Israel pursues all crimes of its leaders except the real one: Occupation
Gideon Levy | Monday 16 January 2017
►http://www.middleeasteye.net/columns/corruption-large-and-small-86604213
(...) The trials never held
But beyond all that, another, even heavier cloud looms – one that no one dares mention. The elephant in the room is the institutionalised state corruption arising from a 50-year-old occupation, to which no one ever alludes.
PM Ehud Olmert was sent to prison for pocketing a few hundred thousand dollars. He was never put on trial for his role in Operation Cast Lead in Gaza, a brutal assault by Israel on a helpless population that killed thousands of innocent civilians, including women and children and the elderly and the sick, and reduced thousands of their homes to rubble.
No one thought to indict Olmert over Cast Lead, nor over the devastation sown by his directives in the war he waged on Lebanon. The only soldier to be put on trial for the crimes committed in Gaza was a soldier who stole a credit card from a private home, and the same dynamic was evident at the apex of the government: war crimes, breaches of international law, crimes of occupation and illegal settlements which collectively are one huge, contemptuous and contemptible violation of international law – no one in Israel has been put on trial for any of that.
Israel likes to portray itself as a democratic country, a nation of law: the only democracy in the Middle East. Israel also likes to busy itself dealing with relatively trivial matters: a show trial for a junior soldier (Elor Azaria) who shot a dying Palestinian who had attempted to stab a soldier made headlines here as proof of Israel’s moral stature as a nation. The evacuation of a few buildings at the Amona settlement – likewise.
But the focus on minor corruption and trivial crimes distracts attention from the main thing: the conduct of an occupation that is the source of all the corruption in, and the criminal acts of, the state of Israel, to which no other crime is comparable. That no one is put on trial or punished for this, while Israel is busy with its minor corruption cases, is troubling and bodes ill.
It must be emphasised: the war on corruption in Israel is important. Its importance should not be minimised. Fighting corruption is important in fashioning the character and image of what is still a relatively young country. But one must strive to maintain proper perspective: Israel takes steps against things on the order of magnitude of a toothache – a necessary task – while entirely ignoring the more difficult and serious battle against the fatal disease afflicting it.