Mohamed K. Mohamed:
Good afternoon everybody. My name is Mohamed Mohamed, I am the executive director here at The Jerusalem Fund and Palestine Center. On behalf of our board of directors and all of our staff, it is a pleasure to welcome you all here today. Of course, welcome to our online audience. It is also a great pleasure and honor to introduce and welcome our distinguished speaker, Dr. Norman Finkelstein, who will be speaking about his latest book, called Gaza: An Inquest into Its Martyrdom, which is right here.
The Gaza Strip is among the most densely populated places in the world. More than two-thirds of its inhabitants are refugees and more than half are under 18 years of age. Since 2004, Israel has launched eight devastating “operations” against Gaza’s largely defenseless population. Thousands have perished, and tens of thousands have been left homeless. In the meantime, Israel has subjected Gaza to a merciless, illegal blockade. Based on scores of human rights reports, Dr. Finkelstein’s book offers a meticulously researched inquest into Gaza’s martyrdom. He shows that although Israel has justified its assaults in the name of self-defense, in fact these actions have constituted flagrant violations of international law. Just to let you know, copies of the book will be available for purchase after the event.
A little bit about Dr. Finkelstein, although you already probably know quite a bit about him. He received his doctorate from the Princeton University Department of Politics. His many books, including The Holocaust Industry: Reflections on the Exploitation of Human Suffering and Knowing Too Much: Why the American Jewish Romance With Israel is Coming to an End have been translated into 50 foreign editions. He is a frequent lecturer and commentator on the Israel-Palestine conflict. Dr. Finkelstein will speak for about 30 to 40 minutes, after which we will have a Q&A session. Please join me in giving a very warm welcome to Dr. Norman Finkelstein.
Dr. Norman Finkelstein:
Well thank you for having me here this afternoon. I had the pleasure before entering this room to meet several Palestinians, Qasim Mohamed, who is the father of the person who introduced me. Currently, he is teaching physics, whereas his son went into the humanities. Then, I met Ziyad Qasim, who was–he’s now retired–the chair in–oh, he’s not retired, he’s no longer the chair–in a very complicated word, it’s polysyllabic, I can’t pronounce it, but it’s basically ear, nose, and throat, and his son went into speculative trading. I’ve noticed a similar trend among the Jewish people, with their parents being distinguished members of the medical profession and the children going into all sorts of lucrative business fields, so there is an affinity for those two branches of the Semitic people, and also–we can agree–a noticeable decline and regression in our peoples. No offense intended to the new generation.
I’m going to be speaking this afternoon on one aspect of the situation in Gaza, which I think merits significant attention, because of the political role it plays. Here, I am referring to the human rights organizations which have played an important role, not as much as we would want, but nonetheless an important role in deterring, to some extent, the magnitude of atrocities Israel has … on the Palestinians, and in particular, on Gaza. And basically, the essence, the gist, the thrust of what I’m going to say this afternoon is: we’re entering into kind of a crisis period now, because the humanitarian organizations have effectively capitulated to Israeli dictate, Israeli pressure, the male fist of Israel and its supporters, and that last deterrent to Israeli ruthlessness I think has been significantly neutralized in recent years. That goes hand in hand with the fact that, internally in Israel, the main organization that has caused Israel problems, created problems for Israel, I think it’s clear that organization has been Breaking the Silence. And Breaking the Silence also came under relentless assault by Israel and its supporters, and as a consequence, it was my intuition, which I found was confirmed, corroborated when I was in D.C. last, which was about a week ago, and I heard Gideon Levy give a lecture in which he mentioned in passing (I think it deserved more than passing notice) that Breaking the Silence has been effectively crushed. While all that is important, if and when there is another Israeli assault, in particular on Gaza, there will be no one to document credibly in the West–and those are two qualifications: credibly, in the West–what Israel is doing, and that last obstacle to Israeli ruthlessness will have been removed. That presents a real problem, I think.
Let me just go quickly, because of reasons of time, I have to be much more abbreviated than I would prefer to be. The record of the human rights organizations when it comes to the Palestinians has been a mixed one. There are only a few younger people in the room, but older people will remember that actually human rights organizations are a relatively new phenomenon. For most of the, for a large part of the Palestine conflict, they just did not exist. It was very hard to get any documentation on what Israel was doing. Amnesty International was pretty much a marginal phenomenon until it won the Nobel Prize, kind of out of nowhere, it won the Nobel Prize, and that catapulted it into center stage. Human Rights Watch comes pretty late in the day, it comes in the 1980s. The Israeli human rights organizations, the formal ones, don’t come into being until the First Intifada.
