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Stand for Israel Blog

Israel releases counter-report on Gaza

March 19, 2010

After conducting its own investigation into the 2008-2009 Operation Cast Lead in the Gaza Strip, Israel’s Intelligence and Terrorism Information Center released a report this month detailing its findings in an explicit side-by-side comparison to the U.N. Goldstone Report.

The report finds “four basic flaws” in the Goldstone Report: It does not deal with Hamas’ ideology; it minimizes the extent and gravity of the terrorist activity carried out against Israel from the Gaza Strip (for instance, it does not define rocket fire targeting Israeli civilians as a war crime); it does not deal with Hamas’ illegal military buildup in the Gaza Strip prior to the operation; and it ignores the aid Hamas (far from being isolated in the Gaza Strip) received from nearby terrorist states like Iran and Syria. Israel’s report delves into these facts, which were ignored by the Goldstone Report.

The report concludes that the two most serious flaws in the Goldstone Report are its “superficiality and reliance [on] information which is selective, biased, and sometimes fabricated, and in many instances was provided by Hamas.” In addition, the report explains, although “some of the information accessible to the authors of [Israel's] study was not available to the Goldstone Mission … the Mission systematically ignored vast amounts of available information which contradicted its central thesis or at least raised serious questions about its validity.”

The entire, well-documented report is available online here.

IDF charges two soldiers in Gaza breaches

March 16, 2010

Besides rampant inaccuracies and the fact that it didn’t really examine the actions of Hamas, one of the main reasons that supporters of Israel have been so critical of the Goldstone Report is that Israel already has military and civilian courts that are responsible for monitoring any misbehavior in the IDF.

In fact, the IDF itself investigated 36 cases of possible misbehavior among its troops during last year’s Operation Cast Lead, the incursion into Hamas-controlled Gaza to stop rocketfire targeting Israeli civilians. Most have been investigated and dismissed, but, last week, IDF investigators moved forward in charging two soldiers with the horrific act of using a 9-year-old boy as a human shield.

The two soldiers, staff sargeants from the prestigious Givati brigade, had the boy open sacks they thought might be booby-trapped with explosives. (The bags, thankfully, turned out to be harmless.)

Haaretz reported that the soldiers, “who breached the army’s rule against using civilians as human shields during war, will be tried for violating their authority and for inappropriate conduct. An Israeli military official said the soldiers could face up to three years in jail.”

Two other Givati soldiers have already been charged with using a credit card they found during the siege.

Yediot Aharonot reports:

More than 30 probes have been launched against soldiers since the Gaza offensive ended in the beginning of 2009. Half of the cases have been closed by the military prosecution, while the other half are nearing their termination and await a decision on whether indictments will be filed.

A special team led by Lieutenant-Colonel Gil Maoz, who heads the military police’s southern district, is conducting investigations into claims regarding unlawful fire, injuring and endangering of innocent civilians, and disobeying orders.

Dozens of officers and soldiers have been summoned to give testimony or receive warning at the military police’s headquarters in recent months, some of them already having been discharged from the IDF.

A military official said the testimonies had revealed other infractions, some committed by commanders. “In places where the incident exceeds the boundaries of reason we will file indictments,” he said.

“But we can clearly state that we are talking about a number of specific incidents, some of them serious and others not, and not about lawlessness in relation to war crimes and the like.”

We can only wish godspeed to the investigators. The IDF’s code of ethics is second-to-none, and soldiers who violate it bring shame on themselves and their compatriots, and do not deserve the honor of serving.

Palestinian Win at the U.N. Friday

February 27, 2010

The U.N. General Assembly passed a resolution Friday supporting more investigation into alleged war crimes by Israel in last year’s Operation Cast Lead in the Gaza strip. The resolution solidifies the U.N. acceptance of accusations made against Israel by the Goldstone Report last year.

The biased resolution, known as the “Arab resolution,” which was drafted by Palestinians and consponsored by more than 20 Islamic countries, essentially mandates an ongoing further “independent” investigation into Israel’s operation in Gaza. However, the last independent investigation–last year’s Goldstone Report–has been criticized by Israel and her allies as biased. The report has also been questioned by U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

Prior to the U.N. vote this week, more than 90 members of the U.S. Congress signed a letter to Clinton which expressed concern that the Goldstone Report was being used “as a tool to delegitimize Israel and sabotage the peace process.”

