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"In its comprehensive sweep, deep probing and acute critical analysis, Finkelstein's study stands alone."—Noam Chomsky
"No one who ventures an opinion on Gaza . . . is entitled to do so without taking into account the evidence in this book."
—The Intercept
What has befallen Gaza is a man-made humanitarian disaster.
Based on scores of human rights reports, Norman G. Finkelstein's new book presents 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 constituted flagrant violations of international law.
But Finkelstein also documents that the guardians of international law—from Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch to the UN Human Rights Council—ultimately failed Gaza. One of his most disturbing conclusions is that, after Judge Richard Goldstone's humiliating retraction of his UN report, human rights organizations succumbed to the Israeli juggernaut.
Finkelstein’s magnum opus is both a monument to Gaza’s martyrs and an act of resistance against the forgetfulness of history.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780520968387 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of California Press |
| Publication date: | 01/09/2018 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 440 |
| Sales rank: | 70,191 |
| File size: | 8 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
Self-Defense
ON 29 NOVEMBER 1947, THE UN GENERAL ASSEMBLY approved a resolution partitioning British-mandated Palestine into a Jewish state incorporating 56 percent of Palestine, and an Arab state incorporating the remaining 44 percent. In the war that ensued after passage of the resolution, the newly born State of Israel expanded its borders to incorporate nearly 80 percent of Palestine. The only areas of Palestine not conquered comprised the West Bank, which the Kingdom of Jordan subsequently annexed, and the Gaza Strip, which came under Egypt's administrative control.
The panhandle of the Sinai Peninsula, Gaza is bordered by Israel on the north and east, Egypt on the south, and the Mediterranean Sea on the west. Approximately 250,000 Palestinians driven out of their homes during the 1948 war fled to Gaza and overwhelmed the indigenous population of some 80,000. Today, more than 70 percent of Gaza's inhabitants consist of expellees from the 1948 war and their descendants, and more than half of this overwhelmingly refugee population is under 18 years of age; Gaza has the "second-highest share of people aged 0 to 14 worldwide." Its current 1.8 million inhabitants are squeezed into a sliver of land 25 miles long and 5 miles wide; it is among the most densely populated areas in the world, more crowded than even Tokyo. Between 1967, when the Israeli occupation began, and 2005, when Prime Minister Ariel Sharon redeployed Israeli troops from inside Gaza to its perimeter, Israel imposed on Gaza a uniquely exploitive regime of "de-development." In the words of Harvard political economist Sara Roy, it deprived "the native population of its most important economic resources — land, water, and labor — as well as the internal capacity and potential for developing those resources."
The road to modern Gaza's desperate plight is strewn with multiple atrocities, most long forgotten or unknown outside Palestine. After the cessation of battlefield hostilities in 1949, Egypt kept a tight rein on the activity of Fedayeen (Palestinian guerrillas) in Gaza. But in early 1955, Israeli leaders plotted to lure Egypt into war in order to topple President Gamal Abdel Nasser. They launched a bloody cross-border raid into Gaza killing 40 Egyptian soldiers. The Gaza raid proved a near-perfect provocation, as armed border clashes escalated. In October 1956, Israel (in collusion with Great Britain and France) invaded the Egyptian Sinai and occupied Gaza, which it had long coveted. The prominent Israeli historian Benny Morris described what happened next:
Many Fedayeen and an estimated 4,000 Egyptian and Palestinian regulars were trapped in the Strip, identified, and rounded up by the IDF [Israel Defense Forces], GSS [General Security Service], and police. Dozens of these Fedayeen appear to have been summarily executed, without trial. Some were probably killed during two massacres by the IDF troops soon after the occupation of the Strip. On 3 November, the day Khan Yunis was conquered, IDF troops shot dead hundreds of Palestinian refugees and local inhabitants in the town. One UN report speaks of "some 135 local residents" and "140 refugees" killed as IDF troops moved through the town and its refugee camp "searching for people in possession of arms."
In Rafah, which fell to the IDF on 1–2 November, Israeli troops killed between forty-eight and one hundred refugees and several local residents, and wounded another sixty-one during a massive screening operation on 12 November, in which they sought to identify former Egyptian and Palestinian soldiers and Fedayeen hiding among the local population....
Another sixty-six Palestinians, probably Fedayeen, were executed in a number of other incidents during screening operations in the Gaza Strip between 2 and 20 November....
