Once More in Gaza

Israel’s relentless bombing of Gaza since early July followed by a ground offensive, this time killing close to 200 people and injuring as well as displacing many more, is the playing out of a well-rehearsed script. The Government of Israel uses its propaganda machinery to manufacture “facts on the ground” to justify its massacres, and it invites indignant reaction and largely harmless retaliatory rocket strikes from the Hamas which controls Gaza. Israel’s government then spins a tale of action, reaction and self-defence which is duly accepted by western powers. In this manner and without any meaningful international response, the occupying power executes yet another step in its plan to emaciate a dehumanised Palestinian population. The “banality of evil” is maintained. The current actions in Gaza are much like the bombings and missile attacks carried out in 2008, 2009 and 2012. The tonnes of bombs used against more than a thousand “targets” in the present campaign have exceeded those used in the eight-day bombing of Gaza in 2012.

In the western media, the current wave of bombing has been justified as retaliatory following the abduction and killing of three Israeli youth in the West Bank in early June. Defiant statements and minor actions by the Hamas are shown to be equivalent to the Israeli bombings. But Hamas has always maintained that it did not violate a 2012 ceasefire before the latest bombings by Israel began. A faulty premise of “self-defence” to justify the actions by Israel has been trotted out again in the media. This has clearly ignored the fact that Israel is internationally recognised as an occupying power in Palestine since 1967. As an occupying power, Israel is bound by international conventions enunciated under “Occupation Law” to use law and order measures to treat actions by the citizens of its occupied territory. Lethal force is to be used only as a last resort. Israel certainly cannot invoke the right of self-defence and resort to an unlimited use of military force, as it has done using precision bombs and missile attacks, against Gaza’s civilians.