Israel’s shelling yesterday of the UN relief agency UNRWA’s Gaza City headquarters is the latest outrage in a rising tide of depravity that looks, despite Israeli cant to the opposite, increasingly like genocide. Over 700 civilians were cowering in the UN complex when two phosphorous shells set part of it on fire. Three UN workers were injured in the attack.
The Israeli military trotted out the now well-rehearsed excuse that it had targeted the building because their forces had come under fire from it. While accepting that most of its personnel were taking shelter at the time of the attack, a senior UN official has insisted there were no Hamas fighters in the compound. He also pointed out that UNRWA had given Israel the GPS coordinates for all its buildings in Gaza and therefore Israeli commanders had no excuse for ordering the attack.
There are two realities behind this Israeli assault that ought not to surprise outside observers. The first is Israel’s core attitude to the UN. It is one of utter contempt. UN Security Council Resolution 242 of 1967 which demanded Israeli withdrawal from all occupied territories was only the first international ruling that Israel chose to ignore. It has been equally scornful of Resolution 446 demanding an end to illegal settlements in the West Bank. The latest snub to world opinion has come with its refusal to end its violent assault on Gaza’s largely defenseless civilian population.
The second reality is that UNRWA’s work in sustaining hundreds of thousands of Gazans, despite the punitive Israel blockade, has infuriated Israeli politicians. Without the UN’s humanitarian effort, the besieged Palestinian population and their political leaders, would have been brought to their knees long ago. Last week’s murder by Israeli soldiers of a UN truck driver, in an aid convoy moving into Gaza, was an indicator of the ire with which Israelis view UN interference. Imagine the Nazi German reaction if the International Red Cross had managed to bring life-saving succor to the Jews in the Warsaw or other ghettos into which Hitler’s butchers had crowded them during World War II.
UNRWA has been getting in Israel’s way for years and this, for some Israeli leaders at least, is payback time. It is perhaps a demonstration of Israeli madness that any responsible politicians or military commander can really imagine that they can take on the entire international community in such a brazen fashion. But then Israel has always been able to count on US protection, even though she has sunk its ships and spied on its arms industry.
In the last days of the unmourned Bush administration, one neocon has insisted that Palestinian militant rockets were genocidal attacks because they were aimed at killing Jews. On the other hand, Israeli slaughter in Gaza was not genocide but merely “collateral damage”. Try Googling photographs of terrified Jewish kids being rounded up by the Nazis and then compare them with this week’s images of distraught Gazan kids under bombardment and see if you can spot the difference.
