We Have
The Right To Kill You
By Nigel Parry and Ali
Abunimah
The Electronic Intifada
12 May, 2003
On 8 May 2003, the Electronic
Intifada obtained and published the text of a document distributed by
the Israeli military to foreign diplomatic representatives. The document,
entitled "Form to be filled out and submitted to IDF authorities
prior to entry to the Gaza Strip", is mandatory for all internationals
to sign in exchange for passage into Gaza.
(see: http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article1452.shtml)
The document is primarily
aimed at excluding foreign peace activists associated with the International
Solidarity Movement, a group mentioned by name in the document, or any
similar groups undertaking nonviolent direct action to thwart Israeli
military violence against civilians and their property in the Gaza Strip.
The form requires activists
to declare that they have "no association with the organization
known as ISM (International Solidarity Movement) nor any other organization
whose aim is to disrupt IDF operations," describing this activity
as "criminal."
Seeking to sidestep Israeli
legal responsibility for violence directed at activists who are confronting
illegal Israeli actions in occupied Gaza, the document assumes the following
responsibility onto the signer:
"I am aware of the risks
involved and accept that the Government of the State of Israel and its
organs cannot be held responsible for death, injury and/or damage/loss
of property which may be incurred as a result of military activity."
In essence, the form represents
an Israeli 'We have the right to kill you' visa for Gaza.
The new measure additionally
aims to bar all internationals from key areas of Gaza. "The Military
Installation Area along the border with Egypt," states the text,
"is IDF administered territory and is strictly out of bounds to
foreign nationals. Please note that this area has been the site of intense
hostilities and is extremely dangerous."
The area described above
is Rafah, a Palestinian city of 130,000 inhabitants on the southern
border where the Gaza Strip meets Egypt. Surrounded by several refugee
camps, Rafah is an area of extreme poverty and has borne the brunt of
some of the harshest Israeli repression during the Intifada. To describe
it as "the site of intense hostilities" is to imply there
is a war being waged between two armies. The reality is far more one-sided,
with Israel's nightly shelling of civilian homes which are also razed
in regular bulldozing campaigns and instance after instance in which
civilians have been shot and killed in situations where Israeli soldiers
were not threatened or under attack.
Internationals have not been
spared. Between March 16th and May 2nd -- a period of less than two
months -- Israeli troops killed three foreign nationals. American ISM
activist Rachel Corrie was crushed by an Israeli bulldozer in Rafah
on March 16th. British ISM activist Tom Hurndall was left clinically
dead after being shot in Rafah on April 12th. And British journalist
James Miller was shot and killed in Rafah on May 2nd.
Israel claimed that the bulldozer
driver did not see Rachel Corrie, an assertion rejected as ridiculous
by eyewitnesses who noted that the bulldozers and a tank present left
the scene after Corrie was crushed without offering any medical aid
to her. Israel claimed that Hurndall and Miller were shot in "crossfire"
accidents. Eyewitnesses noted that there was no concurrent Palestinian
attack on Israeli troops on either occasion. Only Israel was shooting.
The effect of this sequence
of clear instances of excessive and unlawful use of force involving
internationals posing no threat to Israeli troops has been that eyes
of the world have been opened to the impunity with which Israel acts
in the occupied territories. This is something Israel clearly does not
want to see continue, hence the new conditions on entry to Gaza.
The legality of the declaration
Declarations that violate
fundamental human rights or attempt to abrogate them have no validity
under international law, and are an illegal form of coercion. In this
case, Articles 19 and 20 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights
state that:
"Everyone has the right
to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to
hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information
and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers... Everyone
has the right to freedom of peaceful assembly and association."
This includes the right to
associate oneself with the International Solidarity Movement, to visit
their members, and to be an eyewitness -- one of the most immediate
forms of "media" there is -- in Rafah.
Additionally, the Fourth
Geneva Convention mandates Israel, as the Occupying Power, to protect
civilians and be solely responsible for the actions of its forces in
the occupied territories. Human rights, as stated in the first sentence
of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights are "inalienable",
a key concept in international law. Webster's dictionary defines "inalienable"
as "incapable of being alienated, surrendered, or transferred to
another; not alienable; as, in inalienable birthright." As such,
regardless of what international visitors may sign, international law
does not recognise these declarations as binding or in any way excusing
Israel from its legal responsibilities.
