Global Justice in the 21st Century

[Prefatory Note: I am republishing on this blog site a letter and some documentation written by Fred Branfman, a friend and political comrade of more than 40 years. We met first in our shared opposition to the Vietnam War, and engaged in acts of civil disobedience in Washington to express our solidarity with younger Americans who were facing prison for their opposition or death and injury as conscripted soldiers, and our sense of identification with the millions of Vietnamese who were enduring the ravages of high technology war, many without ever having left their villages, much less their country. As he writes, Fred was moved and shocked by the so-called secret war being carried on in Laos by the United States through extensive covert operations, without even the slightest effort to show respect for the US Constitution’s requirements relating to war, and in cruel defiance of international law.  Fred is also very conscious and sensitive about the complexities of his middle class Jewish background, and how it bears on his outlook on Israel-Palestine relations. Throughout his life he has exhibited a primary identity that is preoccupied with what it means to be ‘human,’ taking his cues from religion, ethics, and empathetic experiences. As such, his reflections on the meaning of the events in Gaza in relation to our assessments of Israel’s behavior, whether as Jews or as human beings is relevant for all of us. Fred’s central point about the moral victimization of the perpetrator of crimes as well as the abuse of those being targeted is crucial.]

Dear Friends,

I hope you will consider sending this just-published piece (original version below) to supporters of Israel’s actions in Gaza you know. Most U.S. supporters of Israel that I know are decent people who reflexively support Israel without confronting the actual facts of the atrocities it is committing. But in so doing they must understand that what is at stake is not only Israel’s humanity but their own.

The most painful memories of my life have been triggered by the recent Israeli bombing and shelling of civilian targets in Gaza: the many months I spent interviewing Lao ricefarmers about their 5 years under U.S. bombing – the most significant unknown event of the 20th century. The World Can’t Wait website has just published “Laos: Birthplace of Modern U.S. Executive War and a New ‘Ahuman’ Age” – its lessons apply not only to Laos but to Israel, Gaza, Syria and the many other cases where civilians become the main victims of automated murder.

It is critical to human civilization itself that we make the issue of civilian murder in Gaza personal, by (1) having the personal integrity to look at the facts of, not rationalizations for, Israel-caused civilian destruction in Gaza (please see “The Civilian Impact of Israel’s 2014 Attack on Gaza” below); and (2) to acknowledge that what is at stake here is not only Israel’s humanity but our own. Those who are indifferent to the murder of civilians in Gaza today are also indifferent to the destruction of our own children and grandchildren through climate change tomorrow.

In retrospect it seems like an accident of fate that I so directly encountered the U.S. mass murder of the gentlest, kindest people on earth in Laos. But I regard it now as both the most agonizing and precious experience of my life. For imagining what it means to be on the ground “looking up” at the bombers, rather than “looking down” as we inevitably do in the West, adds a crucial dimension to human existence – and one which may well determine the fate of our species as we confront the growing horrors of the 21st century. ­ Fred

TO ISRAEL’S U.S. SUPPORTERS: PORTABLE GAS CHAMBERS, CHEMICAL WARFARE, BLINDINGS, MASS BOMBING AND SHELLING OF CIVILIANS – WHERE DO YOU DRAW THE LINE?

Note: This message is addressed to U.S. supporters of Israel both because only U.S. pressure can bring about the political settlement which alone can save Israel and Palestine, and because it appears that most Israelis – consumed by fear, hatred and the dehumanization of even Palestinian children – are presently impervious to either reason or human decency.

Dear U.S. Supporters of Israel in Gaza,

If you believed that the IDF could destroy Hamas by employing portable gas chambers or chemical weapons to publicly gas over 1,400 Gazan civilians, including 400 children, chosen at random – or deliberately blinding them – would you favor doing so? I guess not, perhaps you even feel insulted at the suggestion that you might.

But this raises a basic question: if you would not favor gassing Palestinan civilians, how do you justify your support for blowing them to bits? The controversial issue is not Israel trying to destroy Hamas tunnels. Nor is it the attempt to destroy rockets, as if the Israelis can claim that they reasonably suspected the 46-48,000 U.N.-estimated buildings they either partially or totally destroyed of containing rockets. Nor is it rightfully condemning Hamas for rocketing civilian targets as well. As even long-term apologists for Israeli violence like the New Republic’s Leon Wieseltier acknowledge, the issue is massive Israeli bombing and shelling of he civilian infrastructure in Gaza, which is wholly disproportionate to combatting tunnels and/or rockets.

