Tag: Israel Model

Israel Is Finally Being Investigated for War Crimes

After dragging its feet, the International Criminal Court is finally investigating Israel for committing war crimes against the Palestinians over the last five years. It’s long overdue.

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 endeavours 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.

Also read: In 10 Points, What the ‘Israel Model’ Is and Why It’s Bad for India

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.

On December 27, the Jerusalem Post unfurled the abnormally rational-sounding opinion headline “To counter the ICC, Israel needs leadership that truly wants peace” – which remained rational-sounding for the fraction of a second it took to discover that the author of the intervention was none other than former Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert, who presided over:

1. Israel’s 2006 war on Lebanon, which killed an estimated 1,200 people in 34 days, mostly civilians.

2. Israel’s 2006 operation in Gaza – codenamed “Summer Rain” – which left dead at least 240 Palestinians in two months, among them 48 children.

3. Israel’s 2008-9 operation in Gaza, which resulted in the deaths of some 1,400 Palestinians in three weeks, including more than three hundred children.

Talk about war crimes.In his rambling dispatch, Olmert contends that Bensouda’s actions are “based on wickedness, malice, deception and distortion, with a hint of anti-Israel sentiment.” He then admits that the state of Israel “has been controlling the lives of millions of Palestinians for more than 50 years, and there’s no doubt that the Palestinians are not given equal rights or national recognition in the land where they are the majority.”

But still, “the side responsible for thwarting a peace agreement was indisputably the Palestinians”.

But, then, “there is no denying that in the last 10 years, Israel has been the recalcitrant, aggressive party that lacks flexibility, and this is [the] main reason that not only was a peace agreement never reached, but initial discussions never even got underway”. But “only if the Palestinians are prepared to take the far-reaching political steps necessary to establish a productive and functioning society, will there be any chance for achieving peace between Israel and the Palestinians”.

And so on and so forth – the only definitive takeaway being that Ehud Olmert should not be permitted to write opinion pieces if he does not know what his opinion is.

Another Jerusalem Post opinion piece published the same day – “Refusing to play the Palestinians’ ICC game” – is rather more secure in its convictions. In it, one Nitsana Darshan-Leitner rails on about how “the ICC and the threat of war crimes investigations is merely the PLO’s latest version of [late PLO chairman Yasser] Arafat’s [olive] branch-and-pistol diplomacy.” And it’s only happening because “Bensouda was tired of pursuing African dictators and brutal tribal leaders, and wanted to show that the ICC was a court with a truly international reach.” So there was “nothing sexier” for her than Israel-Palestine.

Also read: Ein Rashash: A Typical West Bank Morning Under Illegal Israeli Occupation

Darshan-Leitner’s bio identifies her as an “Israeli civil rights attorney and president of the Shurat HaDin Law Center” – the institution that has been known to offer such excursions as the “Ultimate Mission to Israel,” in which persons with a great deal of excess money can do exciting things like attend a “trial of Hamas terrorists” in an Israeli military court.

As for what the “law” has to do with a country that has placed itself unquestionably above it, perhaps the ICC’s far-from-perfect pursuit of “justice” will at least highlight Israel’s abhorrence of that very concept.

Belén Fernández is the author of The Imperial Messenger: Thomas Friedman at Work, Marytrs Never Die: Travels through South Lebanon, and, most recently, Exile: Rejecting America and Finding the World. She is a contributing editor at Jacobin.

This article was published on Jacobin. Read the original here. 

In 10 Points, What the ‘Israel Model’ Is and Why It’s Bad for India

The model is a curse for the people of Palestine, of course, but it is also a curse for the people of Israel, who are condemned by it to live lives of perpetual insecurity.

So deep does national sentiment in favour of the rights of the Palestinians run that regardless of which party is in power, the Indian government has so far remained formally committed to the cause of an independent, secure Palestine with East Jerusalem as its capital.

India has excellent relations with Israel too, but that has not come in the way of the country taking a stand against Israel’s violations of international law.

Against this backdrop it is not hard to understand why the videotaped remarks of the Indian consul general in New York celebrating the so-called ‘Israel Model’ have proved so controversial.

Perhaps as a form of damage control, the Ministry of External Affairs quickly released an advance copy of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s statement marking the International Day for Solidarity with the Palestinians. Yet, the question remained – could it be that Modi’s letter of support for the Palestinians was just public posture and that what the senior Indian diplomat was caught saying on camera represented the real thinking of the Indian government? Or had the diplomat mis-spoken?

