Robert Fisk: Britain’s explanation is riddled with inconsistencies. It’s time to come clean

Mahmoud Al-Mabhoh

Source: The Independent Newspaper

Collusion. That’s what it’s all about. The United Arab Emirates suspect – only suspect, mark you – that Europe’s “security collaboration” with Israel has crossed a line into illegality, where British passports (and those of other other EU nations) can now be used to send Israeli agents into the Gulf to kill Israel’s enemies. At 3.49pm yesterday afternoon (Beirut time, 1.49pm in London), my Lebanese phone rang. It was a source – impeccable, I know him, he spoke with the authority I know he has in Abu Dhabi – to say that “the British passports are real. They are hologram pictures with the biometric stamp. They are not forged or fake. The names were really there. If you can fake a hologram or biometric stamp, what does this mean?”

The voice – I know the man and his origins well – wants to talk. “There are 18 people involved in the killing of Mahmoud al-Mabhouh. Besides the 11 already named, there are two Palestinians who are being interrogated and five others, including a woman. She was part of the team that staked out the hotel lobby.” Two hours later, an SMS arrives on my Beirut phone from Abu Dhabi, the capital of the United Arab Emirates. It is the same source.

“ONE MORE THING,” it says in capital letters, then continues in lower case. “The command room of the operation was in Austria (sic, in fact, all things are “sic” in this report)… meaning the suspects when here did not talk to each other but thru the command room on separate lines to avoid detection or linking themselves to one another… but it was detected and identified OK??” OK? I ask myself.

My source is both angry and insistent. “We have sent out details of the 11 named people to Interpol. Interpol has circulated them to 188 countries – but why hasn’t Britain warned foreign nations that these people are using passports in these names?” There was more to come.

“We have identified five credit cards belonging to these people, all issued in the United States.” The man will not give the EU nationalities of the extra five – this would make two women involved in Mr Mabhouh’s murder. He said that EU countries were cooperating with the UAE, including the UK. But “not one of the countries we have been speaking to has notified Interpol of the passports used in their name. Why not?”

The source insisted that one of the names on a passport – the name of a man who denies any knowledge of its use – has travelled on it in Asia (probably Indonesia) and EU countries over the past year. The Emirates have proof that an American entered their country in June 2006 on a British passport issued in the name of a UK citizen who was already in prison in the Emirates. The Emirates claim that the passport of an Israeli agent sent to kill a Hamas leader in Jordan was a genuine Canadian passport issued to a dual national of Israel.

Intelligence agencies – who in the view of this correspondent are often very unintelligent – have long used false passports. Oliver North and Robert McFarlane travelled to Iran to seek the release of US hostages in Lebanon on passports that were previously stolen from the Irish embassy in Athens. But the Emirates’ new information may make some European governments draw in their breath – and they had better have good replies to the questions. Intelligence services – Arab, Israeli, European or American – often adopt an arrogant attitude towards those from whom they wish to hide. How could the Arabs pick up on a Mossad killing, if that is what it was? Well, we shall see.

Collusion is a word the Arabs understand. It speaks of the 1956 Suez War, when Britain and France cooperated with Israel to invade Egypt. Both London and Paris denied the plot. They were lying. But for an Arab Gulf country which suspects its former masters (the UK, by name) may have connived in the murder of a visiting Hamas official, this is apparently now too much. There is much more to come out of this story. We will wait to see if there are any replies in Europe.

Israeli commander: ‘We rewrote the rules of war for Gaza’

source: The Independent

A high-ranking officer has acknowledged for the first time that the Israeli army went beyond its previous rules of engagement on the protection of civilian lives in order to minimise military casualties during last year’s Gaza war, The Independent can reveal.

 The officer, who served as a commander during Operation Cast Lead, made it clear that he did not regard the longstanding principle of military conduct known as “means and intentions” – whereby a targeted suspect must have a weapon and show signs of intending to use it before being fired upon – as being applicable before calling in fire from drones and helicopters in Gaza last winter. A more junior officer who served at a brigade headquarters during the operation described the new policy – devised in part to avoid the heavy military casualties of the 2006 Lebanon war – as one of “literally zero risk to the soldiers”.

The officers’ revelations will pile more pressure on Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to set up an independent inquiry into the war, as demanded in the UN-commissioned Goldstone Report, which harshly criticised the conduct of both Israel and Hamas. One of Israel’s most prominent human rights lawyers, Michael Sfard, said last night that the senior commander’s acknowledgement – if accurate – was “a smoking gun”.

