Israeli
High Court Sanctions
Political Assassinations
By Bill Van Auken
16 December 2006
World
Socialist Web
Israel’s
high court Thursday ruled that the Zionist regime’s use of political
assassination—so-called “targeted killings”—against
members of Palestinian organizations in the occupied territories is
not only justified but in conformity with international law.
The ruling constituted the
court’s long-delayed response to a case filed by two human rights
groups seeking a ruling that the practice constituted a violation of
international law and that such killings amounted to war crimes.
Instead, the Israeli justices
gave a green light to the security forces to continue assassinating
those deemed “terrorists” by the Zionist authorities, thereby
ensuring that the killing and maiming of both political opponents of
Israeli occupation and innocent bystanders will not only continue, but
escalate.
This extraordinary judicial
ruling is a telling manifestation of the lawlessness that has long characterized
the actions of the Zionist regime both in the occupied territories and
in the Middle East as a whole. It is, moreover, an indication of the
profound crisis of the Israeli state, which is shedding the last pretenses
of democratic methods of rule.
The petition was initially
brought to the court in January 2002 by an Israeli organization, the
Public Committee Against Torture in Israel, and LAW, a Palestinian group.
Last month, a third human rights organization, Yesh Gvul, had filed
a petition seeking a court ruling against the justices themselves for
having dragged the proceedings out for nearly five years while hundreds
of Palestinians continued to die at the hands of the Israeli state murder
machine.
It is estimated that 339
Palestinians have died as a result of the Israeli assassination program
over the last six years. The victims include 210 individuals actually
targeted by the Israeli security forces and 129 bystanders, many of
them women and children.
While the Israeli government
initially claimed that its “targeted killings” were directed
against so-called “ticking time bombs”—suicide bombers
and others who would strike civilians if they were not immediately stopped—it
quickly became clear that the murderous operation was aimed at decapitating
organizations opposed to Israeli domination and terrorizing the Palestinian
population as a whole.
The overwhelming majority
of the victims were killed not in the midst of an operation stopping
some imminent terrorist attack, but as they were sleeping in their beds,
sitting in offices or riding in their cars in the occupied Gaza Strip.
Among those killed was Sheikh
Ahmed Yassin, a 67-year-old blind and quadriplegic cleric who was a
founder of Hamas. Yassin was assassinated on March 22, 2004, as he was
being taken in his wheelchair from an early morning prayer session.
A US-built helicopter gunship fired a number of US-made Hellfire missiles,
killing Yassin, two bodyguards and eight other bystanders, as well as
wounding over a dozen others. The man named to succeed Yassin as Hamas
leader, Dr. Abdel Aziz al-Rantiss, a pediatrician, was killed less than
a month later, when a helicopter fired missiles at his car, killing
him, his bodyguard and his son, and wounding several bystanders.
Among the more infamous “targeted
killing” operations—and one that prompted the groups that
filed the case to return to court seeking an emergency injunction against
the practice—was that carried out in July 2002 with the aim of
killing another Hamas leader, Salah Shehada.
An F-16 fighter plane dropped
a 1-ton bomb on the apartment building in which Shehada lived and was
sleeping at the time. The explosion caused the collapse of several buildings
in the densely populated Gaza neighborhood, killing 14 people—nine
of them children—and wounding at least 150 others.
More recently, the government
of Prime Minister Ehud Olmert has threatened to assassinate Sheik Hassan
Nasrallah, the leader of Hezbollah, which constitutes a mass social
movement and major political party in Lebanon, and Ismail Haniyeh, the
prime minister of the Palestinian National Authority and leader of Hamas.
Given this horrific record,
the court’s decision had a distinct tone of unreality and even
mockery in its prescriptions to the security forces on the legal and
moral niceties of state-organized assassinations.
For example, it cautioned
Israel’s Murder Inc. that “the ends do not justify the means.”
It called upon the army and intelligence agencies to take into account
the “human rights” of those targeted for incineration with
Hellfire missiles.
“Attacks,” the
court advised, “should be carried out only if the expected harm
to innocent civilians is not disproportional to the military advantage
to be achieved by the attack.”
It cautioned that Israeli
military commanders must possess “strong, convincing and well-founded”
evidence linking a prospective victim to “terrorism” before
ordering an assassination and that an investigation must be conducted
afterwards to determine the “precision of the identification of
the target”—something that will prove cold comfort to those
already dead.
The reality is that all of
these criteria, decisions and investigations are left in the hands of
the security forces themselves, who are granted the right to act as
judge, jury and executioner, exacting an illegal penalty—there
is no capital punishment in Israel—against individuals who have
never been charged or tried.
The ruling was greeted favorably
by the security forces themselves as well as by right-wing Zionist politicians.
It was seen essentially as a pseudo-legal seal of approval for the policy
of cold-blooded state murder that is already under way.
