by Jonathan S. Tobin July 31, 2015 Via Commentary Magazine
Israeli paratroopers inspect the entrance of a tunnel they discovered in the northern Gaza Strip, July 18, 2014. (IDF Spokesperson/Flash 90)
(That dangerous double standard just won’t go away. – LS)
Yesterday, Amnesty International issued its latest broadside at the State of Israel. The group’s report, titled “Black Friday: Carnage in Rafah” dutifully reported at length by the New York Times, seeks to portray an incident from last summer’s war in Gaza as an example of particularly awful Israeli war crimes involving shelling of civilian areas and egregious loss of life. But, as with most such accusations, the closer you look at the charge the more it becomes clear that the point of the exercise isn’t merely a supposed quest for justice for dead Palestinians. While this must be seen in the context of a campaign to prepare war crimes charges against the Israel Defense Forces before the International Criminal Court that was recently joined by the Palestinian Authority, the effort has a broader purpose than merely beginning a human rights prosecution before that body. By expending a great deal of its limited resources on this one incident, Amnesty is seeking to make a much broader political point: delegitimizing Israeli self-defense under virtually any circumstances.
The incident that generated the reported took place on August 1, 2014. On that morning, a cease-fire between Israel and Hamas was put into effect that sought to end the war that had begun a month earlier. The conflict started when a Hamas terror cell kidnaped and murdered three Israeli teenagers and then escalated when the group began firing rockets at Israeli cities and towns. Several thousand of these missiles would be launched at Israel before the war ended. In addition to that, Hamas attempted to employ tunnels it had dug underneath the border with Israel to conduct more such kidnap/murder raids. Though the Israelis tried at first to halt the attacks with air power, when that didn’t work, ground forces were required to stop the terrorists. Though the August 1st cease-fire — like the one that later finally did end the shooting — left Hamas in place and in possession of its rocket arsenal, Israel agreed to it.
But only an hour after the fighting was supposed to stop, a Hamas terror squad ambushed a group of Israeli soldiers in the city of Rafah along the border with Israel. Two were killed and the body of one, Second Lieutenant Hadar Goldin, was dragged into the tunnel from which his attackers had emerged. That set off a desperate search and counter-attack aimed at recovering him and/or his body. That directive, known by the code name, “Hannibal” aims to use maximum force to prevent terrorists from escaping with a hostage. The order is always controversial because some interpret it as encouraging Israeli forces to even endanger the life of the captured soldier rather than standing down and subjecting both the individual and his country to a protracted hostage negotiation that inevitably involves the release of a disproportionate number of terrorist murderers.
In this case, Amnesty accuses Israel of using artillery fire in such a way as to conduct “disproportionate or otherwise indiscriminate attacks” on civilian areas with no regard for the lives of innocents who might be killed in the barrage. According to Amnesty and its Palestinian sources, the Israelis fired 1,000 shells and 40 bombs on the area where the Hamas assault took place resulting in 135 Palestinian deaths.
But while the loss of life during this battle was regrettable, the focus of the Amnesty report is remarkably skewed.
After all, the one war crime that we can be sure that took place was the attack on Goldin and his squad. It was a deliberate violation of a cease-fire that might have been a godsend for ordinary Palestinians, but which didn’t serve the purposes of Hamas. Having bled Gaza white for weeks, the leaders of the terrorist group were not yet satisfied with the toll of casualties among their own people. Hamas places its missile launchers and terror squads among civilians in order to deliberately expose them to Israeli fire. While there are plenty of fortified shelters in the strip for Hamas fighters and their massive arsenal, there are few for civilians. In Hamas-run Gaza, the shelters are for the bombs, not the people.
That means that any fair-minded observer of the events of August 1, 2014 must concede that the responsibility for all of the casualties the ensued as Israeli and Hamas forces fought in Rafah that day belongs to those who cynically ordered the attack on the Israeli soldiers that ended the cease-fire. The tunnel they used ran through residential areas, and the flight of these terrorists was such that they deliberately and with malice aforethought endangered the lives of all those who lived in the area. Their goal was not only to spirit away a hostage but also to create the kind of havoc that would result in more accusations against Israel.
