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Wikileaks on Gaza U.S. Coached Israel on War Crimes By Kathleen Christison

Wikileaks on Gaza U.S. Coached Israel on War Crimes By Kathleen Christison

While attention currently centers on al-Jazeera's release of almost 1,700 documents dealing with Palestinian-Israeli negotiations, Wikileaks acquired documents in the thousands, dealing with other fundamental aspects of war and peace and oppression in Palestine-Israel. CounterPunch offers here three unpublished cables, recounting the visit to Israel of a U.S. assistant secretary of state in January 2010 to discuss reaction to the Goldstone Report on Israel's conduct during Operation Cast Lead in December 2008 and January 2009. They show the U.S. acting like a spin coach, suggesting ways in which the Israelis could deflect international criticism arising from the operation and the report on it. Justice Richard Goldstone, heading a fact-finding mission under the auspices of the U.N. Human Rights Council in the aftermath of the three-week Israeli assault on Gaza, issued a report in September 2009 that, while also criticizing Hamas actions, characterized Israel's conduct as "a crime against humanity." The Obama administration, as expected, condemned the report as one-sided and unbalanced.

Four months later, Assistant Secretary of State for Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor Michael Posner held extensive meetings with Israel's military leadership, Israeli political officials, and representatives of various Israeli and international NGOs. The U.S. was still pushing the line that the Goldstone Report was "fundamentally flawed" and Israel needed to burnish its tarnished international image. Posner provided some suggestions having to do with launching a better public relations effort because, as he said, he believed Israel had a "positive story to tell" and should tell it.

Perhaps the most striking aspect of the several cables reporting on Posner's visit is the utter lack of concern shown for the awful human devastation caused by Cast Lead. Although countless commentators have written about Gaza in the aftermath of the Israeli assault, Philip Weiss of mondoweiss.net best described what had happened there in a posting the day after the release of Goldstone's report. Weiss believed Goldstone had captured not just the bare facts of the assault and its effects on Gaza's 1.5 million people, but the nearly apocalyptic horrors that Cast Lead had visited upon Gazans.

Weiss wrote that, when he visited Gaza himself in May-June 2009, four months after Cast Lead had ended and Gaza had been left by the international community to molder in the destruction with virtually no outside assistance, "the destruction was so overwhelming and the sense of arbitrary punishment so high that I found myself using the word 'persecution.' It was clear to me that these people had been targeted as a people; the assault was an effort to diminish their life spirit in every way possible, including destruction of the family unit." The persecution - a word he came back to - struck him, he wrote, as "biblical, something that you read about in one of the horrifying stories of the Old Testament."

Weiss found an echo of his sentiment in the Goldstone Report, noting, "The Goldstone mission saw the same Gaza I did." He quoted from the report: "Finally, the Mission considered whether the series of acts that deprive Palestinians in the Gaza Strip of their means of sustenance, employment, housing, and water, that deny their freedom of movement and right to enter and leave their country, that limit their access [to] a court of law and an effective remedy, could be considered persecution, a crime against humanity."

Against these accounts, which show a human recognition of the massive scale of Cast Lead and the full scope of its destruction, Posner's accounts of his meetings with Israel's leaders are coldly pragmatic and mechanical - and go to considerable lengths to show sympathy for Israel's position. After holding extensive meetings over two days with Israel's top military brass, Posner concluded, "Overall, the IDF presented a convincing case that it is dealing seriously with these issues and that the IDF exerts more energy trying to minimize civilian casualties than almost every other military in the world."

This conclusion and its ringing endorsement of Israeli conduct during and after the operation show an astounding disregard for the truth. For one thing, the glaring reality was that the Israelis killed, and knew they were killing, hundreds of civilians in Gaza. Gaza is one of the most densely populated places on earth, with 1.5 million people living crowded in an area smaller than 140 square miles; even IDF officers referred to it repeatedly during the talks with Posner as an "urban area." During Cast Lead, Gazans had no way to flee the onslaught, as borders were closed and Israel's virtual carpet bombing of the entire territory left no place untouched.

