Achieving Moral Clarity in Gaza - by Charles Krauthammer OBM

In memory of Charles Krauthammer, brilliant thinker, defender of Israel, who passed away yesterday, Thursday, 21 June. This was first posted 17 July '14.

To deliberately wage war so that your own people can be telegenically killed is indeed moral and tactical insanity. But it rests on a very rational premise: Given the Orwellian state of the world’s treatment of Israel (see: the U.N.’s grotesque Human Rights Council), fueled by a mix of classic anti-Semitism, near-total historical ignorance and reflexive sympathy for the ostensible Third World underdog, these eruptions featuring Palestinian casualties ultimately undermine support for Israel’s legitimacy and right to self-defense.

Charles Krauthammer OBM..
Washington Post..
17 July '14..

Israel accepts an Egyptian-proposed Gaza cease-fire; Hamas keeps firing. Hamas deliberately aims rockets at civilians; Israel painstakingly tries to avoid them, actually telephoning civilians in the area and dropping warning charges, so-called roof knocking.

“Here’s the difference between us,” explains the Israeli prime minister. “We’re using missile defense to protect our civilians, and they’re using their civilians to protect their missiles.”

Rarely does international politics present a moment of such moral clarity. Yet we routinely hear this Israel-Gaza fighting described as a morally equivalent “cycle of violence.” This is absurd. What possible interest can Israel have in cross-border fighting? Everyone knows Hamas set off this mini-war. And everyone knows the proudly self-declared raison d’etre of Hamas: the eradication of Israel and its Jews.

Apologists for Hamas attribute the blood lust to the Israeli occupation and blockade. Occupation? Does no one remember anything? It was less than 10 years ago that worldwide television showed the Israeli army pulling die-hard settlers off synagogue roofs in Gaza as Israel uprooted its settlements, expelled its citizens, withdrew its military and turned every inch of Gaza over to the Palestinians. There was not a soldier, not a settler, not a single Israeli left in Gaza.

And there was no blockade. On the contrary. Israel wanted this new Palestinian state to succeed. To help the Gaza economy, Israel gave the Palestinians its 3,000 greenhouses that had produced fruit and flowers for export. It opened border crossings and encouraged commerce.

The whole idea was to establish the model for two states living peacefully and productively side by side. No one seems to remember that, simultaneous with the Gaza withdrawal, Israel dismantled four smaller settlements in the northern West Bank as a clear signal of Israel’s desire to leave the West Bank as well and thus achieve an amicable two-state solution.

This is not ancient history. This was nine years ago.

Better Late Than Never? Hamas Finally Admits It Lost the Gaza War

...Just shy of one year later, however, a truer picture has emerged: Hamas, at least, is under no illusions about who won and who lost.

Evelyn Gordon..
Analysis from Israel..
10 August '15..

Last summer’s war in Gaza ended with most Palestinians gleefully proclaiming a smashing victory and most Israelis disgruntled at how little the war achieved. Just shy of one year later, however, a truer picture has emerged: Hamas, at least, is under no illusions about who won and who lost. In fact, according to two separate reports last week, the Islamic Resistance Movement (Hamas’s full name) recently admitted that it can’t afford another bout of “resistance” like that anytime soon.

The London-based Arabic daily Al-Hayat quoted sources in Gaza as saying another war is inconceivable unless Hamas acquires anti-aircraft missiles. And while the sources neglected to say so, that isn’t likely to happen anytime soon thanks to Egypt’s crackdown on arms smuggling from Sinai into Gaza.

The sources attributed this decision to what they described as massive civilian casualties caused by Israel’s aerial bombings. Hamas, they declared, was surprised by Israel’s willingness to target members of its military wing even when they were hiding among civilians. But that’s a disingenuous explanation even if you buy Hamas’s claim of massive civilian casualties (which I don’t), because according to Hamas itself, those casualties began on the war’s very first day. Thus, had this really been its concern, it wouldn’t have rejected or violated no fewer than 11 cease-fires before finally accepting an unconditional truce on day 50. And its claim to have reached this realization only in the war’s final days could be credible only if its claim of massive civilian casualties during all the preceding weeks was false.

Consequently, I suspect the explanation senior Hamas officials gave Haaretz is more accurate. They, too, said Hamas didn’t intend to start another war unless it found a way to neutralize Israel’s aerial superiority. But they also cited the fact that the war ended up achieving nothing.

When human rights advocacy appears indistinguishable from rationalizing the crimes of terrorists

...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.

Jonathan S. Tobin..
Commentary Magazine..
30 July '15..

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.

Surprise! .@Amnesty says this house had no terrorists. Wrong again.

...Why would Amnesty purposefully ignore evidence that mitigates its charges against Israel that was documented by other groups like the UNRHC and B'Tselem? The answer is in the question. Amnesty will ignore all evidence that exonerates or contextualizes Israel's actions in war or afterwards. It does not care about the truth.

Elder of Ziyon..
10 July '15..




Amnesty International keeps on deceiving its readers to demonize Israel.

From its website pushing its new anti-Israel campaign that includes the Gaza Platform that I have shown to be filled with lies:

It is in big letters so it must be true!

Now, it is true that 25 family members were tragically killed. And I do not know if any of them were terrorists. But to say that the house had nothing to do with the fighting is not quite true.

There is one crucial fact that Amnesty, and Tawfiq Abu Jame, don't want you to know.

The house had a guest at the time of the bombing.

His name was Ahmed Suleiman Mahmoud Sahmoud.

And he was a commander for the Hamas Al Qassam Brigades.

Don't take my word for it. This was documented by B'Tselem.

Here is the "civilian" that Amnesty doesn't want to tell you about.