When the First Intifada starts up in 1987, December 7th or 8th, 1987 (it’s always been a point of pride for me to say December 8th because Professor Chomsky was born on December 7th, and I was the 8th, so I’m going to insist that the First Intifada began on the 8th, he doesn’t always have to hog the limelight)–so when the First Intifada came into being, among the sordid aspects of it was Israel engaging in mass torture and ill treatment of detainees. Human rights organizations for the first time documented the phenomenon that had been going on in the occupation since 1967. It was known, it was documented by leftists like … and Felicia Langer, human rights lawyers, but it was totally ignored by human rights organizations. Come the First Intifada, it reached epidemic levels–the torture and ill treatment–and then the human rights organizations acknowledged that Israel was engaging in systematic, methodical–those are their terms–systematic, methodical torture of Palestinian detainees at a very high level. Human Rights Watch estimated in the First Intifada that Israel tortured and ill-treated tens of thousands of Palestinian detainees. In general, the human rights organizations–you can make some broad generalizations about them–number one, they rarely accuse Israel of committing war crimes, and in particular, they shy away from the dread, accusing Israel of targeting civilians. Number two, the human rights publications, on the factual side, are generally quite accurate. I think they maintain and preserve high levels of professional responsibility and therefore, you will rarely find, in the human rights publications, in the factual side, you will rarely find outright, flagrant falsehoods, with the exception [of] I think after Operation Cast Lead, Amnesty International’s professional obligation was corrupted, and I’ll get to that.
On the other hand, whereas the factual side of these publications is generally very accurate, the legal side of these publications do [sic] not rise to the same standard of professional obligation. Basically, you have the factual side–what happened–and that’s the job of the fieldworkers, to go out into view, investigate “alleged” crime scenes, and then, on the basis of their investigation, to report back what happened. And then, there’s the legal side of the publications. The legal side is [that] a lawyer looks at the fact set and then decides: Was that a violation of international law? Was it a war crime? If it was a war crime, was it disproportionate force, indiscriminate force, was it the targeting of civilians? And that’s what the lawyers, that’s what the legal side of the publications do. Now, as you can imagine, between the factual side and the legal side intervenes the lawyers, and I don’t think it’ll come as a surprise to people in this room when I say that when the lawyers come in, the truth goes out, and what happens is that the lawyers are much less responsive to what the law says and are much more responsive to what politics dictates. The result is often an egregious, a blatant, a shameful, and a shameless whitewashing.
Now I’ll give you some examples from the period preceding the latest spate of Israeli massacres beginning with Operation Cast Lead in 2008 – 2009. So let’s take 2006, the Israeli war with Lebanon, what Sayyed Nasrallah called the ‘divine victory’–whether or not there was divine intervention is not for me to say–but surely Israel suffered a major setback in 2006, and as the war drew to an end (it lasted 34 days), the war was already over. A resolution had been agreed to in the Security Council, and they were just waiting for it to be implemented on the ground. The war was over. In the last 72 hours, when they were waiting to implement the Security Council resolution, Israel dropped nearly 4.6 million cluster bomblets on south Lebanon. It was the densest use of cluster bombs in history. Human Rights Watch put out a very excellent factual report entitled “Flooding South Lebanon: Israel’s Use of Cluster Munitions in Lebanon.” What did it conclude? Well, what was its legal conclusion? It concluded that Israel “in some locations, possibly committed a war crime.” Now, let’s juxtapose that with what the human rights organizations, including HRW and Amnesty International, with what they say as a matter of routine, let’s say standardly, about Hezbollah or Hamas. They always say, right at the outset, actually they’ll say it from the very inception of a war or an attack, they’ll always say, “Hamas, Hezbollah, they committed war crimes. We don’t even have to investigate it. It’s perfectly clear they committed war crimes for the following reasons. Number one, they were using indiscriminate weapons, weapons which can’t target with sufficient precision a military object or combatants. Two, they were willfully, intentionally, premeditatedly targeting civilians.” So that’s the basis for their claim, routinely. You couldn’t find a single case–and I know it, from having read all the reports–there hasn’t been a single case where, when there’s an outbreak of hostilities, the human rights organizations don’t immediately, directly, unequivocally attack either Hezbollah or Hamas for war crimes on the grounds I just reviewed.
