Collective Punishment and the Blockade of Gaza

TRANSCEND MEMBERS, PALESTINE - ISRAEL, 26 Nov 2012

John Scales Avery – TRANSCEND Media Service

On Wednesday, November 14, 2012, Ahmed Jabari, leader of the military wing of Hamas, was assassinated by a targeted Israeli missile. Hours earlier, Jabas had received a draft of a permanent peace agreement with Israel. The assassination of Jabari must have been carefully planned in order for his whereabouts to have been known so accurately. The probable motive for the killing was to provoke the response that did indeed follow: the firing of Hamas rockets towards Israel. Benjamin Netanyahu’s government responded to the rockets with a massive attack on civilian targets in Gaza, a response that also seems to have been carefully planned in advance, the timing being motivated by the nearness of elections in Israel.

Under the Fourth Geneva Convention, collective punishment is war crime. Article 33 states that “No protected person may be punished for an offense that he or she did not personally commit.” Articles 47-78 also impose substantial obligations on occupying powers, with numerous provisions for the general welfare of the inhabitants of an occupied territory.

Thus Israel violated the Geneva Conventions by its collective punishment of the civilian population of Gaza in retaliation for the largely ineffective Hamas rocket attack which the Jabari assassination provoked. The larger issue, however, is the urgent need for lifting of Israel’s brutal blockade of Gaza, which has created what Noam Chomsky calls the  “the world’s largest open-air prison”.

Francis A. Boyle, Professor of International Law at the University of Illinois, states that “What we’re seeing in Gaza now, is pretty much slow-motion genocide against the 1.5 million people who live in Gaza… If you read the 1948 Genocide Convention, it clearly says that one instance of genocide is the deliberate infliction of conditions of life calculated to bring about the physical destruction of a people in whole or in part… And that’s exactly what has been done since the imposition of the blockade by Israel. ”

Because of its unconditional military, financial and media backing of Israel, the United States government shares the blame for allowing Israel to create an Apartheid state even more gruesome than the one that the world unanimously condemned when it existed in South Africa.

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John Scales Avery, Ph.D. is a member of the TRANSCEND Network and Associate Professor Emeritus at the H.C. Ørsted Institute, University of Copenhagen, Denmark. He received his training in theoretical physics and theoretical chemistry at M.I.T., the University of Chicago and the University of London. He is the author of numerous books and articles both on scientific topics and on broader social questions. His most recent book is “Crisis 21: Civilization’s Crisis in the 21st Century.”

Join the BDS-BOYCOTT, DIVESTMENT, SANCTIONS campaign to protest the Israeli barbaric siege of Gaza, illegal occupation of the Palestine nation’s territory, the apartheid wall, its inhuman and degrading treatment of the Palestinian people, and the more than 7,000 Palestinian men, women, elderly and children arbitrarily locked up in Israeli prisons.

DON’T BUY PRODUCTS WHOSE BARCODE STARTS WITH 729, which indicates that it is produced in Israel.    DO YOUR PART! MAKE A DIFFERENCE!

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This article originally appeared on Transcend Media Service (TMS) on 26 Nov 2012.

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One Response to “Collective Punishment and the Blockade of Gaza”

1. Collective Punishment and the Blockade of Gaza - Transcend | International and Comparative Justice | Scoop.it says:

   26 Nov 2012 at 21:37

   […] Collective Punishment and the Blockade of Gaza. BY TRANSCEND MEMBERS. by John Scales Avery – TRANSCEND Media Service. On Wednesday, November 14, 2012, Ahmed Jabari, leader of the military wing of Hamas, …  […]