When the IDF is refusing to rape Palestinians because they’re racists, they’re not committing war crimes. So we need a special sort of crazy, here in Israel, to decide that our legal system is broken. It’s broken because, according to Yesh Din, we don’t actually have a specific “war crimes” charge in Israeli law.
Probably a good thing for Hamas, that, though I’d rather say what they do when they fire rockets at civilians from civilian homes is still terrorism. Dressing it up and calling it a “war crime” gives it more dignity than it deserves.
But of course, Yesh Din aren’t thinking about anyone committing war crimes except the IDF.
So here’s the pattern. An utterly irrelevant group of anti-Israel lunatics writes a worthless report and sends it out to the crazy media here who discuss and analyse it. The point is, however, the only reason they get any attention is the funds they receive directly from tax payers in Europe. Groups like Yesh Din raise almost no money in Israel because Israelis aren’t so bloody stupid.
So their report was paid for and promoted with €150,000 grant from the EU. Anne Herzberg of NGO Monitor has the whole story:
Last week, the Israeli NGO Yesh Din released a report labeling Israel’s legal system “defective” and calling to “criminalize war crimes in Israeli law.” What news articles on the report omitted, however, was that the document was part of prepared after a 150,000 euro grant to Yesh Din provided by the EU.
The purpose of the grant was to change Israeli policy vis-a-vis criminal accountability of Israeli security forces personnel in the occupied Palestinian territories, in such a way that acknowledges and takes into account the severity and the different nature of war crimes, as distinguished from regular, domestic crimes .
On its face, the grant appears to be part of the EU’s longstanding lobbying efforts to get countries to join the International Criminal Court or at least to adopt the provisions of the Court’s Rome statute into their domestic legislation. The EU is highly invested in the ICC project.
If any law in Israel has to be changed, it should be the one allowing political interest groups to accept money from the EU.
Can I just say that I’m a UKIP activist and a non-Jewish supporter of Israel and that one of the benefits of the UK leaving the EU is that (states the obvious).
Yeah.