So let’s take now these cluster bomblets–densest use of cluster bombs in human history, 4.6 million dropped on south Lebanon. Well, these cluster bomblets were dropped using an indiscriminate delivery system. There was no guidance mechanism to direct these cluster bomblets in their delivery system. Number two, they were targeting indiscriminately. They just blanketed entire towns and villages. Number three, there can’t be any doubt, any equivocation that they were targeting civilians. Is that my conclusion? No. That’s the conclusion of Human Rights Watch itself and of the people who are experts it cites.
So let me quote Human Rights Watch in the same report where they legally conclude that Israel was at most guilty of possibly committing war crimes in some places, but here’s what their factual findings were: “The staggering number of cluster munitions rained on south Lebanon puts into doubt the claim by the IDF that its attacks were aimed at specific targets as opposed to being efforts to blanket large areas with explosives. We found scant evidence that would demonstrate there was any military objective.” They quoted a UN expert as saying, “He had no doubts that Israel deliberately hit built up areas. These cluster bombs were dropped in the middle of villages.” It then quotes none other than an Israeli commander: “What we did was insane and monstrous.” They quote a UN humanitarian coordinator: “It was outrageous.” They quote a UN emergency coordinator: “It was completely immoral.” Human Rights Watch weighs in and says it was “shocking and unprecedented.” Insane and monstrous, outrageous, completely immoral, shocking and unprecedented: but what’s the legal conclusion? In some locations it was possibly a war crime.
When we came to Operation Cast Lead in 2008-9, it was a kind of turning point. Time doesn’t allow me to go through the trajectory of public perception of the Israel-Palestine conflict, and it’s a complex picture, but there can’t be any doubt, in my opinion, that Operation Cast Lead from December 26 to January 17, there can’t be any doubt in my mind that it was a turning point in public perception of what Israel was doing, inflicting on the Palestinians. And, in fact, the human rights report organizations produced quite a large number of reports which were very impressive in their documentation, very compelling in what they had to show. They did accuse Israel of using indiscriminate force, which is a war crime. They did accuse Israel of using disproportionate force, which is a war crime. But they shied away from that war crime which resonates most with the public: namely, targeting purposely, intentionally, willfully civilians.
So let me give you a couple of examples. Human Rights Watch put out a report entitled, “Precisely Wrong,” and it catalogued, chronicled Israel’s use of drone missiles in Gaza during Operation Cast Lead. It seems to make a very compelling case that Israel drone attacks were targeting not just civilians, but targeting children.
So, just as a preliminary, you should know about the drones. They’re operated on the ground by the operator of the drones, and it’s not only that the operator can direct the drone, which has very high resolution cameras, but they can direct also the missiles when they’re fired from the drones. The missiles themselves have cameras. Up until the last minute, up until the last second, when that drone missile is right up against that person’s face, they can divert it. They have that capacity.
So, let’s take one example that is reported by Human Rights Watch. On January 4, 2009, an IDF drone launched a missile at two boys playing on the rooftop. IDF (meaning Israeli army) statements and media reports indicate no fighting in the area at that time. Given the optical capacity of the drones, the young age of the boys should’ve been apparent to the operator. So there you have two little boys playing on the roof, Israel itself acknowledges no military activity in the area, the drones are equipped with high resolution cameras, and the boys were killed. Well, that’s the factual set. What is the legal conclusion of Human Rights Watch in that report? These attacks violated international humanitarian law. It doesn’t call them a war crime, doesn’t even acknowledge that they were targeting civilians. It’s as if a driver of a car deliberately runs down two children playing in the street, and he’s found guilty of violating the speed limit. That was the magnitude of the crime HRW was willing to indict Israel for: a violation of international law. Not even a crime. Amnesty International, on the same question of these drone missiles, it says, “Children playing on the roofs of their homes or in the street and other civilians going about their daily business as well as medical staff attending the wounded were killed in broad daylight by highly accurate missiles launched from helicopters or drones. Disturbing questions remain unanswered as to why such high precision weapons whose operators can see even small details of their targets killed so many children and other civilians.” Well, if you read the factual side of the report, it would seem–at any rate, to me–that the only disturbing question that remains is why do disturbing questions remain? It’s perfectly obvious what happened. A highly precise missile targeted innocent civilians. Why is that complicated? Where is the disturbing question that remains?