The United Nations estimated that, all told, Israeli troops killed between 447 and 550 Arab civilians in the first three weeks of the occupation of the Strip.
In March 1957, Israel was forced to withdraw from Gaza after US president Dwight Eisenhower exerted heavy diplomatic pressure and threatened economic sanctions. By the operation's end, more than a thousand Gazans had been killed. "The human cost of the four-month Israeli occupation of the Gaza Strip was alarmingly high," a historian recently observed. "If the figures for those wounded, imprisoned and tortured are added to the number who lost their lives, it would seem that one inhabitant in 100 had been physically harmed by the violence of the invaders."
The etiology of Gaza's current afflictions traces back to the Israeli conquest. In the course of the 1967 war, Israel reoccupied the Gaza Strip (along with the West Bank) and has remained the occupying power ever since. As Morris narrated the story, "the overwhelming majority of West Bank and Gaza Arabs from the first hated the occupation"; "Israel intended to stay ... and its rule would not be overthrown or ended through civil disobedience and civil resistance, which were easily crushed. The only real option was armed struggle"; "like all occupations, Israel's was founded on brute force, repression and fear, collaboration and treachery, beatings and torture chambers, and daily intimidation, humiliation, and manipulation"; the occupation "was always a brutal and mortifying experience for the occupied."
From the start, Palestinians fought back against the Israeli occupation. Gazans put up particularly stiff unarmed and armed resistance, while Israeli repression proved equally unremitting. In 1969, Ariel Sharon became chief of the IDF Southern Command and not long after embarked on a campaign to crush the resistance in Gaza. A leading American academic specialist on Gaza recalled how Sharon
placed refugee camps under twenty-four-hour curfews, during which troops conducted house-to-house searches and mustered all the men in the central square for questioning. Many men were forced to stand waist-deep in the Mediterranean Sea for hours during the searches. In addition, some twelve thousand members of families of suspected guerrillas were deported to detention camps ... in Sinai. Within a few weeks, the Israeli press began to criticize the soldiers and border police for beating people, shooting into crowds, smashing belongings in houses, and imposing extreme restrictions during curfews....
In July 1971, Sharon added the tactic of "thinning out" the refugee camps. The military uprooted more than thirteen thousand residents by the end of August. The army bulldozed wide roads through the camps and through some citrus groves, thus making it easier for mechanized units to operate and for the infantry to control the camps. ... The army crackdown broke the back of the resistance.
In December 1987, a traffic accident on the Gaza-Israel border that left four Palestinians dead triggered a mass rebellion, or intifada, against Israeli rule throughout the occupied territories. "It was not an armed rebellion," Morris recalled, "but a massive, persistent campaign of civil resistance, with strikes and commercial shutdowns, accompanied by violent (though unarmed) demonstrations against the occupying forces. The stone and, occasionally, the Molotov cocktail and knife were its symbols and weapons, not guns and bombs." It cannot be said, however, that Israel reacted in kind. Morris continued: "Almost everything was tried: shooting to kill, shooting to injure, beatings, mass arrests, torture, trials, administrative detention, and economic sanctions"; "A large proportion of the Palestinian dead were not shot in life-threatening situations, and a great many of these were children"; "Only a small minority of [IDF] malefactors were brought to book by the army's legal machinery — and were almost always let off with ludicrously light sentences."
By the early 1990s, Israel had successfully repressed the first intifada. It subsequently entered into an agreement secretly negotiated in Oslo, Norway, with the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) and ratified in September 1993 on the White House lawn. Israel intended via the Oslo Accord to streamline the occupation by removing its troops from direct contact with Palestinians and supplanting them with Palestinian subcontractors. "One of the meanings of Oslo," former Israeli foreign minister Shlomo Ben-Ami observed, "was that the PLO was ... Israel's collaborator in the task of stifling the intifada and cutting short ... an authentically democratic struggle for Palestinian independence." In particular, Israel contrived to reassign to Palestinian surrogates the sordid tasks of occupation. "The idea of Oslo," former Israeli minister Natan Sharansky acknowledged, "was to find a strong dictator to ... keep the Palestinians under control." "The Palestinians will be better at establishing internal security than we were," Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin told skeptics in his ranks, "because they will not allow appeals to the Supreme Court and will prevent the Association for Civil Rights in Israel from criticizing the conditions there. ... They will rule by their own methods, freeing, and this is most important, the Israeli soldiers from having to do what they will do."
