De Israelische Terreur 133

'International Law at the Vanishing Point.
Richard Falk and Aslı Ü. Bâli.

Richard Falk, professor emeritus of international law and practice at Princeton University, is a visiting professor at the University of California-Santa Barbara. Aslı Ü. Bâli is the Irving S. Ribicoff Fellow at Yale Law School.

In the summer of 2006, two border incidents were invoked by Israel, with strong US diplomatic support and material assistance, to justify a prolonged military offensive in Gaza and a crushing “shock and awe” assault on Lebanon. The main international response, effectively orchestrated by Washington, was built around the bland assertion that Israel has the “right to defend itself.”
Of course, it does. But in the summer the unasked questions were “how,” “with what limits” and “by what means”? It is the role of international law to provide answers to such questions, sometimes not very precise answers, but at least guidelines, which commanders and sovereign governments have considerable latitude to interpret with reference to considerations of “military necessity.” What this means in practice is a rather broad margin of discretion in the international law of war that makes unlawful only clearly outrageous and unreasonable behavior, whether by states or by non-state actors engaged in armed struggle.
In the case of Israel’s summertime conflicts on its southern and northern borders, the international community, again led by Washington, swiftly condemned the actions of Israel’s “extremist” adversaries, and acquiesced in the tightening of existing sanctions upon them by legal and other means. Yet although Israel’s actions in both Gaza and Lebanon were plainly unlawful by international legal standards, there was less condemnation and no material sanction imposed upon Israel, least of all by the chief arbiter of international peace and security, the UN Security Council. The imbalance in the international response has gravely undermined the credibility and, ultimately, the enforceability of international legal norms, which are only norms to the degree that they are enforced without fear or favor.
Lawful Limits of Self-Defense
On June 25, 2006, fighters belonging to three Palestinian factions, including Hamas, tunneled under the fence separating the Gaza Strip from Israel at the Kerem Shalom border crossing and attacked the army post on the Israeli side. The Palestinians killed two soldiers and snatched a third, whom they spirited back into Gaza, where he presumably remains captive. In an announced attempt to retrieve the soldier, Israel has bombed bridges and a power plant in Gaza, stepped up artillery and aerial bombardment of sites believed to house the ineffective rocketeers of Hamas, launched multiple tank incursions into Gaza, arrested tens of Hamas parliamentarians without charge and locked down the sole point of transit for people and goods between Gaza and the outside world. According to the UN, over 300 Palestinians have been killed in the ongoing Israeli offensive.
Global media attention shifted northward on July 12, when Hizballah militants crossed into undisputed Israeli territory, killing three Israeli soldiers and abducting two others, with five additional soldiers being killed on Lebanese territory in the course of an attempted rescue operation. In the ensuing month-long war, Israel bombed bridges, roads, power plants and other civilian infrastructure in Lebanon, and conducted multiple strikes on Beirut neighborhoods and southern villages it dubbed “Hizballah strongholds.” Israel also imposed a comprehensive land, sea and air blockade upon Lebanon. Upwards of 1,000 Lebanese were killed, and nearly one million displaced, in the course of the bombardment, while 39 Israeli civilians were killed, and hundreds of thousands compelled to flee their homes, by Hizballah’s retaliatory rocket fire. The UN Security Council brokered a “cessation of hostilities” between Israel and Hizballah in mid-August, but not between Israel and the fighters in Gaza, where a low-level war continues to rage.
Against the background of these events, a nasty mind game emerged: Israel’s right to defend itself was improperly merged with Israel’s supposed right to act in “self-defense” as generally understood in international law. The trouble here was that the UN Charter and international law have restricted valid claims of self-defense to situations where a major “armed attack” has occurred, precisely to avoid authorizing wars or excessive force as legal responses to border incidents. Indeed, the World Court found US claims of collective self-defense unlawful in the important 1986 case of Nicaragua v. the United States, on the grounds that Nicaraguan assistance to the armed insurgency in El Salvador fell short of an “armed attack.” Understood in this context, Israel’s claimed right to large-scale attacks on Gaza and Lebanon in response to border skirmishes involving the capture of three soldiers is certainly invalid under the international law of self-defense.'

Lees verder: http://www.merip.org/mer/mer241/falk_bali.html