The Experts' Verdict: Every Israeli Missile Strike Is A War Crime
27 September 2014
By Jonathan Cook in Nazareth
Today's Guardian includes an article
that appears to be excusing Israel of responsibility
for the massive death tolll it has inflicted on
Palestinian civilians. But, more significantly, it
includes a lot of useful and damning information
about just how "indiscriminate" Israel's weapons
really are.
This interests me a great deal because
I have been warning about problems with the
interpretation of international law used by leading
human rights groups on this very point since the 2006
Lebanon War.
At that time I got into a dispute with
Human Rights Watch's Middle East policy director,
Sarah Leah Whitson. Her organisation argued that
Hizbullah was committing war crimes by definition
whenever it fired rockets at Israel, even if it hit
military targets, because those rockets were primitive
and inherently inaccurate.
By contrast, HRW claimed, Israel's
missiles were precise and therefore their use was not
inherently inadmissible. Its view was that Israel did
not commit war crimes by firing its missiles; the
obligation was on observers to show that they had not
been used within the rules of war which is a much
harder standard of proof. For more on this debate, see
my articles here [http://www.jonathan-cook.net/2006-09-07/how-human-rights-watch-lost-its-way-in-lebanon/]
and here [http://www.jonathan-cook.net/2006-09-25/human-rights-watch-still-missing-the-point/].
In practice, HRW's argument was
nonsense, as was clear even in 2006. During that war,
Israel dropped millions of cluster munitions little
bomblets that serve effectively as land mines all
over southern Lebanon, endangering the whole civilian
population of the area.
But Norman Finkelstein recently pointed
out the more general problem with HRW's argument:
"By this standard, only rich countries,
or countries rich enough to purchase high-tech
weapons, have a right to defend themselves against
high-tech aerial assaults. It is a curious law that
would negate the raison d'κtre of law: the
substitution of might by right."
It may not be entirely surprising that
HRW and others interpret international law in a way
that serves rich and powerful western states, however
many civilians they kill, and criminalises developing
states, however few civilians they kill.
The current fighting in Gaza
illustrates this point in dramatic fashion. Some 95%
of the 64 Israelis who have been killed during the
current fighting are soldiers; some 75% of the nearly
1,500 Palestinians who have been killed are civilian.
But comments from experts in the
Guardian article add another layer of insight into
HRW's dubious distinctions.
One should ignore the irritating
framing used in the article, which seems to suggest
that the high Palestinian death toll may be down to
human or systems errors. Experts discount this theory
in the article and also point out that Israel is often
not checking whether its shooting is accurate. In
other words, it gives every indication of not taking
any precautions to ensure it is hitting only military
targets (or rather targets it claims are military in
nature). That recklessness makes it fully culpable.
But we also have experts cited here who
make the point that much of Israel's precise weaponry
is not accurate at all.
Andrew Exum, a former US army officer
and defence department special adviser on the Middle
East, who has studied Israel's military operations,
says this:
"There are good strategic reasons to
avoid using air power and artillery in these
conflicts: they tend to be pretty indiscriminate in
their effects and make it difficult for the population
under fire to figure out what they're supposed to do
to be safe."
"Pretty indiscriminate"! So doesn't
that mean Israel was committing war crimes by
definition every time it made one of those thousands
of air strikes that marked the start of Operation
Protective Edge, and that continue to this day?
But it is not just strikes from the air
that are the problem. There is more:
"However, military analysts and human
rights observers say the IDF is still using unguided,
indirect fire with high-explosive shells, which they
argue is inappropriate for a densely populated area
like Gaza ...
"[Israel's 155m howitzer] shells have a
lethal radius of 50 to 150 metres and causes injury up
to 300 metres from its point of impact. Furthermore,
such indirect-fire artillery (meaning it is fired out
of direct sight of the target) has a margin of error
of 200 to 300 metres."
Read that again: a margin of error of
up to 300 metres, plus a lethal radius of up to 150
metres and an injury radius of 300 metres. So that's a
killing and injury zone of close to half a kilometre
from the intended "precise" site of impact in a
territory that is only a few kilometres wide and long.
In short, one of the main shells Israel is using in
Gaza is completely imprecise.
Set aside what Israel is trying to do
in Gaza. Let us assume it is actually trying to hit
military targets rather than being either reckless
about hitting civilian targets or deliberately trying
to hit civilians, as much of the evidence might
suggest.
Even if we assume total good faith on
Israel's part that it is trying to hit only Hamas and
other military sites, it is clear it cannot do so even
with the advanced weaponry it has. The inherent
imprecision of its arsenal is compounded many fold by
the fact that it is using these weapons in densely
built-up areas.
So when are going to hear HRW or the
United Nation's Navi Pillay stop talking about
proportionality or Israel's potential war crimes, and
admit Israel is committing war crimes by definition
right now, as you read this.
Jonathan Cook won the Martha
Gellhorn Special Prize for Journalism. His latest
books are "Israel and the Clash of Civilisations:
Iraq, Iran and the Plan to Remake the Middle East"
(Pluto Press) and "Disappearing Palestine: Israel's
Experiments in Human Despair" (Zed Books). His website
is www.jonathan-cook.net.
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