An Open Letter to Senator George Mitchell
To the Honorable Senator George Mitchell, Representative of the President of the United States of America, Mr. Barack Hussein Obama.
Welcome to Eretz Yisrael and to the State of Israel!
As you are well aware, our country – the State of Israel – is the sole democracy in the Middle East. In the elections that are scheduled to take place in another 12 days, our nation will express its desire – as well as its duty – to insure the sovereignty of the people of Israel and her state over the entire Land of Israel. It is to this land that we return after an exile of 2,000 years, and it is this land that we redeem by possessing it, building it, and protecting it. It is an eternal inheritance for the eternal people; it was bequeathed to our people by the Holy One, blessed be He.
This inheritance has also been recognized by international law, beginning with the San Remo conference on April 25, 1920, and followed by the Mandate of the League of Nations on July 24, 1922. In all probability you will not hear this truth mentioned during your meetings with members of our current government, thus we publicly bring these matters to your attention.
Perhaps your intention – now, or at some other time – is to convince us that peace in the Middle East and the cessation of evil and terror in your country and worldwide will come about only as a result of taking away parts of our land, cleansing these areas of Jews, and transferring these areas to our enemies (as was done in 1938 at the Munich conference with Czechoslovakia and the Sudetenland). In that case, when you return to your country tell President Obama: Foisting borders of Auschwitz on the Land of Israel will bring neither life nor peace….neither for Israel, nor for America, and we will not agree to return to that experiment again.
We have had our fill of all the attempts to trick us into accepting these “Auschwitz Borders” for the State of Israel, and we will not be fooled again. We know perfectly well what hides behind slogans like: “Palestinian State” in western Eretz Yisrael, “Right of Return for 1948 Refugees” or any “freeze” on “natural growth,” i.e., restrictions placed on the birth of Jewish children in “settlements” and the housing needs of their families. We will not fall into these traps.
However if you will stand by our side – indeed, perhaps by leading efforts to advance regional peace talks – efforts by which the Arabs of Eretz Yisrael can be reestablished in the places of their origins – through this, you will advance the cause of world peace by giant steps. For it is only a peace that will be based on justice, truth and the ethical values of Israel’s Bible and the words of her prophets, that will have the strength to stand. Not only this: Only such a peace will bring about prospertity for all humanity.
The ultimate test of justice and truth in our time will be determined here in the Land of Israel, through the return of the Jewish people to Zion, through the building of the land by the nation of Israel and by the exercise of her national sovereignty over the entire land.
We affix our signatures, the undersigned organizations that are true to the Land of Israel:
1. Our Eretz Yisrael
2. Garin Homesh – Sanur
3. The Jewish Committee for the Protection of Zionist Values – Jezreel Valley
4. The Jewish Heart
5. The Sanhedrin
6. “And You Shall Inherit It”
7. The National Jewish Front
8. Protectors of the Land
9. Land of Israel Headquarters
10. Homesh First Headquarters
11. Cities of Israel Headquarters
12. Northern Israel Headquarters
13. Jewish Leadership
14. Women in Green
15. Forum for Administration
16. Kommimut
17. The New Jewish Congress
18. Citizen’s Movement
19. The Temple Mount and Holy Temple Movements
Sunday, February 01, 2009
An Open Letter to Senator George Mitchell
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23 comments:
Now you telling Mitchell how to do his job!?
Pssst. It's called democracy. The individual has his rights to free speech protected (unlike in certain countries we won't name).
Is that so? What if what's said is a critic of the government policies? What's then? Why wont you let Finkelstein in?
Finkelstein is an undesirable. He is an inimical opponent of Israel as a state, not only its policies which he purposefully misrepresents. He can talk alll he wants but not in Israel.
Sure but doesn't it question that there is a free speech in Israel.
And as for Finkelstein, he is an academic, whom i admire. He backs every single of his statements with a source, unlike you claiming that "he purposefully misrepresents".
