David Bernstein
The Volokh Conspiracy
04 January '10
HRW’s website has published this piece on the Geneva Conventions and Israel by director Ken Roth. There are many things wrong with it, but I’ll focus on one piece of blatant dishonesty.
Here’s Roth:
Instead, there is strong evidence that Israel wanted Gazan civilians to pay the price for Hamas’s abuses, and that the decision to impose that cost was taken not by junior officers in the field but by senior government officials.... [A]s the foreign minister at the time, Tzipi Livni, said during a wartime debate in parliament: “On my way here I heard that Hamas declared the man killed by a rocket in Ashkelon ‘one of the Zionists’ despite being an Israeli Arab. They don’t make a distinction, and neither should we.” With culpability running to such senior levels of government, it is no surprise that Israel wants to rewrite the rules.
Roth helpfully provides a link to his source for Livni’s quote, a newspaper article from the Israeli news site Ynet. Put aside, for a moment, the fact that despite the seriousness of his accusation, Roth is quoting from a newspaper article that doesn’t give a transcript (and thus the full context) of Livni’s remarks. And put aside that he is relying on an English translation, not the original Hebrew.
(Read full article)
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Tzipi Livni spoke in Hebrew and nevertheless let's grant the translation is accurate. She pointed out Hamas doesn't care about the laws of armed combat. That seems reasonable to any fair minded person and civilians in Gaza got drawn into the line of fire as a result of Hamas' decision to endanger them as part of its war plans against Israel. But Ken Roth has no words of censure at all for Hamas. And come to think of it, neither did the Goldstone Report.
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