Will Israel be Brought to Book?

Evidence of the scale of Israel's war crimes in its January onslaught on Gaza is becoming unanswerable. Clancy Chassay's three films
investigating allegations against Israeli forces in the Gaza strip,
released by the Guardian today, include important new accounts of the
flagrant breaches of the laws of war that marked the three-week
campaign - now estimated to have left at least 1,400 Palestinians,
mostly civilians, and 13 Israelis dead.

The films provide
compelling testimony of Israel's use of Palestinian teenagers as human
shields; the targeting of hospitals, clinics and medical workers,
including with phosphorus bombs; and attacks on civilians, including
women and children - sometimes waving white flags - from hunter-killer
drones whose targeting systems are so powerful they can identify the
colour of a person's clothes.

Naturally, the Israeli occupation
forces' spokesperson insists to Chassay that they make every effort to
avoid killing civilians and denies using human shields or targeting
medical workers - while at the same time explaining that medics in war
zones "take the risk upon themselves". By banning journalists from
entering Gaza during its punitive devastation of the strip, the Israeli
government avoided independent investigations of the stream of war
crimes accusations while the attack was going on.

But now
journalists and human rights organisations are back inside, doing the
painstaking work, the question is whether Israel's government and
military commanders will be held to account for what they unleashed on
the Palestinians of Gaza - or whether, like their US and British
sponsors in Iraq and Afghanistan, they can carry out war crimes with
impunity.

It's not as if Clancy's reports are unique or uncorroborated by other evidence. Last week, the Israeli newspaper Ha'aretz reported
that a group of Israelis soldiers had admitted intentionally shooting
dead an unarmed Palestinian mother and her two children, as well as an
elderly Palestinian woman, in Gaza in January. As one explained: "The
lives of Palestinians, let's say, is something very, very less
important than the lives of our soldiers. So as far as they are
concerned they can justify it that way".

They also tally with testimony
of other Israeli soldiers from the Givati Shaked battalion, which
operated in the Gaza city suburb of Zeitoun, that they were told to
"fire on anything that moves". The result was that one family, the
Samunis, reported losing 29 members after soldiers forced them into a
building that subsequently came under fire - seven bleeding to death
while denied medical care for nearly three days. The Helw and Abu Zohar
families said they saw members shot while emerging from their homes
carrying white flags. "There was definitely a message being sent", one
soldier who took part in the destruction of Zeitoun told the Times.

Or take the case of Majdi Abed Rabbo - a Palestinian linked to Fatah and no friend of Hamas - who described to the Independent
how he was repeatedly used as a human shield by Israeli soldiers
confronting armed Hamas fighters in a burned-out building in Jabalya in
the Gaza strip. The fact of Israeli forces' use of human shields is
hard to gainsay, not least since there are unambiguous photographs of
several cases from the West Bank in 2007, as shown in Chassay's film.

Last week Human Rights Watch wrote to European Union foreign ministers calling for
an international inquiry into war crimes in Gaza. In the case of
Israel, the organisation cited the siege of Gaza as a form of
collective punishment; the use of artillery and white phosphorus in
densely populated civilian areas, including schools; the shooting of
civilians holding white flags; attacks on civilian targets; and "wanton
destruction of civilian property".

Israel and others also accuse
Hamas of war crimes. But while both Human Rights Watch and Amnesty
International have echoed that charge, particularly in relation to the
indiscriminate rocketing of towns such as Sderot, an exhaustive
investigation by Human Rights Watch has found no evidence, for example,
of Hamas using human shields in the clearly defined legal sense of
coercion to protect fighters in combat. And as Richard Falk, the UN
Special Rapporteur on Palestinian Human Rights, argued recently,
any attempt to view the two sides as "equally responsible" is an
absurdity: one is a lightly-armed militia, effectively operating
underground in occupied territory - the other the most powerful army in
the region, able to pinpoint and pulverise targets with some of the
most sophisticated weaponry in the world.

There is of course no chance that the UN security council will authorise the kind of International Criminal Court war crimes indictment
now faced by Sudan's leaders over Darfur. Any such move would certainly
be vetoed by the US and its allies. And Israel's own courts have had no
trouble in the past batting away serious legal challenges to its army's
atrocities in the occupied territories. But the use of universal
jurisdiction in countries such as Spain or even Britain is making
Israeli commanders increasingly jumpy about travelling abroad.

With
such powerful evidence of violations of the rules of war now emerging
from the rubble of Gaza, the test must be this: is the developing
system of international accountability for war crimes only going to
apply to the west's enemies - or can the western powers and their
closest allies also be brought to book?