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Updates throughout the day at http://calevbenyefuneh.blogspot.com. If you enjoy "Love of the Land", please be a subscriber. Just put your email address in the "Subscribe" box on the upper right-hand corner of the page.Twitter updates at LoveoftheLand as well as our Love of the Land page at Facebook which has additional pieces of interest besides that which is posted on the blog. Also check-out This Ongoing War by Frimet and Arnold Roth. An excellent blog, very important work as well as a big vote to follow our good friend Kay Wilson on Twitter, 

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The deadly tragicomedy at the UNHRC by Melanie Phillips

...The good news from this vignette is that Cameron seems now to realize Britain has a big problem with the FCO’s reflexive impulse to appease the Arabs at Israel’s expense. Yet consider: A British prime minister intent on outflanking his endemically pro-Arab foreign ministry in order to support Israel was forced publicly to adopt an anti-Israel position by Israel’s prime minister – and all because Britain and the West refuse to do what is needed to support Israel properly at the UN. Truly, one doesn’t know whether to laugh or cry.

Melanie Phillips..
As I See It/JPost..
09 July '15..

When the Human Rights Council voted last week to back the report by Mary McGowan Davis on the 2014 Gaza war, the behavior of two council members in particular provoked protests in their home countries.

The report, which used skewed and selective reports falsely to condemn Israel for war crimes along with the true war criminal, Hamas, was a travesty. The resolution, which failed to blame Hamas for war crimes but accused Israel of such behavior not just last year but also in the 2008/2009 war, piled malice upon malice.

Only the US voted against the UNHRC resolution. Five countries abstained: Kenya, Ethiopia, Macedonia, India and Paraguay. But what caused a stir was that two countries, the UK and Germany, voted for it.

In Germany, this was denounced by the Christian Democratic Union party. In Britain, Prime Minister David Cameron was accused of hypocrisy. Only last April he had robustly supported Israel’s actions in Gaza, declaring there was “such a difference” between indiscriminate attacks upon Israel and its attempt to defend itself against them.

What’s more, the UK had also voted against Israel last May when, by 104 votes to 4, Israel was singled out by the World Health Organization as the only nation on earth to be condemned for violating health rights. Voting twice in support of motions designed to demonize, delegitimize and destroy Israel was behavior scarcely fitting one of its allies.

But then the story took off in a very odd direction. Stephen Pollard, the editor of Britain’s Jewish Chronicle, had a scoop which was as strange as it was sensational.

On the morning of the UNHCR vote, he wrote, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had personally called David Cameron and Angela Merkel and asked them to vote for the Israel-bashing resolution.

Another Amnesty blood libel against the IDF

...The footage was uploaded to YouTube yesterday by the Gaza-based Watania news agency, and shows from extremely close quarters a small missile striking the roof of a house across the street. According to the caption, around 15 minutes later – though most of this time has been edited out of the final clip itself – two fully-armed missiles from an F16 jet strike one after the other, blasting the front of the house away and sending a cloud of debris and rubble into the air. When the dust settles, the full extent of the damage is slowly revealed, with only the exposed back half of the home still standing....The 15-minute gap in the video was also reported by the New York Daily News, The Daily Mail and CNN.

Elder of Ziyon..
08 July '15..

Amnesty International created a publicity film for its newly released"Gaza Platform" which I have proven uses inaccurate data meant to bash Israel. under the pretense of being noble.

The film includes this section that is a complete, provable lie.



Watching that video you would think that there was only one minute and nine seconds for the family to flee the house. Amnesty put up a timer and everything! It must be true! There's no way that a family can escape in such a short amount of time; we must have witnessed their deaths.

But if you look at the original video itself things aren't quite so clear. Look at the smoke on the side of the house and listen to the background noises - there is a clear edit at 1:16. (It is more obvious at fullscreen.)



The edit proves that there was more time than 1:09 shown in the Amnesty timer. Making this video a lie.

How much was edited out?

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Updates throughout the day at http://calevbenyefuneh.blogspot.com. If you enjoy "Love of the Land", please be a subscriber. Just put your email address in the "Subscribe" box on the upper right-hand corner of the page.Twitter updates at LoveoftheLand as well as our Love of the Land page at Facebook which has additional pieces of interest besides that which is posted on the blog. Also check-out This Ongoing War by Frimet and Arnold Roth. An excellent blog, very important work as well as a big vote to follow our good friend Kay Wilson on Twitter, 

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A tale of two Gazas: concrete evidence that keeps being buried

...By the way, did Friday's report of the massive concrete-lined Hamas tunnel found and destroyed along with the explosive materials stored inside it, make it to the news reports in your community?

Above the ground:
Gazan misery, unrepaired
destruction. For Hamas,
 it's win/win [Image Source]

Arnold/Frimet Roth..
This Ongoing War..
05 July '15..

The thuggish groups that hold sway over Gaza's miserable population have never hesitated to exploit for political purposes the third-world conditions in which life is lived there.

And why should they? Simply put, it's a strategy that works, arousing pity and sympathy for the ordinary people living in filth and destruction, with the military might of heartless Israel to blame. And done the right way, it can just go on and on, cycle after cycle, year after year, giving the inner circle of Hamas opportunity after opportunity to keep trying to inflict damage on the enemy without ever themselves paying a price.

A key element in avoiding the price: ensure the fattest of the privileged Hamas fat-cat insiders don't ever live anywhere near the fighting.

Qatar, the spectacularly rich enclave nourished by one of the world's largest gas resources, offers a pretty good choice: Khaled Meshaal and a group of his most trusted deputies are ensconced there, living in the lap of luxury. (Reports emerging this past winter suggested they were being kicked out ["Report: Qatar expels Hamas leader to Turkey", Haaretz, January 6, 2015] but these were soon exposed as disinformation. When the BBC interviewed Meshal in April, it was in Qatar.)