A 9 May 2003 news release
from Amnesty International after its delegates refused to sign the waver
in order to enter Gaza stated:
"The organization is
categorically opposed to any attempt to get people to sign away their
rights. The signing of 'waivers' does not absolve the Israeli army of
its responsibility in any way, nor the Israeli authorities of their
duties to ensure that armed forces respect human rights in all circumstances...
The organization is concerned that one aim of these new and drastic
restrictions is to prevent outside monitoring and scrutiny of the conduct
of the Israeli army. It is also concerned that these restrictions will
lead to more killings in Gaza and calls on the army to immediately end
the use of excessive and unlawful force."
Conclusions
It is hard to fathom what
Israel thinks it can achieve by insisting that international visitors
sign this bizarre and legalistic form in order to enter a geographic
region where Israel itself has typically acted in utter violation of
all commonly understood interpretations of international human rights
law, to say nothing of universal notions of morality.
If Israel bulldozes another
Rachel Corrie, will we accept her murder just because the next Rachel
Corrie signed a declaration upon entry to Gaza that stated that she
would not stand in front of bulldozers? When Israel shoots its next
Tom Hurndall or James Miller, will we nod understandingly simply because
point four on the declaration states that "Foreign nationals are
strongly advised to stay well clear of military activity?"
Of course not.
In all civil rights movements
in the past, there has come a point where both those struggling for
freedom and those reporting on the struggle for the international media
have confronted unjust laws. Trying to bar activists from the areas
where they typically confront Israeli human rights violations is essentially
asking for people to make a "loyalty declaration" to a system
of military occupation that is the cause of untold misery for millions
of Palestinians for over half a century. As a result, the document is
fundamentally meaningless.
Instead of addressing any
of the root causes that fuel the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, such
as ending the violence of Israel's military occupation against Palestinian
civilians, Israel prefers instead to remove more of the eyewitnesses
who can give us an honest account of what life on the ground in southern
Gaza is like.
On 20 March 2003, Israeli
peace activist Billie Moskona-Lerman spent a night with two activists
from the International Solidarity Movement who were acting as human
shields in the home of a Palestinian family in Rafah:
"It was at 7.30 that
I went with Laura and Joe to stay the night in the house of Muhammad
Jamil Kushta, the first house fronting the IDF position on the Egyptian
border, an ill-fated house... Rains of ammunition, bullets came down
on us on that one single night. A single night, for me. The shooting
went on continuously from 1.30 to 4.15, near the first light. Only then
it calmed down."
At one point during the night,
Billie's host Muhammad notes, "You hear it so close, because they
are shooting at the wall near us." Their subsequent exchange gives
us a clear and disturbing picture of life for Palestinians in Rafah:
"So they never hit your house itself?" I ask him with an enormous
burst of hope.
"Oh, sometimes they
do. Look at the bullet holes". I raise my head and look to the
sides. The ceiling is fool of holes, the side walls are cut up. So is
the kitchen wall near the tap, near the table, in the toilet, one centimetre
from the children's beds. Some of the holes have been filled up. Every
night, once the shooting ends, Jamil closes the bullet holes with white
cement. The walls are patchwork, and if you dare approach the window
you can see that Jamil and Nora's home is surrounded by ruins on all
sides.
Source: "'I was a human
shield': An Israeli visits ISM in Rafah", Billie Moskona-Lerman,
Live from Palestine/The Electronic Intifada, 1 May 2003
The ridiculous document and
its ongoing implementation concurrent with raids on the offices of peace
activists in other areas of the occupied territories and the expulsion
of activists from Gaza reveals an Israel desperate to pull the rug back
over the hellish situation in southern Gaza and elsewhere that its recent
clumsy killings of foreign activists and news professionals has uncovered.
Even as Israel has begun
brazenly to shoot international peace workers, as it has for decades
shot Palestinians, European and American governments continue to aid
and abet the perpetrator by directly supplying both the murder weapons
and the legal and political cover needed to allow the Israeli colonisation
project to continue daily.
At some point, enough people
in the world will clue in to the obvious fact that there can only be
so many "accidents" in occupied Palestine, and the critical
mass will form to birth a movement equal or greater in size to that
which the Anti-Apartheid Movement reached in the late 1980s, the period
immediately before it defeated White South Africa.
Until that snowball starts
to roll -- and let us recognise that moment is inevitable given the
righteous anger of the millions of people on the earth who have become
eyewitnesses-by-media to Israel's repression of the Palestinian uprising
-- we should feel deep shame.
*Nigel Parry and Ali Abunimah
are two of the co-founders of Electronic
Intifada.