Token justice for the Gaza aid flotilla

On Monday, the United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon announced that a UN inquiry will be conducted into Israel’s deadly attack on the Gaza aid flotilla in May.

It has been hailed as an “unprecedented development” by Ban after Israel agreed for the first time ever to cooperate with a UN inquiry into its military actions.

However, the inquiry won’t be allowed to question any Israeli soldiers and no punishment will be given if any wrongdoing is concluded.

The inquiry’s four-member panel will be led by former New Zealand Prime Minister Sir Geoffrey Palmer, with outgoing Columbian President Alvador Uribe acting as Vice-Chairman.

The other two members will be a representative from both Israel and Turkey.

Together they will look into events of the early hours of Monday 31 May when Israeli soldiers stormed the Mavi Marmara boat and shot dead eight Turkish civilians and one Turkish-American.

The Israelis claim they were initially provoked and then attacked by the activists on the boat, forcing them to defend themselves.

However, the Turkish government maintains the soldiers used unnecessary or disproportionate force in shooting live ammunition and killing people.

According to Ban’s spokesman, the inquiry’s panel “has been tasked with making findings about the facts, circumstances and context of the incident, as well as recommending ways of avoiding similar incidents in the future.”

They will do this by using evidence from both Turkish and Israeli internal inquiries. Israel has already completed one inquiry by the military and two others are underway.

But these two new inquiries are banned from interviewing any Israeli Defence Force (IDF) soldiers, including those involved in the incident, and cannot force the military to produce evidence.

Instead they have to rely on requests for documentation (that can be ignored) and the investigation summaries done by the military.

Essentially it means Israel’s version of events that the UN inquiry must use comes from Israel’s military – the military who is the subject of the inquiry.

Confirmation of the inquiry rules, known as the ‘mandate’, is due in the next few days.

However, Israeli Prime Minister Benyamin Netanyahu has already stated that this will be the case when responding to Israeli criticism that he was opening up their soldiers to damaging investigations.

A statement from his office said “If [the critics] had bothered to check, they will have found that IDF soldiers and officers will not be investigated by the UN or any other body.”

Israel’s somewhat justified argument for this is that other countries don’t have to submit to full international investigations every time they kill innocent civilians so why should they.

Armed forces from America and other countries have killed countless innocent civilians in Iraq and Afghanistan, but those investigations are carried out by the offending country’s military, if at all.

Most of the time the killings are deemed acceptable within the rules and little is ever done about it.

It highlights a problem of low standards set by the world’s more powerful nations.

Israel should be subject to a full investigation of the raid, and any soldiers who acted inappropriately or illegally should be punished.

However, it’s difficult to justify one standard for American troops and another for Israel’s. And it’s unlikely that America will open up their troops to international scrutiny any time soon.

Perhaps some good will come from this inquiry in that certain rules of confrontation may be stricter in the future.

But critics believe it’s really about three things for Israel: silencing international criticism, repairing their damaged relationship with Turkey, and stopping another investigation currently underway by the UN’s Human Rights Council (HRC).

It was the HRC who conducted the famous Goldstone Report – the investigation into the actions of Israel and Hamas during the 2008/2009 Israeli invasion of Gaza.

The Goldstone Report was severely critical of Israel’s behaviour, accusing them of war crimes.

As a result, Israel doesn’t want another damning HRC report and so are hoping, along with American envoy to the UN Susan Rice, that this new inquiry will eliminate “the need for any overlapping international inquiry.”

These days, the war between Israel and Palestine is as much a battle for international public opinion as it is about fighting. In this case, Israel believes they have the facts on their side.

As Netanyahu declared, “Israel has nothing to hide. It is in [Israel’s] national interest to ensure that the factual truth of the overall flotilla events comes to light throughout the world.”

But just how fair and reasonable that inquiry will be is in serious doubt if the rules for investigating are so restrictive.

The inquiry begins its work on 10 August and will submit its first progress report in mid-September.

By The Casual Truth

Photo – The Mavi Marmara