So far, the MEA has not clarified matters. The diplomat’s claim that his remarks have been taken “out of context” is not helpful since it was the context in which he was speaking which made his words so shocking. He was addressing a gathering of Kashmiri Pandits (KPs), lakhs of whom were driven from their homes in the Kashmir Valley following the onset of the armed insurgency in 1990. How could he or anyone imagine the Israel Model – which is based on the eviction of the Palestinian people from their homes and the annexation of their land – can offer a solution to the plight of the KPs?

Either way, it is evident that the diplomat in question, like many people in India and around the world, is a victim of ignorance and disinformation about what exactly the ‘Israel Model’ is. So here, in 10 easy-to-understand facts, is a quick guide to this model.

1. Occupy the sovereign territory of others and turn them into refugees

The United Nations created Israel and Palestine on November 29, 1948 as two equal, sovereign states. Today, Israel is in occupation of Palestine. It has annexed East Jerusalem. It has blockaded the Gaza strip and filled the West Bank with its own outposts of settlers, and refuses to abide by the terms of either UN resolutions or negotiated accords it has signed to end this illegal occupation of Palestinian land. As part of this occupation, Israel also steals the water resources of the Palestinians, and will not allow the refugees who were forcibly driven from their land to return home.

2. Impose collective punishment on the occupied people

When the occupied people exercise their inalienable and legitimate right to resist, the Israel Model involves subjecting the entire civilian population of the Palestinian territories to collective punishment using such methods as a territorial blockade, mass arrests and detentions, travel restrictions that can turn even the shortest of journeys into a nightmare lasting hours, the demolition of homes, fiscal pressure,, the use of civilians and even children as human shields. 

3. Illegally convert occupied territory into your own land

The third feature of the Israel Model is the conversion of Occupied Territory into Israeli land, first by building illegal settlements, then a massive wall (ostensibly to ‘protect’ the occupiers from the occupied but actually to grab more land), then roads to connect these illegal settlements. Israel has grabbed so much land already that the West Bank resembles a piece of Swiss cheese, full of holes. The Israeli academic, one of the world’s leading scholars of Telugu and Tamil, has been chronicling the hundreds of crimes, small and big, that are an integral part of the ‘Israel model’. Each story of the theft of land and water will break your heart.

4. Discriminate against your own citizens on the basis of religion or ethnicity

The Israel Model involves not just robbing the Palestinians of their land but also turning a section of Israel’s own citizens – especially those who are Palestinian – into second-class citizens.  Reactionary politicians like Benjamin Netanyahu regularly speak of Arab Israelis and their representatives as if they are national enemies. Arabs are one-fifth of Israel’s population yet suffer from discrimination when it comes to the right to lease land, reunite their families, or the right to residency in Jerusalem.

5. Turn your courts into a rubber-stamp for the occupation

Fifth, the Israeli model requires that the judicial system, which is otherwise quite independent of the executive, serve as a rubber-stamp for the illegal occupation and for the violation of human rights by the Israeli security apparatus and military. 

Palestinians whose homes are taken over illegally have tried in vain to get the Israeli courts to intervene on the side of justice, yet judgment after judgment has confirmed what the Israeli human rights organisation B’Tselem has said, that “those under occupation cannot seek justice in the occupier’s courts.” 

6. Regularly attack your neighbours 

The sixth element of the Israel Model is to regularly attack your neighbours – especially Lebanon – and breed violence and insecurity in the borderlands of all its neighbours. Israel has formally annexed the Golan Heights from Syria and for years had turned southern Lebanon into a hell-hole.

7. Violate international humanitarian law whenever you wage war

It is impossible to think of the Israel Model without its seventh element – the violation of international humanitarian law whenever the Israeli Defence Forces wage war. Even if we leave aside aggression as a war crime by itself, the actual conduct of military operations by the IDF, especially in Gaza in 2014 and most recently in 2018, and in Southern Lebanon, has involved war crimes such as the disproportionate and indiscriminate use of force, and the killing and maiming of civilians. All of this has been well documented by international human rights agencies but also by the United Nations.

8. Label your critics ‘terrorists’, terror sympathisers’, ‘anti-semites’ and anti-nationals

An integral part of the Israel Model is also the demonisation of critics as terrorists or terror sympathisers. Reactionary Israeli politicians and officials are quick to label the critics of Israeli policies towards the Palestinians as ‘anti-semitic’ or, if they are Jews or Israelis, as unpatriotic and anti-national. 

