Journal for the Study of Antisemitism

2009] BETRAYING TRUTH 169
restrictions constituted collective punishment of Gaza’s estimated 1.4 million
people and violated the Fourth Geneva Convention. 117
This claim misleadingly conflates a failure to aid with active criminal
harm. Context is ignored: Acts of war are launched daily against Israel
from Hamas-run Gaza. Since Israel withdrew from the Gaza Strip in 2005,
more than 6000 rockets and shells have been fired against Israeli cities–first
especially at Sderot, about two miles from the Strip, and more recently at
Ashkelon, Ashdod, and Ben Shira, major Israeli population centers twenty
miles distant. The doctrine of collective punishment forbids the imposition
of criminal or military penalties (e.g., imprisonment or death) on some people
for crimes committed by others. The cessation of trade with a country
or hostile entity such as the Strip is not inflicting a criminal or military
penalty against all its residents, who have no entitlement to objects of trade
that they have not yet purchased. The electricity withheld from sale was a
military tool. (Israel continues to export approximately $500 million worth
of goods and services into the Gaza Strip each year.) 118
Israel’s response to the terrorizing, wounding, or murder of its civilians–a
kind of collective punishment in its own right–has been to target
perpetrators of such violations of international law. Yet the clear difference
between legal force and collective punishment is seldom reflected in media
coverage of the conflict.
Likewise unreported is the fact that Israel’s treatment of non-combatants
in a hostile populace is more consonant with international law than that
of many of its Arab neighbors. 119
Failure to Correct Misreported Facts
On December 20, 2007, the Washington Post published an article
headlined “For Israel’s Arab Citizens, Isolation and Exclusion” by its Jerusalem
bureau chief, Scott Wilson, stating that Arabs other than Druze were
117. Id. Israel has made no effort to prevent Gaza from receiving electricity
from Egypt. Article 49 of the Geneva Conventions clearly does not outlaw acts
such as restriction of supplies to an enemy-controlled area.
118. Id. The United States legally froze trade with Iran after that country committed
an act of war against the USA during the 1979 Islamic Revolution. Even prevention
of access of goods coming from third parties is not collective punishment:
the U.S. blockade of Cuba after it installed nuclear missiles was not a collective
punishment of the Cuban people, but a non-violent act of war in self-defense. Id.
119. See, e.g., U.S. Department of State, “2008 Human Rights Report: Israel and
the Occupied Territories” (Israel “generally respected the human rights of its citizens”),
available at http://www.state.gov/g/drl/rls/hrrpt/2008/nea/119117.htm.