The report, written by Judge Richard Goldstone, a former chief prosecutor of the United Nations International Criminal Tribunals, condemned Israel for the use of “disproportionate force” and committing “numerous serious violations of international law.” It included some criticism of the Palestinian role in the conflict, which the draft adopted by the U.N. Human Rights Council in October did not include, choosing to focus on blaming Israel instead.

In September, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu directly addressed the allegations made by the Goldstone Report when he addressed the U.N. General Assembly, calling it a “perversion of truth.

“Never has a country gone to such extraordinary lengths to remove the enemy’s civilian population from harm’s way,” he said, defending Israel’s actions in Gaza. “We dropped countless flyers over their homes, sent thousands of text messages and called thousands of cell phones asking people to leave.”

Netanyahu eloquently presented the evidence of Israel’s innocence before the U.N. body, but it seems the U.N. body was not listening. The resolution calls for yet another report within five months.

98 nations voted in favor of the resolution, seven against, 31 abstained, and 56 nations did not participate. U.S. deputy ambassador Alejandro Wolff voted against the resolution, the Washington Post reported .

UN head’s reaction to report pleases Israel

February 6, 2010

Israel reacted positively to U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon’s response to a report submitted earlier this week that accounts for the IDF’s actions during last year’s Gaza War, the Jerusalem Post reports.

“Israel is satisfied that the secretary general of the United Nations accurately reflected the Israeli document submitted this week,” the Foreign Ministry said in a statement.

Friday’s reaction comes despite Ban’s conclusion that he could not ultimately determine whether Israel and the Palestinians had met U.N. demands to carry out “independent and reliable investigations.”

In a 46-page paper released last Friday, Israel defended its Cast Lead investigations into war crimes charges that were submitted to the U.N. Human Rights Commission by retired South African justice Richard Goldstone.

“This report stresses that the IDF is like no other army, both from a moral standpoint as well as from a professional standpoint,” said Defense Minister Ehud Barak.

Rights group–in turnabout–zings Hamas for claiming no war violations

January 29, 2010

A vocal international human rights group lashed out against Hamas on Thursday: Using critical language it normally reserves for Israel, Human Rights Watch strongly rejected claims made earlier this week by the Gaza-based terror group that it had investigated allegations in a UN report into last winter’s Gaza war and absolved Palestinian armed groups of any wrong-doing.

AFP reported:

“Hamas’s claim that rockets were intended to hit Israeli military targets and only accidentally harmed civilians is belied by the facts,” the New York-based group said.

HRW issued its statement after the Islamist rulers of the Gaza Strip said its investigations of allegations in a UN report on the Gaza war found that they and other Palestinian armed groups “struck military targets and avoided civilian targets.”

HRW pointed out that most of the rocket attacks on Israel hit civilian areas. “Civilians were the target,” the rights group said, adding that “deliberately targeting civilians is a war crime.”

On Wednesday, Hamas’s statement said:

“The committee worked around the clock to uncover the facts, despite the certainty that there were no violations of international humanitarian law or international human rights law that amount to war crimes,” said the committee head, Hamas justice minister Mohammed Faraj al-Ghul.

“The Palestinian government has on more than one occasion called on armed Palestinian groups to avoid targeting civilians,” said the report by Hamas, which has claimed scores of deadly suicide bombings against Israeli civilians.

“(The armed groups) struck military targets and avoided civilian targets, and any accusations related to this concern errant fire.”

HRW has come in for frequent criticism from pro-Israel advocates, who said that the organization–like many similar non-governmental groups–singles Israel out for harsh criticism without taking into account the larger context of the battles she faces, while allowing the terror groups she fights a complete pass. Further, they say, HRW and other groups take full advantage of Israel’s open society while never criticizing the fact that they can’t even safely enter the territories controlled by rogue regimes in Syria or elsewhere in the Arab world.

