Israeli Targeted Killings against HAMAS: Legality

Israeli Targeted Killings against HAMAS LegalityThe Legality and Efficacy of Israeli Targeted Killings against HAMASExtra-judicial killing is often referred to by the United States in the case of its enemies as exporting terrorism, and has gained special notoriety since its employment by the State of Israel in the years of the twain Palestinian intifadas, or uprisings. The political assassinations and recent attempts by the Israeli disposal, contest by many in the external association, are argued by Israel and the United States as legally sanctioned by members 2 and 51 of the United Nations Charter. Israel conducts suicide bombings against its civilians extradite been curbed significantly by successful assassinations to which it fully admits, albeit each of these assassinations has resulted in collateral damage in the form of innocent bystander casualties. Others, much(prenominal) as Member States of the EU and the Arab League, have denounced Israeli assassinations as illeg al. Whether or not the targeted killings were the factor behind the drastic reduction in suicide bomb and former(a)wise terrorist attacks on Israeli citizenry is a point of major contention several other factors including HAMAS calling of a hudna, or ten-year truce, in hostility and the construction of the separation circumvent along the UN-recognized Green Line demarcating Israeli from Palestinian land should be taken into con lookration.One of Israels most impenetrable arguments in favor of the put on of targeted assassination is not deterrence, but rather preemptionOn November 9, 2000, Fatah leader Hussein Abayat was assassinated by fire from a helicopter, along with cardinal women who were walking nearby. The killing initiated a new Israeli policy of macrocosmly acknowledging assassinationsofficially termed targeted killings, liquidations, and pre-emptive strikes. This policy was premised on a set of interconnected justifications 1) that Palestinians were to blame for the hostilities, which comprise a war of terror against Israel 2) that the virtues of war permit states to kill their enemies 3) that targeted individuals were ticking bombs who had to be killed beca delectation they could not be arrested by Israeli soldiers and 4) that killing terrorists by mode of assassination was a lawful form of national defense1.The legality of Israeli targeted killings relies on a fine balance of situational interpretation of international law while the Israelis never argue the validity of a law in the UN Charter, their political stance on the Palestinian territories often contrasts their approach in dealings with the Palestinians as a sovereign entity. Lisa Hajjar dissects the change Israeli responses to intifada in her Courting bout The Israeli Military Court System in the westerly Bank and Gaza, noting Israels relative position of morality and transparency in comparison to nations in similarly enduring encroachs. Hajjar notes that what distinguishes th e Israeli model from many other states embroiled in protracted conflict is that Israel does not repudiate or ignore international law rather, it home(prenominal)ates international law by forging interpretations of its rights and duties in the West Bank and Gaza to accommodate state practices and domestic agendas2. The Israeli government currently administers authority over the West Bank (referred to as Judea and Samaria in Israeli political circles), and since it controls Palestinian air space, borders, natural resources, and collects taxes from the Palestinian people, both the Gaza Strip and the West Bank would erstwhile be considered under Israeli reign. However, the international community (which includes the UN) does not recognize the Israeli occupation, leaving the Palestinian situation somewhat in political limbo.The UN Charter, in Article Two, states all members shall refrain in their international relations from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity o r political independence of any state since Palestine is not a state under international law, this aspect of Article 2 does not apply. However, the simultaneous objections by the UN in the past, including the passing of more than sixty resolutions of which Israel is currently in violation3, do not apply as according to the same Article, nothing shall authorize the United Nations to intervene in matters which are essentially within the domestic jurisdiction of any state or shall require the Members to submit such matters to settlement, including the application of enforcement measures taken by any given member state. By these technicalities, Israel is not breach of international law, since few international laws can apply to the occupied territories (OT) which have except to be recognized as a sovereign state. Article 51 adds that nothing in the present charter shall impair the inherent right of individual or collective self-protection if an armed attack occurs against a Member of the United Nations, until the Security Council has taken measures necessary to maintain international peace and security moreover, measures taken by members in the exercise of