{"id":1822,"date":"2015-09-10T02:10:05","date_gmt":"2015-09-10T00:10:05","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.jonathan-cook.net\/blog\/?p=1822"},"modified":"2015-09-10T09:40:44","modified_gmt":"2015-09-10T07:40:44","slug":"the-ways-israeli-war-crimes-buy-good-will","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.jonathan-cook.net\/blog\/2015-09-10\/the-ways-israeli-war-crimes-buy-good-will\/","title":{"rendered":"The ways Israeli war crimes buy good will"},"content":{"rendered":"

I recently interviewed Jeff Halper about his excellent new book, War Against the People<\/em>, which examines\u00a0the way Israel has crafted an indispensable role for itself doing what Halper calls “niche-filling” in the “war on terror”.<\/p>\n

Put in the\u00a0simplest terms, Halper’s argument is that Israel develops, refines and tests things \u2013 weapons, missile interception systems, surveillance, crowd control, biometric data collection, new interpretations of international law \u2013 using the Palestinians as guinea pigs. The occupied territories are\u00a0test beds, demonstrating\u00a0how well such\u00a0“innovations” work in the field. That\u00a0knowledge and experience can then be sold on to other international players, including, of course, the biggest: the United States.<\/p>\n

Craig Murray, a former British ambassador (one who went rogue, from the British government’s point of view) has a very interesting post about the latest efforts of David Cameron’s government to justify\u00a0the extra-judicial murder of two Britons in Syria over the summer by claiming that\u00a0such actions\u00a0accord with\u00a0international law. The US began\u00a0doing similar things in the Middle East to its citizens, also using drones, a few\u00a0years\u00a0earlier.<\/p>\n

Israel, of course, led the way decades ago on this\u00a0kind of murder from the skies, before most people had heard of drones. Israel refers to these murders\u00a0as “targeted assassinations”, and has spent the intervening period trying to persuade the world that they are\u00a0legal in international law.<\/p>\n

I have been covering the Israel-Palestine conflict long enough to remember a time when no one took that argument seriously. In fact, Israel was regularly castigated by the US and others for carrying out such attacks, perhaps most famously in 2002 when it dropped a one-tonne bomb on a residential neighbourhood of Gaza, killing at least 10 children as they slept, as it “targeted” Hamas leader Salah Shehadeh.<\/p>\n

Then 9\/11 happened and the US, backed by the UK,\u00a0launched\u00a0its\u00a0endless\u00a0“war on terror”. Usefully, Israel had been\u00a0there long before\u00a0and had a blueprint for how to conduct such a sustained offensive. After all, it had been waging its own war on terror \u2013 aka an illegal, belligerent occupation \u2013 against the Palestinians for decades.<\/p>\n

It is worth bearing all this in mind as you read Murray’s piece (and I recommend you do) on the execution of the two Britons in Syria. I don’t know what drones were used by the UK but there has to be a good chance they were made by Israel. Britain\u00a0is the biggest importer of drones in the world, and most\u00a0of them come\u00a0from Israel \u2013 in fact, 55 were\u00a0bought<\/a>\u00a0by the UK between 2010 and 2014. But Israel’s role in this is about much more than the hardware, as Murray’s post illustrates.<\/p>\n

What did Tony Blair and Jack Straw do back in 2003 when they needed to support the US in its illegal attack and invasion of Iraq? Unfortunately for them, international law is clear\u00a0about\u00a0such attacks, just as it is about extra-judicial murder\u00a0on foreign soil. An unprovoked attack on another state \u2013 one that is not in self-defence from an imminent and credible threat \u2013 \u00a0is a war crime. In fact, it is worse than that: it is defined as “the supreme war crime”.<\/p>\n

That is the advice Blair and Straw received when they tried to get their in-house lawyers to sanction the attack.<\/p>\n

So what\u00a0did they\u00a0do?\u00a0They brought in\u00a0an outside expert. They turned to Daniel Bethlehem, a lawyer beloved of Israeli prime ministers Ariel Sharon and Benjamin Netanyahu, as well as the Israeli army. He had spent many years advising\u00a0the Israeli military as it tried to develop new legal principles that justify states using massive firepower that kills chiefly civilians. That nonchalance you see from Israeli officials every time Israel murders hundreds of children in Gaza relies on the legal sophistry provided by rent-an-excuse\u00a0lawyers like Bethlehem.<\/p>\n

Israel and its enablers\u00a0have tried to create a loophole in international law, arguing that an “imminent” threat exists \u2013 whether from a country like Iraq or two blokes\u00a0with guns in Syria \u2013\u00a0and justifies\u00a0self-defence even if the country has no weapons that pose a credible threat or the people killed aren’t involved in an\u00a0attack on the aggressor state, imminent or not.<\/p>\n

This is exactly the kind of tough, thankless work Israel has been doing that, in our age of permanent “war on terror”, is highly marketable. States buy weapons systems and they pay people like Bethlehem big bucks to put\u00a0their names to\u00a0bits of paper spouting nonsense about international law.<\/p>\n

But most of all, as Halper argues, this kind of usefulness is not paid for in hard currency. It buys good will. Lots of it. Which is why you won’t see the British or US governments making life hard for Israel soon, however much their own publics may be\u00a0outraged by Israel’s behaviour.<\/p>\n

www.craigmurray.org.uk\/archives\/2015\/09\/exclusive-i-can-reveal-the-legal-advice-on-drone-strikes-and-how-the-establishment-works<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I recently interviewed Jeff Halper about his excellent new book, War Against the People, which examines\u00a0the way Israel has crafted an indispensable role for itself doing what Halper calls “niche-filling” in the “war on terror”. Put in the\u00a0simplest terms, Halper’s argument is that Israel develops, refines and tests things \u2013 weapons, missile interception systems, surveillance, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[22,55,10],"class_list":{"0":"post-1822","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-uncategorized","7":"tag-britain","8":"tag-israel-war-crimes","9":"tag-war-on-terror"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jonathan-cook.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1822","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jonathan-cook.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jonathan-cook.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jonathan-cook.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jonathan-cook.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1822"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.jonathan-cook.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1822\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jonathan-cook.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1822"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jonathan-cook.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1822"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jonathan-cook.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1822"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}