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Stand for Israel Blog

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)

UK promises to change law used to harass Israeli officials, but “universal jurisdiction” isn’t limited to UK

December 16, 2009

British Prime Minister Gordon Brown is promising Israel that a wacky British law that’s been used by pro-Palestinian activists to harass Israeli officials is on its way out the door. Whether or not Britain cancels its law, the issue is one that some say imperils the concept of national sovereignty but, more immediately, has become a cudgel to threaten Israel and its leaders.

This week, Israeli Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni became the latest in a line of elected officials and IDF officers who had to cancel plans to visit Great Britain when they learned that warrants for their arrest for “war crimes” had been sworn out in British courts. (It’s also happened in Belgium and Spain.) These warrants are based on a strange legal concept called “universal jurisdiction,” which up-ends the traditional concept of “jurisdiction” — meaning that courts in one locality or country have oversight only over that area or country.

This means that courts in Detroit don’t try cases that happened in Miami, nor can a judge in Miami tell the populace of Detroit what their laws ought to be there. Internationally, courts in Singapore rule over cases that happen in Singapore and don’t have the right or power to make rulings about cases or laws in Holland. Each country or locality has sovereignty–control over itself; it’s the responsibility of each area to set laws and try cases for their own jurisdiction. (This is why criminals are extradited — they have to be tried in the areas in which they’re accused of committing crimes.).

Universal jurisdiction, however, allows courts in one locality to extend their jurisdiction into other areas: So that one area’s courts can claim the right to prosecute offenses that happened well outside its area of jurisdiction. Once this crosses international borders, extending jurisdiction can be said to compromise national sovereignty. (Jurist Robert Bork is one of the legal scholars who’ve explored this issue in detail.)

(Ironically, one of the first cases in which a country tried someone for offenses that occurred outside its border was Israel’s prosecution of Gestapo Chief Adolf Eichmann in 1962. Tried for crimes against humanity and war crimes–he has often been called the “architect of the Holocaust”–he is the only personto receive the death penalty in the Jewish State.)

In the last few decades, universal jurisdiction received major boosts when it was adopted by a number of major Western countries and, especially, when the UN established the International Criminal Court (ICC) in 1998, which would have the power to investigate and charge any individual anywhere for “genocide, crimes against humanity, war crimes, [and] the crime of aggression.” The ICC has yet to get fully off the ground since U.S. under the Bush administration refused to join it; President Obama has said that the U.S. will cooperate with the Court but has not yet ratified the treaty to make this official.

Israeli Minister Moshe Ya'alon was a target.

Israeli Minister Moshe Ya'alon was a target.

Beyond questions of compromising national sovereignty (which are more relevant than ever as some nations pursue a war against terror, while others seek to pacify or placate terrorists and their sponsors), the growth of “universal jusrisdiction” poses a particular threat to Israel, whether in the cases of countries like Britain or Belgium, or in the case of the ICC. As the Israeli journal Azure explained regarding the ICC, such courts are “almost certain to become just as politicized as the many other international bodies created in a similar spirit over the past half century.”

And so, accusations against Israel are pursued zealously in foreign courts, while they ignore the misdeeds of Hamas and other terrorist groups, as well as take Israeli actions out of context. (For instance, the near-impossibility of waging war against a terrorist group without impacting civilians if the terrorist group uses those civilians as human shields.)

Plus, these show trials ignore the fact that Israel’s own judiciary may have already explored and dismissed accusations of malfeasance, misbehavior, or gross violations of law. Israel’s judiciary and IDF oversight may be imperfect, but they do work — and they give truth a much better chance than do the kangaroo courts of public opinion, which, sadly, are only too eager to convict the Jewish state and its citizens of all manner of crimes — when the real crime they’ve committed is daring to defend themselves.

 

Update (12/17/09):

UK officials are discussing the possibility of changing the universal jurisdiction law by requiring that the Attorney General approve any warrants (Canada took this route); legal experts tell SFI that they can’t do away with the law all together since it’s required by the country’s ratification of the ICC.