The Gaza rebuild: a corruption of war
The recent confirmation of aid to rebuild Gaza City after the destruction wrought by Israeli Defence Forces during the summer 'Operation Protective Edge' campaign may do Israel more good than it does Gaza itself, according to Kilcullen-based Col Des Travers (Retd), writes Brian Byrne.
In the immediate aftermath of the summer's war, some $7bn was pledged by the international community to repair the damage in Gaza, which Des Travers has previously compared to that done to Guernica in the Spanish Civil War and to Dresden in WW2. At a recent donors conference in Cairo, that figure washed out to $5.4bn, half of which would be used to repair the physical damage done to the Gaza community. At the conference, Ireland pledged an additional €2.5m to the €500,000 promised in July to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency’s (UNRWA) emergency appeal.
But Col Travers — a former Irish Army officer who has served in a number of Irish peacekeeping operations in the Middle East and the Balkans, and who is also an acknowledged international expert on investigating war crimes — says the factual siege situation between Israel and Gaza means that any rebuilding work will inevitably be to the advantage of Israeli business.
"In the past, such monies were lodged in Israeli banks to be disbursed as they saw fit — the building materials will come from Israel, and if anyone attempts to bring in materials from anywhere else, they will remain warehoused in Israel forever," he says, adding that this will mean the $1.7bn which the IDF claim to have expended on the summer campaign of bombing Gaza 'will be redeemed many times over'. "It will go into the coffers of the Israeli military system. Cronies will get preferential contracts."
While acknowledging that the government of Gaza itself, involving the Hamas organisation, has 'endemic' corruption, Des Travers says a previous war between Israel and Gaza showed 'serious corruption' on the Israeli side, in the demolition of certain targets 'purely for commercial reasons'. "They interfered with the importation of product from Israel to Gaza. I worked on this investigation along with human rights activists in Israel, and our findings are valid."
In that particular conflict, in 2009, Gaza's only flour mill was bombed and destroyed. Col Travers notes that in Israel, the 'closed' flour milling industry is controlled by a small number of families, and that these days flour is imported into Gaza at a 14 percent premium over its price in Israel. "The Israelis claimed they hadn't bombed it, but one of the bombs didn't go off and a journalist representing a major English language newspaper took a photograph of it and sent it to me for identification. He said his paper was going to publish it, but it never appeared. The journalist left Jerusalem, and has been working as a researcher in a university ever since."
A recent special session of the Russell Tribunal on Palestine to which Col Travers provided key testimony about the weaponry and munitions used in the summer conflict, concluded that there were 'genocidal aspects' to how Israel is dealing with Gaza. But he also has a view that such short 'wars' are being used to test weapons systems, and have been in the past.
"In Israel the military industry is huge. One household in every ten derives an income from it, and the sector has something like 8,000 salesmen abroad. They market and field test weapons for the Americans, who can't do it themselves for legal and human rights reasons." He cites an attack on a crowded Al Fakhoura Street on a market day, in January, 2009. "I investigated it very carefully. Three 120mm mortar bombs landed one after the other, killing 31 and shredding and removing limbs and seriously injuring a further 34. That was inspired by a test firing of a new gun, or to demonstrate its efficiency."
It was an incident which was also investigated meticulously and carefully by the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, which included interviews with Israeli officers. "Reading their article, I said to myself that they will eventually arrive where I had ... but they stopped short by a paragraph of saying it was a test of a mortar. I think the newspaper, which has often been called a traitor publication in a very militaristic society, survives because there is some line in the sand beyond which they don't transgress."
After the 2009 incursion into Gaza, when Des Travers was part of an international investigation into what had happened there, he suspected there were some long-term objectives. "I spent four years afterwards researching, and following my visit to Gaza in 2013 I could see what consequences had emerged. Depletion of water. Desertification and drying out of soil. Opening and closing of intervals in which fishermen were allowed to go out. All of this was consistent with exploration for gas in the area. In other words, the campaign had been entirely predatory, a self-serving and corrupt activity masquerading as a conflict against Hamas."
Col Des Travers is not someone who jumps quickly to any conclusions. His training and personality means he tends to consider carefully all aspects of any situation with which he becomes involved. He is very familiar with the Middle East since he first visited the area in 1964 while on furlough from peacekeeping duties in Cyprus. He visited Gaza for the first time in 1980, and has been there a number of times since, watching it grow from a fishing village to what he considers to be one of the most developed communities in that part of the world.
A very experienced military man, who has been under artillery fire himself, he doesn't scare easily. But his views on Israel's military policy towards Gaza have made it more difficult for him to travel to the area. And while he was recently assured by a key security company that 'they' are not going to 'come after him' because they are 'concerned about a reaction from the Irish American community', he is very aware of 'vile stuff' that is written about him in the blogosphere. And he acknowledges that it does have an effect.
"When you are a soldier, in Cyprus, the Lebanon and the Balkans, you know that there are bad guys over the hill who will try to kill you," he muses. "You can live with that, because it is a very identifiable threat. But when there's a threat that you think would upset your children, your grandchildren, that does affect the way you behave." Based on those thoughts, this year he told a human rights scholar at Harvard, the daughter of a Holocaust survivor, that he was 'walking away' from it all. She asked him not to. "Then Protective Edge starts, all hell breaks loose, and you cannot walk away from that."
Because he still believes in a bottom line, one outlined famously by Nelson Mandela. "He said, unless the Palestinians get human rights, then there are no human rights. And that impacts on all of us."
