Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – President Joe Biden’s interview with MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell demonstrates that the project of right-wing Zionism, led by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, is to repeal post-World War II international law and take the world back to the jungle of the 1930s and 1940s, when the world’s great powers polished off 65 million people.
Scott D. Sagan, a Stanford political scientist, and researcher Katherine E. McKinney point out that the Truman administration’s bombing of the Japanese city of Hiroshima in 1945 would violate international law as it is accepted today. That acceptance is not just verbal or aspirational. It is embodied in treaties adopted by national legislatures and therefore has a binding character. The US Senate, for instance, ratified the Charter of the United Nations together with the Statute of the International Court of Justice on October 24, 1945.
McKinney and Sagan write of Hiroshima, “More than 70,000 men, women, and children were killed immediately; the munitions factories on the periphery of the city were left largely unscathed. Such a nuclear attack would be illegal today. It would violate three major requirements of the law of armed conflict codified in Additional Protocol I of the Geneva Conventions: the principles of distinction, proportionality, and precaution”
They explain later that these principles, codified in the first protocol to the Geneva Conventions (ratified by 174 countries), require combatants “to not intentionally attack civilians (the principle of distinction or noncombatant immunity); to ensure that collateral damage against civilians is not disproportionate to the direct military advantage gained from the target’s destruction (the principle of proportionality); and to take all feasible precautions to reduce collateral damage against civilians (the precautionary principle).”
The Israeli military repeatedly and publicly violated all three of these principle in its total war on Gaza civilians, as has been documented by the International Criminal Court, South Africa, Ireland, Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch.
The Likud Party and the parties to its right that dominate the current Israeli cabinet desperately wish to undo all these three principles, which were legislated by the international community after the end of WW II. That is because they are committed to genociding the Palestinian people, and international law is very inconvenient to this aspiration.
In 1945, President Truman alleged that Hiroshima was a legitimate military target. But McKinley and Sagan point out that, while Hiroshima housed certain military-related industrial sites, an army command center, and troop embarkation docks, the bustling metropolis of over 250,000 residents -— men, women, and children -— was far from being “a military base”… In fact, they say, fewer than 10 percent of those who perished in the city on August 6, 1945 were members of the Japanese armed forces.
Alas, they say, U.S. planners of the attack made no effort to “minimize, as much as possible, the killing of civilians.” They say that the historical record of discussion by principals such as Robert J. Oppenheimer, Maj. Gen. Leslie Groves and Secretary of War Henry Stimson shows that the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima was purposefully detonated above the city’s residential and commercial hub, rather than above valid military targets, to amplify the psychological impact on the Japanese population and the leadership in Tokyo.
International humanitarian law has subsequently been erected and widely adopted by treaty in order to prevent the Trumans, Oppenheimers, Groves’s and Stimsons of the future from ever behaving this way again with impunity.
1948 and after are a new era, where, fitfully and in a staccato fashion, the human community is trying to turn a page on the mind-boggling butchery of the mid-20th century, which included the horrors of the genocide of Europe’s Jews.
Netanyahu and his cronies want to pocket the good will toward Jews created by revulsion at the Holocaust, but to hold themselves harmless from the very legal strictures, such as the Geneva Conventions, that underpin the sentiment of “never again.”
Thus, Israel and the United States are signatories to the United Nations Charter and the International Court of Justice (ICJ). Last summer, the ICJ ruled that the Israeli occupation of Gaza and the Palestinian West Bank has departed so starkly, in so many ways, and for so long from the Fourth Geneva Convention of 1949 on the treatment of occupied populations that it is now illegal.
I can’t tell you how inconvenient for a Greater Israel aggressor like Netanyahu this ruling is. It is also inconvenient for the US government, Netanyahu’s patron and enabler, which is why Washington has ignored the ruling, despite its treaty obligations to abide by it.
Netanyahu’s response to this series of inconveniences? Tear it all down! He wants to abolish international humanitarian law.
The United States, on the other hand, still has uses for IHL, as in its campaign against Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine.
“Hiroshima on the Mediterranean,” Digital, Dream / Dreamland v3, 2024
These are Biden’s revelations to O’Donnell about his discussions with Netanyahu regarding the Israeli use of disproportionate force in Gaza:
Biden: “When I went to Israel immediately after the attack led by Hamas, eight days later or whatever it was, I told him that we were going to help. And I said, ‘But Bibi, you can’t be carpet bombing these communities.’ And he said to me, ‘Well you did it. You carpet bombed Berlin. You dropped a nuclear weapon. You killed thousands of innocent people because you had to in order to win a war.’”
Biden: “I said, ‘But that’s why we came up with the [United Nations]. New deals by which—how what we do relative to civilians and military.’”
O’Donnell: “So he was comparing twenty-first-century war tactics, battle tactics, with World War II?”
Biden: “Well, what he was really doing was going after me for saying, ‘You can’t indiscriminately bomb civilian areas. Even if the bad guys are there. Even if the bad guys are there, you can’t take out two, 10, 1,500 innocent people in order to get one bad guy.'”
“And he made the legitimate argument, his perspective -— ‘Look, these are the guys that killed my people. These are the guys that are all over in these tunnels. Nobody has any idea of the miles of tunnels that are down there. The only way to get to them is to take out the places under which they got to the tunnels.’”
Needless to say, Netanyahu’s argument that he was justified in razing all civilian objects in Gaza to the ground to get at some Hamas fighters was not in fact “legitimate.” Like the Hiroshima holocaust, these tactics violate current international legal norms, which is why there is an arrest warrant out for Netanyahu from the International Criminal Court.
That Biden thought Netanyahu’s argument was “legitimate” tells you everything you need to know about the hypocrisy, bankruptcy and sheer evil of current American foreign policy. As Ellie Quinlan Houghtaling said at The New Republic, “it’s bad.” Biden had some successes domestically. His eager and steadfast pursuit of a genocide against the Palestinians of Gaza will haunt his legacy, and will forever stains the escutcheon of the United States of America.
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