Illegal Actions by Israel
[A more detailed explanation of the emergence of Zionism in the 1890s, the British Mandate, the Nakba and the subsequent occupation can be seen at CABA’s website “Israel & Palestine Explained“]
[There is a summary of the history of the Gaza Strip at Gaza Strip – Wikipedia]
The blockade on Gaza began in 2007 and has been condemned by former UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, the United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC) and other major human rights organizations.
Given the severity of the humanitarian crisis, Israel’s duties to “protected persons” as an occupier of the Gaza Strip under Article 55 of the Fourth Geneva Convention require that it allows the passage of all aid, foodstuffs, and water. “Protected persons” are civilian individuals who find themselves, in case of an armed conflict or occupation, in the hands of a power of which they are not nationals. In this case, “protected persons” are the people of Gaza. By placing strict controls and limitations on all provisions for Gaza, including basic food, water, and medical aid, the Israelis have violated this stipulation of the Geneva Convention.
Israel’s blockade also violates international law under Article 33 of the Fourth Geneva Convention whereby: “No protected person may be punished for an offence he or she has not personally committed. Collective penalties and likewise all measures of intimidation or of terrorism . . . against protected persons and their property are prohibited.” This article prohibits the use of collective punishment of protected persons, the breach of which constitutes war crimes. By having breached this article, the Israelis are guilty of war crimes under the Geneva Convention.
The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), the guardian of international humanitarian law, the law applicable in situations of armed conflict, has also termed Israel’s blockade of Gaza “collective punishment” in violation of international humanitarian law. In 2010 the ICRC called the blockade a violation of the Geneva Conventions and called for the blockade on Gaza to be lifted. It was not.
In 2018 the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs warned that Gaza was on the brink of a humanitarian catastrophe.
The Great March of Return in 2018-2019 was met by cruel attacks by Israeli snipers- meant to maim- Palestinians rebut Israeli hysteria over Princeton course teaching book on Israel’s policy to maim – Mondoweiss
In Dec 2019 the International Criminal Court announced that Israel was set to be investigated for crimes against humanity.
In March 2019, a United Nations inquiry found Israeli forces may have committed war crimes and crimes against humanity by targeting unarmed children, journalists and the disabled in Gaza.
Amnesty International’s 2017/18 Report on International Human Rights is critical of the “collective punishment” of the people of Gaza by “Israel’s illegal air, land and sea blockade of the Gaza Strip” and states that Israel’s blockade has triggered a humanitarian crisis.
The UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) said in a report issued on 1st July 2022 that Israel’s blockade on the Gaza Strip should be fully lifted in line with UN Security Council Resolution 1860.
How did we get to this? A short History Lesson
[A longer history can be seen at CABA’s website “Israel & Palestine Explained“]
Gaza’s ongoing suffering through the illegal siege, now 15 years old, is the end result of policies the British began in 1917, when Balfour promised Palestine to Lord Rothschild and the Zionist Federation, at a time when it was still under Turkish control.
Balfour of Lothian
The Balfour family seat lies a few miles from Edinburgh; he was educated in Edinburgh. His views founded Israel. This Conservative politician from the Lothians wrote the ‘Balfour Declaration’ in 1917; this later led to the partition of Palestine to provide a “national home for the Jewish people”. Importantly, the Declaration also stipulated that “nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine”. However, that condition has, of course, proved meaningless.
The following paragraph is an extract from an article by one of our twinning activists in Edina, sister-up with Gaza! – Bella Caledonia:
“Balfour was very much part of the British establishment of the time, he was a Tory, a Foreign Minister under Lloyd-George and had been Prime Minister of the UK. Like many of his class, he was also an evangelical Christian who believed that a return to Palestine by the Jews would herald the second coming of Christ and their conversion to Christianity, or their burning in hell. It was a way these ‘barbecuing Christians’, as Israeli Historian Ilan Pappé calls them, could get rid of the Jews from Britain or Europe and get the only Jew they wanted; Jesus Christ. The fact that Zionism was originally a Christian ideology surprised me, as did the demonstrable anti-Semitism of its adherents. Nonetheless, it was later picked up by a small minority of Jews and, especially after WWII, attracted many Jews of widely disparate values. It has a history of its own which I won’t burden you with here, but it grew and evolved into the settler-colonial state ideology we know today. But it began with Balfour.”
