Palestine home demolitions were unjustified

(The following letter was sent in response to Ferris’s initial research inquiries for the article.)

Greetings Emilé,

ICAHD [The Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions] has a history of action with regards to Rachel Corrie. Her parents, Craig and Cindy, are close friends of ours. As such we appreciate that our Consulate General of the Midwest did not attempt to repeat the rubbish about tunnels under the house of Dr. Samir Nasrallah, in front of whose house Rachel was killed. There was no tunnel at that location. Individual spokespeople for the Israeli Defense Forces [IDF] have made various claims at various times with regards to Rachel’s death including that she was killed by the collapsing wall of a house [BBC’s Dispatches: The Killing Zone, 2003]. What is clear though, in that statement is that the Israeli government is sticking to the line that the mass demolitions done in the southern Gaza Strip were done for strictly security reasons. We believe this to be demonstrably false, for the reasons listed below.

The infamous tunnels that ran below the Palestinian border with Egypt were never a valid justification for house demolitions. Under the Fourth Geneva Convention, to which Israel is party, the Occupying Power (Israel) is allowed to take certain precautions inside the Occupied Territory (Palestine) to guard the safety of the occupier’s forces [Geneva Convention, 1949]. This would include making reasonable and proportional efforts to disrupt the traffic of arms beneath the Gaza border. With regards to what we did to Rafah, Israel was neither reasonable nor proportional. If demolition was the best way to locate and disable the tunnels, which it was not, the Palestinians would have [to] be virtually a race of mole people to justify the demolition of over 2,500 houses and have it be proportional to the threat posed to Israel [statistics from the Palestinian Center for Human Rights, 2006].

Demolition of Palestinian houses was arguably the worst way short of using a divining rod to locate and disable tunnels beneath the border. In a report released in October of 2004, Human Rights Watch pointed out that there were many existing technologies that could have found the tunnels and disabled them with little to risk to the lives of both Israeli soldiers and Palestinians, and that would not have required any damage to the houses of Palestinians [“Razing Rafah: Mass Home Demolitions in the Gaza Strip,” 2004]. These would also have been much cheaper in financial terms than the multiple military incursions into hostile territory. Demolishing a house is not cheap. In addition, Israel is prohibited by the Fourth Geneva Convention from taking the action even if those houses did have tunnels under them [Geneva Convention, 1949].

It being the case that the overwhelming majority of those houses—even the most ridiculously bloated estimates total less than five percent of the houses demolished in Rafah—had no relation whatsoever to tunnels or smuggling. Israel’s actions stand in grave violation of the Fourth Geneva Convention, along with many other international agreements on human rights and the protection of property [see, among others, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights; the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights; and the Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees]

It has historically been the case that the IDF rarely prosecutes those who commit crimes against Palestinians or anyone else, including young American peace activists. There are rarely investigations and the “investigations” that do happen almost always lead to exoneration [see for example “Whitewash: The Office of Judge the Advocate General’s Examination of the Death of Khalil al-Mughrabi, 11, on 7 July 2001,” B’tselem, 2001]. The lack of transparency in these investigations is of major concern and it’s of little surprise that a behind-closed-doors investigation is still occurring three years after the death of Rachel Corrie despite multiple eyewitnesses along with video footage and photographic documentation of most of the incident [BBC’s Dispatches: The Killing Zone, 2003].

May 2006