For the third Sunday in a row, San Jose was joined by other Bay Area residents gathered at the corner of Winchester and Stevens Creek to protest the Israeli army killings in Gaza. The death toll had reached over 1,300. Of those, there are at least 410 children and 98 women.

Even with a ceasefire announced the day before, around 1,000 protesters showed up. The signs held messages asking for an end to the occupation, the Palestinians right for return, and asking to stop U.S. aid to Israel.

Photo: Reem Bazzari

The number of anti-protesters was proportionally high. They waved Israeli flags, and held mostly anti Hamas signs. The pro-Gaza protest, organized by South Bay Mobilization and San Jose Peace and Justice Center, displayed no signs referencing Hamas whatsoever. The protest was organized to bring attention to the humanitarian issue of rising civilian deaths.

The anti-protesters with their anti-Hamas signs chanting ““Free Gaza from Hamas!” were there to divert the attention from this humanitarian issue of civilian deaths. Israel has continuously employed a strategy of blaming the victim and shifting the responsibility of its army’s war crimes and deliberate targeting of civilians, schools and even U.N. workers and placing the blame on the Palestinian resistance.

I passed by a woman holding an Israeli flag and politely asked her why she was here today, counter-protesting. She seemed to be in her early sixties and spoke calmly with a Hebrew accent. She told me that all she wants is peace, she prays for Jews and Muslims to coexist. I said: there was a time when they did, before the occupation. She seemed to have a genuine humanitarian concern and believed that Israel should not have gone into Gaza with this military force killing civilians. But she came today to show solidarity with her country and was saddened that her people were called murderers. She came to say that both sides are responsible for violence and killing of civilians, and that that needs to be known. She believes that demolishing Hamas is the only way to start a path to peace.

On the other hand, another woman told me that “Palestinian civilians deserve to die because they allowed Hamas to exist and attack Israel with Qassam Rockets.” She said the people of Gaza “should have stopped Hamas but they didn’t, thus they deserve this consequence.” I expressed my relief that poor German civilians didn’t have to pay in this fashion for not stopping the Nazi party, or that Americans aren’t paying that kind of price for Bush’s atrocities in Iraq. Or that the Afghani civilians aren’t.. no, umm, never mind.

Let’s say one is willing to agree that Palestinian civilians deserve to die for electing Hamas, who in turn has been sending Qassam rockets over the border:

1) Range

These rockets have a maximum range of 10 km (that’s less than 7 miles for those who are unfamiliar) and lack any guidance system. The Israeli response is a U.S. funded army of tanks, F-16s and white phosphorus.

2) International Law

Under the 1949 Geneva Conventions collective punishments are a war crime. By collective punishment, the drafters of the Geneva Conventions had in mind the reprisal killings of World Wars I and II. In the First World War, Germans executed Belgian villagers in mass retribution for resistance activity. In World War II, Nazis carried out a form of collective punishment to suppress resistance. Entire villages or towns or districts were held responsible for any resistance activity that took place there. The conventions, to counter this, reiterated the principle of individual responsibility. The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) Commentary to the conventions states that parties to a conflict often would resort to “intimidatory measures to terrorize the population” in hopes of preventing hostile acts, but such practices “strike at guilty and innocent alike. They are opposed to all principles based on humanity and justice.”

3) Intent

Israel not only “allowed” for Hamas to exist but it wanted it to form. Anthony Cordesman, a Middle East analyst for the Center for Strategic Studies, states that Israel “aided Hamas directly—the Israelis wanted to use it as a counterbalance to the PLO.” A former senior CIA official speaking to UPI describes Israel’s support for Hamas as “a direct attempt to divide and dilute support for a strong, secular PLO by using a competing religious alternative.” Further, according to an unnamed US government official, “the thinking on the part of some of the right-wing Israeli establishment was that Hamas and the other groups, if they gained control, would refuse to have anything to do with the peace process and would torpedo any agreements put in place.” Larry Johnson, a counterterrorism official at the State Department, states: “The Israelis are their own worst enemies when it comes to fighting terrorism. They are like a guy who sets fire to his hair and then tries to put it out by hitting it with a hammer. They do more to incite and sustain terrorism than curb it.” [United Press International, 2/24/2001 Sources: Larry C. Johnson, Unnamed former CIA official]

These “Israeli” territories Hamas is rocketing are former Palestinian villages that were taken away from them. All the land that is now Israel was promised by a colonizer giving away what was never his.

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