More on the Balfour Declaration and Zionism at Israel & Palestine Explained – Campaign Against BOGUS Antisemitism
However, European anti-Semitism encouraged Jews to move to Palestine and the British allowed them to create the mechanisms of government, whilst denying Palestinians rights to the same. The news item “UK apology sought for British war crimes in Palestine” at www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-63145992 gives some idea of what our country did there in the 1930s.
Even before Israel declared independence, Jewish terrorist units were seizing Palestinian villages and murdering the inhabitants in order to take land.
The British were being attacked too and eventually they fled, leaving their weapons to the nascent Israeli Defence Force, whose 40,000 soldiers used them against the largely defenceless Palestinians. These soldiers were led by Jews who were battle-hardened, having served in the British Army in Jewish battalions fighting the Nazis. The gentle Palestinians never stood a chance. And thus the Nakba of 1948 began, when 750,000 Palestinians were driven from their homes.
70% of Gaza’s present population are descended from those who fled there for safety. These are a people who continue to be most cruelly oppressed by Israel, whose rights to their homes and land have been denied. Now would be a good time for us to wake up to the suffering we have engendered.
Contrary to the Balfour Declaration, the rights of the Palestinians have been prejudiced. The land left to them has been systematically occupied by force by the Israelis, with now only the West Bank and the Gaza Strip left to the Palestinians. The Palestinian areas illegally occupied by Israel have been designated as “occupied Palestinian Territory” by the UN, the EU and the International Court of Justice.
Since September 2000, at least 9,984 Palestinians, 2,172 of whom were children, have been killed by Israel.
Disaffection with the way that Fatah was running the Palestinian Authority (PA) led to the formation in 2005 of the far more outspoken Hamas. Israel nurtured fighting and distrust between the two which became violent; eventually Hamas was elected in Gaza in 2007 and the Fatah runs the PA which controls the West Bank.
In 2019 Human Rights Watch stated that Israel responded to demonstrations for Palestinian rights in Gaza in The Long March of Return with “excessive lethal force” by killing 189 Palestinian demonstrators as they came to the fence around Gaza, including 31 children and 3 medical workers, and wounding more than 5,800 between March 30 and November 19, 2019. As Gazan people threw stones at the their soldiers behind the fence, Israeli troops responded with explosive bullets. Israel’s policy was to shoot to maim, knowing that severely wounded Gazans would both be a burden on their families and a pervasive reminder as to the futility of protest.
Israel justifies its attacks on Gaza by saying they are responding to rocket attacks from Hamas. According to international law, Hamas are permitted to fight against an occupying power. But their weaponry is not a patch on what the Israelis have, who receive almost $4 Bn every year from the USA, mostly to spend on weapons. Between 2004 (when Hamas was first formed) and 2020, Hamas rockets have killed 30 Israelis. The Israeli Defence Force has, on the other hand, killed 3,000 Gazans, half of whom were civilians- not Hamas fighters.
The attack on Gaza of May 2021 was barely mentioned in the UK press and our caring politicians were quite silent, so fearful were they of criticising Israel, for fear of being labelled antisemitic. 256 Palestinians, including 66 children, were killed; in Israel, 13 people, including two children died. The fighting was triggered by an Israeli landgrab of Palestinian homes in the Sheikh Jarrah district of Jerusalem. It was Joe Biden who told Netanyahu to cease the attacks on Gaza; Israel complied.
USA
So how does Israel afford the weapons to keep up such prolonged military pressure on Gaza and the West Bank, etc? Through almost $4 Billion in aid each year from the USA, which is mostly spent on military items. Then Israel can employ its weapons on the Palestinians- then market them to the rest of the world as “battle-tested”. And then earn even more money in munitions sales..
Bizarrely, Israel uses US rockets to destroy US Aid Projects in Gaza; the Americans don’t care: more in this Intercept article
A Fair Fight?
