Israel Is Finally Being Investigated for War Crimes

Jacobin

On December 20, the International Criminal Court (ICC) in The Hague announced that Prosecutor Fatou Bensouda was “satisfied that there is a reasonable basis to initiate an investigation into the situation in Palestine… There is a reasonable basis to believe that war crimes have been or are being committed in the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, and the Gaza Strip.”

Of course, this should be a no-brainer — and yet it took the ICC almost five years (a “preliminary examination” of the situation was opened in January 2015) to determine that “there are no substantial reasons to believe that an investigation would not serve the interests of justice.” Then again, Palestinians have been waiting more than seventy years for justice, so five is perhaps a drop in the bucket.

Not that “justice” is a guaranteed outcome in international legal endeavors that often amount to torturously bureaucratic charades. Nor, it bears underscoring, has the Palestine investigation been officially given the green light — Bensouda is first seeking confirmation that the court’s jurisdiction applies to the territory in question. While Palestine is a signatory to the ICC, Israel — like its BFF, the United States — is not.

Furthermore, the proposed investigation would look into not only allegations of Israeli war crimes but also Palestinian ones — a fact that has been studiously ignored in Israel’s typically apoplectic reaction to the ICC announcement. Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu sounded the good old antisemitism alarm, while branding the ICC’s move a “baseless and outrageous decision” and a “dark day for truth and justice.” Netanyahu’s rival Benny Gantz, former chief of the Israeli military, asserted that “the Israeli army is one of the most moral militaries in the world” and that “the Israeli army and State of Israel do not commit war crimes.” Case closed.

The ICC examination of the “situation in Palestine” looks back only as far as June 13, 2014 and includes various allegations of war crimes during Israel’s summer 2014 Operation Protective Edge in the Gaza Strip. That particular foray killed some 2,251 Palestinians in a matter of fifty days, the majority of them civilians; 551 were children. Six Israeli civilians perished.

Additionally slated for maybe-investigation is the Israeli military’s brutal repression of Palestinian protesters participating in the Great March of Return, which began in 2018 and “reportedly resulted in the killing of over 200 individuals, including over 40 children, and the wounding of thousands of others.” In the ICC’s view, there’s also a “reasonable basis to believe that in the context of Israel’s occupation of the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, members of the Israeli authorities have committed war crimes… in relation, inter alia, to the transfer of Israeli civilians into the West Bank.”

In other words, this is a relatively tame judicial undertaking, considering that for the past seven-plus decades, the Israeli state has — in terms of massacres and territorial usurpation — essentially constituted one continuous war crime. READ MORE AT JACOBIN.

How the US made the so-called 'safe third countries' unsafe

Al Jazeera English

This year, US President and xenophobe-in-chief Donald Trump finagled "safe third country agreements" with Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador, allowing the United States to deport aspiring asylum seekers to the very region many of them are fleeing in the first place. 

Even Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele - the possessor of the enlightened opinion that "President Trump is very nice and cool, and I'm nice and cool, too ... we both use Twitter a lot" - recently admitted that his country needs to be "safer" and that its asylum capacities are currently nonexistent.

Indeed, the fact that the homicide rates in the three allegedly "safe third countries" are consistently among the highest in the world should be an easy indicator that they are anything but safe. Femicides abound.

The US's own role in fuelling violence in Central America's Northern Triangle has been well known for decades - from its habit of backing right-wing dictators and death squads to its continuing support for homicidal state security forces. In the aftermath of the US-facilitated coup in Honduras in 2009, that nation became more unsafe than ever. 

And across the region, the US-exported model of neoliberal oppression has constituted a form of violence in its own right - perpetuating extreme inequality and condemning the masses to often existence-imperilling economic misery. 

But one of the most crucial aspects to consider when contemplating US complicity in the appalling unsafety of the Northern Triangle is the sheer volume of US weapons circulating in the region.

In March, Foreign Policy reported that Trump was "sending guns south as migrants flee north", with his administration "push[ing] to weaken oversight of gun exports".

And yet the cross-border mobility of US armaments is nothing new. Back in 2014, Harry Penate - the former attache to Central America for the US Bureau of Alcohol, Firearms and Explosives - spoke candidly about the significant role American guns were playing in the epidemic of violence in the region, which was already causing a northward exodus of refugees.

According to Penate's estimate at the time, half of the illegal weapons in murder-plagued El Salvador were from the US.

Flash forward to 2018, and the New Yorker's Jonathan Blitzer cited reports that 49 percent of illegal and unregistered weapons recovered in El Salvador came from the US; in Honduras, it was 46 percent, and in Guatemala 29. While the causes of Central American violence were manifold, Blitzer noted, "American firepower facilitates it." READ MORE AT AL JAZEERA ENGLISH.