Until now, the testimony has been kept out of the public domain. The senior commander told a journalist compiling a lengthy report for Yedhiot Ahronot, Israel’s biggest daily newspaper, about the rules of engagement in the three-week military offensive in Gaza. But although the article was completed and ready for publication five months ago, it has still not appeared. The senior commander told Yedhiot: “Means and intentions is a definition that suits an arrest operation in the Judaea and Samaria [West Bank] area… We need to be very careful because the IDF [Israel Defence Forces] was already burnt in the second Lebanon war from the wrong terminology. The concept of means and intentions is taken from different circumstances. Here [in Cast Lead] we were not talking about another regular counter-terrorist operation. There is a clear difference.”

His remarks reinforce testimonies from soldiers who served in the Gaza operation, made to the veterans’ group Breaking the Silence and reported exclusively by this newspaper last July. They also appear to cut across the military doctrine – enunciated most recently in public by one of the authors of the IDF’s own code of ethics – that it is the duty of soldiers to run risks to themselves in order to preserve civilian lives.

Explaining what he saw as the dilemma for forces operating in areas that were supposedly cleared of civilians, the senior commander said: “Whoever is left in the neighbourhood and wants to action an IED [improvised explosive device] against the soldiers doesn’t have to walk with a Kalashnikov or a weapon. A person like that can walk around like any other civilian; he sees the IDF forces, calls someone who would operate the terrible death explosive and five of our soldiers explode in the air. We could not wait until this IED is activated against us.”

Another soldier who worked in one of the brigade’s war-room headquarters told The Independent that conduct in Gaza – particularly by aerial forces and in areas where civilians had been urged to leave by leaflets – had “taken the targeted killing idea and turned it on its head”. Instead of using intelligence to identify a terrorist, he said, “here you do the opposite: first you take him down, then you look into it.”

The Yedhiot newspaper also spoke to a series of soldiers who had served in Operation Cast Lead in sensitive positions. While the soldiers rejected the main finding of the Goldstone Report – that the Israeli military had deliberately “targeted” the civilian population – most asserted that the rules were flexible enough to allow a policy under which, in the words of one soldier “any movement must entail gunfire. No one’s supposed to be there.” He added that at a meeting with his brigade commander and others it was made clear that “if you see any signs of movement at all you shoot. This is essentially the rules of engagement.”

The other soldier in the war-room explained: “This doesn’t mean that you need to disrespect the lives of Palestinians but our first priority is the lives of our soldiers. That’s not something you’re going to compromise on. In all my years in the military, I never heard that.”

He added that the majority of casualties were caused in his brigade area by aerial firing, including from unmanned drones. “Most of the guys taken down were taken down by order of headquarters. The number of enemy killed by HQ-operated remote … compared to enemy killed by soldiers on the ground had absolutely inverted,” he said.

Rules of engagement issued to soldiers serving in the West Bank as recently as July 2006 make it clear that shooting towards even an armed person will take place only if there is intelligence that he intends to act against Israeli forces or if he poses an immediate threat to soldiers or others.

In a recent article in New Republic, Moshe Halbertal, a philosophy professor at Hebrew and New York Universities, who was involved in drawing up the IDF’s ethical code in 2000 and who is critical of the Goldstone Report, said that efforts to spare civilian life “must include the expectation that soldiers assume some risk to their own lives in order to avoid causing the deaths of civilians”. While the choices for commanders were often extremely difficult and while he did not think the expectation was demanded by international law, “it is demanded in Israel’s military code and this has always been its tradition”.

The Israeli military declined to comment on the latest revelations, and directed all enquiries to already-published material, including a July 2009 foreign ministry document The Operation in Gaza: Factual and Legal Aspects.

That document, which repeats that Israel acted in conformity with international law despite the “acute dilemmas” posed by Hamas’s operations within civilian areas, sets out the principles of Operation Cast Lead as follows: “Only military targets shall be attacked; Any attack against civilian objectives shall be prohibited. A ‘civilian objective’ is any objective which is not a military target.” It adds: “In case of doubt, the forces are obliged to regard an object as civilian.”

Yedhiot has not commented on why its article has not been published.

Israel in Gaza: The soldier’s tale

This experienced soldier, who cannot be named, served in the war room of a brigade during Operation Cast Lead. Here, he recalls an incident he witnessed during last winter’s three-week offensive:

“Two [Palestinian] guys are walking down the street. They pass a mosque and you see a gathering of women and children.

“You saw them exiting the house and [they] are not walking together but one behind the other. So you begin to fantasise they are actually ducking close to the wall.

“One [man] began to run at some point, must have heard the chopper. The GSS [secret service] argued that the mere fact that he heard it implicated him, because a normal civilian would not have realised that he was now being hunted.

