international law.

All the above actions clearly warrant Israel’s
criminal prosecution by an international court.  Yet
there are still others to be added to them.  Israel
ignored the World Court in the Hague that ruled 14 - 1
in 2004 that the annexation/separation wall it’s
building is “contrary to international law” because it
“destroyed and confiscated” property, greatly
restricts Palestinian movement, and “severely impedes
the exercise by the Palestinian people of (the) right
to self-determination.”  As a result, the Court
ordered construction to end at once, the existing
portion of it built to be taken down, and Palestinians
adversely affected by its construction to be
compensated for their losses.  Israel ignored the
ruling, continues building the wall, and thus is
violating international law.  In addition, over the
last half century, Israel has been a serial abuser of
UN resolutions flagrantly and willfully ignoring over
five dozen of them that condemned or censured it for
its actions against the Palestinians or other Arab
people, deplored it for committing them or demanded
the Jewish state end them. 

Like its US ally, Israel is also know to be a serial
abuser of torture as a means of inflicting punishment
or trying to elicit information from the 10,000 or
more Palestinian and Lebanese prisoners it forcibly
abducted and now holds in its prisons.  According to
Amnesty International, Israel is the only country in
the world to effectively legalize torture (now, of
course, the US has as well).  Many of those Israel
holds in custody are political prisoners held
administratively without charge, and Israeli human
rights monitoring group B’Tselem reports Israel’s use
of torture is flagrant, widespread and routinely used
against them.  Such practice is clearly a violation of
international law that bans the use of torture or
degrading treatment under any circumstances.  The
Universal Declaration of Human Rights outlawed it in
1948.  The Fourth Geneva Convention then did it in
1949 banning any form of “physical or mental coercion”
and affirming detainees must at all times be treated
humanely.  The European Convention followed in 1950.
Then in 1984, the UN Convention Against Torture became
the first binding international instrument dealing
exclusively with the issue of banning torture in any
form for any reason.  Israel ignores these and all
other international laws and norms but has never yet
been held to account for its actions.  It’s way past
time that injustice be addressed and corrected.  World
public opinion overwhelmingly demands it.

It now remains for an international court to place
Israeli officials on trial, have them answer for their
past and present crimes, and see to it they pay the
price for them if found guilty.  That must happen if
those harmed by them are ever able to achieve the
justice they seek and deserve.  It’s also crucial this
action be taken soon to send a clear message to
Israeli officials that world public opinion no longer
will tolerate this behavior and that it forced the UN
to act in its behalf to demand justice in a world
court of law.  Even if Israel doesn’t accept the
court’s authority, as will likely happen, its
establishment alone may send a message to the Jewish
state strong enough to make it cease further
aggression against its current victims.  It may also
deter it and the US from committing further acts of
aggression against Syria and Iran now in their plans
based on credible reports quoting high-level officials
in both countries.  If it happens, it’s part of the US
and Israeli grand plan to destroy Iran’s legal
commercial nuclear capability, redraw the map of the
Middle East, remove the Iranian, Syrian and Hamas
independent leaderships in it (as well as destroy the
legitimate Hezbollah resistance), and replace them
with new regimes henceforth acting as subservient and
reliable client states.  Neither the US nor Israel
must any longer be allowed to get away with their
current wars of aggression or have world leader’s
support their right to extend them further in the
region as they likely have in mind to do.

Further Action Against Israel Is Also Needed

In addition to halting Israel’s current aggression and
prosecuting its officials responsible for it, it’s
time to go still further and begin a concerted
campaign calling for divestment, economic and
political sanctions and a boycott of Israeli-made
products.  Throughout its history, Israel has been
unresponsive to all efforts aimed at getting it to
abide by international laws and norms, live peacefully
with its neighbors and respect the fundamental human
rights of the Palestinian and Lebanese people whose
lands it occupies and is now in conflict with.  Having
no interest in voluntarily engaging in serious
negotiation to reach an equitable settlement, the only
recourse is for mass people-action to demand it
through punitive measures.  In the 1980s, these
actions proved successful in the struggle to abolish
the repugnant apartheid system in South Africa that
began in 1948 (ironically the year Israel became a
state) and ended officially in 1994.  During its later
years, it became clear this was a failed system that
had to end, and the world community could no longer
tolerate its existence.  Civil unrest and township
violence began growing, and the P.W. Botha government
declared a state of emergency in 1985 that remained in
place until the F.W. de Klerk government lifted the 30
year ban on the anti-apartheid and now ruling African
National Congress and two other opposition parties
previously banned.  In 1990 Nelson Mandela was freed
from prison after 27 years of incarceration, and by
1991 the legal apparatus of apartheid ended.

People of conscience and mass civil society worldwide
are a potent force in big numbers.  It must now
coalesce and denounce Israel as a pariah state and
begin a non-violent campaign to demand governments,
businesses, institutions and other organizations
impose economic and political initiatives with teeth
including divestment, sanctions, boycotts and
embargoes.  They should remain in place long enough to
isolate Israel, and, if necessary, bring it to its
knees economically and politically if that’s what it
takes to prove world public opinion no longer will
tolerate its actions.

As part of the campaign, a clear set of demands must
be made.  They must include an immediate cessation of
Israel’s current hostilities against the Palestinians
and people of Lebanon; Israel’s full withdrawal from
the OPT to the pre-1967 war borders and the
dismantlement of all settlements therein; return of
the Golan and all occupied land in South Lebanon;
abiding by all UN resolutions so far ignored;
dismantlement of its annexation/separation wall along
with full restitution to the Palestinian people
affected by it; agreeing to the Palestinians’ right to
a free, sovereign and independent state and allowing
the right of return of all Palestinian refugees to
their homeland as UN Resolution 194 affirmed and
Article 13 of the Universal Declaration of Human
Rights guarantees to all displaced people; and
agreeing to send its culpable officials to stand trial
in an international tribunal in the Hague to be held
to account to answer the charges levied against them.
If Israel complies fully with these minimum demands
and justice is served, the campaign of punitive action
against it can end and the Jewish state can take its
rightful place as a member of the world community of
nations in good standing. 

Might any of this happen?  With today’s headlines in
mind, it looks doubtful, but at one time the South
African apartheid government had the full support of
the US and the West.  Nonetheless, in the end it fell
because enough pressure was brought to bear against it
to make it happen.  If it could happen to that ugly
regime, it can happen to Israel as well but only if
enough responsible people demand it and turn up the
heat until it does.

Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago and can be reached at
.(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)  Also visit his blog
site at sjlendman.blogspot.com