Of Stanley L. Cohen*

Source: Comedonchisciotte
“The wrongs we seek to condemn and punish were thus premeditated, so evil and so devastating, that a civilization cannot tolerate them being ignored, because it could not survive their reiteration"
With these authoritative words, Robert H. Jackson, Chief U.S. Attorney, had opened the work of the War Crimes Tribunal in Nuremberg, Germany, immediately after the conclusion of the Second World War.
In charge of ascertaining the guilt of prominent members of the army, of politics and the judicial apparatus for violations of international laws... including war crimes, crimes against humanityand against them laws of war…the court had validated the principle of personal responsibility for the genocide against Jews and other ethnic groups, that had been considered, from the German state, a threat to one's own, declared, racial supremacy, religious and political.
Although these crimes had manifested themselves in different forms, their savagery resulted, actually, from a shared collective thought, who considered all those destined to be suppressed by the state not only (beings) inferior, but unworthy of life itself… men, women and children, young and old, reduced to little more than objects of grotesque derision, whose very existence contaminated the national concept of racial supremacy.
There are no more secrets about the terror campaign unleashed from the Third Reich, as he invaded nations and unleashed international violence never seen before. Nor have its methods of total war ever been subject to serious debate, both towards the military, than against civilians. Even if someone has chosen to dispute the number of victims or to rework the exact instruments of persecution, no serious historian doubts the role played by cattle trucks, from the ghettos and crematoriums in a conscious effort to silence the diversity of life, while most of the world looked elsewhere.
This attack on humanity did not happen overnight, or in a pneumatic vacuum, manifesting itself with sudden aggression. It came after a well-calculated and effective historical rewriting… a slow one, but constant relocation of entire populations... which has deprived them of their history, of their culture, of their common purpose and their decorum.
What began with the burning of books and the silence of the press quickly became successful propaganda, which had cast a menacing shadow over millions of people, whose only fault was that he spoke a different language, to have a different faith or to ask for justice. Once you get to this point, move on to aggression, or worse, it really had been a moment.
The repetition of history
Even with the conscience and external vision of people unrelated to the facts, today it is simply impossible not to feel a sense of absolute revulsion if, by charitable people, an honest assessment of Israel is made.
Forget the sense of humanity, compassion or some other lofty concept regarding noble collective purposes. At this moment, Israel has reduced these cornerstones of the very idea of ​​decency to a feeble fiction…a successful narrative for a perverse existence, which crushes truth and justice as if they were tedious obstacles to its own, now decades old, ethnic and racial pogrom against those who are different.
Israel, what he does, he does it well. Damn good. No, it's not about the massacres, of torture, of indefinite imprisonment and land confiscation, these are well-known things. a dark, absolutely public, almost proud record of "results", which is absolutely unprecedented when it comes to contempt, nowadays, for international laws and regulations.
Like his predecessors, what he truly excels at is the big lie… the opportunistic rewriting of history, the ability to reshape what was yesterday, today and certainly tomorrow in a path of law in which no outrage is unacceptable, no crime too heinous, no insult too offensive. The whole thing, naturally, set in the talisman of survival. It's a skill.. a perverse political art form that transforms inconvenient truths into selfish dogmas, with lethal consequences that are all too predictable.
Unlike the rare regimes that are fiercely autocratic or temporarily despotic, Israel has created and perfected a selective reality check, now tested in an absolutely masterful way. Well before UN anthropologists discovered a European state in the midst of Arab history, i Zionists they had perfected the art of fruitful cheating.
As, a hundred years ago, European terrorists had become famous freedom fighters, as they massacred Palestinians sleeping in their beds or cots. The Nab, a hasty flight of at least a million Palestinians, triggered by mass murders and rapes, was revisited with historical lightness and transformed into a voluntary migration… a transfer of restless villagers in search of a better life, to a better place.
I Kibbutzim, enlightened socialist communes that, almost as if renewing itself by magic, they flourished in lands long desolate. Maybe right on the ruins of old villages and their decomposed remains under the first layer of sand?
The settlements, an employment opportunity for a turbulent workforce, who needed motivation and discipline. The siege of Gaza… not at all a premeditated food embargo, medicine, water, electricity and freedom of movement to break the will of two million people, but rather generous help to free them from the shackles of their primitive idealism and from the terror of Hamas.
Presenting itself as a democracy under siege, Israel has long since abandoned any pretense of fairness and justice, in its infinite desire to annex what little remains of Palestine and so on, with this attempt of his, exalts a Jewish state, to all intents and purposes, racist.