It is the actual massive bombing and shelling of Gaza’s civilian infrastructure that raises the basic question: as a human being, where do you draw the line? How do you justify to yourself your support for mass misery inflicted on hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians through a bombing and shelling campaign that – whatever its stated intent – not only murdered 1400 civilians and maimed thousands more, but destroyed hospitals, schools, businesses, and Gaza’s only power station plunging all 1.8 million Gazans into darkness and depriving them even of drinking water, created over 400,000 refugees, and traumatized a U.N.-estimated 373,000 children? (Please see “The Civilian Impact of Israel’s 2014 Attack on Gaza” below. You own integrity requires that you at least acknowledge the facts rather than, as do so many of Israel’s supporters, accept at face-value Israeli claims that it sought to avoid civilian destruction.)

I answered such questions for myself 45 years ago, when I discovered that civilians were well over 90% of the victims of U.S. leaders’ mass bombing of northern Laos. I concluded then that there is never any moral or legal justification for mass bombing or shelling of civilians. Period. Full Stop.

The “World Can’t Wait” website has just posted a PowerPoint presentation on the years-long bombing of northern Laos, perhaps the worst unknown crime of the 20th century. It combines an analysis of automated war, the writings of the rice-farmers who suffered most and were heard from least, and my personal story in discovering and trying to expose it to the world. A Lao mother summed up the nature of mass bombing of civilians for all time: “There was danger as the sound of airplanes led me to be terribly, terribly afraid of dying. When looking at the faces of my children who were losing the so very precious happiness of childhood I would grow in­creasingly miserable. In reality, whatever happens, it is the innocent who suffer.”

The question of protecting civilians in wartime far transcends the Israeli-Palestinian conflict: it is a basic measurement of the progress of human civilization itself. What is at stake in your support for Israel’s recent attacks on Gaza is not only Israel’s humanity but your own.

There are two basic questions regarding warfare: (1) whether a given war is considered legitimate, e.g. whether it is “aggressive war”; and (2) how civilians are treated once a war is launched. These are two distinct questions – even if you consider a given war legitimate there is no moral or legal justification for waging it in a way that mainly murders and maims civilians.

The evolution of international law on this question, beginning with the 1907 Hague Convention, has been slow and painful. But it is today unequivocal: waging war in a way that results primarily in civilian deaths and damage is a punishable war crime. Article 85 of the 1949 Geneva Conventions states categorically that “the following acts shall be regarded as grave breaches of this Protocol … launching an indiscriminate attack affecting the civilian population or civilian objects in the knowledge that such attack will cause excessive loss of life, injury to civilians or damage to civilian objects” – a precise description of Israeli bombing and shelling in Gaza.

Israel claims that it is justified in maiming and murdering civilians because Hamas is using them as “human shields”. But it must be understood: there is always a military and political rationale for bombing civilians. In Laos, Deputy CIA Director James Lilley explained that though North Vietnamese soldiers were not in the villages they would hide there if the U.S. didn’t bomb civilians. Prime Minister Nethanyahu today offers a similar rationale for mass civilian murder.

Other rationales include hoping that mass murder of civilians will turn the population against their leaders, as when former Israeli General Amos Yadlin stated in the N.Y. Times that Israel must bomb partly so that “Gaza’s people (are) given the chance to elect new leaders”. And, as the U.S. Senate Refugee Subcommittee concluded after visiting Laos, the bombing’s purpose was to hurt the enemy by destroying its “social and economic infrastructure.” This was also General Curtis Lemay’s basic rationale for burning alive over 100,000 Japanese civilians in the firebombing of Tokyo on March 9, 1945, an act for which Lemay acknowledged at the time, and his assistant Robert McNamara later
also admitted, was a war crime – for which they should have been executed. (PIease see Note 1 below.)

And it is precisely because there is always a rationale for bombing civilians that the progress of human civilization is largely measured by the extent to which civilians are protected in times of war from indiscriminate bombing and shelling, and that those who violate these rules are prosecuted for crimes of war. Protecting civilians against indiscriminate murder, in short, is not only a question of war. It is a measure of your own humanity.