But the minute analysis of every round fired by the Israelis by Amnesty not only doesn’t take that into account or put their accusations in a reasonable context. It also treats the effort to rescue Goldin — who probably did not survive the initial attack — as wrong while treating the assault on the Israelis as a reasonable and even legal action. But even in the course of its effort to demonize the Israeli actions by pouring on the details of bullets and shells fired amid a chaotic battle amid the fog of war, Amnesty cannot help falsifying their indictment. The report fails to take into account that along with the civilians who were sadly killed or wounded as a result of terrorist actions, some of the casualties they lament were actually Hamas or Islamic Jihad personnel.
But no matter how you break down the battle, the talk of disproportionate fire frames the discussion in a way that inevitably skews it toward treating the Israelis as the transgressors rather than a combatant. Would any nation, including Western democracies or the United States, be any less “indiscriminate” in its fire on terrorists attacking its cities and its troops than the Israelis? The answer is obviously not. As General Martin Dempsey, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff said in his comments about the Gaza war, the conduct of the Israelis in the fighting was a model that U.S. forces seek to emulate in their own conflicts in the Middle East. Indeed, the same accusations of “disproportionate” fire are often, and sometimes with more reason, lodged against Americans fighting in Afghanistan or bombing Taliban or al-Qaeda targets in Pakistan.
As for the “Hannibal” directive, the discussion is a controversial one even within Israel. But the assumption that it means that soldiers are ordered to kill one of their own rather than let them be taken is probably a misunderstanding. Any hostage in a war zone is, by definition, in harm’s way and faces a good chance of becoming a casualty. The Israelis rightly seek to prevent the capture of their people. Doing so spares the country and the individual from a terrible ordeal. Efforts to prevent these crimes deserve the praise of fair-minded people, not their condemnation.
The effort to turn the effort to save Hadar Goldin was, like the entire counter-offensive that Israel conducted in Gaza last summer, entirely justified. The blame for the deaths of Palestinians needs to be placed at the door of the Hamas terrorists that started the conflict and then broke a cease-fire in a conscious effort to set in motion the tragic events that then unfolded.
In the meantime, the family of Lt. Goldin still awaits the return of his body from Hamas that may be holding his remains in order to exact another gruesome exchange for live killers. If Amnesty wants to live up to its claim of advocacy for human rights, it might want to get involved in that issue. More to the point, the group and its financial backers need to understand that by conducting such attacks on Israel, it cannot pretend that is rationalizing the actions of one side in the conflict. In this case, their version of human rights advocacy appears to be indistinguishable from rationalizing the crimes of terrorists and seeking to hamstring the efforts of those seeking to stop them.
More outrageous and depressing news from the Human Wrongs Rights Council. They never met a terrorist they couldn’t love. — AP)
My above title is intended to be a pun – the UN is no wonderland, the exact opposite in fact. And in parallel, the way the UN behaves towards Israel is so reminiscent of the Queen of Hearts’ words that it almost makes one want to chuckle.
Queen of Hearts: Now… are you ready for your sentence?
Alice: Sentence? But there has to be a verdict first…
Queen of Hearts: Sentence first! Verdict afterwards.
As most of you must have heard by now, the UN Human Wrongs Rights Council decision to investigate Israel’s “war crimes” committed during Operation Protective Edge. No matter that the operation is still ongoing, that the ceasefires have proven worthless and that truce talks are taking place at this moment in Cairo between all the sides.
Here is the statement from the UN Human Rights Council establishing a “commission of inquiry:”
…
to investigate all violations of international humanitarian law and international human rights law in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem, particularly in the occupied Gaza Strip, in the context of the military operations conducted since 13 June 2014. William Schabas will serve as Chair of the three-person commission mandated by the Council at its last special session.
June 13? Operation Protective Edge began on July 8. So why is the UN choosing June 13?
The answer tells you all you need to know about how biased the UNHRC is.
Hamas kidnapped and murdered Naftali Fraenkel, Gilad Shaer and Eyal Yifrah on June 12.
Israel started searching for them in the Hebron area on June 13.
The commission is being given a framework where they are supposed to believe that the kidnapping and murder were not acts of aggression, but Israel’s response was.