Galia, as I really do think you are open to influence with an open mind, try here and here and here
I guess i am stubborn, but after seeing his debates and reading his books, i am not convinced by what your material says. The guy is really outspoken, honest and very particular in his academic works.
"Because if you write a pro-Israel article or book, they will call you a plagiarist...They will make up quotes about you.." that 's what Dershawitz said. And that's distortion in itself, which they blame Finkelstein in.
just watch this
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c4bNAi-4j6s
Gosh, Dershawitz is pathetic, but i guess you don't like him either, he is against settlements.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JEAY46YA2_I&NR=1
Here is another open letter to Senator Mitchell I wrote before stubling on your blog. Your Blog amazingly confirms what I so fear:
Dear Senator Mitchell,
I am an Episcopal Priest in Colorado. I am writing you again to plead with you to persuade the President to change our relationship with the state of Israel. I fear for the very soul of the Israeli people as they transform themselves into the kind of oppressors the whole world has said must “never again” be allowed to do anyone what was done to the Jewish people in Europe. An example of this is the current state of siege inflicted on the village of Jayyous where the same tactics used by the Russian’s during the pogroms, by the German’s against the ghettos are being employed by the Israeli’s themselves. Jayyous is a village that groups from Colorado have visited in 2007 and 2008 and were warmly welcomed. What is taking place there is a clear example of what is happening throughout the West Bank as Israel seeks to radicalize the population there through mass arrests and attacks. I fear that Israel is NOT interested in peace and co-existance. It continues to take the land and water of ordinary people who have farmed this land for centuries, and when they engage in peaceful protests, it attacks them.
During the past week, Israeli troops have been storming Palestinian towns in the West Bank, arresting large numbers of people and taking them to unknown locations. They have been attacking Jayyous for the past three days, taking over homes and raising the Israeli flag over them. In the latest attack, they arrested 65 young people, herding them into a nearby school and taking many away.
Recently the town has been protesting the planned re-routing of the wall running through their village because it would entail the destruction of more farmland and uprooting of more fruit and olive trees, making the swath of devastation twice as wide as it is now.
All the principles of land and water confiscation, home invasion and denial of basic rights so common to the West Bank exist there. All are illegal, all are contrary to human dignity, all are in direct contradiction to the principles our nation was founded upon and have said should apply to ALL human beings.
We continue to support the state of Israel even as they terrorize and illegally occupy what should have long since been a sovereign and independent state of Palestine. We continue to enable them to become the very thing they hate. Please ask the President to put a moratorium on all aid to the state of Israel until they comply with all pertinent UN resolutions and an independent state of Palestine is established. Please, help transform our relationship with the state of Israel and the Palestinian people. Please help us become a force for peace and reconciliation rather than slaves to a desperate and truly evil state of affairs.
Sincerely yours,
The Rev. Paul Garrett
Joshua 24:14 my dear man of the cloth
In support of Rev. Garret's comment, watch this video documenting IDF invasion of Bil'in. Such utter lack of respect for fellow human beings, the firing from the hip, without even aiming the weapon (that's how they teach it in IDF nowadays?). Shame. Of course, all totally understandable when the other is dehumanized, becomes a black square.
Dear YMedad
Two thoughts: Isaiah 49:6 and Deuteronomy 5:6-8. From the outside I find very little of the light in the actions undertaken by the IDF and say the settlers in Hebron. And again from the outside (though one whose tax dollars are being made use of by the state of Israel) it looks a whole lot like the Zionist vision of Eretz Israel as recently articulated by Yechiel Leiter and so many others has very much become an idol that demands the sacrifice of both Israeli and Palestinian children. I thought part of the gift of Judaism to the world was the abandonment of idol worship and knowing God regards child sacrifice to be an abomination?