this right of self-defense shall be immediately reported to the Security Council in order to maintain or restore international peace and security. Israel is transparent regarding its attacks and since the Jewish state technically is not attacking the Palestinians as a whole (hence the phrase targeted assassinations), it is not in breach of the UN Charter. Given Israels membership in the UN and the absence of sovereignty on behalf of the Palestinians, no advance can be made to the contrary vis--vis international law. According to HajjarMany states engage in practices that deviate from and thus repugn prevailing interpretations of international law. However, when powerful and dominant states like the US and Israel do so, this cannot simply be written off or criticized as violations because it produces an alter native legality. strange to the claims of both critics who take prevailing interpretations of international law as their point of reference and political realists who disparage the relevance of law, neither state ignores the law. Rather, both use laws and legal discourse to authorize and defend the legality of policies such as military pre-emption, indefinite incommunicado detention, abusive interrogation tactics, assassinations, and targeting of areas dense with civilians4.The efficacy of the targeted killings is disputed from a purely number-oriented statistical study. According to The Alternative Information Center on Palestine/Israel and the Israeli human rights organization Btselem, Israeli deaths banish in mid-2002, decreasing steadily through 20065. Three cases of successful targeted assassinations on HAMAS (an acronym for Harakat al-Muqawama al-Islamiya, or Islamic Resistance Movement) to consider are those of former Izzedine al-Qassam (the free-enterprise(a) wing of HAMA S) leader Salah Shehade in 2002, HAMAS spiritual founder and figurehead Sheikh Ahmed Ismail Yassin, and HAMAS co-founder Abdel Aziz al-Rantisi, who was killed within months of replacing Sheikh Yassin as the organizations head. amid the established spike in violence in 2002 and the assassination of both Rantisi and Yassin in 2004, several events transpired. Between the assassinations of Shehade in 2002 and al-Rantisi in 2004, the Israeli army active the Palestinians with an incursion into the intifada stronghold of Jenin and began the construction of the West Bank separation barrier. Though the physical number of casualties decreased, the number of attempted attacks did not subside until as recently as December 20066. While the execution of figureheads such as those named above are doubtless a positive force in the affect of HAMAS and other terrorist organizations leaders, the question of whether they are an effective means of deterrence and prevention is another issue, especiall y given the religious cistron of suicide bombing in the OT and its culture of martyrdom. To some extent, the system of targeted assassinations has been marginalized as extrajudicial executions (i.e. assassinations) have come to vie with prosecutions as means of punishment and deterrence for suicide bombings by Palestinian militants both suicide bombings and assassinations have a history that predates the second intifada, and both emanate from human rights claimsdystopian in the extremeto kill to survive7. peradventure more contested from a legal standpoint than the act of targeted assassinations is the factor of innocent bystanders caught in the crossfire. The area most targeted by Israeli assassinations, especially by aircraft, is the densely-populated Gaza Strip whose tribe of approximately 1.3 million is estimated by many to be the most densely-populated region in the world. The case of Shehade is one of the more notorious in recent Israeli history, whose death sparked the pro tests of tens of thousands vowing revenge8. According to CNN and other sources, a squadron of F-16 jets dropped an armament of significant magnitude on the apartment building in which Shehade lived sources claim the armament deployed weighed nearly a metric ton. As a corollary of the attack on the three story building in which Shehade lived, fifteen other people, including women and children, were killed in the residential complex9. Justifying the attack that killed the architect of attacks that resulted in the murder of hundreds of Israelis, the assassination of Shehade prompted speculation that Israel had to have been cognizant that an attack of such magnitude would certainly result in collateral damage10. Active awareness of civilian death as a measured loss in such an action prompts the question as to whether or not Israel should have been held accountable on the same counts as groups like HAMAS, condescension the difference in the nature of the attacks. Hajjar, whose writings lean toward the side of the Palestinian cause, nevertheless concedes unconditionally that suicide bombings and assassinations can by no means be considered equivalent except in their effects (death) while the two are not the only forms of violence that graphic symbolize the exchanges during the Al-Aqsa Intifada, together they illustrate with brutal clarity the human costs of