There has been a flurry of news and analysis in the past few days reflecting on what has and has not changed since last summer's intensive Hamas rocket attacks on Israel and the massive Israeli response:

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Updates throughout the day at http://calevbenyefuneh.blogspot.com. If you enjoy "Love of the Land", please be a subscriber. Just put your email address in the "Subscribe" box on the upper right-hand corner of the page.Twitter updates at LoveoftheLand as well as our Love of the Land page at Facebook which has additional pieces of interest besides that which is posted on the blog. Also check-out This Ongoing War by Frimet and Arnold Roth. An excellent blog, very important work as well as a big vote to follow our good friend Kay Wilson on Twitter, 

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Sean will not be forgotten

...When the couple is asked how they would like their son to be remembered, they come full circle and refer back to the funeral. "Sean was a unifying factor, he brought everyone together -- Mizrahim and Ashkenazim, religious and secular, Right and Left, that is the message that should come out of all this," says Alon...
"It is true that there are disagreements, but it doesn't affect day-to-day life. When someone needs help, everyone comes together. That is far more important than anything that happens during other times. People always tell me that Sean brought the people together. That is the message that I want to come out of all this."

Liav Nahmani..
Israel Hayom..
03 July '15..

"I remember the quiet. There were 40,000 people there -- Israelis -- in complete silence. No phones were ringing. It was simply unbelievable. These days you go to a movie or a show with a hundred people and inevitably someone's phone rings in the background. And here, with 40,000 people, possibly more, there was absolute silence in the air."

These feelings were recalled this week by Alon Carmeli, the father of Golani combat soldier Sean Carmeli who was killed in the Gaza neighborhood of Shujaiyya during Operation Protective Edge last summer. About a year after the funeral that brought an entire nation together, he and his wife Dalia are still having trouble processing the tragedy that befell them. But they now realize that an entire country rushed to their side in their moment of need, and has not yet released its embrace.

Sean Carmeli was a lone soldier, having left his family behind and come alone to Israel to serve in the IDF. "We landed in Israel several hours before the funeral," his father recalls. "We were told that the funeral would be held at night and that no one would come. After all, it was going to take place at 11:30 p.m. We thought that it would be a few family members, some friends and that's it. We didn't understand what was happening around us at all."

"I thought it was a mistake," his mother says with pain in her voice. She lowers her gaze and recounts: "I was sure that I would land in Israel, and they would tell me a mistake had been made. That it wasn't Sean. At the funeral itself I didn't even see the people. I couldn't see anything around me."

"During the shiva [mourning period] people came and told me what had taken place around us. Another person told me and then another person, and then it finally began to sink in. Later I saw it all on television and I understood," she says.

"Until Sean's friends from his company came to the house I still thought that I would wake up from this. I had it in my head that since there had already been mistakes made with names of soldiers who had been killed with all the Whatsapp messages during the operation, the same would happen with Sean."

Carmeli was survived by his parents and two sisters, Or and Gal. Because his parents emigrated from Israel 26 years prior and lived in Texas, the IDF classified Carmeli as a lone soldier, and that is where this unique and sad and oh-so-Israeli story began.

The roads in the city of Haifa were closed off that night. The Carmel tunnels were blocked off and the police informed the public that there were no open routes to the military cemetery in the city.

"It was only recently that I realized what happened there," says Alon, Sean's father, about the turn of events. "Or Yifrach, the local leader of the Maccabi Haifa [soccer team] fan club known as the Green Apes, is the brother of Sean's deputy company commander, who fought with him in Shujaiyya.

"If I am not mistaken, the deputy company commander was the one who took Sean out [of the battlefield] after 12 hours that they were under fire and he couldn't be evacuated. At that point he texted his brother, telling him that one of the fans had been killed, and that it was a lone soldier.

"From there, the message travelled to a wonderful guy named Refael Kabesa, the owner of the fan site, and it snowballed from there. But no one dreamed that the message would reach almost every single home.

"During the funeral we were in serious shock. We didn't know what was going on with us. I remember that I couldn't even get close to the coffin. There were so many people trying to make their way to the coffin, but couldn't. I remember the coffin getting farther and farther away from me until the burial. There were so many people. It was crowded and hard to walk."

Realistically, What to Make of the UN's Special Commission Report on Gaza?

...What does one say about a report whose author forthrightly admits that, had she had real information, “it would have looked different”?

Benjamin Wittes/Yishai Schwartz..
Lawfare..
24 June '15..

The UN Human Rights Council’s Independent Commission of Inquiry report on the 2014 Gaza war, released last Monday, is a bad piece of work—bad in almost entirely predictable and boring ways, but no less bad for being bad and predictable. It is also no less important for being boring. Even if one has no great interest in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the standards and approaches the UN is embracing will not remain confined to that conflict. Israel is, as always, the canary in the IHL (International humanitarian law) coal mine. Approaches that begin as a way of constraining Israeli military action quickly migrate to constraining U.S. military action. The effort by the Special Commission to find war crimes in civilian deaths in urban targeting situations in which non-uniformed fighters exploit civilians for combat cover is thus worth some attention.

Let’s start with a basic fact: the commission’s job here was impossible. It is impossible rigorously to analyze whether a given strike or set of strikes complies with IHL without a detailed investigation of what the operators and commanders in the moment knew and why they decided to act as they did. It is always tempting to look at large numbers of dead civilians and assume that the fact of the bodies implicates a targeting decision. But that’s rarely right. Without knowing who the target was, what calculations as to civilian deaths commanders made, and what the expected military advantage of the strike was, a rigorous investigation simply can’t be done.