I understand the dream of land. I feel for the need for security in the face of a history of atrocity. Feeling that I want to see (unlike Christian Zionists) Israel as a solid, stable, democratic state that is a light to the Gentiles 10, 50, 100, even 1000 years from now. But this path you’re on seems to guarantee the opposite. The world climate is shifting from one of sympathy (and guilt) toward one of hostility. It seems a path geared to make enemies of friends. Even the US will come to a point where the economic and global political stakes will have shifted to a point that support for the state of Israel will cease to be feasible (read 12 trillion dollar deficit). If we can’t defend Israel who can? Wouldn’t it be better to work together to co-opt the Palestinians, wouldn’t it be better to make friends of enemies? I believe the US and Israel can work together to marginalize the extremists, reward the moderate and ultimately peel the Palestinians away from the Anti-Israelis and Anti-Semites. Instead of a two party friendship there could be a three party friendship and what a global power house the two states of Israel and Palestine could be when working together. You may say this is just a dream but it to me it seems a nobler dream to than the transient restoration of something that even under Solomon wasn’t able to hold together.
Paul Garrett
Paul, without Eretz-Yisrael at some time there won't be a Jewish People. If the Holocaust had occured 20 years earlier, without the existence of the small Yishuv, no Jews today. Quite simple and unconvoluted.
The Arabs founded the PLO when the "P" (Palestine) indicated not Judea & Samaria (Acts 8:1, btw) but pre-67 Israel. They don't want us anywhere in the Mid East.
So, I guess maybe we should all become one big terrorist organization, regain the world's sympathy and reestablish our country again (and again)?
Naw, that won't work.
Anyway, thanks for your input and on behalf of Hamas in Gaza, thanks to the Americans forking over almost one billion dollars for (ha-ha) humanitarian aid.
Sorry, Peter, comments don't pay and so a 1000 word essay is outside the box here.
Btw, the Rambam actually was an oleh. He's buried in Tiberias, no?
Rambam died in Egypt.
"Sorry, Peter, comments don't pay and so a 1000 word essay is outside the box here."
Could be a fascinating blog post (a bit more important that pics of Amy Winehouse)
Yes, died there and buried in Tiberias, still.
As for Amy, she's much more fun sometimes. And a great voice.
I agree that all Jews can be "olim" like Rambam. Khevra Kadisha and such would make a lot of money.
Dear YMedad,
You wrote: “without Eretz-Yisrael at some time there won't be a Jewish People.”
Jeremiah 29:7 Wasn’t the lesson to the Jewish people that the land and the Temple weren’t essential to their identity as the people of God? In fact that very lesson is what enabled the Jewish people and faith to survive and often flourish with the great Diaspora. In fact it might be argued that given the tumult of the area as Rome fell and later as Muhammad and his throngs galloped out of Arabia it was this lesson given by God 1000 years earlier that enabled that survival. And further it was that far flung Diaspora and ability to retain identity that seems to have enabled, as “Peter” puts it, the Jewish people not to have had all the eggs in one basket…again ensuring survivability. On the whole it seems to me the Jewish faith and people, despite Anti-Semitic horrors, have a pretty good track record of survivability outside of the land. There are a lot of cultures, peoples and religions that have gone extinct in the face of much lesser challenges!
“The Arabs founded the PLO when the "P" (Palestine) indicated not Judea & Samaria (Acts 8:1, btw) but pre-67 Israel.”
Acts 8:1. Luke was giving an account dealing with the Jewish roots and soil of the burgeoning Christian faith and he was using the terminology of the pre-Hadrian Empire of his day. But in the later and larger context “Palestine” was Hadrian’s name for the province after quelling the Bar-Kochba revolt. This name was no doubt chosen in a little way early Soviet style of historic revisionism…Judea and Samaria had been a thorn in the Empire’s side too long and he wanted it gone! The name of course echoed the pre-Israelite Philistia which existed intermingled with the pre-Israelite Canaan. Hadrian’s naming persisted in the area at least through crusader times. It was the common name in the West from Hadrian right up to 1948. Even Margolis and Marx in their “History of the Jewish People” (Jewish Publication Society of America, 8th ed. 1947) have maps that designate the area as Palestine.