After Operation Cast Lead, as I said it was a turning point, not just [for] Amnesty and Human Rights Watch, but it’s estimated as many as 300 human rights reports were issued after the Israeli assault. The most devastating of the reports was the one that was put out by the United Nations Human Rights Council, the report that was chaired by Richard Goldstone. Some of you will probably remember. The Goldstone Report, you might say, crossed a legal, moral, and political rubicon. It really did do what no other report to date had dared to do. That is, up until then, the maximum that most human rights reports would say was that Israel had committed war crimes on the order of disproportionate attacks and indiscriminate attacks, with an occasional, on the margins deliberate targeting of civilians. But basically the thrust, the big picture, the context, was that Israel was engaged in a military operation, a military operation that may have committed excesses–that is to say, disproportionate attacks, indiscriminate attacks–might be culpable of excesses, but nonetheless, these were military operations. The Goldstone Report put the lie to that claim. It concluded, and now I’m quoting it, “that Operation Cast Lead was a deliberately disproportionate attack designed to punish, humiliate, and terrorize a civilian population.” Now, it’s important to–so to speak–internalize or at least ponder those words, because they’re saying Operation Cast Lead wasn’t a military operation. A military operation means when you are targeting military sites, a military installation, or you’re targeting a combatant. That’s a military operation. But, Goldstone said, or the report said, they were targeting the civilians. That’s not a military operation. That’s state terrorism. That’s a crime against humanity.
As you can imagine, Goldstone came under huge personal and professional attack. He had several immunities which acted as–to use the Star Trek language–acted as deflector shields to the Israeli photon torpedoes. So, the deflector shield number one: he was a highly regarded international jurist. He was not known to be a partisan of the left, let alone the right. He was a good, liberal jurist. Number two: he was Jewish, and not just Jewish by fortune, but self-identified and proudly so Jewish. And number three: he was a Zionist, not as a label of a pejorative label or epithet, he was proudly a Zionist. He served on the board of directors of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. His daughter did aliyah, meaning she moved to Israel for ideological, national reasons. So those were three quite effective deflector shields; we will call them deflector shields ten, nine, and eight. Israel started to launch its photon torpedoes and slowly but surely, the deflector shields started to collapse. Then they went for his jugular, his professional jugular, dredging up from the past his role in apartheid South Africa. He’s South African, he was a judge in the apartheid era. Then they went for the moral jugular, they tried to deny him the right to attend his grandson’s bar mitzvah in South Africa.
The pressure escalated to a point that we’re now entering the year, we’re in 2018, so seven years ago it was almost as if it were a prank. On April 1st, 2011, we opened up the Washington Post and there Mr. Goldstone drops a bombshell: he says, “I recant”–in so many words because it was a murky statement by him–“I recant, I take back the report.” He claimed that he recanted because of what he called new information that had become available, but it’s perfectly obvious and not difficult to prove, to demonstrate, no new information had become available. I go through it in painfully minute and tedious detail. I have in the audience Ayman, who has the painful task, the onerous task, of translating this tedious detail into Arabic. He’s my Arabic translator, and if you ever need an Arabic translator I would refer you to Ayman and I get ten percent. That’s right, we agreed on every public service advertisement for you. It was perfectly obvious, and easy to demonstrate, there was no new information available.
Why did Goldstone recant then? Some people say the public pressure finally got to him and he capitulated. My own opinion, based on looking at the evidence quite closely–and I agree it’s speculative–is he almost certainly was blackmailed. There is no other explanation. Everybody has skeletons in their closet, except […], these are exemplary Palestinians of a different generation. But if you don’t have skeletons in your closet, you always have a relative that does. Not commenting on the […], just speaking in generalities. And they got to him, I think almost certainly, and he capitulated, and at that point it became clear that if you’re going to cross Israel you’re going to pay a price. Israel was very unhappy at that Goldstone Report, the Nobel Peace Laureate Shimon Peres called the report a mockery of history, he called Goldstone a “small man devoid of any sense of justice, a technocrat with no real understanding of jurisprudence.” Prime Minister Netanyahu ranked the Goldstone Report as one of three major strategic threats confronting Israel. Among them, the threats being: Iran, Hezbollah, and Hamas, rockets, and the Goldstone Report. And that was not an exaggeration. Of course, the Israelis get the Academy Award every year for “Greatest Dramatic Performance by a State,” but in this case actually it wasn’t theatrics, it was real.
