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- A Hamashole spokesman claimed that Israel had withdrawn its condition that Gilad Shalit be released in exchange for the opening of border crossings.
- US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton praised Prime Minister Ehud Olmert’ decision to transfer NIS 175 million ($43 million) in cash to the Gaza Strip, despite the fact this money will likely end up in Hamas hands.
- Greece has been holding a ship bound for Iran for more than a month and which is carrying components for surface-to-surface missiles.
Updates (Israel time; most recent at top)
3:18PM: After spending much of its time criticizing Israel for controlling the humanitarian aid that goes through to Gaza, UNRWA has now decided to suspend its humanitarian aid, given Hamas’ proclivity to steal it.
Annie Lennox, where art thou to protest this oppression?
2:22PM: While the Free Gaza fools and their fellow terror supporters have made a huge deal about the aid they were bringing to Gaza (the amount of which was grossly exaggerated), another group have been quietly organizing aid.
These same people – as Jews – are being targeted by Hamas for extinction.
1:54PM: And on to our next nominee for Most Drawn Out Death Scene in a Palestinian Children’s Show Inciting Hatred..
They so should have had a scene with Assud asking the doctor “What’s up, Doc?”
1:42PM: Turkey has launched a probe into whether we committed war crimes in Gaza. Perhaps for their next probe, they can investigate why they destroyed Israeli tourism to their country, as well as Israel’s faith in them as an honest Middle East broker.
9:48AM: Another rocket, this one landing near Ashkelon. Disproportionate response in 1,2,3..
9:18AM: It is now being reported that there were blood units aboard the “aid” ship, and Israel has allowed them through to Gaza via Erez crossing.
8:25AM: Islamic Jihad is swearing revenge for yesterday’s killing of their leader Abu Rop/Rov/Rob/Ruv, even though they have been claiming he was not the man killed, but was rather being held by the palestinian Intelligence Services.
8:17AM: Outstanding piece by Greg Sheridan of The Age
Barack Obama will not bring peace to the Middle East. He will not end the Israeli-Palestinian dispute. Though he may part the waves, cool the planet, stop the oceans from rising, this dispute will prove beyond him.
I guess that in eight years — like everyone I assume Obama will be re-elected — we will still be yearning vainly for two states living in peace.
But first, Israel’s election next week. Benjamin Netanyahu will likely become prime minister, perhaps in coalition with Labor, perhaps with a Russian immigrants’ party and religious parties.
Netanyahu will be demonised by the usual suspects but he will be no barrier to peace. Within Israel there is a broad consensus on what a peace agreement would look like. Palestine gets all the land of the West Bank and Gaza except for the large Jewish settlement blocks that are effectively suburbs of Jerusalem or Tel Aviv. These house 80 per cent of the Jewish settlers on 5 per cent of the disputed land. The new Palestinian state would get land from Israel proper to make up for this 5 per cent.
But Israel cannot do that deal unless a credible Palestinian leadership can put an end to serious terrorism, especially cross-border rocket launches, and will accept that such a settlement is the end of Palestinian territorial claims, and unless the Arab world recognises Israel and makes peace with it as a Jewish state.
These conditions cannot be met. Israelis believe their recent operation in Gaza was necessary and successful. They are right. It has made peace more likely and it has greatly diminished the rocket fire from Gaza into Israel.
The cost in innocent Palestinian lives was heavy and tragic, and the fault for this rests entirely with Hamas, the terrorist death cult that rules Gaza. I do not believe a single story of Israeli war crimes or atrocities in Gaza. There is no evidence of any such story beyond Palestinian eye-witness accounts and on countless previous occasions these accounts have been fabricated. Remember the reports of the so-called massacre in the West Bank Palestinian town of Jenin in 2002, reports buttressed by eye-witness accounts? Did you know that it never took place, as later international investigations acknowledged?
Even in this recent Gaza operation, remember the outrage at the Israeli rocket fire on the school in the Jabaliya refugee camp? This dominated the news for days and now it turns out no Israeli munition ever hit the school. The Israelis are among the most disciplined troops in the world and go to great lengths to avoid civilian casualties.
The Gaza operation has advanced the possibility of peace in two ways. It has damaged the standing of Hamas and it has reassured the million people who live in southern Israel of their security. The Israeli population could not consider a peace agreement unless it was reassured about its security.
