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Pugwash Conferences on Science and World Affairs Nobel Peace Prize 1995
Statement of the President and Secretary General
President Jayantha Dhanapala
In the current Gaza conflict we regret first of all the loss of life and the large number of wounded from the Palestinian and to a limited extent from the Israeli population, with especially the high number of civilians affected . This high number of civilian causalties tells us once more that there is no such a thing as a clean, technological and aseptic warfare where civilians are spared and only combatants (soldiers or insurgents) are hit. It is importnat to point out that there is a huge disproportion between the two sides, with over 700 Gaza inhabitants (including many women and children) killed and over 3,000 wounded versus a total number of Israeli causalties numbering in few tens. And the number of causalties increases by the hour. The situation of the population in Gaza is moreover particularly severe since Gaza has been kept as a large prison, where, even under the bombing, people were and are not allowed to leave. Gaza is a place where people were and are not allowed to receive supplies of food, medicine, clean water, fuel, etc in a minimally adequate way. Gaza is a place where, even before the war, destroyed homes could not be reconstructed for lack of cement, where large pools of sewage could not be treated for lack of proper chemicals, where all the basic structures of society could not work properly. Since Gaza is still a de facto occupied territory, the occupying forces, namely the Israelis, have a precise moral and legal obligation to protect the Palestinian civilian population as if it were their own. The very large number of civilian causalties in Gaza, that is euphemistically called “collateral damage”, represents a clear violation of this obligation. Moreover, the situation of Gaza in the last three years, with the Israeli destruction of its infrastructure, and the recent attack on it, represents a clear example of collective punishment that is forbidden by international law. An immediate permanent ceasefire and an equally immediate and unconstrained international relief intervention for Gaza are the only short term acceptable options. One argument that is mentioned against such a ceasefire is that a truce will represent a de facto recognition of Hamas as a sort of legitimate power in Gaza. Hamas is defined by the US, the European Union and Israel as a terrorist organization, namely as an organization with which dialogue is not acceptable. We have to recall that the 2006 general elections in Palestine gave a clear victory to Hamas. Immediately after the elections, the tax-money that the new government was supposed to receive was denied. The new Parliament and the new Government have never been allowed to get physically together, due to the constraints on the communications between Gaza and the West Bank. The EU and the US made sure that none of their money was going to be given to the new Government. In sum, an important part of the “international community” worked to deny the new Palestinian elected Government its legitimacy. This denial of legitimacy has been the beginning of a series of problems that affected for the last three years the political and social life in Palestine and particularly in Gaza. While the right thing would have been to ask the Hamas Government to agree to a ceasefire and to respect (on a reciprocal basis) the agreements signed by previous Palestinian authorities and Israel (and Hamas was ready at the beginning to accept this), there has been instead a mounting pressure on the Palestinians altogether aimed at ‘destabilizing’ the Government that came out of the 2006 elections. When the results of democratic elections are denied, a vicious circle of extremism, repression, violence and lowering of the living standard of the civilian population is often the result. The Palestinian case unfortunately has been no exception. As hard as it may look now, there is only one, albeit difficult, way out, namely to stop all violence, to abandon discrimination against any party and get to the negotiating table with the immediate aim of defining a stable truce and bringing the life of the population to a more acceptable standard. Everybody will soon understand that, as in the case of the Lebanon war of 2006, there is no such a thing as a military solution and that the sooner dialogue resumes, the better. Any other calculation, possibly based on the hope of some political or electoral gain, will backfire.
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