The Civilian Impact of Israel’s 2014 Attack on Gaza

n CIVILIAN DEAD AND WOUNDED: A U.N.-estimated 1396 Palestinian civilians killed including 222 women and 418 children, thousands more wounded. (Source: Information Management Unit in the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs in the Occupied Palestinian Territories, from “Month-long War in Gaza Has Left a Humanitarian and Environmental Crisis”, Washington Post. August 6, 2014)

n CHILDREN: “Pernille Ironside, who runs the UNICEF field office in Gaza, said the agency estimates that roughly 373,000 Palestinian children have had some kind of direct traumatic experience as a result of the attack and will require immediate psycho-social support … (She) added that she’s seen ‘children coming out of these shelters with scabies, lice, all kinds of communicable diseases.’” (Source: “Amid Gaza’s Ruins, Impact on Children Most ‘Severe’: UN Official”, Common Dreams, August 6, 2014)

n ECONOMIC INFRASTRUCTURE: “175 of Gaza’s most successful industrial plants had also taken devastating hits, plunging an already despairing economy into a deeper abyss” (Source: “Conflict Leaves Industry in Ashes and Gaza Reeling From Economic Toll”, NY Times, August 6, 2014)

n MOSQUES, FARMING, INDUSTRY: “As many as 80 mosques have been damaged or destroyed. Many farming areas and industrial zones, filled with the small manufacturing plants and factories that anchored Gaza’s economy, are now wastelands.” (Source: “Month-long War in Gaza Has Left a Humanitarian and Environmental Crisis”, Washington Post. August 6, 2014)

n THE WATER INFRASTRUCTURE: Oxfam said: “We’re working in an environment with a completely destroyed water infrastructure that prevents people in Gaza from cooking, flushing toilets or washing [their] hands.”(Source: “Gaza’s Survivors Now Face A Battle For Water, Shelter And Power”, The Independent, August 5, 2014)

n 400,000 REFUGEES, 46-48,000 HOMES: “Frode Mauring, the UN Development Programme’s special representative said that with 16-18,000 homes totally destroyed and another 30,000 partially damaged, and 400,000 internally displaced people, ‘the current situation for Gaza is devastating’.” (Source: “Gaza’s Survivors Now Face A Battle For Water, Shelter And Power”, The Independent, August 5, 2014)

n ELECTRICITY: “Mr Mauring said that the bombing of Gaza’s only power station and the collapse at least six of the 10 power lines from Israel, had ‘huge development and humanitarian consequences’ (Source: “Gaza’s Survivors Now Face A Battle For Water, Shelter And Power”, The Independent, August 5, 2014)

n SCHOOLS, REFUGEE CENTERS: “United Nations officials accused Israel of violating international law after artillery shells slammed into a school overflowing with evacuees Wednesday … The building was the sixth U.N. school in the Gaza Strip to be rocked by explosions during the conflict. (Source: “U.N. Says Israel Violated International Law, After Shells Hit School In Gaza”, Washington Post, July 30, 2014)

n HOSPITALS: “Israeli forces fired a tank shell at a hospital in Gaza on Monday … It was the third hospital Israel’s military has struck since launching a ground offensive in Gaza last week.” (Source: “Another Gaza Hospital Hit by Israeli Strike”, NBC News, July 21, 2014)

n HOSPITALS, HEALTH WORKERS: “There has been mounting evidence that the Israel Defense Forces launched apparently deliberate attacks against hospitals and health professionals in Gaza … Philip Luther, Middle East and North Africa Director at Amnesty International (said) ‘the Israeli army has targeted health facilities or professionals. Such attacks are absolutely prohibited by international law and would amount to war crimes.’” (Source: “Mounting Evidence Of Deliberate Attacks On Gaza Health Workers By Israeli Army”, Amnesty International, August 7, 2014)

NOTES

1- Robert McNamara, from the Errol Morris film Fog of War:
“LeMay said, ‘If we’d lost the war, we’d all have been prosecuted as war criminals.’ And I think he’s right. He, and I’d say I, were behaving as war criminals. LeMay recognized that what he was doing would be thought immoral if his side had lost. But what makes it immoral if you lose and not immoral if you win?”

Tags: Gaza, Israel, Jewish attitudes, moral responsibility