Israel: Transforming International Law by Violating It

[bemildred]

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Today, most observers - including Amnesty International - tacitly accept Israel's framing of the conflict in Gaza as an armed conflict, as their criticism of Israel's actions in terms of the duties of distinction and the principle of proportionality betrays. This shift, if accepted, would encourage occupiers to follow Israel's lead, externalizing military control while shedding all responsibilities to occupied populations.

Israel's campaign to rewrite international law to its advantage is deliberate and knowing. As the former head of Israel's 20-lawyer International Law Division in the Military Advocate General's office, Daniel Reisner, recently stated: "If you do something for long enough, the world will accept it. The whole of international law is now based on the notion that an act that is forbidden today becomes permissible if executed by enough countries ... International law progresses through violations. We invented the targeted assassination thesis and we had to push it. At first there were protrusions that made it hard to insert easily into the legal molds. Eight years later, it is in the center of the bounds of legitimacy."

In the Gaza fighting, Israel has again tried to transform international law through violations. For example, its military lawyers authorized the bombing of a police cadet graduation ceremony, killing at least 63 young Palestinian men. Under international law, such deliberate killings of civilian police are war crimes. Yet Israel treats all employees of the Hamas-led government in the Gaza Strip as terrorists, and thus combatants. Secretaries, court clerks, housing officials, judges - all were, in Israeli eyes, legitimate targets for liquidation.

Israeli jurists also instructed military commanders that any Palestinian who failed to evacuate a building or area after warnings of an impending bombardment was a "voluntary human shield" and thus a participant in combat, subject to lawful attack. One method of warning employed by Israeli gunners, dubbed "knocking on the roof," was to fire first at a building's corner, then, a few minutes later, to strike more structurally vulnerable points. To imagine that Gazan civilians - penned into the tiny Gaza Strip by Israeli troops, and surrounded by the chaos of battle - understood this signal is fanciful at best.


http://www.commondreams.org/view/2009/04/01-6

[Jefferson23]

1. Always encouraging to read a piece speaking so well to the point of the problem.

"We must break that habit now, or see international law perverted in ways that can harm us all."

All is an understatement here, and I don't know if you happened to read a lecture given recently, "Apartheid and Occupation under International Law", by Professor John Dugard, former U.N. special rapporteur on human rights in the Occupied Palestinian Territory and visiting distinguished professor of law at Duke University.

He speaks on this issue as well, I found it disturbing, makes one feel as though we live in Bizarro world.

Thanks for posting a great read.

[LeftishBrit]

2. Transforming international law by violating it?

That's not *transforming* it. That's business as usual. Even more than other kinds of law, international laws are treated by most countries' leaders as 'rules made to be broken'.

Sad but pretty consistently true.

[bemildred]

3. That's a fair criticism.

It is not necessary to assume that there is some sort of plan or conspiracy at work, expediency will do the job, and it is fair to say that some fault lies with fudging by "NGOs" and "watchdogs" and "high commissions" and the like, choosing to hold their fire for expediencies sake.

[eyl]

4. There's a flip side to it, though

Ultimately, a law must be shown to function in the real world, or else change. In a way, this process is refining international law into something that can be used practically, rather than often vague guidelines written by people who aren't going to face the consequences of actually trying to implement them. AFAIK, Israel's is the only legal system in which tactics are evaluated in essentially real-time (as opposed to after the fighting ends) by the Supreme Court in light of international law.

To give an example, one of the big problems with the laws of war is that they pretty much assume that both sides are states. The situation here of a state vs a quasi-state with guerilla fighters is not well addressed. Some time back, I proposed some changes to the LoW which I felt would deal with the situation mor appropriately. Interestingly, my proposals were pretty similiar to the guidelines the Supreme Court issued a bit later in their verdict on targeted assassinations.

[ProgressiveMuslim]

5. LB, I'd be curious as to your reaction to *substance* of the piece, rather than just saying

"business as usual"... all countries break international law. The whole point of the piece is that Israel is actually breaking new ground in its attempt to deal with a the occupation of a civilian people as an amred conflict.

What do you think of that?

[ProgressiveMuslim]

6. Kick. nt

[Malikshah]

7. You provided your own answer with the quote

"business as usual"