We owe it to humanity to see the rules of war are observed, no matter how tough a test the Israel-Hamas conflict proves. No set of crimes justifies another. To succumb to this principle would mean a never-ending cycle of violence.

For almost 4,000 years, most governments have insisted that if wars must be fought, there should be rules. The first known code, by the Babylonian king Hammurabi, laid down the principle on which all subsequent laws of war have been based: “To Prevent the Strong from Oppressing the Weak”.

During its assault, on Black Saturday, Hamas broke numerous laws of war, starting with its rocket fire into Israel, which made no attempt to discriminate between military and civilian targets, breaking article 13 of protocol II of the Geneva conventions. Its fighters allegedly murdered, tortured, and raped, breaking common article 3 of the Geneva conventions and articles 27 and 32 of the fourth convention. They also allegedly engaged in pillage and terrorism (33, fourth convention) and the taking of hostages (34, fourth, and article 8 of the Rome statute). Though this is harder to prove, these acts might have been motivated by genocidal intent, arguably also putting Hamas in breach of the genocide convention. Any of the people responsible who are captured should be tried for crimes against humanity.

In responding to this attack, Israel has also broken several laws of war. These crimes begin with the use of collective penalties against the people of Gaza (article 33 of the fourth convention and article 4 of protocol II). One aspect of this punishment appears to be the pattern of Israel’s bombing and shelling of Gaza.

“The emphasis is on damage and not on accuracy,” a spokesperson for the Israel Defense Forces announced, which looks to me like stated intent to commit a war crime. The war crime in this case is the damage to property: article 50 of the first Geneva convention, article 51 of the second Geneva convention and article 147 of the fourth Geneva convention. Many of the buildings hit, including numerous schools and health facilities, do not appear to qualify as military targets, despite Israeli claims that Hamas uses people as human shields. Such indiscriminate attacks contravene article 13, protocol II and article 53, fourth convention. The bombing of mosques breaks article 16 of protocol II.

Human Rights Watch claims that Israel has fired white phosphorus shells at Gaza and Lebanon during its counterattack, although this has been denied. White phosphorus munitions can legally be used on battlefields to make smokescreens, mark targets, or burn buildings, but it is considered an indiscriminate and terrible weapon, whose use in such cases might constitute a breach of the chemicals weapon convention.

The Israeli government has admitted cutting off essential supplies to Gaza. On 9 October, the defence minister, Yoav Gallant, stated: “I ordered a full siege on the Gaza Strip. No power, no food, no gas, everything is closed.” This is collective punishment. The energy minister, Israel Katz, appeared to confirm this when he wrote: “No electrical switch will be turned on, no water hydrant will be opened, and no fuel truck will enter until the Israeli abductees are returned home.” The siege also breaches articles 55, 56 and 59 of the fourth convention and article 14 of protocol II, which protects “objects indispensable to the survival of the civilian population”.

While the Israeli government could argue that instructing the people of Gaza City to leave is an attempt to protect them from bombardment, this directive constitute a breach of article 17 of protocol II, forbidding the forced movement of civilians, and of article 49 of the fourth convention on deportations and evacuations. Again, to judge by the statements of some officials, in the siege and attacks on Gaza there could be evidence of genocidal intent. The current fighting, of course, takes place in the context of Israel’s illegal occupation of Palestinian land, and the many subsidiary crimes associated with it.

No set of crimes justifies another

There are no excuses in war or ethics for crimes against humanity. There is never a legal reason to attack one person for the crimes of another, to confuse a people with their government or with the armed forces that claim to defend them, on either side of any conflict. The issue, as always, is enforcement, the most powerful countries customarily refusing to succumb to the rule of law. The laws of war, it seems, are for the little people.

So why bother? Why even mention war crimes, knowing that the charge is unlikely to be enforced against powerful perpetrators? Why not accept that war and atrocity are inextricable?

I will tell you why! Because it is upon these laws that aspects of our humanity hang. If we succumb to cynicism, if we are dissuaded by the hypocrisy of the dominant powers, if we cannot demand and hope for a better world, we accept the premise that might is right, and the powerful may treat the powerless however they wish. Because when we accept atrocities to be perpetuated by one side, this acceptation will be used to justify atrocities by another side, in a never-ending cycle of revenge and carnage.

… and this is exactly what is going on right now and has been happening since 1948 in this perpetual, never ending Palestinian-Israel conflict.

JMD

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J. Michael Dennis, ll.l., ll.m.

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People from Gaza are fearful of what’s to come

In different ways, the sentiment that the Palestinians are collectively responsible for the actions of Hamas in killing of about 1,300 Israelis and abduction of 199, and therefore deserve what is coming to them, has been echoed far beyond Israel’s borders. But the dehumanizing language spilling out of Israel and from some of its supporters abroad is of a type heard at other times and places that helped create a climate in which terrible crimes take place.

For years, Israeli leaders have advocated ethnic cleansing, with a discourse that portrays Palestinians as a fake people with no history that matters. Opinion polls show that significant numbers of Israelis view Arabs as “dirty”, “primitive”, and as not valuing human life. Generations of Israeli school children have been imbued with the idea that Arabs are interlopers and merely tolerated through the beneficence of Israel.