This drive for racial supremacy was made possible not only by the passage of time or a loss of interest on the part of the world community. During this journey, certainly on purpose, Israel has successfully exploited the West's fear and ignorance regarding Arab and Muslim communities. Lately he has found willing companions in some Arab states, eager to move from half-service to full-time partnership, the "dilemma" represented by Palestine having become boring.
In Israel and the occupied territories, the catalog of methods of ethnic substitution is practically infinite. With a slap... a stab, a book… a bomb, a prayer… a provocation, the Zionist narrative has, for a long time, made any pretense of relevance disappear and, even less, of realism. E, Anyway, since time immemorial most of the world has stared in dismay and froze, hypnotized by a continuous spread of propaganda, of Israeli origin but with echoes also coming from abroad.
In any case, in the last ten days, this false pedestal of morality has begun to collapse, because the winds of truth have uncovered that mask of hatred which is the very essence of Israel. In this period, tens of thousands of peaceful, unarmed demonstrators marched towards prison barricades in Gaza, only to face carnage.
There is no need to repeat, in all the details, the stories of the massacres that occurred after hundreds of snipers, drones and tanks had made it clear, with deadly precision, that all of them were justified targets (guilty) of nothing more than vocal protests. When the gas had dissolved, the "lucky" ones, young, donne, children, old people and also journalists, they lay paralyzed by the devastating effects of a chemical attack, similar to those reported from time to time since 2001, which had immediately given way to vomiting and uncontrollable tremors.
Thousands more, less fortunate, were injured by high-velocity explosive projectiles, destined to tear off limbs and destroy organs. There were thirty-one deaths. All the victims were shot in the neck or back.
What's in a peaceful march, in a flag, in a Dabka song and dance that infuriates an occupying force to the point where it sends its snipers to shoot with deadly precision, almost as if they were surrounded by enemies armed to the teeth?
The law
According to international laws, crimes against humanity include "murder and other inhuman acts perpetrated against the entire civilian population... when said acts are carried out or such persecutions carried out in execution of, or in connection with, any kind of crime against peace or (in connection) with all kinds of war crimes.”
A war crime is an act that constitutes a “serious violation of the laws of war, from which individual criminal responsibility derives, which includes the intentional killing of civilians… the destruction of civilian property… and serious violations of the principles of distinction e proportionality, like the strategic bombing of civilian populations."
According to the law of war, military needs are subject to various constraints: an attack or military action must have the objective of defeating the enemy; it must be an attack against a legitimate military objective and damage caused to civilians or civilian property must be proportionate and not exceed the actual and direct estimated military advantage.
According to international humanitarian legislation, Proportionality is the principle that regulates the legitimate use of force in an armed conflict; according to it the belligerents must ensure that the damage caused to civilians or civilian property is not excessive, in relation to military benefits, concrete and direct, that is expected from an attack against a legitimate military objective.
In the end, “the fact that a person acted following the orders of his government or superior does not absolve him of his responsibility, according to international law, since she was not precluded from making a moral choice.”
This is to say that a line of defense that is simply based on the assumption that "I was just following orders from my superiors.”
For years, while someone was arguing about the rules of the international legislature, most of the world has been silent, and consequently an accomplice, while Israel was guilty of unspeakable crimes against the population of Palestine, largely civilian.
Although it is often done with different nuances, or even twisted, the application of the law to the facts is not a matter of magic. Sometimes a simple reading of well-established legal agreements, in light of well-known events, it can bring even a fasting person of law, but with sound principles, to conclude that, actually, the law was violated.
Never before has Israel's indifference to international law been so clear, so visible, as convincing as seen through the magnifying glass of the repeated massacres of the last ten days in Gaza, when thousands of civilians simply demonstrated, and they did it in peace (solo) to say “enough.”
Today, more than seventy years after the Nuremberg trials, we are witnessing an undeniable paradox, because those who, a long time ago, they had been the victims of the concept of racial superiority, religious and political have themselves become total and willing followers of the same evil doctrine.
With words that had shaken the silence of the courtroom in the majesty of the moment, War crimes prosecutor Robert H. Jackson had passed on to future generations a warning on the duties that should accompany the (vera) humanity:
“We must never forget that the facts by which we judge these defendants today are those by which history will judge us tomorrow.”
 
*Stanley L. Cohen is lawyer, resides in New York City
Source: https://www.counterpunch.org
Link: https://www.counterpunch.org/2018/04/13/when-zionism-rubs-up-against-reality/
13.04.2018
Selected and Translated by Markus for www.Comedonchisciotte.org