Late last year, HRW Founder Robert Bernstein added his voice–sadly–to HRW’s critics, alleging that the group had lost its moral focus and no longer made distinctions between open and closed societies:

Nowhere is this more evident than in its work in the Middle East. The region is populated by authoritarian regimes with appalling human rights records. Yet in recent years Human Rights Watch has written far more condemnations of Israel for violations of international law than of any other country in the region.

Israel, with a population of 7.4 million, is home to at least 80 human rights organizations, a vibrant free press, a democratically elected government, a judiciary that frequently rules against the government, a politically active academia, multiple political parties and, judging by the amount of news coverage, probably more journalists per capita than any other country in the world — many of whom are there expressly to cover the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Meanwhile, the Arab and Iranian regimes rule over some 350 million people, and most remain brutal, closed and autocratic, permitting little or no internal dissent. The plight of their citizens who would most benefit from the kind of attention a large and well-financed international human rights organization can provide is being ignored as Human Rights Watch’s Middle East division prepares report after report on Israel.

Human Rights Watch has lost critical perspective on a conflict in which Israel has been repeatedly attacked by Hamas and Hezbollah, organizations that go after Israeli citizens and use their own people as human shields. These groups are supported by the government of Iran, which has openly declared its intention not just to destroy Israel but to murder Jews everywhere. This incitement to genocide is a violation of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide.

As they say in Israel, kein yirbu — may this clarity increase!

Get right down to it: Israel calls Goldstone report “anti-Semitism”

January 27, 2010

The UN is waiting for Israel’s official response to the Goldstone report, the UN’s “fact finding commission” on the 22-day Gaza war which charges Israel with deliberately and disproportionately targeting civilians, among other crimes, but is silent about any misdeeds on the part of Hamas. The official response is expected as early as Thursday.

In advance of traveling to New York to present Israel’s response, Israeli Minister Yuli Edelstein told Yediot Aharonot that “The Goldstone Report … and similar reports, are simply a type of anti-Semitism.

AFP interpreted the Yediot report as suggesting that Israel “is planning an all-out attack on the report to coincide with Wednesday’s anniversary of the 1945 liberation of Auschwitz.”

“The connection between the Goldstone Report and the international Holocaust memorial day is not an easy thing. On the other hand, however, we must learn the lessons from what happened,” Edelstein, the Minister of Information and Diaspora Affairs, said.

“Then too, those who yelled out were told that Hitler is a clown and that all the gloomy predictions of the 1930s were nonsense,” he added.

The UN General Assembly endorsed the report’s findings in November. In the same month, the U.S. House of Representatives passed a resolution calling on the President and the Secretary of State to reject the report and oppose any further consideration of it in the UN. The measure passed overwhelmingly with only 36 voting against it. To see if your representative was among the few who opposed it, go here.

France decides to get into “universal” harassment too

January 10, 2010

Oh, boy: The French government announced this week that it will set up a special judicial unit to investigate and bring charges against people accused of genocide, war crimes or crimes against humanity in France or abroad — utilizing the “universal jurisdiction” law that’s been used in other European states to threaten Israelis with arrest.

Fortunately, unlike British law, France requires some connection between France and the alleged crime. We’ll have to see if visiting Paris leads to harassment of Israeli officials.

Universal harassment continues…

January 5, 2010

More stupidity this week thanks to Europe’s universal jurisdiction laws and the willingness of anti-Israel forces to use them dishonorably for political gain: A delegation of senior IDF officers had to cancel a planned visit to the UK to avoid being arrested upon landing.

The delegation included four officers with ranks of major to colonel who had been invited by the British Army. Alas, the Brits shame-facedly told their Israeli counterparts that they couldn’t guarantee that they wouldn’t be arrested.

Israeli officials said that, oddly enough, consistently trying to arrest Israeli officials will ”make it difficult for the two countries to maintain a normal relationship.”

That’s sort of the point, of course. And the Europeans, as of yet, aren’t really standing up to the clowns making a mockery of what actual war crimes are.

Real “war criminals” use human shields. (Hint: We’re not referring to Israel)

Critics of Israel poo-poo allegations that Israel’s enemies use human shields, and the UN doesn’t condemn it.

There’s a lack of proof, they say. Um, just try watching CNN. (h/t Elder of Ziyon)

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