The ‘Dear Colleague’ letters on Gaza: Additional comments
Posted December 15, 2009
December 15
Yesterday, we urged our supporters to contact their members of Congress to request that they sign onto two ‘Dear Colleague’ letters being circulated on Capitol Hill. The McDermott/Ellison letter calls on President Barack Obama to ease Israel’s blockade of Gaza – which it describes as “de facto collective punishment.” The Moran/Inglis letter calls on Secretary of State Hilary Clinton to “press the Israeli government to end the ban on student travel from Gaza to the West Bank.”
CNI is still urging you to call your member of Congress to request that they sign onto these letters. But we urge you also to communicate the following to your legislators in both the House of Representatives and the Senate:
- That you are very concerned about the suffering that Israel’s siege is imposing on all of 1.5 million of Gaza’s people, in an act of collective punishment that punishes the innocent and is a blatant violation of the responsibility Israel has, under the Fourth Geneva Convention, for the wellbeing of all members of Gaza’s civilian population.
- That you are very concerned that the U.S. government, by having done nothing to hold Israel accountable for this violation of international law, is in fact complicit in Israel’s wrongdoing; and it is also seen as complicit in this way by most of the world’s people, including by the populations of the majority-Muslim countries where U.S. forces are now deployed in very tense situations, at the end of long and vulnerable supply lines.
- That you therefore ask your representatives to do everything in their power to serve the true interests of the American people, as well as our country’s own obligations under international law, by supporting the use of all instruments of our national power to ensure that Israel’s illegal blockade of Gaza is lifted.
Here is a little essential background you can use in these conversations– background that was either omitted from the current ‘Dear Colleague’ letters, or was inaccurately represented in their texts:
- Though Israel took its settlers and troops out of most of the heart of Gaza in 2005, it is still considered by all world powers to be the “occupying power” in Gaza, and therefore still has all the obligations an occupying power has to ensure the wellbeing– and indeed, the normal flourishing– of Gaza’s 1.5 million people.
- During last winter’s Israeli assault on Gaza, more than 11,000 housing units were, according to the Israeli NGO the Israeli Committee Against Home Demolitions, destroyed either completely or very substantially. The former residents of those homes have been forced to double or triple up with relatives living in already overcrowded conditions, or to live in tents.
- The winter cold has already arrived in Gaza. Israel’s refusal to allow any rubble-moving or construction materials into the Strip means that 11,000 families still have no safe shelter. 43,000 babies were born in Gaza in just the first ten months of this year. What kinds of lives can these young people and their families expect?
- In addition to homes, the Israeli military destroyed 3,800 factories and workshops, several schools, many university buildings, nearly all the Strip’s mosques, and many other public buildings. Though some hundred Gazan students are denied access to universities in the West Bank, a far greater number are denied access to all those classrooms in Gaza’s own schools and universities that have been destroyed.
- What happened in Gaza in June 2007 was not, as the McDermott/Ellison letter states, a “Hamas coup”. It was an action by the Hamas leaders who won the free and fair election of January 2006 to fend off a coup attempt undertaken by a Contras-like faction from within the Fateh movement, which was shamefully backed by Israel and the Bush administration. As it happened, the Bush-backed coup attempt failed.
- It was not Hamas that initiated the violence of last winter. In fact, there was a pretty solid ceasefire in place between Hamas and Israel from mid-June 2008 on. But that ceasefire was blatantly broken by Israel with a large and provocative military action conducted on November 4, 2008– a day when most Americans were busy in a historic engagement at our national polls. After Israel’s November 4 provocation, there was a cycle of violence that continued until Israel launched its very large-scale escalation last December 27.
We at CNI regret the fact that the authors of the current ‘Dear Colleague’ letters got things so wrong in the accounts they give of several, clearly documented development over recent years. However, the flaws in these letters should not lead us to ignore them or disavow them. Rather, we should urge people to support them, while stressing that the “facts” of the matter are often very different from the way they’re portrayed in major American media, or in congressional communications.
We should stress, too, that real relief for the 1.5 million Palestinians of Gaza, as for their compatriots in the West bank and in the very extensive Palestinian diaspora, can come only with the speedy attainment of a final peace agreement in which the rights of all Palestinians and all Israelis receive equal regard and equal protection.
