EU congratulates killer of Gaza cancer patients

Ali Abunimah Power Suits 2 May 2018

EU ambassador in Tel Aviv Emanuele Giaufret shakes hands with Israeli general Yoav Mordechai, November 2017. (via Twitter)

Last year, 54 Palestinians died waiting for Israeli permits to leave the occupied Gaza Strip for medical treatment.

Most of them were cancer patients.

Arguably, the one person most responsible for this horrifying toll is Israeli general Yoav Mordechai, the head of COGAT, the bureaucratic arm of Israel’s military occupation in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

That makes him in effect the military ruler of millions of Palestinians.

It is COGAT that decides whether or not Palestinian patients are allowed out of Gaza – and therefore whether dozens of them live or die.

In 2017, COGAT, headed by Mordechai, approved just 54 percent of applications for permits to leave Gaza for medical appointments, the lowest rate since the World Health Organization began collecting data in 2008.

Women seeking lifesaving treatment for cancer have been particularly hard hit by Mordechai’s restrictions.

COGAT has also denied permission for Palestinians wounded in Israel’s ongoing massacres of unarmed civilians in Gaza to travel for medical care, resulting in the loss of their limbs.

Now, the European Union is congratulating Mordechai for his deadly work.

“Mabruk, on the last day in office for Maj. Gen. Yoav Mordechai,” the EU embassy in Tel Aviv tweeted from its official account on Tuesday.

For the EU to use the Arabic word mabruk suggests that on top of callous and depraved disregard for Palestinians, the EU chooses to mock Mordechai’s victims by congratulating him in the language of the people he has killed.
One of Mordechai’s main responsibilities has been enforcing the lethal siege of Gaza, which is illegal under international law, and which the EU claims to oppose.

Under Mordechai’s command, COGAT has blackmailed Gaza’s two million residents that they will continue to suffer from life-threatening electricity shortages unless Palestinian leaders submit to Israeli demands.

For an occupying power to blackmail a civilian population using life-sustaining needs such as food, public health, hygiene and medical care – the provision of which rely on electricity – is a violation of the Fourth Geneva Convention’s prohibition on collective punishment and siege warfare.

Yet COGAT consistently puts out propaganda trying to spin its enforcement of these brutal restrictions as “humanitarian” work.

But this only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to Mordechai’s involvement in Israel’s systematic violence against Palestinians.

Mordechai was a battalion commander with the Israeli army’s Golani Brigade during Operation Cast Lead, the three-week bombardment of Gaza in late 2008 and early 2009, that killed more than 1,400 Palestinians.

There are indications that forces under his command were involved in war crimes during an attack on Gaza City’s Tel al-Hawa neighborhood on 15 January 2009.

More recently, Mordechai was involved in the abduction and torture of 15-year-old Muhammad Fadel Tamimi in order to force him to falsely confess that the severe injury he suffered when an Israeli soldier shot him in the head last December was actually caused by a fall from his bicycle.

Hypocritically, the EU has expressed its “deep concern” over Israel’s treatment of children like Muhammad Tamimi and his cousin Ahed Tamimi who has been jailed by occupation authorities for shoving and slapping heavily armed occupation soldiers shortly after Muhammad was shot.

But this alleged concern does not stop EU officials from honoring the perpetrators of such violence.

Despite its open for support for war criminals like Mordechai and its ongoing deep complicity with Israel’s crimes against the Palestinian people, the European Union still wants us to believe it is a champion of human rights.

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Comments

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Zionism Is Not Judaism replied on

Another contender for next year's Josef Mengele prize? Can you believe it, he has no medical training whatsoever.

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Agustin Velloso replied on

Very sad and enervating, disgusting... you name it.

The only thing that offers some (rather feeble) comfort is to learn that the UN (otherwise 100% useless when it comes to justice for Palestinians) is collecting information on the enormous amount of Israeli crimes against Palestinians and other Arabs.

In a new world with a modicum of respect for humanitarian law and human rights, these data will help to bring criminals to court one day.

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tom hall replied on

Thanks for continuing to post reminders of the morally disgraceful collaboration offered by the EU to the apartheid state of Israel. It seems there is no point below which the leaders of the European Union are not prepared to sink in the mire of hypocrisy. The corruption is simply staggering.

But we must remind ourselves that beyond the immense profits being made and the rewards distributed to European officials, Israel today represents the kind of society most appropriate to the neoliberal social order, with a permanent underclass of people without rights, to be controlled through intense, pervasive methods of exploitation and violent repression. Israel affords the model for policing and ideological control in the U.S. as overseen by successive administrations, while the raft of punitive laws directed at critics of Zionism in country after country in Europe indicate the same process at work. The task before progressive Europeans is political- how to gain control of existing structures of power and/or create new ones within the current framework. The stark truth is that if those who are dissatisfied with the dire circumstances prevailing in the upper echelons of the Union would organise their efforts towards gaining power rather than merely distancing themselves from the anti-democratic forces currently in charge, it is at least possible that progressive change could begin. It's indeed shocking to see the abysmal quality of national delegations to the European Parliament. The European Commission has become an exclusive preserve of right wing bureaucrats, and that grip has to be broken. Parliament must constitute itself in terms of real power to challenge the EC. Parliament is an elective body and should be composed of democratic forces, not the neoliberal cabal we see today. At a certain point, a direct challenge must be mounted from within, by those democratic elements, against the utterly ruinous leadership of the bankers and shills for imperialism.

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tom hall replied on

Yes, there's a border with Egypt. There's also a pro-Israel military junta running that country and refusing for the most part to allow Palestinians access to the only crossing, at Rafah. How this addresses international objections to Israel's shooting of nearly two thousand unarmed protesters inside Gaza is a mystery. As is any possible justification for Israel's refusal to permit medical treatment for those they've shot and gassed.

Perhaps you'd care to explain how the existence of a border between Gaza and the Sinai relieves Israel of its obligations to abstain from war crimes and crimes against humanity.

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Freeman replied on

"Hell is empty and all the devils are here".
William Shakespeare

Ali Abunimah

Co-founder of The Electronic Intifada and author of The Battle for Justice in Palestine, now out from Haymarket Books.

Also wrote One Country: A Bold-Proposal to End the Israeli-Palestinian Impasse. Opinions are mine alone.