9. Dishonour the memory of the Jewish victims of the Nazi Holocaust

The ninth element of the Israel model is the tendency of some politicians to dishonor the memory of the Jewish victims of the Nazi Holocaust by invoking their suffering to somehow justify what the Israeli state is doing to the Palestinian people. Using the suffering of one people to justify committing crimes against others is one of the most atrocious things a politician can do, and regrettably this has now become a tactic that is frequently resorted to.

10. Use war and the threat of terror for domestic political gains

The tenth element of the Israel model is one which has come into starker relief these days, given Benjamin Netanyahu’s failure to form a coalition government in the face of the challenge from Benny Gantz in the September 2019 election to the Knesset.

Israel’s attorney general managed to block Netanyahu’s plans to launch an intensive bombing campaign against Gaza just before those elections but as Israel prepares for a third election early next year, the Palestinian territory has emerged as a convenient punching bag.

Over 30 Palestinian civilians were killed in Israeli bombings in Gaza last month and the fear is that there will be more aggression as Netanyahu seeks to push a reluctant electorate into giving him a majority.

Emulate at your own risk

So there, in a nutshell, is the Israel Model, in 10 atrocious parts. I cannot think of a single redeeming feature of this model. It is a curse for the people of Palestine, of course, but it is also a curse for the people of Israel, who are condemned by this model to live lives of perpetual insecurity, enmeshed in conflict and injustice. Anyone who thinks Israel can serve as a guide for India is either ignorant, or mad.

#BeyondTheHeadlines: ‘Israel Model’ Explained in 10 Points

Siddharth Varadarajan argues why the ‘Israel Model’ is not at all a model that countries, especially India, should adopt.

Last week, Indian Consul General Sandeep Chakravorty spoke at a gathering of Kashmiri Pandits in New York and said that Indians should follow the “Israeli model” in Kashmir. He suggested that India should learn from the Israeli occupation of Palestine.

In this episode of Beyond The Headlines, Siddharth Varadarajan argues why the ‘Israel Model’ is not at all a model that countries, especially India, should adopt. He lists the flaws of the ‘model’ in ten points, and concludes by saying that anyone thinking of adopting such a model in India is ‘uninformed’.

The Wire releases three episodes of #BeyondTheHeadlines, its show by Siddharth Varadarajan, every week on its YouTube channel. Make sure to subscribe here.

Indian Diplomat Wants ‘Israel Model’ in Kashmir, Sets Off Controversy

‘Kashmiri culture is Indian culture is Hindu culture … We have never used our strength as majority community, Sandeep Chakravorty, India’s consul general in New York, said in video recording.

New Delhi: A video recording of India’s consul general in New York advocating India follow the “Israeli model” in Kashmir has sent shockwaves across India’s diplomatic community and turned into an international incident with Pakistan’s Prime Minister Imran Khan terming the top diplomat’s comments as an example of India’s “fascist mindset”.

In a one-hour long video of an interaction with the “Kashmiri Hindu diaspora” in New York uploaded by filmmaker Vivek Agnihotri on his Facebook page, consul general Sandeep Chakravorty seems to be speaking as a representative of “Hindus” rather than “Indians” and appears to implicitly endorse Israel’s illegal policy – officially condemned by the Government of India – of blockading the Palestinians, placing restrictions on their movement and building Jewish settlements in occupied Palestinian territory.

‘Indian culture is Hindu culture’

Speaking of the need for Kashmiri Pandits to return to their homeland – their forced exodus from the Kashmir valley in 1990 following the onset of the insurgency there is widely acknowledged as one of the great injustices of independent India, on par with the massacre of Sikhs in November 1984 and the mass killing of Muslims in Gujarat in 2002 – Chakravorty said: “Kashmiri culture is Indian culture is Hindu culture… None of us can imagine an India without Kashmir,” he said, to claps from the audience.

Indian consul general in New York, Sandeep Chakravorty. Photo: CGI/NY

India had “made a strategic blunder of thinking that all of us think like us”, he added referring to a previous speaker who had mentioned that India takes along all religions.

“We should start thinking like the others. [That is] the only way we can beat them at their game… and that thinking is coming,” he added.

“We have never used our strength as majority community…. we have never [made] use of our Hindu culture… ancient civilisation in diplomacy. Now that we are using it, people are having problems”.

‘Remarks taken out of context’

In a tweet on Wednesday evening, Chakravorty said, “I have seen some social media comments on my recent remarks. My remarks are being taken out of context.”

However, he did not elaborate on what exactly had been taken out of context, given that the video recording of his remarks has been circulating on social media for a whole day.

