- If you keep lying long enough and with
enough conviction, people start to believe you -- or at least doubt the
evidence in front of their own eyes. And so it has been with the Israeli
army's account of how seven members of a Palestinian family were killed,
and dozens of other Palestinians injured, during shelling close by a beach
in Gaza.
-
- This week, according to reports in the
Israeli media, even Marc Garlasco, a Pentagon expert on the effects of
battlefield weapons hired by Human Rights Watch to investigate the deaths,
"conceded" that he could not contradict the findings of the Israeli
army's own inquiry.
-
- Presumably that is because Israel is
not letting him or anyone else near their evidence. But Garlasco's slight
change of tune -- even if it is not exactly a ringing endorsement -- leaves
the door ajar just wide enough that the Israeli army will doubtless slip
through it to escape being held accountable yet again.
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- The army has been claiming for more than
a week, based on its own evidence, that the lethal explosion was not caused
by a stray shell landing on the Gaza beach but most probably by a mine
placed there by Palestinian militants to prevent an Israeli naval landing.
-
- The army's case could be dismissed outright
were it not for the racist assumptions that now prevail as Western "thought"
about Arabs and Muslims.
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- To be plausible the army account requires
two preposterous assumptions: first, that Palestinian militants are so
fanatical that they consider it acceptable to lay a mine secretly in an
area frequented by local families; and second, that they are so primitive
that their best military minds could not work out the futility of placing
a single mine along miles of coastline that could be used for a landing
(or are we to assume that there are many more of these mines waiting to
explode?).
-
- To support its case, the army has produced
two pieces of evidence that apparently make its denials of responsibility
"airtight".
-
- First, it claims that a piece of shrapnel
removed by doctors from an injured Palestinian transferred to an Israeli
hospital was not from one its shells but more likely from a Palestinian
explosive device.
-
- Given that, unlike Israel, the Palestinians
do not have any factories manufacturing mines or rockets and are forced
instead to make them out of any spare metal parts they can get their hands
on -- doors, pipes, wrecked cars, fridges -- this evidence is meaningless.
Palestinian witnesses have already said the beach victims were standing
close to taxis when the shell exploded. So if the shrapnel was not from
an Israeli shell, it suggests only that the missile also damaged other
metal objects -- possibly the cars -- sending a shard into at least one
of the victims.
-
- The army will have a lot of explaining
to do if reports on Israeli TV, not usually noted for its independent approach,
confirm that another piece of shrapnel found in a victim is from an Israeli
shell. So far, of course, the army is denying the report.
-
- The second piece of evidence is supplied
by the army, which says one of its many drones that circle overhead spying
on Gaza round the clock shows the families calmly still on the beach, and
later an ambulance arriving, tens of minutes after the army had finished
shelling the area.
-
- The problem with the Israeli evidence
is that we have to take the army's word for it: that the families shown
are the ones who were about to be shelled, and that the timings given are
accurate.
-
- It also means we have to discount a lot
of counter-evidence supplied by Garlasco, journalists, doctors and Palestinian
witnesses -- and even the Israeli army. The army, for example, has admitted
that one of the shells it fired in the area is unaccounted for, a striking
admission in itself. The drones apparently were no help in locating this
"missing" explosion, even though they were spying on the area.
-
- Garlasco has already determined that
the injuries sustained by the beach victims accord with a blast above ground
-- an Israeli shell -- rather than one underground -- a Palestinian mine.
-
- The many Palestinian witnesses have all
put the time of the blast close to when the shelling occurred, and report
that the reason they were queuing for taxis was because of panic sown by
the shells they were hearing landing nearby.
-
- Independent journalists have shown that,
according to the clocks on the hospital computers that admitted the dead
and injured, the timing of the first blood tests were taken soon after
the Israeli army shelling -- and certainly too soon to accord with the
army's account of when the Palestinian mine supposedly exploded. Doctors
have also confirmed that they were called to the nearest hospitals well
before 5pm -- at about the time, or even before, the army claims the mine
went off.
-
- The outrage expressed in some quarters
at the failure simply to believe the army's version might sound more convincing
were Israel welcoming an international investigation to adjudicate on the
matter. But of course it is not. Just as in spring 2002, following the
deaths of many civilians in the Palestinian town of Jenin and the destruction
of the heart of the local refugee camp during a prolonged attack by the
Israeli army and air force, Israel is rejecting all suggestions of an independent
inquiry.
-
- So why not just take Israel's word for
it? Its army is the most moral in the world, after all, and a state of
law like Israel would gain nothing from lying in such a bare-faced manner.
-
- The only problem is that Israel and its
security forces have been caught out lying repeatedly during this intifada
and before it, not just to people on the other side of the world who cannot
verify the facts but also to its own courts and public.
-
- Ths week, for example, the Supreme Court
ordered the army and Ministry of Defence to pull down several kilometres
of the steel and concrete barrier they have erected on Palestinian land
in the West Bank after it was proved that the security considerations behind
the choice of the wall's route were entirely bogus. Official documents
reveal that the wall was located there to allow for the future expansion
of nearly illegal Jewish settlements on yet more Palestinian land. The
army and government concocted the fib and then stuck to it for more than
two years. Chief Justice Aharaon Barak called their systematic lying "a
grave phenomenon".
-
- And at the start of the intifada, back
in October 2000, the government and police covered up the fact that live
ammunition and sniper units trained to deal with terror attacks had been
used against unarmed Arab demonstrators inside Israel. For more than six
months the government and security services denied that a single live round
had been fired, despite mounting evidence to the contrary that lawyers
and journalists like myself had unearthed.
-
- They might have got away with their brazen
lies too, had it not been for an unusual series of events that led to the
appointment of a state inquiry headed by a Supreme Court judge, Theodor
Or, who quickly exposed the truth.
-
- That happened not because of any urge
by official bodies to come clean or the inevitable triumph of Israeli justice.
It happened for one reason alone: the prime minister of the day, Ehud Barak,
feared losing the impending general election to his rival Ariel Sharon
and thought he could buy back Arab votes by setting up an inquiry.
-
- The inhabitants of Gaza have no such
leverage inside the Israeli legal and political system. They have no friends
inside Israel. And now it looks like they have no friends in the international
community either.
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- Jonathan Cook, a writer and journalist
living in Nazareth, Israel, is the author of "Blood and Religion:
The Unmasking of the Jewish and Democratic State", published by Pluto
Press. His website is www.jkcook.net
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