However, I still think the prospects for peace are almost nil. Hamas certainly wanted Israel to launch this action. Otherwise it would not have fired more than 6000 rockets at Israeli civilian targets since Israel withdrew all settlers and soldiers from Gaza in 2005. Hamas knew what the rockets would bring. This column predicted the Israeli action more than a year ago. If commentators in Australia knew it, Hamas certainly knew it too.
It may be that Hamas gravely miscalculated Israel’s resolve, and its own ability to inflict casualties on Israeli soldiers. But why did Hamas want such an Israeli response in the first place?
The answer is to have Israel painted again as the international villain. It also wanted to inflame Islamic opinion. In this it has succeeded. Even in moderate Islamic majority states such as Indonesia and Malaysia, Israel has been demonised in recent weeks. In the Arab world it is much worse. It is true that the leaders of key Arab nations, such as Egypt, Jordan and Saudi Arabia, fear the Muslim Brotherhood, of which Hamas is a branch, and fear Iran, which sponsors Hamas, much more than they hate Israel. Therefore their response to Israel’s action was moderate. But this was only possible because there is no democracy in the Arab Middle East. In democratic Turkey the Prime Minister had to engineer a public confrontation with Shimon Peres. A number of the smaller Gulf states have been awash with virulent anti-Israel hatred. This all has something like the effect Hamas wants.
Hamas’s goals and motivation are theological and filled with sectarian hatred and anti-Semitism. If you doubt this just google the Hamas charter and read gems such as: “The prophet, prayer and peace be upon him, said: ‘The (end of days) will not come until Muslims fight the Jews and kill them; until the Jews hide behind rocks and trees, which will cry: O Muslim, there is a Jew hiding behind me, come and kill him!”‘
Hamas has engaged in countless atrocities against Palestinians it doesn’t like. It has murdered many Fatah men, but the media subjects this behaviour to very little scrutiny. Hamas is somehow accepted as just a force of nature, not held morally responsible for its actions.
Even if Hamas has been partly discredited by this conflict, the wider ideology of Islamist jihad, under various brands, has currency in the Palestinian population, and among the Shiites of southern Lebanon.
So Hamas has absolutely no desire to negotiate a peaceful Palestinian state living in neighbourly quiet next to Israel. Hamas, and many Palestinians, have effectively abandoned the two-state solution. They instead have a long-term demographic strategy. In 1950, there were 240,000 Gazans, Now there are 1.5 million. By 2040 there will be three million. Eventually, they believe, they will swamp Israel with sheer numbers. And they will never let Israel be free of responsibility for them, either by an association with Egypt, which is what Israel tried to achieve by its withdrawal in 2005, or by becoming an independent state at peace.
At the other end of the spectrum, I believe many moderate Palestinians don’t really want two states either. If you were an Arab East Jerusalemite, would you really want to leave Israel, with its modern economy, world class hospitals etc, to be ruled either by the corrupt kleptomaniacs of Fatah or the totalitarian Islamists of Hamas?
To all this, Obama can bring prestige, goodwill and new energy. It won’t be enough. Bill Clinton brought all this to the situation in 2000, with a less Islamised and polarised Palestinian population, and a less bitter Israeli public opinion. Clinton failed. So will Obama. Instead of a solution, we should look for Israel to manage the situation at the lowest level of violence possible, while encouraging any normalisation that can take place. It’s not much, but at least it’s possible.
7:30AM: Here we go again: a Qassam has landed in the Eshkol area.
6:12AM: Regarding the Gaza-bound “aid” ship that contained very little aid, LGF reader Wm T Sherman reminds me that it appeared to “loaded with thousands of cubic feet of badly needed fresh air.”
6:05AM: Every once in a while, Ha’aretz has an excellent article.
When senior Israel Defense Forces officers are asked about the killing of hundreds of Palestinian civilians during the fighting in the Gaza Strip, they almost all give the same answer: The use of massive force was designed to protect the lives of the soldiers, and when faced with a choice between protecting the lives of Israeli soldiers and those of enemy civilians under whose protection the Hamas terrorists are operating, the soldiers take precedence.