In those remarks, he noted that there were had been international criticism about India’s move to remove Jammu and Kashmir’s autonomous status and put restrictions on movement and communication from United Nations Human Rights Council to US Congress. Rather, they should be looking at what’s happening in Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan, he said. “They don’t like that we are asserting ourselves”.

“I believe that that in my lifetime we will have our land back… not everybody can live in the United States. Our refugee brothers are living on the road.. refugee camps”.

Then, speaking about the return of Kashmiri Pandits to their homes in valley, he felt that they were prevented by “fear of life”.

Praising the Indian government’s decision of August 5, he said, “We have not taken such a big international risk only for an amendment”.

He added that the Indian government had successfully managed to “stall” international criticism.

“I believe the security conditions in Jammu and Kashmir will improve, it will allow the refugees to go back, and in your lifetime, you will be able to go back,” said Chakravarty.

The diplomat stated that they “will be able to find security, because we already have a model in the world”.

He asserted that the Indian government should also follow the policy of Israel, though he did not elaborate on which aspect or even its relevance – since Israel’s policies are those of a foreign occupier while India’s official stance is that Kashmir is an integral part of the country. “I don’t know why we don’t follow it. It has happened in the Middle East. If the Israeli people can do it, we can also do it”, he said.

Chakravarty added that “we have to push our leadership to do that”. “Give us some time… we will do it and that is the determination of this leadership. You know when Prime Minister was at Howdy Modi, he got the biggest applause when he said 370 and not everyone in that hall were Kashmiris”.

Earlier he had pointed out that the Jewish diaspora had retained their culture for over 2000 years and similarly asked Kashmiri Pandits to remember their own.

“What has happened on 5th August will have long term repercussions for Kashmiri people,” he concluded.

Imran Khan wades in

On Wednesday morning, Imran Khan tweeted about what he termed the “fascist mindset of the Indian govt’s RSS ideology”, providing a link to a news article published by Middle East Eye, a London-based media organisation about Chakravorty’s controversial remarks.

Till Modi, India chafed at Israel comparisons

India has traditionally pushed back on any comparison between Kashmir and Palestine. India has also always voted in favour of resolutions that have criticised Israel’s settlement policy.

While the Israeli government has always tried to suggest that New Delhi and Tel Aviv are in the same boat,  the Indian side has resisted facile comparisons. When Silvan Shalom, who was Israel’s deputy prime minister and foreign minister at the time, met leaders of the BJP-led government in Delhi in February 2004, he argued that the fence India was building along the LoC was no different from the ‘security fence’ Israel had erected to ‘protect’ itself from terrorist attacks – in reality, a monstrous wall built on Palestinian land.

Deputy Prime Minister and Foreign Minister of Israel Silvan Shalom calls on Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee in New Delhi on February 11, 2004. Photo: Wikimedia

Shalom’s hosts, including Atal Bihari Vajpayee, who was prime minister at the time, heard him out but rejected the comparison. They refused his request that India join Israel in telling the International Court of Justice not to take up the ‘security fence’ matter. Similarly, his demand that India declare Hamas and Hizbollah as terrorist organisations was not accepted.

But in 2016, Prime Minister Narendra Modi broke new ground by drawing a comparison between Israeli and Indian military actions. “Our army’s valour is being discussed across the country these days,” he told a political rally just after the September 2016 army action on terrorist launch pads across the Line of Control. “We used to hear earlier that Israel has done this. The nation has seen that the Indian Army is no less than anybody,”

While Palestine is seen in international law as territory under foreign – i.e. Israeli – occupation, Jammu and Kashmir is not. The United Nations, and many countries, regard the region as ‘disputed territory’ given the Pakistani and Chinese occupation over portions of it, but not ‘occupied territory’.

In August 2012, S.M. Krishna, as India’s external affairs minister, had called for an “end to illegal Israeli settlements in the occupied Palestinian territories and for an early and significant easing of restrictions on the free movement of persons and goods within Palestine”.

Since the NDA regime took over in May 2014, the India-Israel relationship has warmed up substantially, with reciprocal visits by prime ministers.

While there have not any separate statements on Israeli settlements so far, India has been party to multilateral documents that criticise Israel’s policy in Palestine.

“Calling on Israel to end its occupation of the Palestinian “Arab” territories it seized in 1967 and dismantle all the settlements built there including the settlements erected in the occupied East Jerusalem on the basis that, according to the international Law, they are illegal and illegitimate,” said the 2016 Manama declaration of the first Arab-India Cooperation Forum.

Questions by reporters to the Ministry of External Affairs on how the government saw Chakravorty’s comments have gone unanswered so far.