Pentagon admits rejection of ICC arrest warrants has no legal basis
A Pentagon spokesperson admitted that the US's decision to reject the International Criminal Court's arrest warrants for Israeli leader Benjamin Netanyahu and former defence minister Yoav Galant are not grounded in law and reiterated that the US doesn't believe the ICC has jurisdiction over Israel and Gaza. Neither the US or Israel are member states of the ICC.
MEMO November 22, 2024
November 23, 2024
Mike Phipps reviews Loot: How Israel Stole Palestinian Property,
by Adam Raz, published by Verso.
NOVEMBER 24, 2024
This is the first book whose primary focus is the plunder of Palestinian property, says the author says his Introduction. This looting was not out of compliance with some political order from above: “the looting of moveable assets was voluntary, and many people engaged in this criminal behaviour.”
While looting and theft are almost standard practice in wartime, the plundering that took place during the Independence War that created the State of Israel was different. The Jewish population plundered the property of neighbouring Arab inhabitants. “These were not abstract ‘enemies’… They were yesterday’s neighbours.”
The first half of the book documents in detail the scale of the looting of Palestinian property. In Tiberias, the fall of the city to the Zionist army meant the complete exodus of the Palestinian inhabitants, never to return. A huge amount of property was left behind and looting took place on a unprecedented scale. One Jewish National Fund official was appalled, writing in his diary: “Ten by ten, in groups, the Jews moved about and robbed Arab homes and stores… There was a competition between the different Haganah platoons… who arrived in cars and boats and loaded up all types of things… The soldiers assigned specifically to protect property ignored what was going on around them, and it is rumoured that they were accepting bribes. A moral collapse.”
Another observer noted: “‘These scenes were familiar to me, but I was always used to associating them with what others did to us during the Holocaust, during the world wars, and during all the pogroms… And here – here we were doing these horrible things to others.”
Tiberias would serve as a model for other cities throughout the country. In Haifa, looters did not even wait for properties to be abandoned. A government minister reported that mostly Arab properties were targeted, but even Jewish homes were being attacked: “During the various home invasions, there were cases where the invaders used force, hit men and women, knocked down doors, gathered up the furniture that they removed from rooms, and took people from their homes and put them in the street… It is clear that the home invasions were organized by army officers. There were officers among the invaders who removed their rank insignia.”
Unrestrained looting also took place in Jerusalem. The pillagers had taken so much plunder from Palestinian homes that they needed to protect it from other Jewish civilians who had also come to loot: “Blood began to flow.” The plunder reportedly went on for days – even months – in both Arab and Jewish neighbourhoods. It stopped only when there was nothing left to steal. What could not be taken, or was considered valueless, was smashed up. Entire libraries were torched.
In Jaffa, it was British soldiers who began the looting of shops for days on end. Others soon joined them. Communist Party member Ruth Lubitz noted: “All along the way, there is not a home, a store or a workshop that has not had everything taken from it.” In a twelve-day period in June 1948, over 5,000 tons of goods were taken out of the city on trucks.
Around 550 Palestinian villages were conquered in the Independence War. In some, mass looting, involving “people from every social stratum”, took place. “Machines, work animals, homes, and granaries that could have been of use to the army itself and the state treasury were destroyed, killed, and burned,” complained one government department.
Mosques and churches were also targeted. Israel’s Foreign Minister, Moshe Sharett, described it in 1949 as “wild vandalism, desecration of holy sites worthy of savages, not Jews.” Notably, the Dormition Abbey of the Benedictine community, on Mount Zion, considered to be one of their holiest churches, was thoroughly looted. Monasteries and mosques were routinely destroyed.
A great moral failure
It could be argued that the stealing of furniture and household goods is trivial compared to the massacres perpetrated at the time, such as the execution of dozens of Palestinian prisoners in Ein Zaytun – an atrocity that was concealed for years. But the involvement of so many civilians – including children – in the pillaging had far-reaching consequences.
Some saw this: “I am afraid of the loss of innocence, the loss of the idea that man needs to live by his labour rather than by plunder and robbery, because there is something here that smacks of great moral failure.”
Another: “Booty does more than just destroy the victim. It damages the perpetrator’s soul; if its influence rears its head even slightly during wartime, much of its poison spreads through society’s arteries during subsequent times of peace.”
Politically, the involvement of so many people in the pillaging was critical. It integrated them into a collective crime and made it easier to lock them into support for the ongoing atrocities committed by the nascent Zionist state. As Raz puts it, “It turned looters… into political collaborators.” He goes on: “The plunderer became an unwilling advocate of a policy agenda that strove to create a condition of perpetual war between Israel and the Arab world.”
Moreover, inasmuch that the Israeli leadership appears to have ignored the warnings about mass looting expressed to it from within its own government and later granted a blanket amnesty, this may have been deliberate government policy: “It served Prime Minister Ben-Gurion’s policy of removing Arab residents from the State of Israel and helped him realize it.”
After the war, the Israeli Prime Minister appointed his Attorney General “to look into whether the army and its soldiers harmed the lives of Arabs in the Galilee and the south in ways that run counter to the rules of war.” To this day, the findings remain confidential. “Even though Israeli soldiers committed numerous atrocities,” notes the author, “only one, accused of murdering fifteen Arabs, was put on trial.” He received a one-year prison sentence and a short time later was pardoned.