“They don't want us anywhere in the Mid East.”
Did nascent state of Israel give the indigenous population any reason to wish to welcome the formation of such state? Think of it this way: Some “authority” comes to your door and asks you to let some people, whose great-great-great-great-great-grandparents used to live in your house, take up one of the bedrooms in your house (which you have had from at least your great-great-great-great-grandparents). They’ve suffered a great tragedy and need a place to stay. So you say ok – they can sleep in with granny. Then a week later you wake up and find that your new housemates have declared the bedroom their property and not yours, filed a deed claiming the bedroom as their property with that authority you never knew existed or knew had any possible relationship to you and…so doing they have also kicked your granny out of the house. Then the following week you wake to discover that these housemates have taken over the kid’s bedrooms and kicked them out of the house. The next they have taken over the living room and kitchen. Fed up you try, with the help of some neighbors, to forcibly evict these housemates. But things go badly and you end up in the basement and your wife has been kicked out of the house too. You hang on but slowly you’re forced out of the rec-room, the storage-room, and the laundry-room and even the bathroom until you’re stuck in the coal bin and you can’t even leave the house to see your family because if you do you know it will be shut against you.
How would you feel, what would you think, and what would you do?
“So, I guess maybe we should all become one big terrorist organization, regain the world's sympathy and reestablish our country again (and again)?”
What? Are you forgetting: Irgun, Lehi, JDL, Gush Emunim, Kach, Terror Against Terror, Ergof Magen, the “settlers” of Hebron…
“Naw, that won't work.”
I really hope you believe that. I hope you believe that terrorism is not just un-workable in the long run but see it as immoral and a violation of the image that God placed within us at the creation. God willing, someday we’ll all be able to see that. And I think you are wrongly consoling yourself trying to think that the “World” is, anti-Semitecally sympathetic toward terrorists-qua-terrorists to thus enable a justification of what the IDF is doing. The ”World” is appalled (as it was/is with the US) by the use of shock and awe terror on a mind-bendingly disproportionate scale and with the slow grinding intimidation and humiliation the people of Gaza and the West Bank endure on a daily basis. I think too much of the “World” is appalled at what they see the shape the state of Israel morphing into…a shape that looks too damn familiar beyond even the Reagan to Bush USA to something much darker
“Anyway, thanks for your input and on behalf of Hamas in Gaza”
Have I said one word favoring Hamas? People of the gun can form neither a viable nor a legitimate government. In the end the gun (power) becomes the end not the means to an end; the gun becomes the end that ALL must serve or defer to or else. It is this reliance on force rather than humanity, humility and faith in God that always has and always will get all of us into this sorry state of affairs. But, I would ask, what incentive have the actions of the IDF and the policies if the Israeli government given to the Palestinian population to do other than to radicalize?
“thanks to the Americans forking over almost one billion dollars for (ha-ha) humanitarian aid.”
Why do you laugh? Is it that you realize that it is to profoundly anti-humanitarian use so much of that aid is devoted by the state of Israel? (Of course I’m aware that my country does much the same around the globe with my tax dollars…of this I am truly ashamed and work to end.)
Again the thought: Somehow the state of Israel has to take the lead, The state of Israel has to be the one to break free of the cycle of violence and take the high ground to make friends of enemies.
How would you go about that?
Peace,
Paul Garrett
a. Wasn’t the lesson to the Jewish people that the land and the Temple weren’t essential to their identity as the people of God?
No. In Exile we needed a substitute and waited for the real thing because in addition to the Law, without the physicality of the land, we were killed and lost in many communities of dispersion. what kept us alive in the past century or so was the thrust of Zionism.
b) "Think of it this way: Some “authority” comes to your door and asks you to let some people, whose great-great-great-great-great-grandparents used to live in your house"
Think of it this way: you trek out from the Arabian desert peninsula, having just been converted from paganism to a new monotheistic faith and you are told kill in the name of religion and you arrive in a seaside country where in a "cottage", the father is dead, the uncle is wounded, the woman is raped and the children are wandering about and the sheriff turns off their electricity at will and occasionally kicks them out and you take over the place and then, a long time later, the family's relatives come back and ask to buy back the basement... I think you get my point.
c) "The state of Israel has to be the one to break free of the cycle of violence".
