Xymphora: Zionists work to destroy international law

The planned destruction of international law
Monday, April 06, 2009
http://xymphora.blogspot.com/
George Bisharat on the ongoing Israeli plan to weaken international law in order to allow for the atrocities necessary to build Anti-Assimilation-Land:
"Since 2001, Israeli military lawyers have pushed to re-classify military operations in the West Bank and Gaza Strip from the law enforcement model mandated by the law of occupation to one of armed conflict. Under the former, soldiers of an occupying army must arrest, rather than kill, opponents, and generally must use the minimum force necessary to quell disturbances.

While in armed conflict, a military is still constrained by the laws of war - including the duty to distinguish between combatants and civilians, and the duty to avoid attacks causing disproportionate harm to civilian persons or objects - the standard permits far greater uses of force.

Israel pressed the shift to justify its assassinations of Palestinians in the Occupied Territories, which clearly violated settled international law. Israel had practiced "targeted killings" since the 1970s - always denying that it did so - but had recently stepped up their frequency, by spectacular means (such as air strikes) that rendered denial futile.

President Bill Clinton charged the 2001 Mitchell Committee with investigating the causes of the second Palestinian uprising and recommending how to restore calm in the region. Israeli lawyers pleaded their case to the committee for armed conflict. The committee responded by criticizing the blanket application of the model to the uprising, but did not repudiate it altogether.

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."

and (the money quote by Daniel Reisner; it will presumably be used at his war crimes trial in the post-sea-bathing period):
"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."

There are many, many reasons why we should single out Israel and its JIZ supporters for their crimes, but the intentional destruction of all the norms of international law - a destruction which will deny protection to civilians all over the world until the norms are reconstructed, a difficult process which will take decades and will be ongoing long after the last Israeli Jew is sea bathing - would by itself be sufficient to damn them all for eternity. The difference between Israel and its disgusting supporters and, say, some slaughterers in Central Africa is that the African slaughterers:
do not have a master plan to to destroy international law in order to allow their slaughtering; and
could not destroy international law if they wanted to.

The Human Rights Industrial Complex is completely Jew-dominated, a dominance that would not be a problem but for the fact that human rights protections are constantly perverted for the purposes of building Anti-Assimilation-Land. Note the dance known as the Human Rights Watch (or Amnesty International) shuffle, where an inconsequential Palestinian or Lebanese reaction to terrible provocation - as little as a Palestinian child throwing a stone in the general direction of a group of illegally-stationed Israeli soldiers brutally manning an illegal Israeli checkpoint - is regarded as the moral equivalent of a terrible Israeli counterattack, perhaps the bombing of an entire household. The shuffler then throws up his hands and says everybody committed atrocities, so who is to judge who is right and who is wrong. The new UN investigation will follow this route: it will not absolve Israel, but will hide Zionist atrocities under this fraudulent moral equivalence. Another in the long list of the sins of Zionism: destroying the credibility of all official advocates for human rights.