Adam Raz has amassed an amazing amount of detail in his research of this subject. Given the ongoing efforts to erase Palestine’s past and conceal Israel’s treatment of Palestinians, this book is an important contribution to uncovering the reality on which the Zionist state was founded.
Mike Phipps’ book Don’t Stop Thinking About Tomorrow: The Labour Party after Jeremy Corbyn (OR Books, 2022) can be ordered here.
UK
By the Social Housing Action Campaign
Prime Minister Keir Starmer has pledged to crack down on benefit fraud. In order to fulfil this promise, SHAC is urging him to eliminate the blank cheque that landlords are able to write when it comes to Housing Benefit (HB) in respect of service charges.
Starmer is reported in the Mail on Sunday on government plans: “We will crack down hard on anyone who tries to game the system, to tackle fraud so we can take cash straight from the banks of fraudsters … There will be a zero-tolerance approach to these criminals. My pledge to Mail on Sunday readers is this: I will grip this problem once and for all.”
SHAC asserts that housing associations across the country are ‘gaming the system’ when it comes to the HB collected from its tenants.
Housing Benefit Service Charge Abuse
HB covers payments for both service charges and rents. For some renters, the cost of services such as communal cleaning is included in their rental payments. However, for a proportion of tenants, rents and service charges are billed separately and both can be covered by HB.
Housing associations collect around £1.7 billion in respect of service charges annually. Approximately half of this is paid through HB.
The Housing Benefits Bill
The housing benefits bill is at its highest level since records began, and is pushing overall government spending to record amounts. The distribution of housing spend between benefits and building and maintenance has also changed dramatically.
The UK Housing Review 2024 notes that government spending on housing in 2021/22 was £30.5 billion compared to £22.3 billion in 1975/76 (not adjusted for inflation). However, 88% of this is used to fund housing benefits, with only 12% of government spending used to build or improve homes.
• No-one is scrutinising the legitimacy of service charge demands from landlords in respect of tenants in receipt of HB.
Scrutinising the service charges for a single resident in a single year involves hours of work, even when the landlord fully cooperates and provides the statement and an invoice pack.
Akin to an audit, it requires the reconciliation of multiple invoices against statements in the service charge bill, and sometimes checks to identify whether works being invoiced have actually been carried out. It would be impossible for the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) or staff in local authorities to conduct the scrutiny needed for the hundreds of thousands of service charge payments made through HB annually.
• Service charge accounts are riddled with inaccuracies.
Over the last three years, SHAC has collated evidence to support this assertion. Recent media coverage such as the BBC’s The Leasehold Trap and The True Cost of Leasehold provides further validated case studies and quantitative analysis of this form of financial abuse. The First Tier Tribunal (Property Chamber) also regularly rules in favour of tenants and residents (shared owners and leaseholders) who claim to have been overcharged by their landlords.
• Inaccuracies have been identified in the service charge accounts of members on mixed-residency estates, where some tenants are paying the charge directly, and others are paying via the benefits system.
Those who are paying directly are incentivised to challenge inaccuracies. By contrast, those whose charges are paid via benefits risk losing those benefits if they alert the DWP to the inaccuracies without the landlord acknowledging and removing overcharged items from their bills. Tenants are therefore left with a shortfall to cover. This makes it impossible for tenants in receipt of Housing Benefit to report inaccuracies even if they become aware of them.
• It is clear that the benefits system is being defrauded by millions of pounds annually through service charge abuse.
This is not an issue that can be addressed by individuals, or simply by cutting HB. This would penalise the victims of service charge abuse rather than the perpetrators. The Prime Minister needs to address the issue at source to prevent the inaccurate service charges. This issue demands a major inquiry into service charge abuse by councils, housing associations and private landlords.
SHAC is a campaign group linking tenants, renters, shared owners, and leaseholders living in homes owned by housing associations, councils, and private landlords. We campaign to improve housing conditions and to reduce the commercialisation of public housing. Web: www.shaction.org
Keir Starmer has vowed to implement “sweeping changes” to deal with the “bulging benefits bill blighting our society” in a move that could anger many MPs on the Labour left.
Writing in The Mail on Sunday, the Prime Minister pledged to clamp down on benefit fraud in what he says will be the “biggest overhaul of employment support in memory.”
Work and Pensions Secretary Liz Kendall is expected to announce a major overhaul to the benefits system this week. She told Sky News’ Sunday Morning with Trevor Phillips that people who repeatedly refuse to take up training and work will face benefits sanctions.
It comes as the number of people claiming incapacity benefits is expected to rise over the coming decade in trends partly driven by a growing number of people out of work due to mental health conditions.
Starmer wrote: “In the coming months, Mail on Sunday readers will see even more sweeping changes. Because make no mistake, we will get to grips with the bulging benefits bill blighting our society.
“Don’t get me wrong – we will crack down hard on anyone who tries to game the system, to tackle fraud so we can take cash straight from the banks of fraudsters.
“There will be a zero-tolerance approach to these criminals. My pledge to Mail on Sunday readers is this: I will grip this problem once and for all.”
A benefit clampdown risks angering some MPs on the left of the parliamentary party, many of whom have already shown disgruntlement over the government’s reluctance towards reforms such as a scrapping the two-child benefit cap.