While it is true that the next paragraph tries to stave off this criticism by saying “whether before, during or after,” the very mention of that date and not the day before shows that its mandate “to establish the facts and circumstances of such violations and of the crimes perpetrated and to identify those responsible, …all with a view to avoiding and ending impunity and ensuring that those responsible are held accountable, and on ways and means to protect civilians against any further assaults” is directed only at Israel and not Hamas.
Hamas has never been accused of “impunity.” That is a NGO keyword that only applies to Israel in the context of this conflict.
This is not a mistake. Diplomats are very careful with statements like this, and using the words “military operations conducted since 13 June 2014″ shows that the UNHRC does not consider the kidnapping and murder of the teens to be within the mandate of the commission – only the Israeli response.
Kidnapping and targeting civilians is a war crime, by the way, so the choice of June 13 is a very deliberate attempt not only to portray Israel as the initiator of the hostilities but to whitewash Hamas war crimes.
None of this should come as a surprise to those of us who know the character of the UN (bad) and the UN Human Wrongs Rights Council (evil, malicious). Let’s add to this stinking pile the composition of the hastily gathered panel tasked with investigating Israel’s already-determined war crimes, and you get a witch-hunt worthy of the worst of the Salem trials.
Israel dismissed the Monday appointment of the three members of a UN human rights’ investigative committee to review the recent military operation in Gaza, saying the identity of the three proved that the results of the probe were a foregone conclusion.
The committee will be headed by Canadian Prof. William Schabas, and was to include British-Lebanese rights lawyer Amal Alamuddin, best known for her recent engagement to actor George Clooney, and Doudou Dienne of Senegal, who has previously served as the UN’s watchdog on racism and on post-conflict Ivory Coast.
However, Alamuddin later released a statement saying that she was too busy with eight other cases and could not take on the UN position.
The biggest problem is with the chairman of the panel, William Schabas, a man known for his deep hostility towards Israel, and towards Binyamin Netanyahu in particular.
William Schabas, anti-Israel chair of the UN investigatory panel
Schabas, a professor of International Law at London’s Middlesex University, has called for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former president Shimon Peres to stand trial at the International Criminal Court in The Hague for war crimes.
He also supported the 2010 Goldstone Report into Israel’s last ground offensive in Gaza, though he said in a later interview that the scale of destruction in Gaza did not compare to other atrocities in the world.
UN Watch, a Geneva-based watchdog with ties to Israel, slammed the appointment and called on Schabas to recuse himself.
“You can’t spend several years calling for the prosecution of someone, and then suddenly act as his judge,” UN Watch head Hillel Neuer said in a statement. “It’s absurd — and a violation of the minimal rules of due process applicable to UN fact-finding missions.”
Israel’s ambassador to the United Nations predicted on Wednesday that Jerusalem will not cooperate with the so-called “Schabas committee” that has been appointed to investigate alleged war crimes committed during Operation Protective Edge.
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The Foreign Ministry said that Schabas’s appointment to head the panel proved that Israel cannot expect justice from this body.
“The report has already been written and the only question is who signs it,” the Foreign Ministry said.
In an interview with Army Radio, the Israeli envoy, Ron Prosor, expressed doubt regarding the legitimacy of the panel due to what is perceived by Jerusalem officials as a committee with a clear anti-Israel bias.
“Forming an investigatory committee headed by Schabas is like inviting ISIS to organize religious tolerance week at the UN,” Prosor told Army Radio.
Ambassador Ron Prosor, Israel’s Permanent Representative to the United Nations, on Tuesday said “the United Nations Human Rights Council set a new record for anti-Israel bias and proved once again, that it would be better named the ‘Human Wrongs Council’” because of its “complete travesty of justice” by inviting Professor William Schabas, “one of the most outspoken critics of Israel to serve as its judge and jury.”
It was not only Israel of course who objected to the anti-Israel opinions of the committee members:
Jewish organizations also condemned the creation of the commission and its appointments. The Anti-Defamation League called the panel “a farce” with the outcome “all-but preordained.”
