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CounterPunch
March 15,
2003
A War Without Balance
Rachel Corrie,
Nuha Sweidan and Israeli War Crimes
By STEVE NIVA
The Israeli bulldozer that ran over and
killed American peace activist Rachel Corrie, 23, in the Gaza
Strip today had killed before. A few weeks ago, on March 3, an
Israeli bulldozer killed a nine-month pregnant Palestinian woman,
Nuha Sweidan, while destroying the house next door in a dilapidated
Gaza refugee camp. Palestinian witnesses said that Mrs. Sweidan,
33, bled to death under the rubble as she cradled her 18-month-old
daughter. Her unborn baby also died.
Rachel Corrie and Nuha Sweidan probably
never met, but they will forever be linked as victims of Israel's
35-year occupation of Palestinian lands in the West Bank and
Gaza Strip.
They are both victims of Israeli war
crimes. The Geneva Conventions expressly prohibits attacks on
civilian populations regardless of the motivation, even if in
retaliation for attacks on its own civilians. To attack civilian
populations intentionally is a war crime. Both Rachel Corrie
and Nuha Sweidan were killed during military actions against
a civilian population, in this case, during a house demolition.
Since June 2002, the Israeli army has
destroyed more than 150 houses belonging to Palestinians allegedly
involved in attacks, a policy human rights groups describe as
collective punishment and which has drawn US criticism in the
past.
This past month, Israel nearly set a
record for killing Palestinians, mostly  civilians,
in a single month. According to the Palestinian Ministry of Health,
Israeli assaults killed 82 Palestinians, of them 50 in the Gaza
Strip and 32 in the West Bank, wounding an additional 616 persons.
Israeli soldiers also killed several Palestinian children and
3 medical staff as they sought to attend to wounded. Now, they
have killed an American peace activist. In this same period,
only six Israeli's were killed, all of them soldiers.
Why so many civilian casualties?
These killings are the product of Israeli
Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's escalation of Israeli Army assaults
on Palestinian population centers following his re-election on
January 28. Since that time, Israeli forces have largely focused
their wrath on Gaza. They have conducted unprecedented armored
military operations in Gaza city centers, pursued suspected militants
deep into refugee camps and deployed bulldozers to destroy dozens
of building and homes. This latter type of operation led to Rachel
Corrie and Nuha Sweidan's deaths.
Israeli sympathizers may object that
these assaults and civilians killings are justified in response
to Palestinian suicide bombings but international law is clear
that attacks on civilians are prohibited under any circumstance.
Palestinian suicide bombings are clearly
war crimes, even though some Palestinians claim they are justified
in response to Israeli massacres and the illegal occupation of
Palestinian land. However, Israeli military assaults that systematically
result in civilian deaths are also war crimes, regardless of
their justification. Both are reprehensible and must be condemned.
Moreover, few independent observers accept
that Israel's assaults on Palestinian civilian centers in the
past two months correlate as responses to suicide bombs. These
operations began nearly a month after the January 5 suicide bomb
that killed over 20 Israeli's in Tel Aviv. The only other suicide
bomb this year came on March 5, well after the Israeli campaign
in Gaza was underway. Furthermore, in both cases the suicide
bombers came from the West Bank, not Gaza.
The reality is that Rachel Corrie and
Nuha Sweidan will also be forever linked as victims of the extremist
Israeli leader Ariel Sharon's relentless war on Palestinians
on behalf of Israeli settlements and his vision of a Greater
Israel that seeks total control of all of historic Palestine.
The escalating assaults on Gaza over
the past month indicate that Ariel Sharon is preparing the way
for an invasion and reconquest of the Gaza Strip to complement
his reconquest of the West Bank last April. With the West Bank
now firmly under Israeli control, Gaza has become the sole remaining
area of armed Palestinian resistance to Israel. It stands in
the way of Sharon imposing a settlement on the Palestinians that
will assign them small, disconnected Bantustans surrounded by
hundreds of Israeli settlements. Ariel Sharon was the original
architect of the massive expansion of settlements after 1978
and continues to be their main patron.
Sharon is well known for his cold, calculating,
tactical acumen, both as a General and as a politician. He is
also known as a ruthless fighter and has been accused of crimes
against humanity for his role in the massacre of nearly a thousand
Palestinian women, children and elderly people in Beirut in 1982.
He is well aware of the sympathy Israel
has received in response to the brutal suicide bomb attacks over
the past few years. He knows that the world is focused on the
impending war in Iraq. Thus, he has calculated that the time
is right to set in motion the reoccupation of Gaza, even if it
provokes further suicide bombings because he can use them as
a pretext for even larger actions.
Menachem Klein, an Israeli political
scientist at Bar Ilan University near Tel Aviv, outlined the
logic of Sharon's actions in a recent Christian Science Monitor
article (13 Mar 2003).
"These raids can be a kind of rehearsal,
with the idea to arrest someone, but also to see how to get in
and out, what tactics to use. A rehearsal on live people. And
the thinking is that if the world gets used to these short-term
reoccupations, it will digest the long-term one."
Rachel Corrie, Nuha Sweidan, over a hundred
Palestinians and scores of Israeli civilians are the victims
of this live rehearsal.
It is true that Palestinian suicide bombers
have helped contribute to this cycle of violence through their
own vicious acts. Indeed they have murdered women, children and
innocent civilians as well.
However, this is not a symmetrical conflict.
Israel dominates the lives and land of over 3 million Palestinians
through massive military assaults, imprisonment of thousands,
torture and systematic starvation policies that have lead to
a major humanitarian crisis in many areas of the West Bank and
Gaza Strip. In fact, Rachel had been working with other members
of the International Solidarity Movement (ISM) to defend a newly
dug water well from Israeli attempts to destroy it before she
was killed.
Moreover, since his return to power two
years ago, Ariel Sharon has systematically escalated Israeli
military assaults and assassinations in search of a military
solution, despite the waves of suicide bombings, in order to
achieve a very clear set of political objectives. At the top
of the list has been the destruction of any base of Palestinian
political and military resistance to Israeli settlements and
permanent control of the land Israel occupied in 1967. Gaza is
his last objective.
There is no "balance" in this
conflict. It is time to call Israel into account for its war
crimes and time to stop Ariel Sharon from imposing his violent
dream of Greater Israel on Palestinians. It is time to stop the
needless deaths of Rachel Corrie, Nuha Sweidan and others, whether
Palestinian or Israeli, or now, American.
Steve Niva
is a Member of the Faculty at The Evergreen State College. He
teaches international politics and Middle East studies. He met
with Rachel Corrie before she left for Gaza in January and is
deeply saddened by her tragic and unnecessary death. He can be
reached at: niva@counterpunch.org
Editors' note: an excellent story in the Electronic
Intifada on the murder of Rachel Corrie is accompanied by
a series of photographs of Rachel confronting the bulldozer.
The disturbing photos clearly show that she was within plain
view of the driver. She was wearing a bright red coat and holding
a megaphone that she was using to warn the IDF man at the wheel
of the dozer.
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