...the Rome Statute.
I'm gettting really sick and tired of people telling me that somehow the Rome Statue allows any army to bomb civilian targets, on a whim, because their commanders claim it's a military target. They aren't even claiming at this point that every single mosque, home, police station and school in Gaza has rockets -- they're saying that Israel has every right to "err on the side of assuming that a target is a military target."
Unbelievable. Well, my fingers are getting tired of restating the lunacy of this case over and over and, well... a picture paints a thousand words, does it not?
5 comments:
Sister Jeanne here. I don't see the significance of the Rome Statue regarding Gaza. A fast google search makes it clear that it's the one that established the ICC, but neither Israel nor the PA/Hamas ratified it (so no jurisdiction, arguably). If you are referring to the ICC declining war crimes jurisdiction over a possible investigation in Gaza, that's also a nonissue, since the UN can do a special tribunal ala Yugoslavia, Darfur and so on, I believe. Though that's also a hypothetical political issue down the road.
**Sighs** The legalities in the Gaza strip are a real mess anyway, since it's pretty unclear who actually is 'the legal government' Israel, the PA, Hamas, Egypt (don't laugh, they have precedent too). Pick one of the above.
Middle East, especially Israeli/Palestine, politics are almost fractally crazy. As insane as something might seem, it's almost guaranteed to be even more bafflingly insane, the more you learn about it.
In theory, Israel ceded autonomy of the Gaza Strip and the West Bank to the Palestinan Authority as part of the Oslo Accords. So Hamas, as the elected government of the Palestinan Parliament, has a claim to being the legal government. But PNA also has standing, by virtue of having declared a state of emergency after the election, and acting in the capacity of the emergency government. Most governments (including Arab governments, which is probably the most pertinent) recognize the PNA as the legal government of both territories. And, of course, the actual borders of Gaza are a matter of hot dispute. Egypt, as far as I know, renounced all their claims to land north of the international border in 1979, but the border with Jordan is a poorly-defined No-Man's-Land, which Israel claims as theirs, but the PNA claims as Palestinian.
Basically, it's a mess. I once heard it described as the political equivalent of a Jackson Pollock painting, with infinite layers of complexity, messiness and near-total indecipherability.
True, and a pretty good summation.
That's not counting the political considerations, for instance Egypt doesn't want the Strip because of the domestic political threat Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood are to it's leadership...
Honestly, another part of the problem is who has de facto control? Israel controls the airspace, waters, and has demonstrated they can militarily dominate it any time (So could Egypt if they wanted to send the tanks through Rafah and the IDF stood on the sidelines, though). Internally, before this, Hamas had De facto interior control after their civil war/coup de etat with Fatah in 2007. But then the PA in theory had control of the Gaza side of the border crossings, along with some measure of support (clearly there was Fatah support judging from Israel's intelligence, some of which probably was generated by Fatah).
This doesn't count that the 'rule of law' as we would view it in the West was a nonplayer in Gaza even before the IDF attacked. Certainly it was absent in the 2007 internal Palestenian civil war.
Add in that it's hard to understate the rancor between Fatah and Hamas after the aforementioned civil war. I was cruising the Palpress PA website's comment section, and the commentary about the death of Said Sayam, Hamas's Interior Minister was...nasty. There was actually a post /thanking/ Israel for killing him.
That's a good point. One of the oddest, more ironic things springing out of this whole business is that there's almost nothing in the world that could improve relations between Fatah/PNA and Israel, except the Israelis spending a significant amount of time blowing up Hamas.
Hrlo
Post a Comment