Ideas@TheCentre
Preferential condemnation
Imagine your local council directing bulldozers to demolish your home. You’d have something to say about that.
I expect you’d have even more to say if bumptious officials said it was because your house was built on council land and they wanted the land back.
We expect the state to uphold the lawful rights of property owners. That’s why the forcible demolition by the state of inhabited private dwellings is always an affront.
For some years, the Israeli Defense Force (IDF) has been demolishing Palestinian homes in the disputed, or occupied, territories. The IDF says the demolition targets are families of terror suspects.
Commentators such as the jurist Alan Dershowitz defend the IDF’s practice of what he calls ‘calibrated and collective punishment.’ Many other commentators around the world condemn the practice vigorously. Debate about the legitimacy of such collective punishment continues.
But the recent decision by Hamas, which rules Gaza with apparent indifference to the well-being of its citizenry, to demolish Palestinian homes in Gaza has been met with a deafening silence.
Middle East media analyst Tom Gross reports that 120 families are to lose their homes in the latest round of demolitions.
According to Gross, this is ‘a far greater number than the number of illegally built Palestinian homes Israel has demolished in recent years – and unlike Israeli authorities, Hamas doesn’t even claim these homes were built illegally or with dangerous structures.’
Hamas simply wants the land on which the homes stand. And most news agencies and commentators have turned a blind eye.
The story was picked up by The Australian’s Middle East correspondence, John Lyons, who asked the United Nations whether it condemned house demolitions by Hamas the way it did demolitions by Israel.
Richard Miron, from the UN Special Coordinator’s Office, said the United Nations would not be making a condemnation. ‘We appear to be dealing with a civil dispute about land,’ Miron said.
The IDF policy of demolishing homes has been extremely controversial. Critics have accused Israel of gross violations of international law.
Many of those same critics are now silent in the face of the Hamas demolitions. If they say anything at all, it is only to make the specious claim that the land grab is nothing more than a domestic legal dispute.
Self-styled beacons of moral authority such as Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and Desmond Tutu claim to be serious about upholding human rights. Yet their lamps burn dimly when it comes to the activities of Hamas.
Meanwhile, 120 Palestinian families in Gaza are waiting for somebody to speak out and condemn Hamas for its cruel and greedy land grabs.
Peter Kurti is a Research Fellow with the Religion and the Free Society Program at The Centre for Independent Studies. He is the editor of the forthcoming publication, What’s New with Anti-Semitism?