“Here we go again,” said Abraham H. Foxman, ADL National Director. “As if on cue, the United Nations Human Rights Council has appointed a so-called ‘independent’ panel to investigate Israel’s conduct in the recent conflict in Gaza, with the outcome all-but preordained. This farce began with an illegitimate Council resolution and will predictably end with an illegitimate panel investigation and report, entirely biased against Israel, which places the blame squarely on Israel for ‘war crimes’ and other violations of international law and pays no attention to the terrorism of Hamas.”
In his last full day in office, former Israeli President Shimon Peres also objected to the creation of the commission in a joint press conference with the UN Secretary-General, who he called out for allowing UN-run schools in Gaza to be used by Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad as rocket depots and launchpads.
“We have seen this theater of the absurd before,” Foxman said. “The inquiry will be stacked against Israel through the appointment of individuals with anti-Israel bona fides like Professor William Schabas. Israel, understandably, will refuse to cooperate. And, finally, a harsh, biased and fundamentally flawed report will be issued, providing fodder to those who have already found Israel guilty on all counts and handing Hamas a phony victory in the court of public opinion.”
“Schabas has made comments critical of Israel’s leadership in the past, and participated in the 2012 Russell Tribunal on Palestine, a conference in which Israel is put on trial, with its guilt on war crimes fully presumed,” Foxman said. “Diène has served as U.N. Special Rapporteur on contemporary forms of racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia and related intolerance from 2002 to 2008 and as the Independent Expert on the situation of human rights in Côte d’Ivoire from 2011 to 2014.”
B’nai B’rith International said “the commission itself illegitimate as it was born of a UNHRC resolution that stridently excoriated Israel in advance of the ‘inquiry’ it launched and didn’t so much as mention Hamas by name. It was specifically designed to scrutinize not years of cross-border terrorist attacks against Israelis, but rather Israel’s defensive response to them. Any suggestion that there is equivalence between terrorism and a state defending its civilians from that threat is both outrageous and unacceptable.”
Schabas tried to defend himself with the old “some of my best friends are Jews” routine, ludicrously saying that he was impartial, not anti-Israel.
The professor appointed to lead a United Nations inquiry into possible war crimes during the recent military campaign in the Gaza Strip defended his record to Israeli media Tuesday and said past statements that paint him as anti-Israel would have no bearing on his probe of the Gaza conflict.
Willam Schabas told Army Radio in an interview on Tuesday that he is not anti-Israel, has visited Israel in the past to give university presentations and is a member of the editorial board of a legal publication.
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Israel dismissed the probe as one-sided and said the appointment of Schabas — who has called for both Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former president Shimon Peres to stand trial in the International Criminal Court in the Hague — proved the outcome of the report had been predetermined.
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Asked about a comment made last year that he would most like to see Netanyahu stand trial in the Hague, Schabas said the comments were made in reference to the Goldstone Report, a UN Human Rights Council investigation that claimed Israel had committed war crimes during the 2008-2009 Operation Cast Lead by deliberately targeting civilians during fighting in the Gaza Strip.
“I didn’t prejudge him and I didn’t say he was guilty,” Schabas told Army Radio. “I was making a comment in the context of a discussion about the priorities of the International Criminal Court. I think probably every person in Israel has criticized the government in Israel at some point or other in their lives and the suggestion that I’ve delivered a verdict on this is wrong and unfair.”
He can wriggle all he likes, but his own words damn him:
Read the above words again and note his huge error. This from a supposed “expert” on the Middle East. He can’t even get his Prime Ministers right! Yair Lapid puts him right:
Finance Minister Yair Lapid, in an interview with Channel 2 later on Tuesday evening, pointed out that it was former prime minister Ehud Olmert who was in office during Operation Cast Lead and not Netanyahu.
Schabas’s obsession with Netanyahu reveals the extent of his animosity towards the Prime Minister, and by extension towards Israel. How on earth can anyone expect Israel to get a fair hearing at the hands of an ignorant oaf of a bigot like that?
The Israeli press watchdog site Mida has another video of Schabas in an interview with Israeli TV in which he refuses to call Hamas a terror organization and where he does not walk back his error about Netanyahu.