Number one, after the Goldstone Report was issued, Israel was facing a real problem with criminal indictments around the world. The participants could not visit foreign countries without being faced with the prospect that under what’s called “universal jurisdiction” they were going to be charged with war crimes. And number two, as long as the Goldstone Report hung in the air it was very difficult for Israel to launch another military operation, which is like depriving Dracula of a supply of blood. So they were very angry, and they launched a campaign. The campaign culminated in their objective, the objective was achieved, and the Goldstone Report was recanted. As I said, after that, the writing was on the wall: Don’t mess with Israel. Then you saw Operation Protective Edge in 2014, the regrettable consequences of that Goldstone capitulation and the dread and fear that Israel now instilled in the human rights community. Operation Protective Edge was quantitatively, not qualitatively but quantitatively, much worse than Operation Cast Lead. Five hundred children were killed in Operation Protective Edge, three hundred thirty during Cast Lead. Eighteen thousand homes were destroyed during Protective Edge, six thousand during Cast Lead. It was a real horror story. If you want to judge the magnitude of the horror, I don’t think statistics capture it as well as a single statement, a single statement by Peter Maurer, the head of the International Committee of the Red Cross. Bear in mind, as the head of the ICRC, he is by professional obligation, his job is to witness, to visit war zones. If he’s the head of the ICRC, you can be certain he’s been to Yemen, he’s been to Afghanistan, he’s been to Iraq, he’s been to Syria, he’s been to Central Africa, he’s been to all the major war zones. And yet, and notwithstanding, and nonetheless, he visits Gaza. And he comes back and he says, “I’ve never seen such massive destruction ever before. I’ve never seen such massive destruction ever before.” Not Yemen, not Afghanistan, not Iraq, not Syria, never before seen such massive destruction as I’ve seen in Gaza. Tiny little Gaza, it can fit into this room, and he’s never seen such destruction before. The destruction visited on Gaza, eight times since 2004, it’s just two years after Operation Pillar of Defense, it’s just five years after Operation Protective Edge, never having a chance to requild, still under that illegal, immoral, inhuman blockade, and still never before had he seen such destruction as in Gaza.
Nonetheless, there was practically no human rights reportage on what happened in Operation Protective Edge. As Mr. Haddad perhaps noticed, it was the second shortest chapter in the book. There was no material on what happened in Operation Protective Edge. Human Rights Watch, after Operation Cast Lead, produced five substantial reports, many of them quite long. After Protective Edge, one tiny report. Eminently forgettable, eminently worthless. The only ones who did weigh in significantly–I think the total number of human rights reports came to about, I would estimate it came to about ten–there were three hundred on Cast Lead–it came to about ten, if my memory’s right–and you can check my footnotes, but I think that’s pretty accurate–was only about ten, and half of them, of those ten, were from Amnesty International. Amnesty International weighed in, but it weighed in with a complete, shameful whitewash. Very painful to read those reports, and the same thing is true of the U.N. Human Rights Council, the council which produced the Goldstone Report, this time produced a report by this New York State judge Mary McGowan-Davis, which was really a scandal and an offense to our human faculties to read that report.
In the time that remains, I want to document the claim I just made. Otherwise, it’s rhetorical and not convincing. So what did these whitewashes look like? Number one: the pretense that there was suffering on both sides. Amnesty International, “on both sides civilians once again bore the brunt.” The UN Human Rights Council: “This commision was deeply moved by the immense suffering of Palestinian and Israeli victims.” Well, what did the balance sheet look like? Civilians killed: Palestinians sixteen hundred, Israel six. Ratio: two hundred seventy to one. Children killed: Palestinians five hundred fifty, Israelis one. Well, you don’t have to be a doctor or a physicist to figure that out. You can be an investor or work at the Jerusalem Fund to figure that one out. Ratio: five hundred fifty to one. Homes destroyed: Palestinians eighteen thousand, Israel one. Again, you don’t need that degree in rocket science to figure out the ratio, eighteen thousand to one. Now you have to ask yourself. Does that sound like, or does the phrase “once again, civilians bore the brunt on both sides,” – “The Commission was deeply moved by the immense suffering of Palestinian and Israeli victims,” – do those phrases capture, accurately, what happened? Eighteen thousand to one, five hundred fifty to one, both sides bore the brunt, civilians on both sides?