The IDF’s response to criticism does not sound improvised or argumentative. The army entered Gaza with the capacity to gauge with relatively high certainty the impact of fighting against terror in such a densely populated area. And it operated there not only with the backing of the legal opinion of the office of the Military Advocate General, but also on the basis of ethical theory, developed several years ago, that justifes its actions.
Prof. Asa Kasher of Tel Aviv University, an Israel Prize laureate in philosophy, is the philosopher who told the IDF that it was possible. In a recent interview with Haaretz Kasher said the army operated in accordance with a code of conduct developed about five years ago for fighting terrorism.
“The norms followed by the commanders in Gaza were generally appropriate,” Kasher said. In Kasher’s opinion there is no justification for endangering the lives of soldiers to avoid the killing of civilians who live in the vicinity of terrorists. According to Kasher, IDF Chief of Staff Gabi Ashkenazi “has been very familiar with our principles from the time the first document was drafted in 2003 to the present.”
Kasher’s argument is that in an area such as the Gaza Strip in which the IDF does not have effective control the overriding principle guiding the commanders is achieving their military objectives. Next in priority is protecting soldiers’ lives, followed by avoiding injury to enemy civilians. In areas where Israel does have effective control, such as East Jerusalem, there is no justification for targeted killings in which civilians are also hit because Israel has the option of using routine policing procedures, such as arrests, that do not endanger innocent people.
Prof. Kasher has strong, long-standing ties with the army. He drafted the IDF ethical code of conduct in the mid-1990’s. In 2003 he and Maj. Gen Amos Yadlin, now the head of Military Intelligence, published an article entitled “The Ethical Fight Against Terror.” It justified the targeted assassination of terrorists, even at the price of hitting nearby Palestinian civilians. Subsequently Kasher, Yadlin, and a team that included IDF legal experts wrote a more comprehensive document on military ethics in fighting terror. Lt. Gen. Moshe Ya’alon, who was the IDF Chief of Staff at the time, did not make the document binding but Kasher says the ideas in the document were adopted in principle by Ya’alon and his successors. Kasher has presented them to IDF and Shin Bet security service personnel dozens of times.
“The article was translated into English and published in a military ethics journal and is still being debated around the world,” Kasher said. “The feedback is generally positive, although the message is difficult to digest. In the end, everyone acknowledges that they conduct themselves this way. There is no army in the world that will endanger its soldiers in order to avoid hitting the neighbors of an enemy or terrorist. The media don’t understand the nature of international law. It’s not like tough traffic laws. Much of it is customary law. The decisive question is how enlightened countries conduct themselves. We in Israel are in a key position in the development of law in this field because we are on the front lines in the fight against terrorism. This is gradually being recognized both in the Israeli legal system and abroad. After the debate before the High Court of Justice on the issue of targeted killings there was no need to revise the document that Yadlin and I drafted even by one comma. What we are doing is becoming the law. These are concepts that are not purely legal, but also contain strong ethical elements.
“The Geneva Conventions are based on hundreds of years of tradition of the fair rules of combat. They were appropriate for classic warfare, where one army fought another. But in our time the whole business of rules of fair combat has been pushed aside. There are international efforts underway to revise the rules to accommodate the war against terrorism. According to the new provisions, there is still a distinction between who can and cannot be hit, but not in the blatant approach which existed in the past. The concept of proportionality has also changed. There is no logic in comparing the number of civilians and armed fighters killed on the Palestinian side, or comparing the number of Israelis killed by Qassam rockets to the number of Palestinians killed in Gaza.”
When asked whether the IDF should be guided in its operations in Gaza by the concept that there should be zero tolerance for endangering the lives of soldiers, Kasher responds, “The soldiers’ lives are endangered by virtue of their very presence in Gaza, by virtue of the fact that we send them to an area where there are enemy snipers and explosives set to go off in areas where the IDF is present. Sending a soldier there to fight terrorists is justified, but why should I force him to endanger himself much more than that so that the terrorist’s neighbor isn’t killed? I don’t have an answer for that. From the standpoint of the state of Israel, the neighbor is much less important. I owe the soldier more. If it’s between the soldier and the terrorist’s neighbor, the priority is the soldier. Any country would do the same.”
The decision regarding the magnitude of force used to protect the lives of the soldiers is up to the commander in the field. “The commander must be skilled in gauging the appropriate use of force,” Kasher said.
