2008 - Primera Guerra contra Jamás en Gaza: Operación Plomo Fundido (27 dic 2008-18 ene 2009)

Operación Plomo Fundido - Resumen

Fuente: Gaza Facts - The Israeli Perspective y Operation Cast Lead: Israel strikes back against Hamas terror in Gaza Dec 2008-Jan 2009 (Israel Gov-MFA) - Sobre el tratamiento mediático de la Operación Plomo Fundido: Narratives, The Media and Operation Cast Lead (Philip Mack, 2014). En el JCPA nos ofrecen enlaces a diversos artículos sobre esta operación.

Luego vendrían la Segunda Guerra contra Jamás en Gaza: Operación Pilar de Defensa (14-21 nov 2012) u la Tercera Guerra contra Jamás en Gaza: Operación Margen Protector (8 jul - 26 ago 2014)

 

Pasados unos meses de la Conferencia de Annapolis (27 nov 2007), el Oriente Medio vivía una nueva ola de violencia en la Franja de Gaza donde, en junio de ese año, Jamás se había hecho con el poder, acabando con la Autoridad Palestina y persiguiendo a sus fuerzas de seguridad y a la gente del Fatah, a quienes acaba expulsando de la Franja.

La Desconexión unilateral israelí de la Franja de Gaza en 2005 no había aplacado la violencia palestina sino que, muy al contrario, la alentó, incrementando un 500 % el número de cohetes y proyectiles de mortero disparados por los terroristas palestinos desde Gaza contra poblados y otros objetivos civiles israelíes: solo en 2008 se lanzaron 3.000, la cuarta parte del total de 12.000 lanzados entre 2000-2008.

Israel responde a estos ataques a finales de 2008 con la Operación Plomo Fundido, que duró del 27 de diciembre del 2008 al 18 de enero de 2009, con el objetivo de (1) acabar con el disparo de proyectiles y (2) destruir la "infraestructura terrorista" y la capacidad militar de Jamás. 

La operación militar constituye un paradigma de lecciones efectivamente aprendidas por el Ejército de Israel tras su bastante lamentable ejecución durante Operación en el Sur del Líbano de 2006 contra el Jizbalá.

Pese a los innumerables informes que dicen otra cosa, en el campo palestino perecieron no más de 200 personas no peligrosas; las demás estaban claramente relacionadas con Jamás.

La historia, con sus antecedentes y consecuentes, la cuenta bien Robert Wedine en Five Years Later: Operation Cast Lead and the Goldstone Report, Revisited (January 2, 2014)

Investigación del Gobierno de Israel sobre las Operaciones en Gaza

Informes del Gobierno

Informes sobre la operación del Shabak Agencia de Seguridad de Israel

Sobre la Legislación aplicable a este tipo de Operaciones

Sobre la legislación relativa a este tipo de operaciones: Israel, ‘Palestine,’ and the Law Of War (Part I y Part II) (Louis Rene Beres, Sep 25 y Oct 4, 2012). 

Y sobre los críticos a las mismas: Immaculate Intervention: The Wars of Humanitarianism (George Friedman, April 5, 2011). Algunos creen que el Informe trae como consecuencia la necesidad de redefinir el concepto de crimen de guerra para que los estados puedan enfrentarse a la moderna guerra asimétrica donde los terroristas se parapetan tras los civiles, con y sin su connivencia.

Ética del comportamiento de las IDF en la Operación

Asa Kasher, académico que contribuyó a elaborar el primer Código Ético de las IDF y que sigue colaborando en la fijación de los parámetros éticos que han de guiar sus intervenciones, en una entrevista se refiere a la actuación israelí durante la Operación Plomo Fundido:

"(...)