In 1989, Netanyahu lamented that Israel missed the opportunity presented by global attention on China’s repression of pro-democracy protests in Tienanmen square “to carry out mass expulsions among the Arabs of the occupied territories”.

In 2002 during the second intifada, the Tel Aviv newspaper Yedioth Ahronoth published a letter by Israeli children titled: “Dear soldiers, please kill a lot of Arabs”. The paper said dozens of such letters were sent by schoolchildren. Some of those same children are now enforcing the occupation in the West Bank where Israeli settlers have largely had a free hand to drive Palestinians off their land and out of their villages, and sometimes to beat and kill. And some will be headed into Gaza.

Today, Gaza is being bombarded.

Almost a thousand children have died. 50% of Palestinians are kids. The vehemently anti-Israel response from some parts of the left reflects a significant ideological evolution on the issue, especially among younger generations.

According to Spain’s Minister of Social Rights, given the attempted genocide carried out by the State of Israel, Netanyahu should be taken to an international criminal court for war crimes. And this opinion is now shared by many countries.

The foremost concern of western governments as the Israel-Hamas war enters a murderous second week is not the plight of Palestinians in Gaza. It is the alarming prospect of a swiftly spreading conflict pitting Israeli and US forces against Iran and its militia proxies. But Israel will not be stopped. A high-risk, full-scale ground offensive into northern Gaza is imminent, and most western leaders surely wish it wasn’t happening.

Israel is now pulverizing the Gaza territory

The Israeli government’s mass evacuation order from northern Gaza is an ostensibly humanitarian act done in an utterly inhumane way. The order requires 1.1 million people to flee their homes in northern Gaza in advance of an imminent Israeli ground invasion, the next step in the Israeli response to the horrendous Hamas massacre and abduction of Israeli civilians on 7 October.

Warring parties, if possible, are supposed to give “effective advance warning of attacks”. Yet the Israeli order will compound the suffering of the Palestinian civilians of Gaza. It may also begin an illegal process of ethnic cleansing.

The threat in northern Gaza is plenty real as Israeli bombers pulverize neighborhoods in attacks that appear designed less to pinpoint Hamas fighters than to collectively punish the civilian population of Gaza, the same population that has endured years of Hamas’s military dictatorship and had no say in Hamas’s decision to slaughter Israeli civilians.

There is nothing utopian about insisting that the Israeli military abide by the requirements of international humanitarian law. These requirements are not a concoction of human rights groups. They are rules agreed to by all governments including Israel’s.

For the sake of Palestinian civilians, the Western governments that are embracing Israel’s unquestionable right to respond to Hamas’s vicious assault should also insist that Israel abide by the same rules that make Hamas’s targeting of civilians an unlawful way to fight against Israel’s occupation.

JMD

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J. Michael Dennis, ll.l., ll.m.

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‘Only the beginning’ says Netanyahu

Nothing can justify the horrific attacks Israel suffered last week. But those attacks cannot justify an unlimited destruction of Gaza and its people. The imposition of sieges that endanger the lives of civilians by depriving them of electricity, food and water is prohibited under international humanitarian law, as are indiscriminate military attacks and forced deportation of people.

Gaza is a small, closed, and besieged area that is being bombarded, with nowhere safe to go. All parties must immediately cease violations of international law, respect human dignity, provide civilians safe passage, and allow humanitarian agencies to reach those trapped in this conflict.

The international community must shoulder its responsibility to address the root causes of the current escalation, including five decades of occupation and annexation pursued by Israel, and identify viable paths to prevent further violations of international law, human suffering, and bloodshed.

Terrorism is never and never will be an answer to terrorism.

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J. Michael Dennis, ll.l., ll.m.

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Sheikh Yassin, the Hamas Founder and Spiritual Leader

Assassinated March 22, 2004, by the Israeli forces while he was being wheeled out of an early morning prayer session in Gaza city, Yassin, 67, was the founder and spiritual leader of Hamas.

Born near the city of Ashkelon, now part of Israel, and moved to Gaza as a refugee after the state of Israel was created in 1948. Paralyzed in a childhood accident, he lived his life confined to a wheelchair.

As a student in Egypt, he joined the Muslim Brotherhood, a social and political movement that was outlawed by Egypt in 1954. He was arrested by Egyptian authorities in 1965. After returning to Gaza, Yassin had by 1968 become a leader of the Muslim Brotherhood. In the 1980s, his group was supported by Israel as an alternative to Yasir Arafat’s Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO). Yassin established Hamas at the beginning of the first intifada in 1987.

He was arrested by Israel in 1989 and sentenced to life imprisonment for ordering attacks on Israeli soldiers. But he was released in 1997 by then-prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu in exchange for two agents from Mossad, Israel’s intelligence organization, who were captured in Jordan after a failed attempt to assassinate other Hamas leaders. Israel has tried to kill Yassin before; in September 2003 it dropped a bomb on a building where he was meeting with other Palestinian leaders. Yassin escaped that attack with light injuries.