Nope. He who started the violence and perfected it, morphing it - your favorite word - into some evil and despicable force directed exclusively against civilians in the most horrific way including suicide bombers, one of the most perverse human behaviors.
No. In Exile we needed a substitute and waited for the real thing because in addition to the Law, without the physicality of the land, we were killed and lost in many communities of dispersion. what kept us alive in the past century or so was the thrust of Zionism.
A pretty outrageous claim, given that for the good part of the twentieth century most Jews were either opposed or at least indifferent to Zionism. And even if this claim had any truth to it, to slight three thousand years worth of Jews experience for one century's is pretty preposterous.
Think of it this way: you trek out from the Arabian desert peninsula, having just been converted from paganism to a new monotheistic faith and you are told kill in the name of religion and you arrive in a seaside country where in a "cottage", the father is dead, the uncle is wounded, the woman is raped and the children are wandering about and the sheriff turns off their electricity at will and occasionally kicks them out and you take over the place and then, a long time later, the family's relatives come back and ask to buy back the basement...
It would make some sense if the family's relatives came back in, say, 20 years. It does not when you are talking about centuries. If the Canaanites miraculously appeared today and asked the Jews to give them back the land from which they were exterminated by a the early Israelites (trekking from the Sinai desert and "told to kill in the name of religion"), I doubt you would comply. Your arguments work only in one direction - favorable to Jews, unfavorable to everybody else. Even the Palestinians understand this and don't demand removal of the Israelis. Some deal could be even worked out for you the settlers: remain in your place, but accept the rule of the Palestinian state.
OK…Think of it this way: You have migrated up from the Sinai having gradually arrived at the idea of monotheism and coming to a Seaside country you are told to kill in the name of religion and practice total warfare against the countries inhabitants. You kill the father, wound the uncle, rape the woman, enslave the children and get into a family feud and start killing each other…
Well maybe this isn’t productive playing historical similes. What I was asking of you was to put yourself in the shoes of the Palestinians who are your contemporaries, not historical shadows…a small exercise in simple empathy. So if empathy is off the table perhaps moral and survival-self interest might strike a chord?
What we are talking about are living breathing people who are abusing the image of God in themselves even as they abuse it in each other. We are talking about living breathing people who either have to make a future together side by side or else have no future at all. Surely you see, don’t you, that the weight of history and the weight of time both play against the long term survivability of the state of Israel as it is currently crafting itself? Surely the state of Israel sees this? But I guess if the state of Israel senses itself to be transient it might decide that it has no stake in the future so see no need to break the cycle of violence...indeed can revel in it as some sort of fey Zionist riff on ragnarok. But perhaps the people of the Jewish faith as a matter of moral principal and faithfulness might have a moral (and survival) stake in taking the high road and breaking the cycle of violence and work to make friends out of enemies? Maybe they can even teach the world how this can be done?
I think this idea of ending the violence and becoming friends can even be prove to be attractive to the Palestinians. They have to know if the state of Israel fails the dream of an independent Palestine fails too. Syria, Jordan, Egypt and the rest see no advantage to themselves in an independent Palestine. No, if Israel fails then at that point the Palestinians and the land simply become pawns shoved around in a different game of chess. Their only hope for a state is a two state compact with the state of Israel. I believe this can be done Israeli’s and Palestinian’s living side by side in partnership and peace. . (Would this be the eighth rung of Rambam’s ladder?) I believe you can do it if you want it…
Know peace, know the future. No peace, no future.
I think it's too late...I think you have lost your souls and so have we.