Remembering the U.S. Invasion of Panama, a Landmark on the Timeline of Lethal U.S. Hypocrisy.

El Faro

In the runup to the December, 1989 United States military invasion of Panama, the name of the operation underwent a drastic revision. No longer would it be known by the random moniker Operation Blue Spoon; henceforth, it would be called Operation Just Cause. Then-chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Colin Powell would later explain that, not only did the updated title have an “inspirational ring,” it also meant that “even our severest critics would have to utter ‘Just Cause’ while denouncing us.”

Thirty years on, Just Cause still ranks up there with the military’s greatest hits of perverse euphemism—think Operation Iraqi Freedom, more realistically denominated as the decimation of Iraq. Just Cause, the largest U.S. combat effort since the Vietnam War, involved more than 27,000 U.S. troops and entailed a brief but maniacal battering of Panama, leaving up to several thousand—primarily poor—Panamanian civilians dead, according to human rights groups. (The U.S. has preferred to lowball casualty counts, claiming only a few hundred civilian deaths.) The impoverished Panama City neighborhood of El Chorrillo saw such a level of devastation that ambulance drivers began referring to the area as “Little Hiroshima.”

The target of the operation, Panamanian leader Manuel Noriega—a longtime U.S. crony who had fallen afoul of his gringo masters and been spontaneously recast in the role of Super-Narco Menace and Public Enemy Number One—took refuge in the Vatican embassy but was driven to surrender following prolonged auditory torture from American tanks outside, which blasted clever musical selections like Bon Jovi’s “Wanted Dead or Alive” and Van Halen’s “Judgement Day.” Noriega was then hauled off to the U.S. to face drug trafficking charges—clearly a great triumph for justice as, just two days after Just Cause began, the army had announced the apprehension of “50 pounds of cocaine” in a house he was known to frequent. 

The commander of the Panama-based U.S. Southern Command subsequently boosted the quantity to 110 pounds—before the Pentagon admitted a month later that, actually, the cocaine had not been cocaine at all but rather tamales in banana leaves. Lest anyone question the overall justness of the cause, a Pentagon spokeswoman revealed that these seemingly innocuous comestibles were in fact “a substance they use in voodoo rituals.” READ MORE AT EL FARO.

Bolivia: A coup for Israel too

Middle East Eye

Shortly after left-wing Bolivian President Evo Morales was ousted in a US-supported coup in November - disguised as a noble reaction to alleged electoral fraud - the self-appointed, fanatically right-wing Bolivian “interim” government announced the renewal of diplomatic relations with Israel. 

These had been severed by Morales in 2009 during Israel’s Operation Cast Lead in the Gaza Strip, which killed some 1,400 Palestinians, including more than 300 children. Though Israel naturally cast itself as the singular victim of the affair, the ratio of Palestinian civilian to Israeli civilian deaths was 400:1.

During a subsequent Israeli-inflicted bloodbath in Gaza in 2014, this one by the name of Operation Protective Edge and entailing the slaughter of 2,251 Palestinians (including 299 women and 551 children), Morales denounced Israel as a “terrorist state” - a perfectly accurate assessment, given the circumstances and Israel’s track record.

So it’s no surprise that Israel was quick to embrace rapprochement with the newly cleansed government of Bolivia after the November coup, with Israel’s Ynet news site reporting that “the resumption of relations between Bolivia and Israel was made possible by the end of the reign of former hostile President Abu Morales”. (It is not clear whether the Evo-to-Abu modification was a bizarre mistake or a deliberate attempt by some sneaky Ynet person to Arabise the “hostile” leader’s name.)

Additional bonding opportunities rapidly materialised, as Bolivia went about requesting assistance from Israel in training police units for counterterrorism operations. On 6 December, Bolivian interim interior minister, Arturo Murillo, told Reuters: “We’ve invited them to help us. They’re used to dealing with terrorists. They know how to handle them. The only thing we want is to bring peace.”

The “terrorists” supposedly wreaking havoc in Bolivia are, according to the Reuters report, “radical leftists allegedly linked to [Venezuelan President Nicolas] Maduro and drug-traffickers whom the [Bolivian interim] government say had instigated deadly unrest in the country”. In other words, the usual mishmash of hemispheric bogeymen trotted out to justify whatever right-wing undertaking is in need of justification - and never mind that the Bolivian military and police have been the ones perpetrating massacres. READ MORE AT MIDDLE EAST EYE.