In July 2000, PLO head Yasser Arafat and Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak joined US president Bill Clinton at Camp David to negotiate a final settlement of the conflict. The summit collapsed in mutual recrimination. But which side bore primary culpability for the aborted talks? "If I were a Palestinian," Ben-Ami, one of Israel's chief negotiators at Camp David, later commented, "I would have rejected Camp David as well," while Israeli strategic analyst Zeev Maoz concluded that the "substantial concessions" Israel demanded of Palestinians at Camp David "were not acceptable and could not be acceptable." Subsequent negotiations also failed to achieve a breakthrough. In December 2000, President Clinton unfurled his "parameters" for resolving the conflict; both sides accepted them with reservations. In January 2001, parleys resumed in Taba, Egypt. Although both parties affirmed that "significant progress had been made" and they had "never been closer to agreement," Prime Minister Barak unilaterally "called a halt" to these negotiations, and as a result "the Israeli-Palestinian peace process had ground to an indefinite halt."
In September 2000, amid the diplomatic stalemate and after Israeli provocation, Palestinians in the occupied territories once again entered into open revolt. Like its 1987 precursor, this second intifada was at its inception overwhelmingly nonviolent. However, in BenAmi's words, "Israel's disproportionate response to what had started as a popular uprising, with young, unarmed men confronting Israeli soldiers armed with lethal weapons, fueled the [second] intifada beyond control and turned it into an all-out war." It is forgotten that the first deadly Hamas suicide bombing of the second intifada did not occur until five months into Israel's relentless bloodletting. Israeli forces had fired one million rounds of ammunition in just the first few days of the uprising, while the ratio of Palestinians to Israelis killed during the first weeks was 20:1. In the course of the spiraling violence triggered by its "disproportionate response," Israel struck Gaza with special vengeance. In a cruel reworking of Ecclesiastes, each turn of season presaged yet another Israeli attack on Gaza that left scores dead and fragile infrastructure destroyed: "Operation Rainbow" (2004), "Operation Days of Penitence" (2004), "Operation Summer Rains" (2006), "Operation Autumn Clouds" (2006), "Operation Hot Winter" (2008). In the warped memory of Israeli president and Nobel Peace Prize laureate Shimon Peres, however, this period was "another mistake — we restrained ourselves for eight years and allowed [Gazans] to shoot thousands of rockets at us ... restraint was a mistake."
Despite continual Israeli assaults, Gaza continued to roil. Already at the time of the Oslo Accord its intractability caused Israel to sour on the Strip. "If only it would just sink into the sea," Rabin despaired. In April 2004, Prime Minister Sharon announced that Israel would "disengage" from Gaza, and by September 2005 both Israeli troops and Jewish settlers had been pulled out. Dov Weisglass, a key advisor to Sharon, laid out the rationale behind the disengagement: it would relieve international (in particular American) pressure on Israel, in turn "freezing ... the political process. And when you freeze that process you prevent the establishment of a Palestinian state." Israel subsequently purported that it was no longer the occupying power in Gaza. However, human rights organizations and international institutions rejected this contention; the fact was, in myriad ways Israel still preserved near-total dominance of the Strip. "Whether the Israeli army is inside Gaza or redeployed around its periphery," Human Rights Watch concluded, "it remains in control." Israel's own leading authority on international law, Yoram Dinstein, aligned himself with the "prevalent opinion" that the Israeli occupation of Gaza was not over.
The received wisdom is that the process initiated at Oslo must be reckoned a failure because it did not yield a lasting peace. But such a verdict misconstrues its actual objective. If Israel's goal was, as BenAmi pointed out, to groom a class of Palestinian collaborators, then Oslo was a stunning success for Israelis. Indeed, not just for them. A look at the Oslo II Accord, signed in September 1995 and spelling out in detail the mutual rights and duties of the contracting parties to the 1993 agreement, suggests what loomed largest in the minds of Palestinian negotiators: whereas four full pages are devoted to "Passage of [Palestinian] VIPs" (the section is subdivided into "Category 1 VIPs," "Category 2 VIPs," "Category 3 VIPs," and "Secondary VIPs"), less than one page — the very last — is devoted to "Release of Palestinian Prisoners and Detainees," who numbered in the many thousands.
