Several readers from various countries approached me recently claiming “They also deserve a homeland.” They were referring to the Jews; one of the emails even went as far as mentioning the “Jewish Heart.” In such a way they were trying to justify various Israeli actions I condemned in the website. Are they right? Do the Jews deserve a homeland and have the right to defend themselves no matter what? For the sake of this article, let’s look from the UN Partition Decision onwards; i.e. let’s assume the Jews had the right to found the State of Israel in its actual shape (for a detailed analysis of this see Is Israel Sovereign?). After assuming that, is my readers’ claim true? Do the Jews deserve a homeland?

Israel and Bolivia Torture

Israel and Bolivia Torture

Self-defense is an unalienable right. If someone attacks you on the street you have the right to defend yourself. There are many interpretations of what is an acceptable self-defense response, but almost everybody will accept that its proportionality is important. At its very minimum form, self-defense means publicly denouncing the aggressor or just blocking the attack. Most Christians would adopt either one of these options. Others preach for retribution, in the form of “an eye for an eye.” Does Israel defend itself in a proportionate way? Following the Israeli attack against Gaza between December 27, 2008 and January 18, 2009, a massacre known as “Operation Cast Lead,” the UN Human Rights Council (UNHRC) sanctioned the creation of a commission to investigate “all violations of international human rights law and international humanitarian law by the occupying power, Israel, against the Palestinian people.” On September 15, 2009, the commission presented the Report of the United Nations Fact Finding Mission on the Gaza Conflict to its mandating authority, the UNHRC. On October 16, 2009, the report was overwhelmingly adopted by the UN General Assembly. One of the key points in this extraordinary report is that Israel consistently acts in wild disproportion.

In Article 62 it states: “The tactics used by Israeli military armed forces in the Gaza offensive are consistent with previous practices, most recently during the Lebanon war in 2006. A concept known as the Dahiya doctrine emerged then, involving the application of disproportionate force and the causing of great damage and destruction to civilian property and infrastructure, and suffering to civilian populations;” in the following article it adds: “the Israeli military conception of what was necessary in a war with Hamas viewed disproportionate destruction and creating the maximum disruption in the lives of many people as a legitimate means to achieve not only military but also political goals.” This brutality was openly acknowledged by the Israeli authorities: “In 2004 and 2005, the Israeli Supreme Court, sitting as the High Court of Justice, ruled that some parts of the route of the Wall violated the principle of ‘proportionality’ in both Israeli and international law, causing harm to an ‘occupied population,’” adds the same report in article 185. Many more horrific examples are cited by the report but these are explicit enough. There is a Thai proverb that accurately describes Israeli behavior: “To ride an elephant to catch a grasshopper.”

Israel and Bolivia Torture | Rule of Evil

The abovementioned topic is related to what is known as “collective punishment,” a sanitized term that refers to an attack on the general population as a retribution of acts committed by individuals. Collective punishment is internationally recognized as a war crime. The UN commission found Israel guilty of it: “the Mission considers that it does not justify a policy of collective punishment of the civilian population of the Gaza Strip. The Mission is aware of the Government of Israel’s declaration of the Gaza Strip as a ‘hostile territory.’ Again, for the Mission, such a declaration does not relieve Israel of its obligations towards the civilian population of the Gaza Strip under international humanitarian law.” (Article 1305) Horrific examples were provided by the report (Article 1716): “…The firing of white phosphorus shells over the UNRWA compound in Gaza City is one of such cases in which precautions were not taken in the choice of weapons and methods in the attack and these facts were compounded by reckless disregard for the consequences. The intentional strike at the Al Quds hospital using high explosive artillery shells and using white phosphorous in and around the hospital also violated Articles 18 and 19 of the Fourth Geneva Convention. With regard to the attack against Al Wafa hospital, the Mission found a violation of the same provisions, as well as a violation of the customary law prohibiting against attacks which may be expected to cause excessive damage to civilians and civilian objects.” Israel intentionally fired illegal white phosphorous artillery shells on hospitals; is this the “Jewish Heart” my reader was referring to?

Then, Israel also favors attacks known as “extrajudicial killings,” in which people considered undesirable by the state of Israel are assassinated without a proper legal process. The best known example took place on September 25, 1997, when Khaled Mashal—a prominent Hamas leader—was the target of an assassination attempt carried out by the Israeli Mossad under orders of the Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Two Mossad agents carrying Canadian passports entered Jordan and injected Mashal with an unknown nerve toxin. A few days later, Netanyahu—who earned the title of bio-terrorist in this action—surrendered to international pressure and provided the antidote (see Mossad, Sonic Weapons & Khaled Mashal for more details). A similar event took place recently, when on March 9, 2012, the IDF launched an air-strike in Gaza, killing Zuhir al-Qaisi, also known as Abu Ibrahim, the leader of the Popular Resistance Committees, the organization that captured former IDF soldier Gilad Shalit (see Scary Sicarii: Israeli Extrajudicial Executions for more details). These are nothing but brutal attacks beyond the rule of law. They can’t be justified. As far as we know, both Khaled Mashal and Zuhir al-Qaisi are innocent and honest men, Israel is the obvious criminal in both cases.

Another striking characteristic of the Israeli administration is its claim to possess precognition powers. In other words, they claim to know a person is about to commit a crime and based on that would attack that person in a variety of ways. Recently I provided such an example at Minority Report: IDF arrests Palestinian prisoner released in Shalit swap. This claim of precognition not only leads to open crime committed by the state of Israel, it also undermines a basic principle of all legal systems in the world, on paper even of the Israeli one. Israel operates according to Criminal Law, also known as Penal Law, the law pertaining to crimes and punishment. The laws comprising this topic regulate the definition of offences found to have a sufficiently deleterious social impact and impose punishments on them. However, the law does not impose restrictions on society that physically prevents people from committing a crime in the first place.

Atop everything else, Israel openly operates intelligence networks collecting information on everybody, including its citizens. This is not only a violation of basic human rights but also inverts the rule of law, since it implies people are guilty unless proven otherwise, while most people on earth agree the opposite is true.

Back to the emails I got, one of them said: “Everybody has the right to look after his own interests.” That is true, but nobody has the right to do so at the expense of committing crimes against others. The State of Israel has proved beyond all doubt that it rejects even its own Rule of Law and has become thus an outlaw country. At that very moment it lost its right to judge, to punish, and eventually to exist. States do not exist for committing crimes, not even against non-citizens. A Jewish Heart would make its top priority to stop this inhuman, violent, heartless, horror-state.

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KIDNAPPED BY BOLIVIA!—I am being tortured by the Bolivian Government I have been declared a Political Prisoner of Bolivia, a country which does not respect human life. I am held in Bolivia illegitimately, violently and against my will. I am violated daily; please make this public in any possible way. Before writing to me, please read 15-Day Execution Order and the Bolivia section of the website.