by Julie Webb-Pullman
President Joe Biden – building a pier with the bones of my friends, my family photographs and my birds without beaks will not bury your culpability – just any remaining shreds of humanity.
Mr Biden, I cannot let pass the building of a pier with the bones of so many of my friends and colleagues, in flagrant contempt for their dignity, let alone international humanitarian law. The sheer depravity of even contemplating building anything from the rubble that you know contains the remains of thousands of missing Gazans – men, women, children, babies born and unborn – what sick mind could come up with such a morally bereft and macabre plan, such a despicable crime against humanity?
William Gladstone said: “Show me the manner in which a nation cares for its dead and I will measure with mathematical exactness, the tender mercy of its people, their respect for the law of the land and their loyalty to high ideals.”
The high ideals relating to the treatment of the dead are to be found in international humanitarian law, the Geneva Conventions. Grave breaches of the Geneva Conventions constitute war crimes and crimes against humanity. The irony of this terminology should not be lost on you, Mr President, and serve as a timely reminder to you in your role as not only the prime enabling party to this conflict, but also the willing accomplice in this latest contemptuous treatment of the Gaza dead. I will keep it brief.
Parties to an armed conflict must take all possible measures to prevent despoilment of the dead
(Geneva Convention (GC) I, Article 15(1); GC II, Article 18(1); GC IV, Article 16(2); Additional Protocol (AP) I, Article 34(1); AP II, Article 8; and customary international humanitarian law (CIHL) Study, Rule 113).
Ill-treatment and mutilation of dead bodies is prohibited
(GC I-IV, Article 3(1)(c); AP II, Article 4(2)(a); CIHL Study, Rule 113).
Identification – Parties to an armed conflict must record all available information before disposing of the dead, with a view to identifying these dead bodies or human remains at a later date
(GC I, Article 16(1); GC II, Article 19(1); GC III, Article 120(2); CIHL Study, Rule 116).
Identification is an “obligation of means” that requires parties to do all they can with all means available. You have the means, Mr President. You are trundling earthmovers into Gaza right now that could be recovering them.
Where is your plan to first follow up on every missing Gazan, to find and identify them in the rubble using DNA testing, as has been done for many victims of recent natural international disasters such as tsunamis and earthquakes? What have you done to ensure no Gazan remains are in the rubble you have so nonchalantly appropriated before beginning to construct your unprincipled pier?
Mr President, you are showing the world yet again that you have no respect for Palestinians, dead or alive, and no respect for these “high ideals” the civilised world has every right to expect from a head of state.
This begs the question, who in the civilised world will stand up to your project? US politicians? European sycophants? Will any Arab rulers show any higher morality or continue their cowardly collusion and sell themselves to the highest bidder? Or will it be left as usual to the ordinary people to stand up to this horrific abuse of the fundamental right to the dignity in death that these Gazans were denied in life? What about the US soldiers, almost 20 per cent of whom are Hispanic, tasked with carrying out this travesty of what binds all civilised peoples, respect for the dead? Will they stand up as did Aaron Bushnell, break their silence as have numerous Israeli soldiers and scream, “YA BASTA – WE WILL NOT DO IT!”?
Mr President, I do not consent to the photos of my parents, now confetti in the rubble of my Gaza apartment, forming the silent foundation for certain famine, when the same trucks bringing in construction machinery could be bringing in the mountains of humanitarian aid already sitting at the Rafah Crossing. Like so many thousands of Gazans, my parents are already dead, but their ghosts are NOT resting in peace. They will haunt every US soldier who sets foot in Gaza. I imagine them waiting to draw them into that watery grave and drown them for their genocidal complicity.
Mr President, amongst that rubble, is a painting by Alejandro Cabrera, hand-carried into Gaza in defiance of the siege. It is of a Nicaraguan jungle scene he painted especially for me, with beautiful birds, somehow sent before he had painted in their beaks. How prescient, as if he knew that, like thousands of Gazans, these birds would never get to sing in Gaza and would soon lie voiceless beneath the rubble produced by YOUR bombs. You know Alejandro Cabrera, Genocide Joe, you have two of his paintings hanging in US embassies. Nicaragua knows well the beneficence of US “assistance”, as does the rest of Latin America regarding Israeli generosity. And all of those Latinos serving in your US army have that history flowing in their veins.
The birds without beaks may have been silenced, but the disappeared of the US dirty wars in Latin America are stirring. Like the ghosts of my parents, the bones of every Gazan buried in that rubble will never be still until the missing and dead are recovered, identified, honoured and laid to a dignified rest.
Mr President, I give you notice. Your pier of depravity is not just dead in the water – it is a blatant war crime.
Like the war on Gaza’s living, this war on their dead must be stopped – NOW.
Biography:
Julie Webb-Pullman has lived and worked in Australasia, the Pacific, Latin America and the Middle East, living in Gaza from 2011 to 2020. She has published extensively in SCOOP (NZ), Prensa Latina, Tortilla Con Sal, Dissident Voice, Al Ray, Al Jazeera, Middle East Monitor, Middle East Eye and others.
The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Palestinian Media Center In Europe.
