Is it lawful to target Hamas for extermination? - VT Foreign Policy
VT Condemns the ETHNIC CLEANSING OF PALESTINIANS by USA/Israel
$ 280 BILLION US TAXPAYER DOLLARS INVESTED since 1948 in US/Israeli Ethnic Cleansing and Occupation Operation; $ 150B direct "aid" and $ 130B in "Offense" contractsSource: Embassy of Israel, Washington, D.C. and US Department of State.
Nobody seems to challenge Israel and its Western allies on their determination to hunt down and wipe out Hamas. That’s Israel’s stated objective and reason for the genocide it has been committing relentlessly for nearly 8 months while the US, UK and most of the EU provide a chorus of approval not to mention the weaponry to do it. But is eliminating Hamas permissible in international law?
Indeed, is imposing coercive regime-change lawful when the party forcing the change is itself a terror regime with a long history of war crimes and crimes against humanity inflicted on its victim?
Hamas happen to be the chosen and legitimate government in Gaza after winning the last election in 2006 fair and square. Their 2017 Charter is reasonably in tune with international law while the Israeli government pursues policies that definitely are not. Israel illegally occupied Gaza and in 2005 pulled out its troops and squatters but continued to occupy Gaza’s territorial waters, airspace, airwaves and all points of entry and exit. And for 18 years Israel has imposed a cruel and vicious blockade, crippled the economy and carried out periodic strikes to reduce the Palestinian population in a campaign called “mowing the grass”. That is what provoked Hamas’s action.
It is convenient for the Israel-US-UK axis to make everyone think the trouble began with Hamas’s attack on October 7 but Israel had been terrorising Palestinians and occupying and thieving their lands and resources by military force for decades. That being the case, why do the UK and other governments keep repeating that Israel, the aggressor, has a right to defend itself when the UN makes it perfectly clear that Israel cannot claim self-defence against a threat that emanates from the territory it belligerently occupies?
China, referring to Hamas, reminded everyone at the ICJ that “armed resistance against occupation is enshrined in international law and is not terrorism”. And, as the UN Secretary-General has emphasised, the “abhorrent attacks” by Hamas in Israel “can never justify the collective punishment of the Palestinian people. International humanitarian law – including the Geneva Conventions – must be upheld”.
UN Resolution 37/43 gives Palestinians an unquestionable right to resist Israeli aggression in their struggle for “liberation from colonial domination, apartheid and foreign occupation by all available means including armed struggle”. 37/43 also condemns “the constant and deliberate violations of the fundamental rights of the Palestinian people, as well as the expansionist activities of Israel in the Middle East, which constitute an obstacle to the achievement of self-determination and independence by the Palestinian people and a threat to peace and stability in the region”. So when Netanyahu rejects the idea of a Palestinian state and says all territory west of the Jordan River must be under Israeli security control, he collides head-on with international law.
First step towards peace must be recognition by the major powers of Palestine as a state
And nobody seems to be challenging the Western powers over their refusal to recognise Palestinian statehood. Palestinians should not have to negotiate their freedom and self-determination – it’s a basic right and doesn’t depend on anyone else, such as Israel or the US, agreeing to it. All States are required to recognise the right to self-determination and independence for all peoples subjected to colonial and foreign domination. That includes the Palestinians. Legal opinion (such as Wilde) has it that when 138 of the world’s states at the UN General Assembly voted in 2012 to re-designate Palestine’s status from ‘non-member Entity’ to ‘non-member State’, this had the effect of establishing statehood.
The problem now is getting everyone to recognise that.
A large majority (around 140) of the world’s states have done so. Spain, Ireland and Norway just did. Why hasn’t the UK? Britain promised the Palestinian Arabs independence back in 1915 in return for their help in defeating the Turks but reneged in 1917 (in favour of the shameful Balfour Declaration). We should have granted Palestine provisional independence in 1923 in accordance with our responsibilities under the League of Nations Mandate Agreement, but didn’t. In 1947 the UN Partition Plan allocated the Palestinians a measly portion of their own homeland and, without consulting them, handed the lion’s share to incomer Jews with no ancestral connection to it… thanks in large part to the Balfour stitch-up.
The following year Britain walked away from its mandate responsibilities leaving Palestinians at the mercy of Israel’s vicious plan for annexing the Holy Land by military force – “from the river to the sea” – which they’ve pursued relentlessly ever since, bringing terror, misery, wholesale destruction and ruination to the Palestinians. And now genocide. Ours is a record of betrayal.
We recognised Israel quickly enough in 1949 even though it had carried out massacres and committed other terrorist acts, trashed 500 Palestinian towns and villages and driven 700,000 civilians off their property and out of their homeland. Creating a ‘New Israel’ was plainly a criminal enterprise, and to achieve their aims the New Israelis invented modern terrorism and wrote the manual – the infamous ‘Plan Dalet’. Nobody knows that better than Britain which was the mandatory power in Palestine when Jewish terror gangs went to work on clearing the way for Israel’s declaration of statehood and then immediately expanding its borders far beyond those set down in the Partition.
Now we continue to dither over Palestine, giving Israel more time to pursue its territorial ambitions at the Palestinians’ expense.
Today the UK government repeats its mantra: “our long-standing position remains that we will recognise a Palestinian State at a time that is most conducive to the peace process”. But that is not what international law requires.
Many have dismissed the move towards recognising a Palestinian state as something purely symbolic. But new voices insist that it is both symbolic and practical. “On the one hand it’s a symbolic gesture that shows concern and solidarity with Palestinians in the context of the Gaza War,” says Dr Julie Norman, associate professor in politics and international relations at UCL, and senior associate fellow at the Royal United Services Institute (Rusi). But there’s the view that recognising Palestinian statehood could influence the decades-long conflict and help deliver a peaceful resolution. “Rather than seeing statehood as the end of a negotiated process, as most Western states maintain, the move is trying to situate statehood as a starting point for negotiations, hold Israel to the trajectory of a two-state solution, and indicate that the international community will not cede all direction on the resolution of the conflict to the US.”
And Dr H A Hellyer, a senior associate fellow at Rusi and the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, remarks: “Recognising the state of Palestine is about what happens after that war ends.” Although Israel won’t be dissuaded from its campaign in Gaza they’ll only stop if “forced to do so by external pressure, particularly from the United States”. A practical consequence of recognising Palestinian is that it “re-establishes or reaffirms international law” and “reaffirms that there is an occupied territory”.
That sounds fine as long as negotiations in future are between two parties of equal status and Palestine – as a sovereign state with no gun to its head this time – negotiates only what it wishes to.
Stuart Littlewood
31 May 2024
After working on jet fighters in the RAF Stuart became an industrial marketing specialist with manufacturing companies and consultancy firms. He also “indulged himself” as a newspaper columnist. In politics, he served as a Cambridgeshire county councillor and member of the Police Authority. Now retired he campaigns on various issues and contributes to several online news & opinion sites. An Associate of the Royal Photographic Society, he has produced two photo-documentary books – Paperturn-view.com.
Also, check out Stuart’s book Radio Free Palestine, with Foreword by Jeff Halper, which tells the plight of the Palestinians under brutal occupation.
Stuart’s Very Latest Articles: 2023 – Present
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