Mida comments:
So even given the opportunity, Schabas did not recant or walk back his statement. He would like to see Netanyahu tried based on the findgins of the Goldstone Report. There’s only one problem: the Prime Minister responsible for the “alleged crimes” of Operation Cast Lead is none other than Ehud Olmert. Netanyahu was head of the opposition at the time and had nothing to do with it. Thus, already at the beginning of the interview, Schabas revealed his severe bias: as far as he’s concerned, Netanyahu is guilty regardless of the facts.
…
This wouldn’t be the first time Schabas had shown such an attitude towards Netanyahu. Already in 2010, he wrote an article in a law journal that Netanyahu is the man most likely to threaten Israel’s existence. His evidence? Netanyahu’s statement that “we face three strategic challenges: Iran’s nuclear program, rockets fired at us and the Goldstone Report.” Not Hamas, not Hizballah and not Iran – the greatest danger to Israel is its own Prime Minister, who dares to defy the word of UN legists and argue for the innocence of his country. According to this logic, Emil Zola was a traitor and a criminal for daring to charge the French Courts with falsely convicting Alfred Dreyfuss.
And finally, as yet another reminder of the what the Human Wrongs Rights Council is all about, the Gatestone Institute has a very detailed article by Denis McEoin. Again, none of this will be new to most of my readers, but it always bears repeating (and sharing as widely as possible):
But expecting the UNHRC to carry out a fair, balanced or accurate investigation of anything involving the State of Israel is rather like asking the Organization of Islamic Cooperation [OIC] to carry out investigations into the persecution of Christians, Ahmadi Muslims, or Baha’is in Muslim countries.
Before the emergency session ended, Navi Pillay, the South African UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, who has her own office in New York, but supervises the Geneva-based UNHRC, warned the world that Israel may have committed war crimes by not doing enough to protect civilians. Pillay, however, has a long track record of demonizing Israel; it was she who was behind the infamous and totally discredited Goldstone Report of 2009, which accused Israel of deliberately targeting Gazan civilians — a finding that the report’s author, Richard Goldstone, later retracted, although Pillay did not.
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We are still living in 1984. The UNHRC works to defend and even promote countries that abuse those rights, and to condemn one of the most rights-observant countries in the world — Israel. When anyone tries to take the floor at the UNHRC and reveal the truth about abusive states, watch the abusers press their buzzers and demand that the truth-teller be stopped from speaking. How many times have the vigilant and dedicated human rights activists Anne Bayefsky of Human Rights Voices or Hillel Neuer of UN Watch been attacked for speaking truth?
Watch the indefatigable Hillel Neuer here:
There’s much more at the link. Read it all. The article concludes:
Most disturbingly, both the UN Security Council and the UN General Assembly, while pussy-footing with the world’s most ostentatious human rights violators, cannot get savage enough with one of the world’s most tolerant and free countries, Israel. Between its formation in 1947 and 1991, the UN General Assembly has adopted 300 resolutions against Israel. In the year 2006-7, it issued 22 such resolutions — but not one about the Sudanese genocide then continuing in Darfur. The year before, Israel had pulled out of Gaza entirely in an effort to make peace. Yet the General Assembly passes 19 resolutions per year against Israel and almost none on any other state.
No fewer than three UN entities exist that are dedicated to furtherance of the Palestinian cause (which is, in its simplest form, dedicated to destroying Israel). There are no UN entities to advance the Israeli cause, which has always been to make peace with its neighbors and to help its citizens — mainly Christians, Muslims and Jews — build good lives for themselves. Never in history has a human institution for goodwill and peace among men been so betrayed by those who seek to use it for their own ends.
What is Israel supposed to do in these circumstances? No matter how much care we take in avoiding civilian casualties, no matter how much aid we allow through, no matter how many enemy civilians we treat in our field hospitals, no matter how much fuel, water and electricity are provided to the enemy civilians – at Israeli taxpayers’ expense I would add – all we get is a cold shower of intense condemnation in the UN and the international media.
Why do we bother at all? If we’re going to be accused of genocide, maybe we should go out and commit genocide. Then the world will be able to tell the difference.
At the moment all I feel is profound depression and nausea at the utter unfairness and injustice of it all.
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