UNDERSTANDING
THE GOLDSTONE REPORT

Friday, July 30, 2009

I’ll bet you haven’t heard of Muhammad al-Dasuqi, right? Well that’s the problem, isn’t it?

Let’s start over again: Imagine, a couple of official U.S. government, large State Department mini-vans making their way through the Gaza Strip on a nice quiet day. Their mission? To help Gaza students get scholarships to study in the United States. 

Suddenly, they are attacked. Three men, all American security guards employed by the State Department, are murdered. It is 2003 and so the Palestinian Authority (PA) is still running the Gaza Strip. The United States, protector and chief fundraiser for the PA, demands that the terrorists be brought to justice.

The PA promises to help…and doesn’t. But, of course, U.S. financial assistance and diplomatic support for the PA continues as if nothing has happened. The PA is America’s coddled client, and simultaneously an anti-American grouping; it is the beneficiary of extraordinary American help, and simultaneously the supposed victim used to pretend that the West doesn’t help the Palestinians, or Arabs, or Muslims. 

But what about Dasuqi? He is a leader of the Popular Resistance Committee, a terrorist group which is the closest thing in the Palestinian political arena to al-Qaida. While it is certainly separate from Hamas, it is also treated usually by Hamas as a junior partner. 

It is now December 2008. Dasuqi is standing on a field in Gaza at a graduation ceremony for Hamas’s police force. Almost all the members are also part of Hamas’s elite military forces whose goal is to wipe out Israel and its Jewish residents. 

Just days before, the Hamas regime in the Gaza Strip has torn up a ceasefire to which it had never completely abided. It announced a new offensive against Israel. There was a huge increase in the rockets and mortar shells fired at Israeli towns and villages. Hamas had gone to war.

And so Israel responded in self-defense. One of its first operations was an aerial attack which bombed the graduation ceremony. Dasuqi and a lot of others were killed.

But since police are regarded as civilians—assuming they are people who direct traffic and investigate burglaries rather than members of a terrorist militia—Dasuqi and all the others were counted as civilians, constituting in this one attack about 10 percent of the civilian fatalities claimed by Palestinian and Western sources as having been inflicted during the conflict.

The U.S government should have been pleased that Dasuqi was dead. There was no chance that he would be brought to justice by the PA or Hamas, he was a leading figure allied with al-Qaida which is America’s sworn enemy. Yet his death is counted as some kind of disproportionate, even arbitrary attack on an inoffensive neighbor. 

The British government has made decisions—the basis of the arms’ embargo blocking the sale of several military systems to Israel--which claim the war was an act of internal repression. 

This is one small piece from the massive and systematic misrepresentation of Israel’s defensive strike into the Gaza Strip.

Another is that detailed studies of the names of those listed as killed during the war shows that the number of civilians killed is closer to 400 than the 1200-1400 figure generally used by the media. Palestinian documentation shows that many of those listed as civilians were in fact Hamas or Islamic Jihad fighters. Even of the lower civilian figure, a number were human shields, either volunteering to help shield Hamas’s military effort or involved against their will or even knowledge in being very close to headquarters, equipment dumps, or firing positions. 

To know more, visit the official report on the war, summarized at 
http://www.mfa.gov.il/MFA/Terrorism-+Obstacle+to+Peace/Terrorism+and+Islamic+Fundamentalism-/Operation_in_Gaza-Factual_and_Legal_Aspects.htm