February 13, 2009
Gaza: Death's Laboratory
by Conn Hallinan
Foreign Policy in Focus
Erik Fosse, a Norwegian cardiologist, worked in Gaza hospitals during the recent war. "It was as if they had stepped on a mine," he says of certain Palestinian patients he treated. "But there was no shrapnel in the wound. Some had lost their legs. It looked as though they had been sliced off. I have been to war zones for 30 years, but I have never seen such injuries before."
Dr. Fosse was describing the effects of a U.S. "focused lethality" weapon that minimizes explosive damage to structures while inflicting catastrophic wounds on its victims. But where did the Israelis get this weapon? And was their widespread use in the attack on Gaza a field test for a new generation of explosives?
DIMEd to Death
The specific weapon is called a Dense Inert Metal Explosive (DIME). In 2000, the U.S. Air Force teamed up with the University of California's Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. The weapon wraps high explosives with a tungsten alloy and other metals like cobalt, nickel, or iron in a carbon fiber/epoxy container. When the bomb explodes the container evaporates, and the tungsten turns into micro-shrapnel that is extremely lethal within a 13–foot radius. Tungsten is inert, so it doesn't react chemically with the explosive. While a non-inert metal like aluminum would increase the blast, tungsten actually contains the explosion to a limited area.
Within the weapon's range, however, it's inordinately lethal. According to Norwegian doctor Mad Gilbert, the blast results in multiple amputations and "very severe fractures. The muscles are sort of split from the bones, hanging loose, and you also have quite severe burns." Most of those who survive the initial blast quickly succumb to septicemia and organ collapse. "Initially, everything seems in order…but it turns out on operation that dozens of miniature particles can be found in all their organs," says Dr. Jam Brommundt, a German doctor working in Kham Younis, a city in southern Gaza. "It seems to be some sort of explosive or shell that disperses tiny particles…that penetrate all organs, these miniature injuries, you are not able to attack them surgically." According to Brommundt, the particles cause multiple organ failures.
If by some miracle victims resist those conditions, they are almost certain to develop rhabdomyosarcoma (RMS), a particularly deadly cancer that deeply embeds itself into tissue and is almost impossible to treat. A 2005 U.S. Department of health study found that tungsten stimulated RMS cancers even in very low doses. All of the 92 rats tested developed the cancer.
While DIMEs were originally designed to avoid "collateral" damage generated by standard high-explosive bombs, the weapon's lethality and profound long-term toxicity hardly seem like an improvement.
It appears DIME weapons may have been used in the 2006 Israeli invasion of Lebanon, but not enough to alarm medical workers. But in Gaza, the ordinance was widely used. Al-Shifa alone has seen 100 to 150 victims of these attacks.
Gaza as Test
Dr. Gilbert told the Oslo Gardermoen, "there is a strong suspicion…that Gaza is now being used as a test laboratory for new weapons."
DIME is a U.S. invention. Did the Israelis get the weapons from the United States, or did they design similar ones themselves? Given the close relations between the two militaries, it isn't unlikely that the U.S. Air Force supplied the weapons or, at least, the specifications on how to construct them. And since the United States has yet to use the device in a war, it would certainly benefit from seeing how these new "focused lethality" weapons worked under battlefield conditions.
Marc Garlasco, Human Rights Watch's senior military advisor, says "it remains to be seen how Israel has acquired the technology, whether they purchased weapons from the United States under some agreement, or if they in fact licensed or developed their own type of munitions."
DIME weapons aren't banned under the Geneva Conventions because they have never been officially tested. However, any weapon capable of inflicting such horrendous damage is normally barred from use, particularly in one of the most densely populated regions in the world.
For one thing, no one knows how long the tungsten remains in the environment or how it could affect people who return to homes attacked by a DIME. University of Arizona cancer researcher Dr. Mark Witten, who investigates links between tungsten and leukemia, says that in his opinion "there needs to be much more research on the health effects of tungsten before the military increases its usage."