Moreover, some military and
security officials said that the ruling would give legal cover to those
responsible for carrying out these killings against potential war crimes
prosecution or private lawsuits in non-Israeli courts. “A ruling
of this kind provides enormous protection,” deputy state attorney
Shai Nitzan told the Israeli army radio.
The threat that leading officials
could be prosecuted for such crimes became all the more real recently,
when a pro-Palestinian group sought to have former Israeli armed forces
chief Moshe Yaalon arrested in connection with the July 2002 bombing
in Gaza that killed 14 people during his visit to New Zealand last month.
Significantly, the court
threw out the category of “enemy combatant”—borrowed
directly from the Bush administration’s arsenal of legal justification
for torture, illegal detentions and extrajudicial executions—Introduced
by Israeli state attorneys to defend the killings.
The court held that “unlawful
combatant” is not a category recognized under international law.
It also found that those deemed terrorists by the Zionist regime are
not combatants but civilians.
Nonetheless, it accomplished
the same ends as the “enemy combatant” definition favored
by the Bush administration by declaring that those civilians alleged
to be involved in terrorist activities are “subject to the risks
of attack like those to which a combatant is subject, without enjoying
the rights of a combatant, e.g., those granted to a prisoner of war.”
In other words, those individuals
targeted by the Zionist regime’s security forces for assassination
are by definition denied all rights, just as the “enemy combatants”
persecuted by the Bush administration are, even if, from a legal standpoint,
the Israeli court achieves this aim via a different route.
In summing up the ruling,
the court declared, “Thus it is decided that it cannot be determined
in advance that every targeted killing is prohibited according to customary
international law, just as it cannot be determined in advance that every
targeted killing is permissible according to customary international
law. The law of targeted killing is determined in the customary international
law, and the legality of each individual such act must be determined
in light of it.”
This is pure sophistry. Extrajudicial
executions are illegal under international law. The United Nations Basic
Principles on the Use of Force and Firearms by Law Enforcement Officials
state unequivocally that the use of lethal force is permissible only
“in self-defense or defense of others against the imminent threat
of death or serious injury” or “to prevent the perpetration
of a particularly serious crime involving grave threat to life.”
Clearly the killing of leading political figures in the occupied territories,
and the threat to murder the leader of a major political party in Lebanon,
do not fall under this category.
Similarly, in December 2004,
the UN’s Special Rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary
executions stated in regard to the “global war on terrorism,”
“Empowering Governments to identify and kill ‘known terrorists’
places no verifiable obligation upon them to demonstrate in any way
that those against whom lethal force is used are indeed terrorists,
or to demonstrate that every other alternative had been exhausted. While
it is portrayed as a limited ‘exception’ to international
norms, it actually creates the potential for an endless expansion of
the relevant category to include any enemies of the State, social misfits,
political opponents, or others. And it makes a mockery of whatever accountability
mechanisms may have otherwise constrained or exposed such illegal acts
under either humanitarian or human rights law.”
Clearly, the Bush administration
has itself engaged in such extrajudicial executions. In his 2003 State
of the Union address, Bush himself boasted that some alleged supporters
of Al Qaeda had “met their fate by sudden justice” and were
“no longer a problem to the United States of America.”
Israel, which has the greatest
experience with such extrajudicial killings—assassinations have
served as a customary instrument of state policy since the founding
of the Zionist state—has now gone one step farther, with its highest
court decreeing such war crimes to be sanctioned by both Israeli and
international law.
Such a ruling marks a further
degeneration into lawlessness by a state that has similarly justified
expropriation of land and the expulsion of its legal inhabitants, collective
punishment against civilian populations and the waging of aggressive
wars against its neighbors.
Contempt for international
law, binding treaties and internationally recognized borders has been
the hallmark of Israeli policy for six decades. But what the Israeli
high court ruling makes clear is that whatever countervailing pressures
previously existed within the Israeli political establishment have ceased
to operate.
What kind of a state produces
a binding legal decision from its highest court that political assassination
of citizens and leaders of other territories is a justifiable policy,
sanctioned by international law? One can imagine the howls of outrage
in Washington and Israel itself if the government of Iran or the Palestinian
National Authority were to issue similar judicial rulings.
Far from trying to curb the
criminal practices of its principal client and ally in the Middle East,
the Bush administration has consistently aided and abetted them, from
the campaign of assassinations in the occupied territories to the barbaric
assault against Lebanon last summer. It has concluded that these acts
of provocation and aggression can be utilized to further US imperialism’s
own drive to dominate the region.
Nonetheless, just as with
the debacle confronting US policy in Iraq, there is in the high court
ruling enshrining assassination in Israeli national law a powerful element
of crisis and frenzy, a sense that the Zionist project is reaching the
end of its rope.
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