In a telling anomaly, the Oslo Accord stipulated a five-year interim period for so-called confidence building between the former foes. Contrariwise, when and where Israel genuinely sought peace, the reconciliation process unfolded at a rapid clip. Thus, for decades Egypt was Israel's chief nemesis in the Arab world, and it was Egypt that launched a surprise attack in 1973, in the course of which thousands of Israeli soldiers perished. Nevertheless, only a half year separated the 1978 Camp David summit convened by US president Jimmy Carter, which produced the Israeli-Egyptian "Framework for Peace," and the 1979 "Treaty of Peace," which formally terminated hostilities; and only three more years elapsed before Israel evacuated (in 1982) the whole of the Egyptian Sinai. A half decade of confidence building did not insert itself in the Israeli-Egyptian negotiations.
The barely disguised purpose of Oslo's protracted interim period was not confidence building to facilitate an Israeli-Palestinian peace but collaboration building to facilitate a burden-free Israeli occupation. The operative premise was that after growing accustomed to the emoluments of power and privilege, the stratum of Palestinian beneficiaries would be averse to parting with them; however reluctantly, they would do the bidding of the power that meted out the largesse and "afforded them significant perquisites." The transition period also enabled Israel to gauge the dependability of these Palestinian subcontractors, as crises periodically erupted that tested their loyalty. By the end of the Oslo "peace process," Israel could count among its many blessings that the number of Israeli troops serving in the occupied Palestinian territories was at the lowest level since the start of the first intifada. The only holdout in the Palestinian leadership was its chairman. Notwithstanding his legendary opportunism, Arafat carried in him a residue of his nationalist past and would not settle for presiding over a South Africa–like Bantustan. Once he passed from the scene in 2004, however, all the pieces were in place for the "Palestinian Authority" implanted in the occupied territories to reach a modus vivendi with Israel. Except that it was too late.
In 2006, disgusted by years of official corruption and fruitless negotiations, Palestinians voted into office the Islamic movement Hamas, in an election that was widely heralded as "completely honest and fair" (Jimmy Carter). Privately, Senator Hillary Clinton rued that the United States didn't rig the outcome: "we should have made sure that we did something to determine who was going to win." Since its establishment in 1988, Hamas had formally rejected the internationally endorsed terms for resolving the Israel-Palestine conflict. However, its participation in the electoral contest signaled the possibility that the Islamic movement "was evolving and could evolve still more." But Israel immediately tightened its siege, and "economic activity in Gaza came to a standstill, moving into survival mode." The United States and European Union followed suit, as they inflicted "devastating" financial sanctions. If the noose was tightened around Hamas alongside the people of Gaza, it was because they did as told: they participated in democratic elections. The unstated subtext, ignorance of which cost Gaza dearly, was that Hamas was obliged to lose. The UN special rapporteur on human rights in the occupied Palestinian territories noted other anomalies of this punitive response:
In effect, the Palestinian people have been subjected to economic sanctions — the first time an occupied people have been so treated. This is difficult to understand. Israel is in violation of major Security Council and General Assembly resolutions dealing with unlawful territorial change and the violation of human rights and has failed to implement the 2004 advisory opinion of the International Court of Justice, yet it escapes the imposition of sanctions. Instead the Palestinian people ... have been subjected to possibly the most rigorous form of international sanctions imposed in modern times.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Gaza"
by .
Copyright © 2018 Norman G. Finkelstein.
Excerpted by permission of UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
PrefaceAcknowledgments
PART ONE
OPERATION CAST LEAD
1 • Self-Defense
2 • Deterring Arabs, Deterring Peace
3 • Spin Control
4 • Human Shields
PART TWO
THE GOLDSTONE REPORT
5 • A Zionist Bears Witness
6 • The Star Witness Recants
PART THREE
THE MAVI MARMARA
7 • Murder on the High Seas
8 • Whitewash I: The Turkel Report
9 • Whitewash II: The UN Panel Report
PART FOUR
OPERATION PROTECTIVE EDGE
10 • Stalled Juggernaut
11 • Israel Has the Right to Defend Itself
12 • Betrayal I: Amnesty International
13 • Betrayal II: UN Human Rights Council
Conclusion
Appendix: Is the Occupation Legal?
Index
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