Beyond DIMEs
DIMEs weren't the only controversial weapons used in Gaza. The Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) also made generous use of white phosphorus, a chemical that burns with intense heat and inflicts terrible burns on victims. In its vapor form it also damages breathing passages. International law prohibits the weapon's use near population areas and requires that "all reasonable precautions" be taken to avoid civilians.
Israel initially denied using the chemical. "The IDF acts only in accordance with what is permitted by international law and does not use white phosphorus," said Israel's Chief of Staff Gabi Ashkenazi on January 13.
But eyewitness accounts in Gaza and Israel soon forced the IDF to admit that they were, indeed, using the substance. On January 20, the IDF confessed to using phosphorus artillery shells as smokescreens, as well as 200 U.S.-made M825A1 phosphorus mortar shells on "Hamas fighters and rocket launching crews in northern Gaza."
Three of those shells hit the UN Works and Relief Agency compound on January 15, igniting a fire that destroyed hundreds of tons of humanitarian supplies. A phosphorus shell also hit Al-Quds hospital in Gaza City. The Israelis say there were Hamas fighters near the two targets, a charge that witnesses adamantly deny.
Donatella Rovera of Amnesty International said: "Such extensive use of this weapon in Gaza's densely-populated residential neighborhoods…and its toll on civilians is a war crime."
Israel is also accused of using depleted uranium ammunition (DUA), which a UN sub-commission in 2002 found in violation of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the UN Charter, the Geneva Conventions, the International Convention Against Torture, the Conventional Weapons Convention, and the Hague Conventions against the use of poison weapons.
DUA isn't highly radioactive, but after exploding, some of it turns into a gas that can easily be inhaled. The dense shrapnel that survives also tends to bury itself deeply, leaching low-level radioactivity into water-tables.
War Crimes?
Other human-rights groups, including B'Tselem, Gisha, and Physicians for Human Rights, charge that the IDF intentionally targeted medical personal, killing over a dozen, including paramedics and ambulance drivers.
The International Federation for Human Rights called on the UN Security Council to refer Israel to the International Criminal Court for possible war crimes.
Although the Israelis dismiss the war-crimes charges, the fact that the Israeli cabinet held a special meeting on January 25 to discuss the issue suggests they're concerned about being charged with "disproportionate" use of force. The Geneva Conventions require belligerents to at "all times" distinguish between combatants and civilians and to avoid "disproportionate force" in seeking military gains.
Hamas' use of unguided missiles fired at Israel would also be a war crime under the Conventions.
"The one-sidedness of casualty figures is one measure of disproportion," says Richard Falk, the UN's human rights envoy for the occupied territories. A total of 14 Israelis have been killed in the fighting, three of them civilians killed by rockets, 11 of them soldiers, four of the latter by "friendly fire." Some 50 IDF soldiers were also wounded.
In contrast, 1,330 Palestinians have died and 5,450 were injured, the overwhelming bulk of them civilians.
"This kind of fighting constitutes a blatant violation of the laws of warfare, which we ask to be investigated by the Commission of War Crimes," a coalition of Israeli human rights groups and Amnesty International said in a joint statement. "The responsibility of the state of Israel is beyond doubt."
Enter the Hague?
Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert said that Justice Minister Daniel Friedmann would coordinate the defense of any soldier or commander charged with a war crime. In any case, the United States would veto any effort by the UN Security Council to refer Israelis to the International Court at The Hague.
But, as the Financial Timespoints out, "all countries have an obligation to search out those accused of 'grave' breaches of the rules of war and to put them on trial or extradite them to a country that will."
That was the basis under which the British police arrested Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet in 1998.
"We're in a seismic shift in international law," Amnesty International legal advisor Christopher Hall told the Financial Times, who says Israel's foreign ministry is already examining the risk to Israelis who travel abroad.
"It's like walking across the street against a red light," he says. "The risk may be low, but you're going to think twice before committing a crime or traveling if you have committed one."
Conn Hallinan is a Foreign Policy In Focus columnist.
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http://www.antiwar.com/orig/hallinan.php?articleid=14238
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