... We are a democratic state. And that means two things. One, we are obligated to effectively protect our citizens from all danger. So we have a police force, to protect against crime. A Health Ministry, to protect against medical dangers. A Transportation Ministry, against the dangers on the roads. And we have a Defense Ministry, to protect us against the dangers our enemies represent. The state cannot evade this obligation... There is nothing more important than protecting citizens’ lives. Nothing... A state is obligated to ensure effective protection of its citizens’ lives. In fact, it’s more than just life. It is an obligation to ensure the citizens’ well-being and their capacity to go about their lives. A citizen of a state must be able to live normally. To send the kids to school in the morning. To go shopping. To go to work. To go out in the evening. A routine way of life. Nothing extraordinary. The state is obliged to protect that. At the same time, the moral foundation of a democratic state is respect for human dignity. Human dignity must be respected in all circumstances. And to respect human dignity in all circumstances means, among other things, to be sensitive to human life in all circumstances. Not just the lives of the citizens of your state. Everybody. This applies even in our interactions with terrorists. I am respecting the terrorist’s dignity when I ask myself, “Do I have to kill him or can I stop him without killing him?” And I certainly have to respect the human dignity of the terrorists’ nondangerous neighbors – who are not a threat. We always talk about “innocents,” but “innocence” is not the issue here. The issue here is whether they are dangerous. So the correct translation is “non-dangerous.

Okay, so that’s some of the theory. Now relate that to Operation Cast Lead (entrevistador)

Fine. We have to protect our citizens and we have to respect human dignity. But when it comes to a war like Operation Cast Lead, those two imperatives are likely to clash. I am obligated to protect my citizens, but I have no way to protect them without the non-dangerous neighbors of the terrorists becoming caught up in the conflict. What am I to do?

Two things: First, you decide what is more important in the given situation. And second, you do whatever you can so that the damage to the other side is as small as possible: Maximizing effective defense of the citizens; minimizing collateral damage.

How do I decide which of the conflicting imperatives is more important? 

People don’t like this idea, because they don’t understand it: They think it is immoral to give priority to the defense of the citizens of your state over the protection of the lives of the neighbors of the terrorists. They don’t understand that the world is built in such a way that responsibility is divided.

Please elaborate (entrevistador)

We are responsible for the residents of the State of Israel... We are not responsible for the lives of Canadians in the same way as we are for the lives of Israelis and vice versa. This is completely accepted and completely moral and no one questions this. We don’t have one world government that is responsible for everything. We have states with their own responsibilities... I cannot evade my prime responsibility to protect the well-being of the citizens of my country. Now, among all the means I could use to protect them, I will choose those that are better morally – better from the point of view of the effectiveness of the protection and the minimalization of the damage to the neighbors of the terrorists.

And what do we do to minimize the harm done to the neighbors of the terrorists? (entrevistador)

We can’t separate the terrorist from his neighbors. We can’t force the terrorists to move away, because they don’t want to move away. That’s their whole strategy: To be there... The terrorists have erased the difference between combatants and non-combatants... No one has the power to move them from where they are without conquering the entire area, which requires special justifications. But if we can’t force the terrorist out, we can make the effort to move his neighbors... experience shows that... very many non-dangerous neighbors do move away from terrorists if they are warned. So Israel, the IDF, carries out very intensive warning operations. Unprecedented.

There are those who don’t like the term, “the most moral army in the world.” I think it’s a very complex phrase, and one has to make all kinds of professional diagnoses. You can’t just blithely invoke it. But let’s look at that claim in this particular context. Who tries harder than we do to warn the neighbors [to leave a conflict zone]? Who does it better than we do? I don’t know if the public realizes this, but we recently carried out precisely such an act of warning – by publishing a map of Hezbollah positions in south Lebanon. Israel released details of hundreds of villages where Hezbollah has a position deep inside the village. From there, they’ll fire on us if and when they want to, and we will have to protect ourselves. That means we’ll have to fire into the village. The publication of this map is a warning... The populace has to know that it is in a dangerous situation... The fact is, this is an advance warning.

Now let’s come to Operation Cast Lead in this context. We distributed leaflets [to Gaza civilians, telling them that they should leave a potential conflict zone]. It may be that we can do that better – distribute better leaflets, more detailed, with more precise guidance on how to get away. We broke into their radio and TV broadcasts to give them announcements, to warn them. That can be done still more effectively. We made phone calls to 160,000 phone numbers. No one in the world has ever done anything like that, ever. And it’s clear why that is effective. It’s not a piece of paper that was dropped in my neighborhood. The phone rang in my own pocket! Yes, it was a recorded message, because it’s impossible to make personal calls on that scale. But still, this was my number they dialed. It was a warning directed personally to me, not some kind of general warning. And finally, we had the “tap on the roof” approach. The IDF used nonlethal weaponry, fired onto the roofs [of buildings being used by terrorists]. That weaponry makes a lot of noise. It constituted a very strong, noisy hint: We’re close, but you still have the chance to get out. What we don’t use is nohal shachen (the “neighbor protocol”). I recently read comments by a British general, a commander in Afghanistan...