unbearable justice and intractable conflict11. In order to adequately address Israeli culpability in targeted attacks, one must first put into larger context the timing of such attacks. Unlike the first intifada, the roots of the second are entwined in the military court system, which has been a central setting for the conflict12. The second intifada in particular marked the change in Israeli occupation of the OT, an expansion from a predominantly law enforcement model to a war model13. Since the attacks on both sides escalated in both nature and cost, the Israeli retaliatory actions also warranted a change in their degree of severity. The deterrent component of Israeli vengeance to the first intifada was surmised to have failed, given the reorganization of additional terrorist organizations that despite their political competition inside the framework of Palestinian government collaborated in their attacks on Israeli citizenry. There existed a perception that the duration of the first intifada had forced the Israeli government to make concessions to Palestinians and that these concessions, namely the redeployment from Palestinian population centers, had weakened the militarys ability to provide for Israeli security, creating a reliance on the Palestinian Authority that was ineffective in preventing suicide bombings and other types of attacks on Israelis14. A low-intensity, small-arms confrontation, the first intifada was dwarfed by the weaponry and frequency of attacks inside Israel proper. Where the first intifada was characterized by stone-throwing at tanks, the second is today notori ous for suicide bombs and gruesome lynching of Israeli settlers and soldiers. While deterrence whitethorn not have been achieved, the escalation in the degree of Israeli retaliatory measures and those of pre-emption undoubtedly carried with it the intent to assert Israeli military dominance.Targeted assassinations took place long before the Al-Aqsa Intifada in 2000. While the legal ramifications of such assassinations are as yet to be officially disputed, the moral indignation inside Israel and abroad has been considerable. Opinions clash over the morality of such assassinations, even among Israels populace. Detailed by Nachman Ben-Yehuda in Political Assassinations by Jews A Rhetorical machination for Justice, targeted assassinations should hardly be a significant point of contention in the international community. Though assassinations may be equated with executions (albeit doled out without formal trials), targeted attacks are not murder. Ben-Yehuda points out that a political a ssassination event is typically carefully planned and cold bloodedly executed, despite the large numbers of collateral damage as previously mentioned15.Israel has done well in the past to point to its critics the fact that at the risk of probable to provide a justification for political assassination events in the form of executions, one must be reminded that selecting the route of political executions was in fact taken by governments in different cultures as a useful and pragmatic tool16. Unlike Syrias Asad regime, which in 1982 massacred nearly 40,000 members of the Islamic Brothers following an assassination attempt on then-President Hafiz al-Asad, Ben-Yehuda is careful to make note of Israels use of targeted assassination in specific cases when no other course of action leave behind spare its soldiers lives. He makes a point to note that while it is inaccurate to assert that political executions were a major tool use by Israel, it was used whenever the decision makers felt tha t executions could achieve specific goals like revenge, or in preventing future occurrences of aggression and violence against Israel17 . Ben-Yehuda also observes how some equate a governments reliance on assassinations to a desperate gamblers stroke political analysts have speculated that assassination is the tactic of the resource-less and that a government which cannot ensue foreign policy by conventional means and uses assassins instead is likely to be a government so vulnerable that its weapons perform like boomerangs in the hands of the inexperienced18.America has recently endeavored to use the Israeli model of late, adopting the tactic of assassination in 2002 which had been prohibited by executive orders since 197719. Studying Israeli legal arguments, the US militarily justified its assassination of suspected al-Qaeda member Ali Qaed Sinan al-Harithi and five others (including a US citizen) in Yemen by a pilotless drone20. Unlike, Israel, however, the US violated Yemeni air space, a questionable act given distinction in its targeting of an American citizen. Targeted assassinations executed by the United States should not be conflated as a purely Israeli export, however missions that transpired in the Vietnam conflicts notorious Project Phoenix neutralized 8,104 Viet Cong cadres and was considered so stiff a practice that the Saigon interior minister set goals for 1969 noting the United States hope for 33,000 neutralizations through the rest of the year21. While Israel used assassinations as a relatively domestic tool and was met with criticism, the