The rockets that Hamas fire into Israel have, since they began in 2004, up until 2019 (when this check was made) killed forty-four Israelis. Acting in “defence”, the Israeli Defence Force (IDF) has killed, just since 2000, almost ten thousand Palestinians – that’s 227 Palestinians killed for every Jew that has died. (source-Wikipedia)
Wikipedia estimates that in the 1948 Nakba, Israel killed 11,047 Palestinian civilians; in the Second Intifada around 1,900 died; in the 2008-9 Gaza War between 295 and 962 died; in 2012 the Israeli “Operation Pillar of Defence”, the Israeli Defence Force (IDF) killed 109 Gazans; in the 2014 Israel-Gaza conflict the IDF killed 1,617; in 2019, in The Long March of Return, they killed 189 – and in May 2021, they killed 256 Palestinians in Gaza.
In response to this nightmarish David and Goliath scenario, all the world can say is that “Israel has the right to protect itself”. That it is “protecting” the land that was taken by force from Palestinians seems irrelevant to the West and many others at the UN. Thus oppression becomes the norm, and the protestors are seen as just troublesome. If the same rules were applied to Ukraine and Russia as the West uses on Palestine & Israel, there would be no sanctions and we would be affirming the right of Putin’s Army to defend itself by heavy bombing against the troublesome Ukrainians, who had the temerity to object to Russian occupation!
[If you are unclear about the history around Israel/Palestine, the CABA website has some useful information and films you can watch.]
All Major UK Political Parties are Culpable- and Hamas was democratically elected
All major UK political parties, must accept some responsibility for the ongoing suffering and killing of civilians in Gaza. Neither Labour, Conservative, nor the ConDem coalition UK Governments have demanded loudly and consistently that Israel end its siege; or taken measures, such as sanctions, to enforce Israel to comply with international law. The Israeli occupation and the blockade on Gaza is completely illegal.
Edinburgh can lead the way in promoting the enforcement of UN resolutions and international law. The twinning of Edinburgh with Gaza can be a tiny step towards repaying the debt we owe the Palestinian people, while it will also show our respect for justice and international human rights law.
The residents of Gaza voted overwhelmingly for Hamas. They cannot be collectively punished for so doing. As explained above, the ICRC (in 2010) called the blockade a violation of the Geneva Conventions and called for its lifting. Israel’s blockade also violates international law under Article 33 of the Fourth Geneva Convention whereby: “No protected person may be punished for an offence he or she has not personally committed. Collective penalties and likewise all measures of intimidation or of terrorism . . . against protected persons and their property are prohibited.” This article prohibits the use of collective punishment of protected persons, the breach of which constitutes war crimes. “Protected persons” are civilian individuals who find themselves, in case of an armed conflict or occupation, in the hands of a power of which they are not nationals. In this case, “protected persons” are the people of Gaza.
Astonishingly, one Edinburgh Labour Councillor suggested to the petitioner it would be more appropriate for Edinburgh to twin with Tel Aviv. She thought twinning should be purely cultural, not political – and was best undertaken with cultures and wealth similar to our own.
A Conservative Councillor wrote in response to our appeal to support twinning Edinburgh with Gaza City: “While I appreciate the humanitarian nature of the suggestion, in my opinion allowing our city to be linked at a civic level with Gaza would equate to a tacit endorsement of a terrorist regime which actively subjugates and exploits its own people. I would therefore actively oppose any proposal of this nature.”
By taking this stance, he is refusing to acknowledge the suffering his party- and our country – has created, and is supporting an isolationist policy that drives some extremely angry people to violence.
More on the Conservatives and Gaza on the Kids Not Suits website here
Hamas have a right to use arms against Israel – according to UN
The Edinburgh Tory Councillor is ignoring that Hamas were democratically elected. Furthermore, under UN rulings, the Palestinians have a lawful right to resist Israel’s occupation of their lands, including through armed struggle. In 1982, the UN General Assembly “reaffirmed the legitimacy of the struggle of peoples for independence, territorial integrity, national unity and liberation from colonial and foreign domination and foreign occupation by all available means, including armed struggle.” [more here]
Would this same Councillor condemn the Ukrainians as terrorists for resisting Russian occupation?
Hamas & Elections
Furthermore, the Councillor’s claim that Hamas subjugates and exploits its own people is not valid.
As Wikipedia and the Guardian notes, in the 2006 Palestine elections, Hamas won the majority of seats in seven of the ten municipalities in Gaza selected for the first round with voter turnout being around 80%; the rival Fatah group were the clear losers. There have been frequent plans for fresh elections since then, but they have never been realised; one problem is that in order to legitimately represent the Palestinian people, they would need to take place in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip at the same time. (The two areas are 60 miles apart, with Israel occupying the land between them).