It is thus not simply an inconvenience but a debilitation that the commission got no cooperation from Israel, got no access to Gaza from Israel or Egypt, and did not have key questions answered by Hamas. That the commission received cooperation from Palestinian authorities—who do not control Gaza, in fact—is not much help.

The instinct of both Hamas and the Israelis to decline the privilege of addressing the commission’s concerns is understandable, though for different reasons. Hamas, having an entire strategy built around violation of IHL, cannot answer questions about its conduct without implicating itself. Israel, meanwhile, has a deep and well-founded suspicion of UN activity, particularly activity of the Human Rights Council. And there was reason to expect this commission to be worse than earlier ones, not better. The result was that the commission was left making judgments based on a combination of the public record and interviews with victims about matters the merits of which centrally depend on the viewpoints of commanders and operators. There’s no way to do this well.

There are a lot of ways, however, to do it badly.

The Israeli calculation was wrong in one key respect. The report is not worse than prior UN efforts. It’s better. It actually lacks the overt bias of prior UN investigations. It makes some notional effort at evenhandedness, finding information “pointing to serious violations of international humanitarian law and international human rights law by Israel and by Palestinian armed groups,” violations that “may amount to war crimes.” It criticizes the “inherently indiscriminate nature of most of the projectiles directed towards Israel by [these armed] groups and to the targeting of Israeli civilians.” And it spends a fair bit of space analyzing Palestinian conduct.

There are two major oddities, however, in the commission’s discussion of this conduct. The first is the degree to which the commission gives the benefit of the doubt to armed groups that made no secret about their intentional targeting of civilians. On page 18, for example, the commission introduces the subject of rocket attacks into Israel by describing Hamas’s military wing as focused chiefly on attacking military targets. “Security experts have noted that while the Al Qassam Brigades may have targeted civilians in the past as part of its military strategy, in 2014 its declared official policy was ‘to focus on military or semi-military targets and to avoid other targets, especially civilians.’”

If this does not sound like your memory of the Gaza war, we feel your pain. And It doesn’t take too many pages before the reality catches up with the wishful thinking. On page 21, for example, the commission notes a Qassam Brigades statement that it had launched rockets at the city of Dimona. Three pages later, it notes the announcement that the group had mortared Kibbutz Nirim and other communities. On page 25, the commission cites Israeli government statistics that 4,000 or 4,500 rockets and mortars were aimed at Israeli cities, towns and communities, and about half of the rest landed in Gaza. Yet the commission keeps coming back to uncertainty as to Hamas’s targeting aims and practices, despite at the same time repeatedly citing statements by Hamas that they were targeting Israeli cities and civilians (see pp. 26-27, in particular).

But it is not suicidal

...Israel did not ask for Operation Protective Edge as it did not desire any of the wars that have marked its history to date. But the Jewish state and the IDF can look in the mirror of morality without shame, because unlike those around us, in every IDF soldier there is a man reluctant to kill. On the other hand, Jewish morality does not dictate suicide or passivity in the face of aggression, and it does not judge acts according to the identity of the perpetrator but by an objective scale of moral values. It is strange to receive lessons from those who never practice what they preach at us.

Shraga Blum..
i24 News..
25 June '15..

With publication this week of the report on Operation Protective Edge, the UN Human Rights Council has reached new heights of hypocrisy and a new moral abyss. Put aside the anti-Israeli opinions of those who chaired this committee, the fact that it took at face value the claims of Hamas or pro-Palestinian Israeli NGOs but cast doubt on everything that emanated from official Israeli sources, and the whole composition of the Human Rights Council that turns it into a grotesque farce.

But one of the most serious aspects of this report is that it establishes an ethical equivalence between a democracy respectful of the rule of law and a terrorist organization that unscrupulously tramples humanitarian principles. Although the findings of this commission have no legal force, they will help fuel the anti-Israel and anti-Semitic atmosphere created by the Palestinian Authority in its global war against Israel. To associate the words "Israel," "Hamas" and "war crimes" is a crime against truth and justice.

And something tells me that this report is the only one that will prevail in the international public and media arenas, not the one written by 11 international military experts who concluded that they "know no other army in the world that takes such great steps to avoid civilian casualties" and that "Israel goes further than most armies to remain faithful to international law and to protect civilians."

Israeli leaders - of the government and the Zionist opposition - soon realized where the main fault of this unjust report lies: the amoral and abject juxtaposition between Israel and Hamas, which could set a dangerous precedent with practical consequences in the fight of democracies against terrorism.

In its conclusions, the UN fact-finding commision officially erased the moral line that distinguishes the attacked from the attacker, the one who protects his people from the one who protects himself with his people, the one who regrets every death of an Arab child from the one who considers the death of a Jewish child a victory, the one who sanctifies life from the one who regularly proclaims that he "loves death as much as the Jews love life."

The U.N.’s Gaza Report - Both Flawed and Dangerous

...The report is characterized by a lack of understanding of warfare. That is hardly surprising. Judge Davis admitted, when I testified before her in February, that the commission, though investigating a war, had no military expertise. Perhaps that is why no attempt has been made to judge Israeli military operations against the practices of other armies. Without such international benchmarks, the report’s findings are meaningless....

Richard Kemp..
NY Times..
25 June '15..

LONDON — AS a British officer who had more than his share of fighting in Afghanistan, Iraq and the Balkans, it pains me greatly to see words and actions from the United Nations that can only provoke further violence and loss of life. The United Nations Human Rights Council report on last summer’s conflict in Gaza, prepared by Judge Mary McGowan Davis, and published on Monday, will do just that.