“Finally he was shot. He was not shot next to the mosque. It’s obvious that shots are not taken at a gathering.”

Andrew Phillips: No relief for the Palestinians while Israel enjoys impunity

Source: The Independent Newspaper

 

To visit Gaza for a third time in five years still induces a gut reaction of pity, depression and anger – pity at the hopeless, helpless plight of the Palestinians; depression about their future and, ironically, that of Israel too; and anger at the latter’s cynical policies – and impunity.

 

 I was part of a pan-European Parliamentary delegation which also enjoyed complete political access in Egypt, including meetings with its Foreign Minister and Speaker, plus the head of the Arab League. In Gaza we met the Prime Minister and cabinet colleagues, NGOs and the head of the indispensable UN mission (UNRWA).

 

Relations between Israel, Palestine and Egypt are grotesquely complicated and intractable. There are rights and wrongs on all sides and, indeed, mutual fears. The Mubarak establishment harbours deep anxieties about infection of the Egyptian street by the populist, faith-based Hamas. The legacy of Jewish history fosters an almost genetic insecurity, and the Gazan Palestinians live in traumatised dread of another pulverisation.

 

The last one, a year ago, left around 1,400 Palestinian dead (against 13 Israeli fatalities) and many thousands wounded. As we saw, their already poor infrastructure, most factories, many schools and public buildings and thousands of houses were obliterated or severely damaged. One meal was hosted for us by Palestinian MPs in their wrecked debating chamber.

 

Following the Gaza blitz the UN raised a $4.5bn restoration fund. Not one dollar has been spent, so vindictive is Israel’s siege by land, sea and air. Bare survival is thanks to the tunnels under the Egyptian border, but they are now being blocked off. If and when that is complete further radicalisation of the Palestinians and working class Muslims elsewhere is inevitable, and with it more terrorism in the West, of which the abuse of Palestine is the greatest engine.

 

Gaza, then, is a ghetto of 1.5 million abandoned people – half under 18 and 80 per cent unemployed – with plenty of time to feed on their resentments. Unsurprisingly, 30 per cent want to leave their prison.

 

But what for me and many explodes the Israeli apologia for their conduct in Palestine, and particularly its security claims, is its relentless colonisation of the West Bank and East Jerusalem, settlers now totalling around half a million. Nothing could be as provocative, except perhaps the assault on, and siege of, Gaza conducted with the same controlled violence as characterises the occupation of the West Bank with its hundreds of humiliating and disruptive checkpoints and a pass system which outdoes that of old South Africa.

 

And what about the law? Israel – cradle of lawyers – is in cavalier breach of International Law, the United Nations Charter, its Conventions and Resolutions, and yet is protected from the consequences which should follow (harken to Tony Blair on defiance of UN resolutions last Friday!). Israel is now more “rogue state” than the “strategic partner” David Miliband recently labelled it.

 

All this is replete with tragedy and paradox. The psychic wounds of the unspeakable Holocaust are still raw and unmanageable and also sustain the collective guilt of the West, warping political judgments and norms in the process. Israel does what it wants, the latest example being their humiliating rebuff of President Obama’s insistence that they stop their colonisation. The Palestinian voice is puny by comparison.

 

This history, which constrains so many liberal Jews in the West from speaking out on Palestine, as they otherwise surely would, is matched by the public silence of many non-Jewish critics for fear of being branded anti-Semitic – as unpleasant a tag as exists. All this has profoundly dangerous potential.

 

So Israel, effectively unhindered by the US or ourselves, is deluded by the “triumph” of its machiavellian diplomacy into believing that the tactics of divide and rule, obfuscation and procrastination, will forever enable it to frustrate justice for the Palestinians. Yet for Israel to defy the UN steadily undermines its own legitimacy, given the UN was its only begetter and may yet be needed as its main guarantor.

 

As for token Palestinian resistance, I sense they at least agree with the Jews in the lesson hard learnt by the latter, never to acquiesce in one’s own oppression, whatever the odds. So Israel least of all should be surprised at the defiant trickle of Hamas rockets, against which their criminally disproportionate retribution in Gaza looked like nothing so much as the abused becoming the abuser. I returned, as usual, miserable and ever more convinced that tough love is overdue to help save the remarkable nation that is Israel from itself. The West should now look to the imposition of escalating cultural and economic sanctions. Nothing else has worked and time may be short. There will be a hullabaloo, but carrying on as heretofore would be the sin.

 

 Lord Phillips of Sudbury is a Liberal Democrat peer