An unlikely leader

Ahmed Yassin was an unlikely leader. Twisted awkwardly in a rusting wheelchair, his tiny body racked by a fit of coughing, in a 1988 interview, he explained quietly why, in the name of Islam, the Palestinians must maintain their armed struggle against Israel.

Despite his frail appearance, Sheikh Yassin spoke with an authority based on unshakeable faith. “If we want a Palestinian state we must have Palestinian land,” he insisted. “There is no point in making a state on paper. Our state will be Islamic.”

Nine months into the uprising in the Israeli-occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip, the crippled sheikh, and others like him represent a powerful opposition to those who seek to translate the sacrifices of the intifada into concrete political gains.As the PLO abroad agonised over whether to declare Palestinian independence unilaterally, form a government-in-exile, or amend the movement’s covenant, Muslim radicals in the occupied territories were making it clear that they opposed any concessions.

Sheikh Yassin was the spiritual leader of the Islamic Resistance Movement, which was born and bred in the squalor and misery of Gaza and encouraged, or at least ignored, by the Israelis, until they realised belatedly it would not supplant the PLO.

The movement, known by its Arabic acronym as Hamas, has been active since the intifada erupted. Occasionally it has challenged the mainstream, PLO-backed United National Leadership of the Uprising and called for its own strike days and protests.

However, as the PLO faced up to the challenge of matching months of sustained unrest with politically imaginative ideas, Hamas has become firmer in its views, raising the old spectre of divisions within the Palestinian ranks at a time when the need for unity has become a byword.

Leaflet number 25 issued by the United Leadership condemned Hamas for “serving the enemy”. Independent strike calls were described as “an imposition of authority on the street by force”.

Hamas’ ideas are influenced by the Muslim Brotherhood organisations in Jordan and Egypt. Its activists in the occupied territories have been blamed in the past for attacking left-wing, PLO-backed institutions.

Secularism, democracy, and other planks of PLO ideology were utterly alien. Its manifesto stated: “There is no solution to the Palestine problem except through Jihad.”

The Hamas manifesto approvingly quoted the notorious antisemitic forgery, the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, and warns of Israeli plans to conquer Arab and Muslim lands “from the Nile to the Euphrates”.

Sheikh Yassin was slightly more guarded, but there was no mistaking for his vision of the future: “It is not enough to have a state in the West Bank and Gaza,” he argued. “The best solution is to let all, Christians, Jews and Muslims, live in Palestine, in an Islamic state.”

Allah, he believes, was on his movement’s side. “When oppression increases,” the sheikh explained in his elegant, classical Arabic, “people start looking for God.”

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J. Michael Dennis, ll.l., ll.m.

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Today and tomorrow, like it or not, the future belongs to crowds.

We are now living in a society where there are too many chiefs and not enough indians.

Remember the images of the Chinese pro-democracy protesters dispersed by troops in Tienanmen Square; the images of the several million mourners streaming through the streets of Tehran to the funeral of Ayatollah Khomeini; the images of a “tent city” emerging in Tompkins Square Park; the images of hundreds of English soccer fans penned against a chain-link fence during a match at Hillsborough Stadium in Sheffield; the images of the January 6 United States Capitol attack?

Our world is now defined by images of crowds to rival those of the past: people waiting in mile-long lines at food banks; police using tear gas to disperse protesters; thousands of people gathered in support of Black Life Matters, Pro-life, LGBTQ rights and so on. More than ever, the protests of the past few years have shown that the most immediate and dramatic way for people to register discontent and call for change is by massing in the streets in frank and perilous defiance of the establishment and public order.

More than ever, people are standing in the streets rather that in the voting polls.

A dire consequence: governments, legislators and politicians are no longer adopting legislations and policies to build a better society, they are doing it to please the crowds and make sure to be re-elected and maintain their own personal power. To make things worse, news media in search of better ratings, are throwing oil on the fire: news commentators are no longer reporting, they are commenting; the more incipient and incendiary they are, the more profit. The real problem of the world today is not the Covid-19, the real problem is the degeneracies and degeneration of the people.

Imbecility is now the trademark of most of our populations.

Among the younger generation, progressive values are hegemonic. On issues ranging from LGBTQ and women’s rights to anti-racism and immigration, younger people are attempting to communicate their moral values on social media to the older generation.

Our world is getting really crazy, perhaps the most astounding year in generations, a time of norm-shattering abnormalities with an unlimited potential of destruction that might culminate in world-wide conflicts.

Based on the crisis-infused year we are in now; it is easy to predict that the balance of 2023 will unfold with even more craziness and long forgot aberrations. What we need is, as for the deluge, the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, a major modern upheaval that would purge the earth from all the Trumps of this world, from all the malefactors of an evil society.

Michel Ouellette JMD, ll.l., ll.m.
Systemic Strategic Planning / Regulatory Compliance / Crisis & Reputation Management

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Michel Ouellette / J. Michael Dennis is a Former Attorney, a Trial Scientist, a Crisis & Reputation Management Expert, a Public Affairs & Corporate Communications Specialist, a Warrior for Common Sense and Free Speech.

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