Israeli alibi for school attack: a lie you weren't supposed to believe

By Richard Seymour

Author of The Liberal Defense of Murder

Let's be clear about this. On 6 January, three UN-run schools in Gaza were attacked by Israeli forces, not just one. What is more, the previous day an Israeli bombing of a UN school had killed three members of the same family. This sort of killing can usually be dealth with in a perfunctory fashion ('we regret all loss of innocent life, but the responsibility belongs to those who use terror and hide among civilians...'). However, the massacre of 43 people in a UN school bearing flags and insignia and housing some 350 refugees from the fighting (many of whom had fled on orders from IDF leaflets dropped on the towns and cities), demanded a more considered explanation and justification. I just want to take a quick look at the explanations offered by Israeli spokespeople and its military.

The IDF's initial justification for the attack on the Al-Fakhura school was that Hamas had used the building to fire mortars from, and its tanks had responded. Implicit in this was an admission that they had targeted the school on purpose. The tank shells, presumably shot from quite nearby, were fired by soldiers operating under orders from command centres equipped with detailed targeting intelligence. As is now known, the Israeli military had the GPS coordinates not only of this UN school but of the other UN schools that it attacked. And the first thing the IDF let us know is that it was done on purpose. Their excuse was barbaric, of course. The idea that an invading force may attack a building filled with hundreds of terrorised civilians just in order to kill two of those resisting the invasion is nothing short of grotesque. 

But the fact that it was barbaric was part of the point: rather than bluntly condemning a war crime, you were invited to focus on whether Hamas would be so evil as to attack Israel's brave boys from within a civilian building. Because it is so frequently repeated you might be predisposed to assume that Hamas did indeed position its 'infrastructure of terror' among unsuspecting citizens but, whether you are so predisposed or not, you are already drawn into the macabre calculus of the murderer if you even get involved in that argument. You have tacitly accepted the logic in which war crimes are not merely acceptable, but actually appropriate, if the enemy really is as evil as Israel says. 

The usual suspects, of course, immediately embraced Israel's excuse: Israel's killing, they expostulated, merely demonstrates the ruthless, diabolical genius of Hamas. If anything, they added, the IDF was admirably restrained in its action. But it is doubtful that many others were taken in.

The second thing that the IDF claimed was that there were Hamas troops hiding inside the building, nestling among the refugees, thereby forcing the Israelis to slaughter the innocent. This is quite a different claim, and the first thing that would occur to any reasonable observer would be that the sudden embellishment reflected some sort of dishonesty ('the elaborations of a bad liar', as Hannibal Lecter would put it). Or perhaps there had been a failure by everyone to get their stories straight and stick to them. At any rate, the logic of the astounding claim that Israel acted in self-defense remained as tortuous as it had been. But Israel claimed to have identified the bodies of Hamas members, and even fed two names to the media, (so once again you were invited to get bogged down in the merits of Israel's claim rather than decide on an appropriate response to the slaughter).

The next part of the story is the most interesting. In order to get around the absurd idea that Hamas military operatives had sneaked into the building and launched mortars without anyone in the school noticing, Israel's spokespeople claimed that Hamas gunmen had taken over the UN building, taken the civilians hostage and used the base to fire mortars at Israeli soldiers. Mark Regev said it was a "very extreme example of how Hamas operates". Such a claim was obviously checkable in a matter of minutes. Any UN personnel present in the school at the time could easily say whether in fact they had all been suffering under Hamas captivity until Israel 'liberated' the building. 

The UN produced an emphatic denial, based on its own investigations, that there was ever any Hamas fighter in the building. By now, the fact that Israel has never provided any real evidence for its claims, which continue to shapeshift, comes into sharp focus. Moreover, since Israeli troops didn't visit the building or have access to the records of the deceased, it would be highly improbable that they would be able to not only name two of the dead, but also gather intelligence that proved they were members of Hamas' military wing, within such a short space of time.

So, the Israeli government topped that brazenness with a stroke of effrontery that is somehow not adequately captured by the word 'chutzpah'. Israel announced that as it was lodging a complaint with the UN for allowing the building to be secretly used by Hamas. Now it appears that Israeli diplomats admit that no rockets were fired from the school. They are now briefing that there was some mortar fire, but that it came from outside the school. Now, there is no evidence that there was any mortar fire at all, but perhaps you aren't really supposed to believe it. Actually, you were never supposed to believe any of it. There was no way that you were ever expected to be taken in by this pitiful subterfuge. They didn't even present a very convincing lie, or a very good case. 

What they did was tell you up front that they attacked a clearly marked UN school building filled with civilians on purpose, and then follow it up with a flimsy cover-story followed by an even more flimsy revised cover story and an outlandish allegation against the UN that they have dropped in a matter of hours in such a way as to undermine their previous cover-stories. This is obviously contemptuous, but it isn't just a sensational flip-off to 'world opinion'. They are saying they killed civilians on purpose, that nowhere in Gaza is safe, and that they reserve their right to do it again and offer the same risible mitigations and alibis as before.

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Israeli child-killing strategy; also: casualty figures fiddled

From Richard Seymour, author of The Liberal Defense of Murder:

Amira Hass, in a powerful Dec. 31 article for Ha'aretz, writes: "This isn't the time to speak of ethics, but of precise intelligence. Whoever gave the instructions to send 100 of our planes, piloted by the best of our boys, to bomb and strafe enemy targets in Gaza is familiar with the many schools adjacent to those targets - especially police stations. He also knew that at exactly 11:30 A.M. on Saturday, during the surprise assault on the enemy, all the children of the Strip would be in the streets - half just having finished the morning shift at school, the others en route to the afternoon shift." [http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1051028.html]

This is an important insight. Israel's control of the situation is immense. They have detailed intelligence, sattelite imagery (which they like to show off at press conferences), sophisticated guidance technology, etc. It has planned this assault for months in advance, and its leadership is ostentatiously proud of how all the branches of military and intelligence, from Shin Bet to the Southern Command, have gelled in this attack. If an assault on major public facilities is timed to coincide with children being in the streets, this is not accidental: it is intended to leave a number of children lying in their own blood, and terrorise others.

Palestinian men not counted as civilian casualties

So far, we have been given the impression in media reports that the majority of those killed have been in some sense not civilians. The UN has suggested that of its estimate of 320 deaths, about 62 are civilians... I had assumed that this was because the majority of those killed were policemen and, for some reason, we are all going along with Tel Aviv in not considering this a civilian profession. However! Apparently, I was under-estimating the creativity of the statisticians, for here's a weird thing: the UN's tally of the civilian dead "does not include civilian casualties who are men." [ABC News, Dec. 30, 2008; http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2008/12/30/2456334.htm]

There is no such thing as a civilian adult male in Gaza! According to this supposed scourge of Israel, any Gazan male with a bit of size on him is fair game.

Israeli power is, of course, extremely creative in determining the fields of law, morality and knowledge within which it operates. After all, when the IDF (Israeli military) slaughtered women outside a mosque in plain view not only of the public but of the cameras, it was immediately explained by Israeli spokespeople and their apologists that the women were in fact part of a cunning Hamas military operation to stop morally upright Israeli men from killing morally degenerate Palestinian men. So, they were a legitimate target. 

And besides, it was hinted, why do they get to wear the veil? What are they hiding? So, if needs must, the very category of civilian, adult or child, male or female, can be conjured out of existence. And then Lt Gen Ashkenazi can come out to the podium and explain: "our intelligence shows that 1.5 million terrorists were eliminated today..."

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