Then there’s this claim they always want to conjure up, this formidable military threat posed by Hamas, […] they conjure up this Hamas arsenal and it always has Grad rockets, Iranian Fajr-5 missiles, and all sounds really sinister and ominous. And it’s always accompanied by these graphs and pictorials which make you tremble. They send shivers down your spine as you contemplate this terrorist arsenal. But then, a simple question comes to mind. They give you the exact number of rockets that Hamas allegedly possesses, they give you the quality, whether it’s a Grad rocket, Iranian Fajr-5, or so on and so forth, and then you ask yourself a question. If they know the quantity, and they know the quality of the Hamas terrifying arsenal, then they must know where these weapons are stashed. Otherwise, how would they know the quantity and the quality? They must know where these weapons are held. But then, if they know where the weapons are stashed and they pose an existential threat to Israel, as everything always does, then why don’t they preemptively just eliminate them? Israel has, by its own admission, launched already more than a hundred preemptive attacks in Syria to prevent Syrian weapons from going to Hezbollah. Well, if it launches preemptive attacks to prevent or preempt Syrian weapons from reaching the hands of Hezbollah, why hasn’t it done the same thing with these Hamas weapons?
The answer, it seems to me, is perfectly obvious: Israel just plucks this data out of thin air, and then all the media organizations, all the think tanks, and regrettably, all the human rights organizations just reiterate, repeat this Israeli propaganda as if it were gospel. There aren’t these weapons, let alone this arsenal of sophisticated weapons that Hamas has at its disposal. You might say, well how do you know that? So far everything you say sounds convincing, sounds logical, sounds reasonable, but it’s not proof. It’s not evidence. Fair enough, I recognize different standards of evidence and I would say this evidence falls into the category of the speculative. But then we have what you might call “the proof of the pudding is in the eating” evidence. The evidence is the damage that was done by this alleged arsenal of weapons. What was the damage? According to the U.N. figures, Israel fired 5,000 rockets during Operation Cast Lead. That’s not a small number. Excuse me, Hamas […] fired 5,000 rockets at Israel. That’s not a small number. What was the damage done? We know exactly what the damage done was, because the Israeli ministry of foreign affairs posted a war diary, and each day it listed the damage that was done the day before. I went through that war diary, I was curious. Five thousand rockets, one house was destroyed, one. That’s a little perplexing. I don’t know anything about military weapons, and even if I were blindfolded and I fired 5,000 rockets, I’d like to think I’d hit more than one house. I mean, not that I would want to destroy a house, but I would like to think I would have a better ratio than that, five thousand to one. How can that be? Well Israel has an answer, because Israel always has an answer. They’ll say, “Ah, Professor Finkelstein, we got you now, gotcha. Because you left out the Iron Dome, our miraculous, brilliant, genius anti-missile defense system. It has to be miraculous, brilliant, and genius because Jews created it. So you left out Iron Dome.” Okay, I’ll factor in Iron Dome. According to Israel, Iron Dome was only deployed above the major urban areas in Israel. According to Israel, 820 Hamas rockets came within the vicinity of Iron Dome. Iron Dome had an efficacy rate of 90 percent, Israelis claim. Seven hundred forty rockets were deflected or intercepted by Iron Dome. In fact, Theodore Postol, who’s one of the leading anti-missile defense specialists in the world at MIT, he says well, not ninety percent, it was probably closer to five percent, or it deflected about forty Hamas rockets. But let’s accept the Israeli figure. Let’s accept, 720 rockets were deflected or intercepted. That still leaves thousands of thousands of thousands of rockets which weren’t deflected. Altogether, there were 5,000. If you subtract 740 from 5,000, you still get 4,060. Okay, I’m not going to figure it out. You got it. Simple fact is, they weren’t rockets, they were enhanced fireworks, and the unfortunate thing is that Israel and Hamas had a mutual stake in pretending they were rockets. Israel, so it can claim that it was acting in self-defense, and Hamas, so it can claim that armed resistance works. You see how afraid Israel is of our Hamas rockets? So, as I said, there was a mutual stake in pretending they were rockets, but in fact they weren’t.