The report starts by attributing responsibility for the conflict to Israel’s “protracted occupation of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip,” as well as the blockade of Gaza. Israel withdrew from Gaza 10 years ago. In 2007 it imposed a selective blockade only in response to attacks by Hamas and the import of munitions and military matériel from Iran. The conflict last summer, which began with a dramatic escalation in rocket attacks targeting Israeli civilians, was a continuation of Hamas’s war of aggression.

In an unusual concession, the report suggests that Hamas may have been guilty of war crimes, but it still legitimizes Hamas’s rocket and tunnel attacks and even sympathizes with the geographical challenges in launching rockets at Israeli civilians: “Gaza’s small size and its population density make it particularly difficult for armed groups always to comply” with the requirement not to launch attacks from civilian areas.

There is no such sympathy for Israel. Judge Davis accuses the Israel Defense Forces of “serious violations of international humanitarian law and international human rights law.” Yet no evidence is put forward to substantiate these accusations. It is as though the drafters of the report believe that any civilian death in war must be illegal.

Referring to cases in which Israeli attacks killed civilians in residential areas, Judge Davis says that in the absence of contrary information available to her commission, there are strong indications that the attacks were disproportionate, and therefore war crimes. But all we get is speculation and the presumption of guilt.

The report is characterized by a lack of understanding of warfare. That is hardly surprising. Judge Davis admitted, when I testified before her in February, that the commission, though investigating a war, had no military expertise. Perhaps that is why no attempt has been made to judge Israeli military operations against the practices of other armies. Without such international benchmarks, the report’s findings are meaningless.

The commission could have listened to Gen. Martin E. Dempsey, chairman of the United States Joint Chiefs of Staff, who said last November that the I.D.F. had taken extraordinary measures to try to limit civilian casualties. Or to a group of 11 senior military officers from seven nations, including the United States, Germany, Spain and Australia, who also investigated the Gaza conflict recently. I was a member of that group, and our report, made available to Judge Davis, said: “None of us is aware of any army that takes such extensive measures as did the I.D.F. last summer to protect the lives of the civilian population.”

Would the public of any country stand for its leaders adopting such a policy?

...Has any country actually adopted such a policy? Would the public of any country stand for its leaders adopting such a policy, exposing the country’s own population to attack while their own military stands down?

David Bernstein..
Washington Post/The Volokh Conspiracy..
23 June '15..

Mary McGowan Davis, who headed the U.N. commission that investigated last summer’s Israel-Hamas conflict in Gaza, tells Ha’aretz (paywall): “We wanted to make a strong stand that the whole use of explosive weapons in densely populated neighborhoods is problematic and that the policy needs to change…. Because it is not OK to drop a one-ton bomb in the middle of a neighborhood.”

Of course, one shouldn’t gratuitously drop a one-ton bomb or any bomb in the middle of a neighborhood. But Davis’s critique doesn’t seem limited to gratuitous bombings, but includes the bombing of military targets located in civilian neighborhoods.

If the rule was “you may never bomb [use “explosive weapons”] in a residential neighborhood if civilian casualties may result, regardless of the value of the military target,” it’s pretty obvious what would happen — enemy forces would simply plant themselves in residential neighborhoods knowing they would be immune from attack.

So, for example, Hamas could launch all the missiles it wanted at Israel from the middle of Gaza City, and use apartment buildings, schools, etc. as staging grounds and headquarters, and Israel would be helpless to respond.

United Nations Report on Gaza Scores Points for Barbarism

...The report, though, will probably be ratified by the Human Rights Council and, later, by the UN General Assembly, and increase the general atmosphere of recrimination toward Israel. It represents then, another win for barbarism, with the West again cooperating in the war against its own values.

P. David Hornik..
FrontPageMag.com..
24 June '15..

In the 21st century, barbarism has gained ground at the expense of civilization. Democracy has been in sharp decline. Terrorism increased by 35 percent in 2014. ISIS’s latest video is the most horrific yet.

If civilization can still prevail, it first has to be able to distinguish between civilization and barbarism. Civilization has had a notoriously hard time doing that. It signed a peace agreement with Herr Hitler and declared “peace in our time.” It may be on the verge of signing an agreement with Iran that leaves its nuclear program intact and ensures it will get—for starters—$150 billion worth of sanctions relief.

The inability to morally distinguish between Israel and its barbaric enemies is, of course, a key part of the malaise. The UN Human Rights Council’s report on last summer’s war in Gaza, released this week, is a further symptom of a disease that appears incurable.

The 47 members of the council, based in Geneva, include human rights stalwarts like Algeria, Cuba, Pakistan, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and Venezuela. Not surprisingly, with such a membership, the council’s overriding purpose is to vilify Israel: 80 percent of its resolutions condemn it. As Benjamin Netanyahu noted on Tuesday, the council

has passed more resolutions against Israel than against Syria, North Korea and Iran combined. In fact, it has passed more resolutions against Israel than against all the countries of the world combined.

Yet democratic countries sit on the council, too—France, Japan, the Netherlands, the United States, and others; they participate in its votes and never threaten to leave it en masse unless it stops being a blatant Israel-defaming kangaroo court. The current “fact-finding mission” on the Gaza war was first headed by a Canadian academic, William Schabas; and now, Schabas having stepped down when it turned out he had been in the Palestinians’ pay, by U.S. jurist Mary McGowan Davis.

If this latest report is somewhat less extreme than one of its predecessors, the infamous 2009 Goldstone Report on the 2008 war in Gaza, it’s because it puts Israel on the same moral footing as Hamas—unlike in the Goldstone Report where Israel was a ruthless killer and Hamas almost irrelevant. It’s hardly comforting, of course, when Israel is portrayed—at best—as equivalent to Hamas instead of much worse.

