'Just World News' with Helena Cobban

Israel attacks Gaza, demonstrates it is still the 'occupying power'

The Israeli military has sent ground forces deep into Gaza over the past two weeks, and has killed 17 Palestinians, and wounded uncounted others. In what even longtime Israeli flack Ron Ben-Yishai admits are retaliatory attacks, Palestinian rocketeers from Gaza have wounded an unknown number -- presumed small-- of residents of southern Israel, but killed none. This (highly asymmetrical) exchange of attacks has spread fear on both sides of the international border between Gaza and Israel.

In addition, the Israeli government recently tightened yet further the siege it has maintained around Gaza since the election nearly three years ago of a Hamas-dominated parliament in Gaza and the West Bank. The siege has contributed to the deaths of more than 200 Gaza Palestinians and has prevented the other 1.5 million residents of the Strip from leading anything like a normal life.

This BBC report tells us that UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon urged Israeli PM Olmert in a recent phone call to lift the siege.

Yesterday, the UN's High Commissioner for Human Rights, Judge Navanethem Pillay, issued a hard-hitting statement calling for an immediate end to the blockade of Gaza. It said:

"By function of this blockade, 1.5 million Palestinian men, women and children have been forcibly deprived of their most basic human rights for months... This is in direct contravention of international human rights and humanitarian law. It must end now."

Here in the United States, apologists for the Israeli government have argued since 2005 that Israel "ended the occupation of the Gaza Strip" that year, and that therefore since then it has borne no continuing responsibility for the welfare of the Strip's residents such as is required of any "foreign military occupying power" under the Fourth Geneva Convention.

But since 2005, Israel has continued to maintain tight control over all avenues and channels through which the Gazans might have contact with the outside world, and it has maintained it still has a "right" to intervene militarily in Gaza whenever it chooses.

Those two aspects of Israel's policy put the lie to its claim that it has "ended" the military occupation of the Gaza Strip that it has, actually, maintained continuously since June of 1967.

If Israel were not, in fact, the military occupier of this territory then either the blockade it has maintained around it or the repeated military actions it has mounted against it would be considered under international law as overt acts of war that would allow the legitimate (indigenous) government of Gaza to request any and all forms of international military aid to counter and suppress those hostile acts.

But few actors in the international community believe that the democratically elected administration in Gaza has this right. Indeed, the BBC report on the Gaza situation quotes an un-named an Israeli official as describing Israel's latest ground-force incursion into Gaza as "a routine operation", i.e. not an act of war as such.

Routine???

The people of Gaza, the West Bank, and Golan have had to live under the vagaries, aggressions, harsh repression, and downright dispossession that have marked Israel's military occupation rule of these territories for 41.5 years now. It is time for all these military occupations to end.

Why, even the United States' military occupation rule over Iraq is now scheduled to end at the end of 2011, after lasting less than eight years! How can the international community allow Israel's rapacious and inhumane occupations to continue?