Adekeye Adebajo | Gaza as a mirror of Iraq and Afghanistan

Current events in Gaza feel like Groundhog Day. Following a horrific attack by Palestinian Hamas militants in southern Israel on October 7 that killed 1,400 Israelis and resulted in the kidnapping of over 200 hostages, hardline Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, launched a relentless bombardment of the strip in which 2.3 million Palestinians live in an open-air prison.

Israeli attacks have killed over 10,000 Palestinians – including 4,104 children at an average rate of 132 a day – as well as 92 staff of the UN relief agency, and 41 journalists. Homes, hospitals, mosques, churches, schools, ambulances, and the Jabalia and Bureij refugee camps have all been bombed. This was the fifth war between Israel and Hamas since 2008. The previous four had resulted in 5,365 Palestinian fatalities to 308 Israeli dead. Israeli human rights group, B’Tselem, estimated that 87 per cent of the 40,000 fatalities of this conflict between December 1987 and April 2021 have been Palestinian.

After the recent Hamas attack, Israeli defence minister, Yoav Gallant, noted: “We are fighting human animals and we act accordingly,” before calling for a total blockade of Gaza with “no electricity, no food, no water, no fuel”. Determined to eliminate Hamas, a daily aerial bombardment has continued in which 165,000 Palestinian homes have been destroyed, and 1.5 million Palestinians (75 per cent Gaza’s population) internally displaced. Tel Aviv further asked 1.5 million northern Gazans to move South or be considered accomplices to terrorism, even as it continued to bomb southern Gaza.

Human Rights Watch has noted that such collective punishment constitutes a war crime. After being criticised for being slow to demand a ceasefire, the UN has finally found its voice, cautioning against “mass ethnic cleansing”, condemning “crimes against humanity”, and even warning against a “risk of genocide against Palestinians”. The world body has estimated that 670,000 Israeli citizens now live in 130 illegal settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem.

ABANDONED USUAL CAUTION

While lambasting Hamas’ attacks as unjustifiable and calling for the release of Israeli hostages, Portuguese UN Secretary General, António Guterres, abandoned his usual caution to note that: “The attacks by Hamas did not happen in a vacuum. The Palestinian people have been subjected to 56 years of suffocating occupation. They have seen their land steadily devoured by settlements and plagued by violence; their economy stifled; their people displaced and their homes demolished.” Guterres highlighted “clear violations of international humanitarian law”, before reminding UN delegates that “even war has rules”. An enraged Israel accused Guterres of “blood libel”, and called for his resignation.

Navi Pillay, the South African former UN High Commissioner for Human Rights and the current chair of the UN-mandated Independent Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory, has called for the protection of Palestinian and Israeli civilians, arguing that the root causes of the conflict involving systematic discrimination against Palestinians – including the harassment and killing of civilians and journalists – must be urgently addressed by ending the Israeli occupation and allowing Palestinians their right to self-determination. She further requested the International Criminal Court to investigate crimes in Palestinian territories.

Israel must be careful to avoid repeating America’s failed two-decade counter-terrorism campaign. After the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington, DC, that killed 3,000 Americans in September 2001, the administration of George W. Bush launched a global “war on terror” in which it cautioned that whoever was not with the US was with the “terrorists”.

Two wars were launched into Afghanistan and Iraq which resulted in 440,000 civilian deaths, while utterly failing to eliminate terrorism in both countries. Instead, 22 years later, Washington has spent an estimated $4 trillion on both wars and endured a humiliating withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021, leaving the Taliban to take power shortly after. As the Irish UN Special Rapporteur on the promotion and protection of human rights, Fionnuala Ní Aoláin, recently noted, America’s “war on terror” resulted in violations of international law such as torture (in Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib prisons), was counterproductive, and fostered the conditions for terrorism to flourish.

TACKLE GRIEVANCES

The grievances that fuel terror thus need to be tackled for any effective counter-terrorism strategy to succeed. Israel’s siege of Gaza will surely create a new generation of aggrieved terrorists. Equally worrying for the West is that, having struggled enormously to mobilise diplomatic support in the global South to condemn Russia’s invasion of Ukraine last February, the unconditional support of most Western states for Israel is now laying bare the double standards at the heart of an Orwellian international system in which some states are widely perceived to be more equal than others.

It is estimated that 10,000 Ukrainian civilians have died in 20 months of conflict, compared to a similar number in Gaza in one month. Rather than calling for a ceasefire and urging the urgent delivery of humanitarian assistance to the besieged Palestinian population in Gaza, most Western countries have instead promoted a perverse provision of bombs and bread to the territory.

Israel’s main weapons supplier – the US – has sent two aircraft carrier strike groups to the region in an unsubtle attempt to intimidate Iran, a supporter of Hamas and Lebanon’s Hizbollah. The pro-Palestinian “Arab Street” is growing increasingly restive at its 22 feckless governments. In a recent non-binding vote at the UN General Assembly, 120 countries demanded the protection of Palestinian civilians and an end to the Israeli siege of Gaza; 45 states abstained; while only 14 were against. The vote eloquently demonstrated Washington and Tel Aviv’s diplomatic isolation. Israel must thus temper anger with wisdom. Its American ally has lessons to share, having seen this movie before in Afghanistan and Iraq. We all know how it ends.

- Professor Adekeye Adebajo is a senior research fellow at the University of Pretoria’s Centre for the Advancement of Scholarship in South Africa. Send feedback to columns@gleanerjm.com.