majority of the world remained silent for several reasons in the case of Americas Project Phoenix. First, Israel has yet to officially declare war, as such a declaration would imply the sovereignty of Palestine as a nation. Second, the US was embroiled in a conflict that would later claim in excess of 50,000 soldiers and countless hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese. As a preemptive measure, Phoenix was mo rally admissible due to the magnitude of the conflict and the fact that Vietnam, official or not, was a multi-national, regional conflict and full-blown war. It should be noted that even in war, however, Phoenix had become known and increasingly controversial in the US, a problem that would never cease and added to the long list of grievances the American public would take with the war in general22.Robert Freedman recalls the Israeli public opinion of targeted assassination, stating public opinion in Israel is characterized by high levels of knowledge and personal involvement regarding issues of security and by low levels of perceived influence the public relies on the leadership and is aware of its own ineffectiveness despite such reliance23. An open society, Israels actions are not only carried out on behalf of the people, but are O.K. by the people. As per the international outcry abroad, those who defend Israels actionsnamely states embroiled in similar conflicts such as Serbia , Cyprus, and Russiaremained staunch allies and knew the authorisation of Israels actions would lessen international reaction to their own respective situations. Among Israels political adversaries, however, the escalation of the violence in the second intifada, along with well-documented media coverage of bus and caf bombings, changed the character of international outcry significantly. Unlike the PLOs activities in the late 1960s through 1980, HAMAS and its extreme tactics of suicide bombing after 2000 earned the Palestinian cause worldwide antipathy as well as scorn directed at the Israeli state. Such changes in threats, Freedman argues, precipitated changes in responses which varied in intensity. The escalation of targeted assassinations was a two-fold public relations strategy. On the one hand, it showed a change from the popular perception of Israeli indiscriminate fire on the Palestinian population, and on the other, it showed a general concern for IDF soldiers and law enfor cement, starkly contrasting the willingness of HAMAS and Islamic Jihad to knowingly detonate and kill its own members. Freedman notes how the Israeli response to the threats posed by the PLO, particularly during the height of its armed struggle in the 1968-1971 period, was based on a combination of administrative, economic, and military actions24. The military component and predominance of assassinations reflects the difference between PLO secularist attacks and HAMAS-style religious branding, adding more weight to the conflict and another dimension of severity. To date, the Israelis have been able to continue in their targeted assassinations, owing to a combination of brutal Palestinian aggression as well as the language of ambiguity adhered to in the UN Charter.BIBLIOGRAPHYBen-Yehuda, Nachman. (1993) Political Assassinations by Jews A Rhetorical Device forJustice. Albany State U of New York P.Freedman, Robert Owen. (1991) The Intifada Its Impact on Israel, the Arab World, andthe S uperpowers. Miami U of Florida P.Hajjar, Lisa. (2005) Courting Conflict The Israeli Military Court System in the WestBank and Gaza. Berkeley U of California P.Hirst, David. (2004) Obituary Sheikh Ahmed Yassin. Online Resource lendable athttp//www.guardian.co.uk/israel/Story/0,2763,1175854,00.html.Prados, John. (2003) Lost Crusader The Secret Wars of CIA Director William Colby.New York Oxford U P.Rice, Edward E. (1988) Wars of the Third Kind Conflict in Underdeveloped Countries.Berkeley U of California P.Various. (2007) Al-Aqsa Intifada Enters Sixth Year. Online Resource Available athttp//www.alternativenews.org/aic-publications/other-publications/al-aqsa intifada-enters-sixth-year-20050929.html.Vause, John. (2002) Israel Takes Heat for Gaza Airstrike. Online Resource Availableat http//archives.cnn.com/2002/WORLD/meast/07/23/mideast/index.html.Various. (2004) Hamas Chief Killed in Air Strike. Online Resource Available athttp//news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/3635755.stmWatson, Geoffrey R. (2000) The Oslo Accords International Law and the IsraeliPalestinian Peace Agreements. Oxford Oxford U P.Note UN Charter available at www.un.org/aboutun/charterFootnotes1 Hajjar 2006, p. 2382 Hajjar 2006, p. 2433 Hajjar 2006, p. ix4 Hajjar 2006, p. 2465 http//www.alternativenews.org/aic-publications/other-publications/al-aqsa-intifada-enters-sixth-year-20050929.html6 Hajjar 2005, p. 2447 Hajjar 2006, p. 2368 CNN 20029 Ibid10 Ibid11 Hajjar 2006, p. 3612 Hajjar 2006, p. 23513 Hajjar 2006, p. 23614 Hajjar 2006, p .23715s Ben-Yehuda 1993, p. 35416 Ben-Yehuda 1993, p. 31817 Ben-Yehuda 1993, p. 35418 Ibid19 Hajjar 2006, p. 24620 Ibid21 Prados 2003, p. 21022 Prados 2003, p. 21423 Freedman 1991, p. 26924 Freedman 1991, p. 47