Gen. Richard Kemp? (entrevistador)

No, this was someone else, saying at a press conference, how moral his forces are. And then he described their policy, which was nohal shachen, as the symbol of the morality of British soldiers.

What did he say, specifically, that they do? (entrevistador)

He said that when they are facing a terrorist hiding out in a building with non-dangerous neighbors, they make one of the neighbors telephone or speak through a loudspeaker to the Taliban terrorist who is in this building, and say that rather than killing him and the neighbors and destroying the house, he should surrender and that he’ll be taken away with various guarantees. This British commander was very proud of this ostensibly humane procedure – a procedure that the courts here forbid us to do. We don’t do it. We issue warnings in an unprecedented way – not one warning, but many. We make enormous efforts to get the neighbors away from the terrorists. Now there’s one more thing that maybe we could do, and there’s an argument surrounding it: send soldiers into the building. Send in soldiers to check that maybe someone has stayed. I am against this. Very against this.

So there’s a difference between what we did in Jenin [during Operation Defensive Shield in 2002, where 13 soldiers were killed in an ambush] and what we did in Gaza? (entrevistador)

Yes, we changed our approach. The approach is more appropriate now. I think what we did in Jenin was a mistake. There was a primitive conception that “it’s all right to endanger soldiers.” Every time there was a dilemma like this – soldiers here and non-soldiers on the other side – the soldiers were endangered.

Why was that wrong? (entrevistador)

You need, to a certain limit, to warn the people to get out. At a certain point, the warnings are over and there are two possibilities. That people have stayed because they don’t want to leave or because they can’t leave. If they can’t leave, despite all the warnings, despite the possibilities to get them out, even to send ambulances to get them out, that’s interesting to me, and we’ll come back to that. But if a neighbor doesn’t want to leave, he turns himself into the human shield of the terrorist. He has become part of the war. And I’m sorry, but I may have to harm him when I try to stop the terrorist. I’ll do my best not to. But it may be that in the absence of all other alternatives, I may hurt him. I certainly don’t see a good reason to endanger the lives of soldiers in a case like that. Sometimes people don’t understand this. They think of soldiers as, well, instruments. They think that soldiers are there to be put into danger, that soldiers are there to take risks, that this is their world, this is their profession. But that is so far from the reality in Israel, where most of the soldiers are in the IDF because service is mandatory and reserve service is mandatory. Even with a standing army, you have to take moral considerations into account. But that is obviously the case when service is compulsory: I, the state, sent them into battle. I, the state, took them out of their homes. Instead of him going to university or going to work, I put a uniform on him, I trained him, and I dispatched him. If I am going to endanger him, I owe him a very, very good answer as to why. After all, as I said, this is a democratic state that is obligated to protect its citizens. How dare I endanger him?

Even in uniform, he is still considered one of those citizens that the state is obliged to protect? (entrevistador)

Yes, he is one of the citizens that I have an obligation to protect. But somebody has to do the protecting. So each generation produces its soldiers. Now it’s this generation. Before that it was their parents. After this, it will be their children. Their turn. Their generation. But even now that it’s this generation, that these are the people in uniform, I need a very strong reason to send them somewhere dangerous. Why do I conscript them to the army? Two words: No choice. Given the threats around us, a volunteer, standing army would not be sufficient. And why did we send them to Gaza? Because for eight years before Operation Cast Lead, we tried all the other options. It didn’t help. There was no choice. We sent the army to Gaza because there was no choice. And why did we send them to that particular theoretical house we’ve been discussing? Because there were armed terrorists in it who were attacking Israel. There was no choice. But now you want to send soldiers into that house just in case, by chance, there’s still someone inside, who doesn’t want to leave. You want me to send in soldiers to pull him out? Why? Why do I owe him that? I have issued so many warnings and this man has refused to come out. I haven’t got a strong enough reason to tell that soldier he has to go in. This man has been warned five times and decided not to leave. Therefore he took the danger upon himself. After all those warnings, one has to act against the terrorists and those of his neighbors who have decided not to leave, and not endanger the lives of the soldiers.