New York Times Plays 'Fair' in Mideast Reportage

“It is unrealistic to expect Hamas, which the United States and other countries consider a terrorist group, to comply with international law or police itself. But Israel has a duty and should have the desire, to adjust its military policies to avoid civilian casualties and hold those who failed to do so accountable.” The same editorial writer before and during World War II probably would have put greater onus on Churchill than on Hitler in being held responsible for protecting civilians. After all, it would have been “unrealistic” to expect the Nazis to “comply with international law.”

Leo Rennert..
American Thinker..
24 June '15..

The headline tells it all when it comes to New York Times coverage of the UN Human Rights Council report on the 2014 Gaza war (“Both Sides In Gaza War Are Faulted by U.N. Panel” June 23, page A4.)

For every Hamas terrorist action, Times correspondents Jodi Rudoren and Somini Sengupta are quick to juxtapose some malfeasance on Israel’s part.

How much fairer can you get?

Answer: Plenty.

By putting equivalence above everything else, the Times and the UN report fail to give readers the real crux of what actually happened. They ignore the fact that it was Hamas, not Israel, that triggered the 50-day summer war with incessant rocket barrages on civilian populations in Israel. Had Hamas desisted, there would have been no war.

The Times’ coverage of the Gaza War, with its repeated stretches to treat each party equally, is as if the Allies in World War II had been as culpable as the Japanese and the Germans.

Surprise! EU and New Israel Fund NGOs Central to UNHRC Lawfare Attack

...European government funding enables these NGOs, as does funding from private foundations such as the New Israel Fund (NIF). Without the financial support and public backing from their donors, these fringe advocacy organizations would not have a platform to disseminate their propaganda.

NGO Monitor..
22 June '15..

The report of the Commission of Inquiry (COI) on the 2014 Gaza War, headed by William Schabas and then Mary McGowan Davis after the former’s resignation over his undisclosed paid work for the PLO, quotes extensively from biased and unreliable political advocacy non-governmental organizations (NGOs). Although these groups lack credibility and do not employ professional fact-finding standards, the COI repeated the NGOs’ unverifiable factual claims and allegations of Israeli “war crimes.”

European government funding enables these NGOs, as does funding from private foundations such as the New Israel Fund (NIF). Without the financial support and public backing from their donors, these fringe advocacy organizations would not have a platform to disseminate their propaganda.

An initial review of the “Report of the detailed findings of the independent commission of inquiry established pursuant to Human Rights Council resolution S-21/1” shows that the unverified claims of NGOs were referenced, cited, and quoted at a high volume, in contrast to accepted international fact-finding standards:

(Read Full Report)

Updates throughout the day at http://calevbenyefuneh.blogspot.com. If you enjoy "Love of the Land", please be a subscriber. Just put your email address in the "Subscribe" box on the upper right-hand corner of the page.Twitter updates at LoveoftheLand as well as our Love of the Land page at Facebook which has additional pieces of interest besides that which is posted on the blog. Also check-out This Ongoing War by Frimet and Arnold Roth. An excellent blog, very important work as well as a big vote to follow our good friend Kay Wilson on Twitter, 

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A Report That Leaves No Room for Israeli Self-Defense

...In the end, the UNHRC report does nothing to clarify how nations should conduct wars. But it does tell us everything we need to know about the need for civilized nations to cease supporting an agency that purports to speak in the name of human rights but instead bolsters hate.

Jonathan S. Tobin..
Commentary Magazine..
22 June '15..

After months of anticipation, the report by the United Nations Human Rights Council about last summer’s Gaza war is out today and its contents are no surprise. While the UNHRC acknowledged that Hamas’s indiscriminate firing of rockets and missiles at Israeli cities and towns were acts of terrorism, it concentrated most of its fire on Israel’s attempts to defend its territory and citizens. The UNHRC not only described Israeli actions as “disproportionate and indiscriminate” but also considers the blockade of Gaza to be a violation of Palestinian human rights and should be investigated by the International Criminal Court. But while the toll of Palestinian civilian deaths was a tragedy, the UN Gaza war report is predictably skewed not just in terms of its mischaracterization of what were, in fact, highly restrictive rules of engagement that often put Israel Defense Forces personnel in danger, but also seeming to grant Hamas impunity to wage a terror war against Israel’s existence. In effect, what the UNHRC is doing is to create rules that allow Hamas to hide amid a civilian population, using them as human shields, and then to claim those trying to stop terror are the real criminals. The United States must not only reject this dangerous precedent, but it ought to withdraw from a biased UN agency that seems to exist largely to single out the Jewish state for unfair treatment.

The UNHRC takes the view that the large number of Palestinians who were killed by Israeli fire around or in their homes is, almost by definition, proof that the IDF misbehaved. Just as wrongheaded is the claim that Israel’s efforts to warn Palestinians to leave specific areas or even specific structures is insufficient to ward off charges of war crimes. But as this feature by Willy Stern published this month by the Weekly Standard shows, the legal process by which IDF strikes are approved is geared toward saving civilian lives goes beyond any notion of what international law requires. Indeed, the Israeli rules, which often endanger Israeli soldiers and allow terrorists to escape simply because of the possibility that civilians might be harmed, are such that they go well beyond the practices what other Western nations, including the United States in its conflicts in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Iraq observe.