There was also no Hamas terror tunnels, but time doesn’t allow me to go into that. I want to give one last example, and then I want to leave it open, because this time I actually am curious, we have a physicist here, I want to hear, I’m curious, maybe I’m making an error in judgement, and I’m curious. Maybe you have an alternative explanation. And we also have a medical doctor who says he’s prepared, even though his specialty’s ear, nose, and throat, he says he was prepared after my presentation to do brain surgery. So maybe we’ll see if it’s warranted, based on your explanations.
I want to just take one last example, because it’s the one that really pained me the most. It was what Amnesty did on the question of the homes destroyed in Gaza. You know, I don’t like to be emotive. I like to stick to the facts. But bear in mind that seventy percent of the people of Gaza are refugees or descended from refugees. Fifty-one percent are children. During Operation Protective Edge, eighteen thousand homes were destroyed. By any reckoning, that is not a trivial number. But that is really the most marginal aspect of the fact that the homes were destroyed, because the public assumption is that that is war, it’s a war. Amnesty International put out a report called “Families Under the Rubble,” and it discussed the Israeli targeting of the houses. It says, “Yes, it’s true, the attacks were disproportionate. Yes, it’s true, the attacks were indiscriminate.” “But,” it says, “we think that in each and every house that was attacked there may have been a Hamas militant inside.” Each and every house attacked, there may have been a Hamas militant inside. They based this claim on the most flimsy, gossipy kind of evidence. Now you might say, I think that you’re being subjective now. If they claim there might have been a Hamas militant, and that these were disproportionate attacks, these were indiscriminate attacks, but they weren’t targeting civilian dwellings, maybe it’s true. Maybe it is true. But then, I challenge you. I challenge you, go on the web and read, even though my publisher will throttle me for saying this in public, even before you look at my book, read the report on Operation Protective Edge. Breaking the Silence, Operation Protective Edge. It’s about 110 pages, big font […], it’s not difficult. What do you find? Virtually every soldier testimony, virtually every soldier testimony, describes the systematic, methodical destruction of Palestinian homes, having nothing whatsoever, nothing, to do with the presence of Hamas militants.
I excerpted in the book three and a half pages from those testimonies. Believe it or not, it began as ten pages and I had to ask friends to whittle it down because there was so much. What the French call an embarras des richesses because you don’t know what to choose. How did the operation begin? A soldier writes, “As we were going in, I got the impression that any house we passed on our way got hit by a shell. The houses farther away too. It was methodical, there was no threat.” What did Operation Protective Edge look like in the middle? It lasted long, it was fifty one days. Around the middle, here’s another soldier. The D9s, those are the bulldozers. “The D9 operators didn’t rest for a second, nonstop, as if they were playing in a sandbox, driving back and forth. Back and forth, razing another house, another street, day and night, 24-7. They went back and forth, back and forth, flattening house after house.” How did Operation Protective Edge end? A soldier writes, “The very day we left Gaza, all the houses we had stayed in were blown up by combat engineers.” And after testimony after testimony after testimony, Amnesty concludes that of all the houses, there was probably some militant that Hamas was targeting, albeit with excessive and indiscriminate force.
Time doesn’t allow me, but the betrayals by the U.N. Human Rights Council, which claimed that when Israel dropped more than one hundred one-ton bombs on Shuja’iyya, which is among the most densely populated neighborhoods in Gaza–which is one of the most densely populated places on earth–when you drop more than one hundred one-ton bombs on that neighborhood, and fired thousands of high-powered artillery shells on Shuja’iyya over a seven-hour period, that they were doing it to protect injured soldiers. Now, I wonder if anyone here, including our physicists, and I’m putting you on the spot, let us say there were injured soldiers in Shuja’iyya, how do you protect them, or as the Human Rights Council report said, force protection. How do you protect them by dropping one-ton bombs and firing indiscriminate artillery shells into the neighborhood, is that how you protect them? I have an even better way to protect them: why don’t you nuke Shuja’iyya? That will surely protect the injured soldiers.
You don’t know whether to laugh or to cry when you read the aftermath in the human rights community, and that includes Amnesty, that includes Human Rights Watch by its silence. That includes the International Committee of the Red Cross representative, this wretch named Jacques De Maio. It includes Richard Horton from the Lancet magazine, a medical magazine in the U.K. It includes Luis Moreno Ocampo, this well-paid call girl, the former chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court. It was really a very painful record to have to review, but it’s also a very ominous record because it suggests very strongly that if and when the Israelis attacked again, there won’t be anyone around to report what actually happened.
Thank you.
