Editor’s note: This commentary is by Jules Rabin, who came to Vermont in 1968 to teach at Goddard College and 10 years later shifted to baking bread in a wood-fired oven. He lives in Plainfield. This piece was first published in the Times Argus.
[S]ince when is it a punishable offense to bring a grievance before a court of law?
Battered wives know that if they break the wall of silence that conceals their misery and go to the cops, they may be in for another bout of battering, once back in the privacy of the home. And now Palestine, which has been locked into a kind of abusive marriage with Israel since the United Nations in 1947 divided the territory of the old Palestine Mandate between Palestinians and Jews – now that Palestine of today, having maneuvered to bring its complaints against Israel to the International Criminal Court, is facing condemnation and retribution from Israel and Israel’s chief ally, the U.S.
“Abusive marriage,” you may ask?
Forget for now the crippling military occupation of Palestine by Israel since 1967 and consider just the casualty figures in the latest of the three brief and brutal wars that Israel and Gaza have fought in the last six years.
In that latest war, lasting 50 summer days of 2014, 71 Israelis were killed: 65 soldiers and six civilians, among them one child and one woman. On the Palestinian side, there were 2,310 deaths, between 50 percent and 70 percent of them civilians, including 513 children and 253 women.
Do we get it? Look again: 2,310 deaths on one side, 71 on the other; 513 children dead on one side, one child dead on the other; 253 women dead on one side, and one on the other.
The colossal disparity in those figures is suggestive of “abuse” on a scale so vast that it proclaims a wanton disregard by Israel of Palestinian lives in the mass: a virtual antechamber to genocide. And that’s a part of the case that the Palestine Authority aims to bring before the International Criminal Court (ICC), where it has just gained standing: the scale of the killing in Gaza and the scale of the destruction of Palestinian infrastructure, generally, with swaths of densely settled Gaza bombed to rubble as far as the eye can see, while the Israeli infrastructure was barely touched by the hopeless barrages of rockets flying in from Gaza.
In the meantime, in the periods between various other such major eruptions of punitive violence against Palestinians in their home territories over the years, the streaming of Israeli settlers by the hundreds of thousands into Palestine’s other patchwork territories, beyond Gaza, has continued, month after month, year after year, and decade after decade, with its attendant seizures of Palestinian acres and Palestinian water resources, the destruction of ancestral olive trees by the tens of thousands, and the awful compression of the everyday lives of Palestinians, hemmed in by 20-foot high barrier walls. With their – the Palestinians’ — movements between towns in their shrinking territories maddeningly regulated by the authority of 20-year-old Israeli soldiers standing at checkpoints, who, bored, nasty or impersonal, wield authority over Palestinian graybeards, matrons and day-laborers. “Yes you may.” “No … you may not.” “And for crying out loud step back, now! Get out of my face, you!”
Like it or not, Israel, and like it or not, Washington, Palestine has gathered together its resolve and its diplomacy and is preparing to turn in the batterer to the authorities, who we hope will take notice and act; however much the U.S. may fume about it.
And now, just a couple weeks ago, after a long trek through diplomatic corridors, the government of Palestine, such as it is, has won the right to bring its grievances before the International Criminal Court, where it will accuse Israel of the reckless and disproportionate use of armed force – those hundreds of dead babies and hundreds of dead women, and the aerial destruction of tens of thousands of homes — that took place in Gaza last summer.
And Israel is raising hell about it, as though Palestine was committing an act of aggression by the mere act of going to court.
Israel has pointed out, incidentally, and rightly, that by joining the I.C.C. and accepting its authority, Palestine too makes itself liable to the charge of committing war crimes: most notably, in recent times, its indiscriminate firing of rockets by the thousands from Gaza into populated Israeli districts. That the resultant casualties have been miraculously few doesn’t wipe away Palestinian guilt for those attempted aggressions and the terror they have provoked among Israelis. (The one female fatality on the Israeli side was an elderly woman who died of a heart attack when sirens warning of a rocket attack went off.)
To punish Palestine for its audacity in applying for membership in the I.C.C., Israel threatens to withhold Palestinian tax revenues which it controls, as it controls almost everything else of major importance in Occupied Palestine. Never mind that those tax revenues are the property of the government of impoverished Palestine and are essential to its delivery of ordinary municipal services.
Israel threatens to apply other unspecified sanctions as well, which its total control of access to all of the Palestinian territories enables it to do.
Now, I can understand Israel’s reaction to Palestine bringing its complaints to the I.C.C.; understand it while not condoning it. Abusive nations, like abusive spouses, resist having their actions scrutinized by outside authorities. With so much blood on its hands, Israel has an obvious stake in Palestine keeping its mouth shut before the tribunals of the world.
But what about the U.S. – our own country, 6,000 miles from that crater of conflict? What are we to make of the U.S. closely seconding Israel’s position … telling Palestine to for God’s sake keep still, not raise hackles, and not waste everybody’s time, going to the international court?
“Just … resume negotiations with Israel (for the umpteenth time),” is the advice from here, “and wait for a better day to come .…” “Negotiate, negotiate, negotiate,” is the mantra of our secretary of state and UN ambassador. Never mind the failure of round after round after round of negotiations over two decades and more, with no letup in the occupation, and the steady – massive — expansion of Israeli settlements in the meantime, in steady violation of international law.
Along with that urgent advice by the U.S. – to wait in the shadows a little longer yet — there has gone out a threat to punish Palestine for its unprecedented application for relief to the international court, by withholding from it $400 million in scheduled U.S. humanitarian aid. (Generous, but only one-eighth the $3+ billion in aid we bestow annually on already prosperous and physically intact Israel.)
How can it be that mighty “we,” — the U.S.A. — are again faithfully seconding every turning of tiny Israel’s actions and diplomacy, contrary to the judgment of most other countries of the world -– as we have done already 40 times in 40 years, by using our exclusive power of the veto specifically and narrowly in Israel’s defense, in the UN Security Council? With gentle regrets expressed, here and there, about one or another of the excessively harsh actions that Israel feels itself compelled to take (those 513 child deaths last summer in Gaza, for one example). We “deplore,” liberally.
But with no serious – effective — pressure put on Israel, ever. Certainly not any significant reduction in the massive military and economic aid we bestow on Israel every year without fail, more than to any other country in the world.
And with still no slack given to the battered little guy, Palestine, who right now is seeking just to have its day in court, for goodness sake.
Like it or not, Israel, and like it or not, Washington, Palestine has gathered together its resolve and its diplomacy and is preparing to turn in the batterer to the authorities, who we hope will take notice and act; however much the U.S. may fume about it.
