Foreign Minister Penny Wong says Israel has a right to defend itself, and judging its security decisions from a distance is “very difficult”, as Israel’s government vows to cut off food and water to the blockaded Gaza Strip.
Well, looking at the Geneva convention and Article 8 “War Crimes” of the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, “Intentionally using starvation of civilians as a method of warfare by depriving them of objects indispensable to their survival, including wilfully impeding relief supplies as provided for under the Geneva Conventions.”
And one committing a crime doesn’t allow the other to do the same. So either get pissed at both sides for war crimes or get pissed at none. But trying to excuse war crimes for one side in a war is a disgustingly hypocritical thing to do.
So either get pissed at both sides for war crimes or get pissed at none.
Yeah, not many people are taking that step.
I tend to think of it this way, personally: stealing is wrong, but it’s more acceptable to steal when you’re poor than when you’re rich. Both sides are committing attrocities, but one does so to opress while the other to liberate themselves from opression. I will acknowledge that my understanding of the conflict is very limited though, so this might be oversimplified or outright incorrect.
There is no reason to supply the means of sustenance to an active enemy you are at war with.
In practical terms how do you organise aid for a state you’re at war with? How do you ensure the safety of your aid workers in a way that doesn’t involve your military, but also doesn’t just provide new hostages? How do you stop your own aid workers from getting in the way of military operations?
I guarantee you Israel wouldn’t do this if they had a better option, this will only radicalise the normal people who start to go hungry and thirsty.
In practical terms you avoid the situation entirely by not operating an open air prison for decades and indiscriminately bombing civilians, thereby breeding terrorists with nothing to loose, and then cutting off the food, water and electricity to civilians as a collective punishment.
You guarantee Israel wouldn’t do this if they had a better option? I think it’s far more likely that the far right in Israel have just been waiting for an excuse to do this.
Seems like not cutting off food water and electricity would be easier than “organizing aid”
Why should they provide those things to a group they are at war with? After their government slaughtered a bunch of civilians?
It wasn’t their government. It was an organisation started by an Israeli government at the time to combat the PLO
The flip side of that coin is it’s pretty bad to make a independent population, who can’t vote in your elections, totally dependent on you. Preventing them from having independent sources of water electricity and food. Preventing them from self-determination and self-governance.
This all ties back to the core issues here. There’s a population that has no autonomy, no say in its future, no say and it’s foreign policy, de facto non-citizens in the state they can’t participate in. That’s not a stable situation, in any society.
You understand food has to come from somewhere and Israel controls the sea, the air and most of the land while bombing the fuck out of the people and infrastructure.
That is a polite way of saying the optics of the situation are awful and you want to admonish your ally but not openly criticize them.
I would argue that it’s quite easy to judge, at any distance, the collective punishment of civilians through the withholding of the essentials of life.
We’ve a referendum this weekend largely on whether we’re ready to confront uncomfortable and complex consequences of a history of colonial violence. What’s more difficult is reconciling these sorts of statements from a government that says it is.
The Aboriginal tribes didn’t slaughter civilians, or rape and murder aid workers, to be fair.
We had a period of frontier wars that lasted 150 years. It was grossly asymmetric but the estimates for colonial casualties run into the thousands.
Were those casualties civilians though, or were they mostly soldiers? That’s the key difference.
And the Palestinian population at large has done that have they? Maybe we should judge the so called “settlers” for stealing peoples homes and having picnics while watching Palestinian protestors shot by IDF snipers? Or shall we just pretend that Israel has been the perfect “neigbour”?
