This diary will probably slide off very fast, but I wanted to post this quote from the Geneva Conventions, because people seem really fuzzy about whether collective punishment, while morally repugnant, is even illegal. Hello, it's a
war crime under the
Fourth Geneva Convention:
Article 33. No protected person may be punished for an offence he or she has not personally committed. Collective penalties and likewise all measures of intimidation or of terrorism are prohibited.
Part III. Status and Treatment of Protected Persons
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Section I. Provisions common to the territories of the parties to the conflict and to occupied territories
Article 33. No protected person may be punished for an offence he or she has not personally committed. Collective penalties and likewise all measures of intimidation or of terrorism are prohibited.
The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) Commentary to the conventions states that parties to a conflict often would resort to "intimidatory measures to terrorize the population" in hopes of preventing hostile acts, but such practices "strike at guilty and innocent alike. They are opposed to all principles based on humanity and justice."
Additional Protocol II of 1977 explicitly forbids collective punishment. But as fewer states have ratified this protocol than GCIV, GCIV Article 33. is the one more commonly quoted.
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Source http://en.wikipedia.org/...
In light of the Fourth Geneva Convention, it is impossible to view the actions of the Israeli government in Gaza, e.g. the bombing of the electrical power plant and of water pumping stations (providing electricity and water to the civilian population) and the rounding up of democratically elected Palestinian government members (whatever we may think of them), including 8 Cabinet members, as legal, legitimate, moral or otherwise justified, and this for the very same reasons we condemn terrorism against civilians. Terrorism, whether by means of a suicide bomber, of a shell from a battleship lying off a beach or a bomb from a supersonic jet dropped from hundreds of thousands of feet, whether ordered by a "terrorist group" or by a state (which is "state-sponsored terrorism" par excellence) is still terrorism and by definition, a war crime.