Det danske Fredsakademi
Kronologi over fredssagen og international politik 22. november
2012 / Timeline November 22, 2012
Version 3.5
21. November 2012, 23. November 2012
11/22/2012
Protester mod the Western Hemispheric Institute for Security and
Cooperation,
USA.
11/22/2012
Collective Punishment And The Blocked Of Gaza
By John Scales Avery
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 limitless military and financial backing of Israel,
the United States shares the blame for allowing Israel to create an
Apartheid state even more gruesome than the one that the world
unanimously condemned in South Africa.
11/22/2012
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