Israel's wanton proceedings in both Gaza and Lebanon are war-crimes, writes Raymond Deane.
The July 16th G8 statement on the Middle East crisis was a shameful abdication of responsibility on the part of some of the world's most powerful leaders.
Once again the west, with Japan and Russia in expedient if apparently reluctant tow, has determined that Israel may continue to violate international law, while resistance to its criminality is demonised.
In reality, the G8 statement and that of the EU foreign ministers on Monday 17th constitute a cover for Israel to attempt the destruction of both Hamas and Hizbullah.
This is because the west acknowledges militant Islam as the only force capable of bringing down the Arab dictators whose bought compliance is necessary to ensure western hegemony in the region.
Tom Cooney had no grounds whatever to assert in his recent opinion piece that the G8 statement "has brought a shift in how international law views states which are linked to terrorism".
A single statement by a cohort of opportunistic politicians cannot transform a legal consensus elaborated over generations.
A problem inherent in Mr Cooney's argument is his blanket acceptance of Israeli terminology.
The fact that such language is also used by Israel's unconditional allies does not grant it objective validity. The constant references to "terrorism" and "terrorists" constitutes an illicit attempt to smuggle in conclusions without elaborating premises. Others might dub Hamas and Hizbullah "freedom fighters" or "the Islamic resistance" and call Israel "a terror state".
Such language, whether correct or not, similarly presupposes a specific ideological stance and would be inappropriate in a discussion of international law.
If the G8 statement is important "because it recognises Israel's right under international law to use military force to defend itself", then its importance is negligible indeed: this right is already recognised, as is the right of all peoples - including the Palestinians or the Lebanese - to defend themselves forcefully against assault.
Mysteriously, the first conclusion Mr Cooney draws from his hollow premise is merely to repeat it, while asserting that it in some way rebuts "the International Court of Justice's stance", presumably when in its advisory opinion of July 9th, 2004 it condemned Israel's construction of a wall on Palestinian territory.
However, the ICJ explicitly accepted Israel's right to self-defence, while condemning the wall's route. Hence Mr Cooney's linkage is entirely tendentious.
His second conclusion is that "Israel may hold Lebanon directly responsible for the attack".
Even were such a conclusion justified in strict legality, in geo-political reality Lebanon's chaotic multi-sectarian and impotent government is "directly responsible" for very little.
To suggest that it can disarm Hizbullah in accordance with UN Security Council resolution 1559 - while Israel is encouraged to disregard scores of UN resolutions - is to play a disingenuous game.
Whatever the pretext for its recent actions, Israel has no right to target civilians or civilian infrastructure, whether in Lebanon or the Occupied Palestinian Territories. Article 6(b) of the Nuremberg Charter prohibits the "wanton destruction of cities, towns or villages, or devastation not justified by military necessity . . .", the latter being defined by the laws of war. The 1907 Hague Convention prohibits the penalisation of "the population on account of the acts of individuals for which they cannot be regarded as jointly and severally responsible," a prohibition repeated by Article 33 of the Fourth Geneva Convention of 1949. Hence Israel's wanton proceedings in both Gaza and Lebanon are war-crimes, and no rhetoric from the G8, the EU, or even Tom Cooney can alter the fact.
Mr Cooney again illicitly adopts Israeli language when he refers to Israeli soldiers having been "kidnapped" rather than "captured". He fails to mention the hostages Israel took with it when it withdrew unilaterally from Lebanon in 2000 after its long, bloody, and illegal occupation of that country.
Neither does he mention the regular kidnapping of Palestinian civilians by the Israeli army, or the thousands of Palestinian civilians rotting without trial in Israeli prisons. If "an Israeli rescue mission is an act of self-defence under article 51 of the UN Charter" then the Palestinians and Lebanese would be within their rights to invoke the same article. Of course in Mr Cooney's eyes, only Israel has rights.
Mr Cooney claims that because "neither the Palestinian Authority nor the Lebanese government has tried to rescue" the soldiers, "diplomatic means have failed."
But Israel has never tried diplomatic means, having had recourse to extreme military violence from the start.
Mr Cooney's claim that Israel cannot attempt to arrest Corp Shalit's captors in Gaza as it "would cause many civilian casualties" smacks of the blackest of black humour in view of the destruction and slaughter that Israel has wreaked in the Gaza Strip without retrieving its soldier.
Mr Cooney truly oversteps the boundaries when he describes Palestinian and Hizbullah fighters as "unlawful combatants" who can be denied "the benefits of prisoner-of-war status".
The term "unlawful combatant" has no existence in international law. According to US legal expert Nathaniel Berman, its use seems "designed to put detainees beyond the reach of any law", something that Mr Cooney apparently wishes upon Israel's victims in symmetry with his conviction that Israel should itself be blessed with impunity.
Clearly he espouses the Bush/Rumsfeld stance concerning the alleged al-Qaeda prisoners held without trial in Guantánamo. Unfortunately for this argument, last month the US Supreme Court ruled by a 5-3 majority that, contrary to the US government's view, Article 3 of that pesky 1949 Geneva Convention "relative to the treatment of prisoners of war" applies to the prisoners in Guantánamo and other US-run concentration camps such as Bagram. Perversely, Mr Cooney wishes to withhold from Palestinians and Lebanese the rights that the US Supreme Court has judged inalienable and universal.
It is an open secret that Israel had planned its reoccupation of Gaza long before the capture of Corp Shalit, and equally well known that the army had been yearning for another crack at Lebanon.
The actions of Hamas and Hizbullah merely provided the necessary excuse. Uri Avnery, veteran founder of the Israeli peace bloc Gush Shalom, maintains bluntly that "The real aim is to change the regime in Lebanon and to install a puppet government . . . Everything else is noise and propaganda." What a pity that a lawyer like Mr Cooney chooses to add to the noise and propaganda, instead of encouraging his beloved Israel to relinquish its militaristic arrogance and act, for the first time in its grim history, within the law.
Raymond Deane is a founding member of the Ireland Palestine Solidarity Campaign.