Recently, the Palestinian Authority (based in Ramallah in the West Bank and controlled by Fatah), cancelled those planned for 2021, citing Israel’s refusal to permit the inclusion of East Jerusalem as the reason. Hamas were incensed at the decision; they would welcome elections.
Hamas, apparently, continues to enjoy support in Gaza and state they would welcome elections to validate their mandate to govern.
On the 2nd July 2022 Hamas Welcomed the UN Report Calling Israel to Lift the Gaza Siege | News | teleSUR English
Why is Hamas popular in Palestine?
70% of the population of Gaza are refugees from Israel’s illegal ethnic cleansing operations from 1947 onwards.
They elected Hamas because it campaigned for their right to return, as the UN called for in resolution 194.
For info on the specifics of Gaza City governance, see our Gaza Council page here
Hamas- Current Policy on Israel
According to Wikipedia: co-founder Sheik Ahmed Yassin said in 1987, and the Hamas Charter affirmed in 1988, that Hamas was founded to liberate Palestine, including modern-day Israel, from Israeli occupation and to establish an Islamic state in the area that is now Israel, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.
However, since 1994, the group has frequently stated that it would accept a truce if Israel withdraws to the 1967 borders, paid reparations, allowed free elections in the territories and gave Palestinian refugees the right to return.
[ UN resolution 194 affirms the Palestinians right to return to the places from which they were driven. It was passed in 1948 and has never been rescinded.]
Hamas military wing was first added to the EU Terrorism List in 2001; the EU’s top court delisted it in Sept 2016, then following moves by Israel, it was confirmed in November 2021 as relisted following a CJEU ruling.
Gaza Twinning challenges Israel’s breach of International Law
When we asked Norman Finkelstein how we might respond to comments from Councillors saying that to twin with Gaza was to support Hamas, he gave us an excellent 4-minute reply “Why Twinning with Gaza has Nothing to do with Hamas”. He points out that Israel’s breaching of international law is the main issue; Israel’s siege is, quite simply, illegal. See the video at https://youtu.be/UmeraZ3SGh0
This article by David Hearst, a journalist who was previously with the Scotsman and the Guardian shows how little we in the UK care about what our country has helped to create: Gaza 2020: How easy it is for the world to delete Palestinian pain
Israel is an Apartheid State
At the end of January 2022, Amnesty published its report declaring that Israel was an apartheid state. See their 15-minute video at www.tinyurl.com/amnesty-israel
Over the past few years, several other noted human rights bodies have done the same. Read about them at Opinion | It’s Settled That Israel Is Committing the Crime of Apartheid—Now What Should We Do About It? | Phyllis Bennis (commondreams.org)
Note that where Gaza is concerned, Israel needs cheap labour for its building sites putting up new homes for settlers, building schools, etc. Israelis don’t want to do heavy work for low wages, but Gazans are so poor now that some of them will do it just to feed their families. So Israel lets a few thousand of Gaza’s two million people through their checkpoints each week, so Gazans can live for 5 days in prefab huts, working on buildings for Israel, before returning to see their families at the weekend.
But there are exceptions- it’s thought that up to 10% of Israeli Jews do not support the occupation
Western Media Coverage on Palestine-Israel
By viewing the Palestinian struggle for liberation as illegitimate, western media denies Palestine’s right to exist. It is fairly typical for the press to misrepresent or delete Palestinian views, as the recent Vogue coverage of Palestinian US model Gigi Hadid’s utterances shows:
See Telesur’s video from 22 Feb 2017: Gaza – the world’s largest prison? at https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=1033894893420579
Travel for residents in Gaza is very difficult World gives cold shoulder to people from Gaza | The Electronic Intifada
Edinburgh’s Involvement in Israeli Oppression
See Firms arming Israel received £10m from Scottish Enterprise (theferret.scot) which describes how Italian arms giant Leonardo MW at Crewe Road North in Edinburgh is involved in arming Israel and gets Scottish taxpayers subsidies to do so. These weapons are using to kill Gazans objecting to the occupation of their country.