But when one boils down the UN report to its essentials, it comes to this: The only sort of Israeli action in Gaza that might pass the HRC’s test would be if Israeli soldiers knocked on every door and politely asked if there were any terrorists there and then left if they were told there weren’t. The fact that Hamas deliberately fires its rockets amid and from civilian structures places those in those buildings in harm’s way. Israel tries to warn civilians to leave and even goes to extreme measures such as firing duds at buildings in order to get noncombatants to evacuate them. But Hamas made it clear to civilians that those fleeing the fighting would be considered collaborators if they didn’t stay put. That’s a death threat that Gazans rightly treat as more worrisome than the prospect of being caught in a firefight involving the Israelis. The UNHRC standard is damaging to Israel, but it also hurts the Palestinians since it effectively leaves them at the mercy of the Islamist tyrants that have seized control of Gaza.

Remembering the Kidnapping That United Us

...Just as the boys' kidnapping cannot be separated from the process that led to Operation Protective Edge and the destruction of Hamas' tunnels, we cannot separate the boys' heroism, which ruined the kidnapping plan, from the horrific scenario of the planned Hamas invasion. Three young boys who demonstrated exceptional courage and resourcefulness caused a butterfly effect that began with a heroic act inside a moving car and ended by saving the State of Israel from disaster. That courage did not stem from a sense of adventure or from a lack of thought, but from outstanding education. Education that was entirely about love of Israel, contributing to the greater good, and willingness to pay the price and make a personal sacrifice for the good of society, "for the good of the people and the country," as people used to say before such things went out of fashion.

Yossi Dagan..
Israel Hayom..
17 June '15..

A year full of changes has passed since the moment the entire country was shocked by the news that three boys had been kidnapped in Gush Etzion, a report that was our worst nightmare come true. It seemed as if it was a landmark. Everyone remembers where they were and what they were doing when they heard the news.

The nerve-wracking time between the abduction and the discovery of their bodies created a wave of identification with and concern for their families, whose sympathetic, united and respect-worthy appearance -- both in the time of uncertainty and after their sons' fate became known -- swept almost everyone up in a rare wave of unity and consensus. Right, Left, secular, religious -- everyone was a partner, a brother in times of trouble, brought together by tension and mourning, by our enemies' generosity in occasionally giving us a reminder of the real proportions of the existential problems in the Middle East.

The monstrous murder in cold blood also played a part, as it went had in hand with the barbarity we have recently become familiar with as part of the horrors of the Arab Spring. Public sympathy increased when it became clear that they were shot because, in a moment of unbelievable heroism, one of the boys called the police to report the kidnapping, even though it was clear that doing so would get him killed. The conversation caused the terrorists to take into consideration that the act had been exposed and security forces were on their tail, and that from the get-go their attempt to keep their prisoner alive as negotiating chips had gone awry. The alternative scenario was to keep them in a Hamas prison and demand the release of thousands of terrorists in exchange for their freedom, which would be a strategic blow to the state that would have cost hundreds of lives. The boys' heroism foiled the kidnapping.

One thing led to another. The wave of arrests and targeted hits on Hamas leaders, which were part of the search and the security establishment's attempt to catch the kidnappers, sparked rocket fire and the biggest and most important round of fighting against the terrorist kingdom that had arisen in Gaza. All of Israel's population centers were under rocket fire, daily life was disrupted, and even Ben-Gurion International Airport was almost shut down. Israel was amazed to discover Hamas operatives breaching its territory, shooting soldiers and sometimes even managing to escape via the vast system of tunnels that led directly into communities in the western Negev. Right, Left, secular, religious -- again, everyone was a partner, a brother, united, thanks to our enemies. Lone soldiers who fell in battle had tens of thousands of people at their funerals. The people of Israel enlisted to donate to the Israel Defense Forces, more soldiers appeared for reserve duty than were called up, and the best face of our society was revealed. Days like these make it clear that as a society, we are better than our self-image. In the end, Operation Protective Edge caused significant destruction to the attack tunnels and created deterrence against Hamas, which is licking its wounds while under attack at home for its "moderation."

Three Alternative Reports Challenging the U.N. Gaza Probe

Ahead of its release, three significant competing documents have just been published, posing a serious challenge to the UN commission, whose members lack any background or expertise on the laws or conduct of war:

The report on Gaza by a group of
global military leaders, publicized by
UN Watch on Friday, became the top
story in Israel.

UN Watch Briefing..
Latest from the United Nations..
Vol. 538 | June 16, 2015..

The formal debate will take place on Monday, June 29th, but no one knows precisely when the much-discussed report of the U.N. Commission of Inquiry on the 2014 Gaza Conflict will be made available online.

Ahead of its release, three significant competing documents have just been published, posing a serious challenge to the UN commission, whose members lack any background or expertise on the laws or conduct of war:

• The Israeli foreign ministry released a 277-page report that details with photo and other evidence how Hamas used schools, hospitals and UN facilities as launching points from which to fire rockets at Israel, turning their own population into human shields and targets.

• A mission by global military leaders has found that Israel went out of its way to minimize civilian casualties and observe international law during last summer's crackdown in Gaza, even to the point of costing the lives of its own soldiers. The preliminary findings by the international military experts, publicized by UN Watch on Friday, had been submitted in May to the UN inquiry.

• UN Watch and NGO Monitor have just published a new book that documents missing dimensions in UN and other partisan investigations of the Gaza conflict. Written by a group of experts, the book reveals how rockets and missiles are produced and imported by Gaza terrorist organizations, the financing of Hamas in violation of international law, and Hamas' abuse of international humanitarian aid.