It cannot be possible to direct the firepower Israel launched against Gaza for over three weeks on an "urban area" without knowing in advance that civilians would be killed in huge numbers. All estimates are that well over half of the 1,400-plus Gazans killed were civilians. At least 25 per cent of the dead were children - a conservative number in a population of which more than half are minors. Howard Zinn wrote in 2006, referring to both U.S. and Israeli military operations, that if one deliberately drops a bomb on a civilian target, the deaths of innocent people are "inevitable" and "if a military action will inevitably kill innocent people, then that action is as immoral as any 'deliberate' attack on civilians" [emphasis in original].

This is clearly a moral truth that escaped Michael Posner who, it's worth noting, spent a career in the field of human rights before becoming an assistant secretary of state. Considerable testimony from Israeli soldiers since Cast Lead ended, including well before Posner began his spin exercise, has shown clearly that the Israelis deliberately intended to kill civilians and knew they were doing so. On January 26 this year, UK Channel 4 broadcast a story about a video made by a dissident Israeli filmmaker that shows Israeli soldiers talking about their mission in Gaza. One tank commander said he was told the night before the operation began that the assault was to be "disproportionate." He was instructed, unambiguously, to "cleanse the neighborhoods, the buildings, the area." Noting that he was choosing his words carefully, he acknowledged that "It sounds really terrible to say 'cleanse,' but those were the orders." Even without benefit of this particular film, Posner should have been aware, well before his mission to Israel a year after the operation concluded, that "cleansing" was the principal Israeli mission in Gaza and "disproportion" was the means.

Furthermore, although Posner affirmed his belief that the IDF was "dealing seriously" with the "flawed" Goldstone Report's allegations, a year had passed since the conclusion of Cast Lead by the time he met with his Israeli contacts, and the IDF had done nothing. Posner himself urged the Israelis to begin an investigation in the wake of international criticism of Israeli conduct - criticism that he deemed "biased and disproportionate" - specifically in order to "help change the debate internationally."

It is a supreme irony that, when the IDF did finally issue its own investigative report on the Goldstone allegations in July 2010, it acknowledged more than 20 of Goldstone's most dramatic citations of war crimes against civilians. Unsurprisingly, the report was not widely publicized. The IDF report promised for the future to institute "operational changes in its orders and combat doctrine" in order to "further minimize civilian casualties and damage to civilian property." This circumlocution is an implicit acknowledgement that, despite its protestations in public and to Posner that Israeli forces had taken "all feasible precautions" to avoid killing civilians, its operations and its basic combat doctrine had not, in fact, followed those precautions. As one Israeli blogger observed wryly, the Israeli approach was one of "I didn't do it but will try harder next time."

One wonders if Posner ever got it. Throughout the meetings, the Israeli generals nitpicked and rationalized, and Posner never challenged or seriously questioned them, asking only that they conduct a review of policies that would enhance Israeli credibility internationally and increase understanding of "the real challenges that democratic states face fighting asymmetrical conflicts with terrorist organizations." In other words, the task was to find some kind of rationalization for killing civilians while still claiming to be a democratic state. Evidently, this remains the U.S. position. During a State Department press conference just days ago, picked up by Mondoweiss, spokesman P. J. Crowley was still criticizing the Goldstone Report because it "significantly complicated and retarded" peace efforts - the idea apparently being that it was unfair to Israel and made Israel unwilling to move forward on U.S. requests for a settlement freeze.

Israel's own basic disregard for human rights and international humanitarian law - and, by extension, the disregard of the United States - were exposed throughout these meetings. Coincidentally, the Palestine Papers just released by al-Jazeera reveal the underlying Israeli attitude toward the body of international law meant to regulate the conduct of occupying powers and parties to war. During a meeting with Palestinians in November 2007, then-Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni, who had earlier served as Israel's justice minister, declared, "I am a lawyer ... But I am against law - international law in particular. Law in general." CP

Kathleen Christison is a former CIA political analyst and the author of several books on the Palestinian situation, including Palestine in Pieces, co-authored with her late husband Bill Christison. She can be reached at kb.christison@earthlink.net