And what, now, of the issue of civilians who are prevented by the terrorists from leaving a conflict zone?  (entrevistador)

This has to be handled in a graduated fashion. I’ll explain. Let’s imagine a fictitious situation, whereby the terrorists have forced 20 children onto the roofs of every single building in Gaza that has been marked as a target because it has terrorists in it. That’s what I see in my reconnaissance photographs. Every single roof is covered with children. That means that I can’t fire on those buildings. But they’re firing at me from those buildings. There are 20 children on the roof, and from the house the terrorists are firing. It’s the same in every house. If I can’t fire on any house because there are children on the roof, I have lost my capacity to protect myself. There is nothing I can do. Always in those circumstances, people say, “Well, make peace.” Fine. Great. I want peace. We have to seek peace. But right now I’m facing these houses and they’re firing at me. Talking about a peace conference now is not really the point. Or people say, as with the cop facing the murderous bank robber, “Don’t shoot him. We need to clean up the neighborhood so that the people have jobs and don’t turn to crime.” Again, great, yes, that’s true. We have to create a situation where there aren’t criminals in that neighborhood, but right now I’ve got an armed robber in the bank and he’s threatening to kill his hostages. So, right now I have to protect the citizens of my state, and if I don’t fire at any of the houses that have children on the roof, then I won’t be able to protect my civilians. And that’s unthinkable, out of the question. So, what I have to do, and it’s tragic however you look at it, is fire at one of those houses. The first place that they fire at me from, even though there are children on the roof, I will immediately fire on it, and some of those children will be killed – because I have no choice, because I have no other means to protect myself. The terrorists took away from me the normal means of self-defense. It’s out of the question that I not protect myself, so I hope the terrorists will take the children off the roofs, and I will wait for them to take the children off the roofs in order to defend myself against the terrorists, but if they don’t take the children off the roofs, I will continue. I have no choice. A state cannot say “I will allow my citizens to be killed because the enemy has placed children on all the roofs and I will not kill children.” That brings me back to what you mentioned at the very beginning about your interview with former air force commander Shkedy and the circumstances when Israel will fire and won’t fire. I can always ask myself, in all kinds of circumstances, maybe there’s a different way to stop this terrorist or that attack. Maybe I have more time. If there’s time, if there’s an alternative means, then that’s fine. When he was IDF chief of staff, Moshe Ya’alon once said that he prevented a targeted strike at [Hamas military commander Salah] Shehadeh when his daughter was right next to him. (Shehadeh was eventually killed in a targeted strike in 2002, in which 14 other people were killed, including his wife and nine children. Then prime minister Sharon later said he would have aborted the operation had it been realized that it would cause those other fatalities.) Ya’alon evidently knew there would be another opportunity and that he could take the risk of waiting longer to strike. It wasn’t now or never. But when it’s now or never, there is no choice. I wouldn’t sleep after giving an order which involved killing not only terrorists but also the daughter of a terrorist. If there is a choice, you have to use it because of your imperative to respect human dignity. But sometimes there’s no choice.

(...)

... appropriate doctrines must be informed by the same spirit: we are a democratic state, we must protect our citizens, we respect human dignity, we must minimize collateral damage in every effective means...

(...)

I hear the same thing everywhere in democratic states. I’ve been to something like 15 of them, from India to Canada. There is no one who will say I don’t have to protect my civilians and to minimize the damage [to the other side]. There is no one who will say I must not harm the other side and minimize the damage to my civilians. No one will say that. No one. Nowhere."

(entrevista completa)

Análisis palestino de su actuación mediática

NSU Analysis of PA Media Interviews (Negotiations Support Unit-Negotiations Affairs Department-PLO, Jan 18, 2009) - Documento filtrado entre los PalestinePapers - This is an internal NSU assessment of whether PA officials had an effective media strategy during the Gaza War. It concludes they did not: 

"The poor performance, and the contradictory and unclear (old) messages that were delivered by the different Palestinian officials, left an unprecedented negative image of the Palestinian leadership among the Palestinians, Arabs, and the international solidarity movements." 

The document also provides a long list of recommendations regarding future media strategies as well as expected Israeli narratives.

2012 - Segunda Guerra contra Jamás en Gaza: Operación Pilar de Defensa (14-21 nov)

2014 - Tercera Guerra contra Jamás en Gaza: Operación Margen Protector (8 jul - 26 ago)