Stay informed of the latest from the United Nations by visiting www.unwatch.org/

Updates throughout the day at http://calevbenyefuneh.blogspot.com. If you enjoy "Love of the Land", please be a subscriber. Just put your email address in the "Subscribe" box on the upper right-hand corner of the page.Twitter updates at LoveoftheLand as well as our Love of the Land page at Facebook which has additional pieces of interest besides that which is posted on the blog. Also check-out This Ongoing War by Frimet and Arnold Roth. An excellent blog, very important work as well as a big vote to follow our good friend Kay Wilson on Twitter, 

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Surprise! NY Times attacks Israel's report on conduct of Gaza War

...Nowhere in her article does Rudoren indicate to readers that these preferred sources, such as Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, pursue anti-Israel agendas. Their views are accepted unconditionally. Which one can’t say about Rudoren’s treatment of the IDF.

Leo Rennert..
American Thinker..
16 June '15..

Israel is out with a 277-page report on the conduct of last year’s 50-day Gaza war -- by both the IDF and by Palestinian terrorist groups like Hamas. The report concludes that the Israeli military went to extraordinary lengths to spare civilians, while Hamas & Co. deliberately put civilians in the path of military operations. Yet, while the report is based on extensive research and interviews with participants, the New York Times will have none of it. Thus, Jodi Rudoren, its Jerusalem bureau chief, sets out to disparage its findings and undermine its credibility -- in the Times’ news section no less.

Before Rudoren even gets to particulars in the report, she quotes a Hamas spokesman in a telephone interview that the report “has no value and will not work in changing the facts because the Israeli occupation crimes took place in front of the world’s cameras.”

A clear signal by Rudoren to Times readers that delving into the report is a waste of time -- not worth paying any attention to it. After all, Hamas says so.

Immediately after her interview with the Hamas spokesman, Rudoren again brushes the Israeli report aside as essentially worthless. “The Israeli report mostly repeats familiar positions,” she writes in yet another attempt to downgrade Israeli evidence about the IDF’s operational conduct.

Nor is this the only time that she pre-emptively dismisses the report’s contents as value-less.

But if you think the Jews are the one people in the world not entitled to a state or its defense...

...By any rational standard, Israel’s effort to stop Hamas missile fire and tunnels was a just war. But if you think Israelis deserve to be killed simply because they are Israelis and that the Jews are the one people in the world not entitled to a state or its defense, then it doesn’t matter how hard the IDF tries to save Palestinian lives. Such bias has a name and it applies to those who hold such views whether they are Arabs or Jews: anti-Semitism. That and not the details of the reports about Gaza is what will continue to drive the debate about the war.

Jonathan S. Tobin..
Commentary Magazine..
15 June '15..

It’s not likely that many of Israel’s critics will pay much attention to the report issued on Sunday by the country’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs about last summer’s war in Gaza. Nor will they take notice of a separate report compiled by a multinational group of retired generals and admirals on the conflict that was submitted to the United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC) last week. Both of these reports say the Israel Defense Forces acted in a largely exemplary fashion during the 50 days of conflict. They conclude that charges of war crimes against the Israelis are false and that the primary responsibility for the entire conflict and the toll of civilian casualties belongs to the Hamas terrorists who started the Gaza war and used the population in the strip as human shields. Instead, Israel-bashers will wait for the report of the UNHRC, which is likely to condemn the IDF. But the problem here goes deeper than dueling reports from two parties — Israel and the HRC — whose bias is not in doubt. The battle over the reports provides a microcosm of the entire conflict precisely because the facts are irrelevant to the debate. It doesn’t matter how much care the IDF takes to avoid hurting noncombatants. If, like the HRC and other Israel-haters, you don’t think the Jewish state has a right to exist or to defend itself, everything it does is illegitimate. By the same token, it doesn’t matter how culpable Hamas is, their crimes are always going to be rationalized or even justified by those determined to smear Israel.

The MFA report, like that of the group of foreign military leaders, examined the conflict soberly and admitted that, as in every war, there were plenty of mistakes made in the heat of battle. Though the rules of engagement for allowing a strike on a specific target in Gaza involved a formidable list of assurances that civilians were not put at risk, there are always going to be instances in which circumstances change in the short period between authorization of firing and when the shells land. Moreover, it is not always possible to distinguish between armed combatants and civilians when Hamas fighters are doing everything possible to blend in with their human shields. That is why, contrary to Hamas propaganda mimicked by much of the international press, sought to deny that nearly half of the Palestinians killed were actually terrorist personnel. Sometimes those who are warned to leave areas about to come under attack don’t do so (often at the demands of Hamas). Sometimes fire is inaccurate. But despite the attempt of Israel-haters to portray the IDF as bloodthirsty, even those incidents that were clearly errors cannot be said to be the result of deliberate action. Sometimes soldiers just make a mistake, as happens in every war in history.

It should be remembered that General Martin Dempsey, the chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, said last year that the conduct of the IDF was a model for Americans forces to follow in their own fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan. As these reports make clear, there isn’t a military in the world that is forced to observe such restrictive rules of engagement when fighting terrorists.

Nor should it be forgotten that the context of the Gaza war is not one in which Israel launched an unprovoked attack on innocents. To the contrary, the chain of events that led to war began with the kidnapping and murder of three Israeli teenagers by a Hamas cell. The Hamas rulers of Gaza then escalated the conflict by firing thousands of rockets on Israeli cities and towns. They also attempted to use terror tunnels dug under the international border between Israel and Gaza to kidnap and murder other Israeli civilians.

Hamas runs what is for all intents and purposes an independent Palestinian state in all but name in Gaza. But its conduct in the war consisted of acts of terrorism as well as war crimes against its own people because of its decision to launch missiles and conduct attacks against Israelis in the vicinity of civilians. Its leadership hid in secure bunkers under hospitals that Israel did not attack. Though, unlike Israelis, the people of Gaza had few places to which they could flee for safety, there were plenty of shelters in the strip. But those shelters were for Hamas’s bombs and fighters, not ordinary Palestinians.