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08/10/2009

Moral hazards

Filed under: Israel, Israeli Double Standard Time — Tags: — Soccerdad @ 10:00 am

Dion Nissenbaum who has never seen a rationalization of terror or condemnation of Israel that he hasn’t accepted uncritically wrote about “Breaking the Silence” a few weeks ago. He accepted the view that some soldiers claimed that the IDF operated in a “moral twilight zone.” That’s probably true. As Israel’s investigation into the IDF’s conduct during the war against Hamas earlier this year acknowledged, decision made in a battlefield may turn out to be wrong. But that, by itself, doesn’t prove a war crime.

Calling the theater of war a “moral twilight zone” may not be inaccurate, but in the context it’s used, it is highly misleading. Israeli soldiers undergo training to teach them what is and what is not acceptable in battle.

Interactive software developed by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) to prepare soldiers for such dilemmas has been called the best and most advanced of its kind by senior officers from many foreign armies.5 The IDF has received numerous requests for the video from other armies. The research for this article involved conversations with senior American, Canadian, and British officers whose comments reinforced those reactions. As more and more nations encounter the new form of armed conflict, they too will have to develop models relevant to their particular needs, rules of engagement, and standard operating procedures. Meanwhile, this author’s research clearly indicates that the IDF has “defined the field.”

However, this does not mean that in the future IDF soldiers will not commit acts that violate both morality and law. Mistakes will occur because eighteen-year-olds, no matter how well trained and sensitized, remain eighteen-year-olds. Over the past few years, the question of how IDF soldiers should conduct themselves toward the Palestinian civilian population has become a major issue among commanders, actively addressed at all levels. This is not to suggest that previously the IDF was immoral, but to note that morality in armed conflict is now a pressing concern.

Every human endeavor is going to be imperfect. And if the endeavor involves the use of force, that imperfection can lead to deaths. But that by itself doesn’t make the endeavor wrong, no matter how much Israel’s detractors may claim. In fact Israel’s imperfections – to it critics and enemies – are treated as worse that Hamas’s purposeful crimes (that HRW has only belatedly and imperfectly gotten around to criticizing.) When will we see more honesty from Israel’s detractors?

Crossposted on Soccer Dad.

08/09/2009

The fog of war lifted

Filed under: Israel, Media Bias — Tags: — Soccerdad @ 1:00 pm

The BBC at the time it happened.

Strike at Gaza school ‘kills 40′
…
The UN officials said they regularly provided the Israeli military with exact co-ordinates of their facilities, and that the school was in a built-up area.

UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said he was “deeply dismayed” that despite these efforts, three UN-run schools had been hit by nearby Israeli strikes.

The Israeli military said that, according to initial checks, its soldiers had come under mortar fire from militants inside the al-Fakhura school.

“The force responded with mortars at the source of fire,” it said in a statement. “Hamas cynically uses civilians as human shields.”

It later reported that two well-known members of a Hamas rocket-launching cell had been among those killed at the school, naming them as Imad and Hassan Abu Askar.

The Washington Post reported:

The Israeli military said its soldiers fired in self-defense after Hamas fighters launched mortar shells from the school. The United Nations condemned the attack and called for an independent investigation.

“We are completely devastated. There is nowhere safe in Gaza,” said John Ging, head of the U.N. Relief and Works Agency in the Gaza Strip.

The incident — one of the single most deadly during Israel’s 11-day offensive — underscored the dangers Palestinian civilians face as thousands of Israeli soldiers fight their way across Gaza against an enemy that does not wear uniforms or operate from bases, but instead mingles with the population.

The Post’s report deserves credit for acknowledging that Hamas does not conform to the laws of war, but the reporting generally took the tone of “both sides are wrong.” And the Post’s reporters failed to identify Hamas’s tactics as violations of international norms.

The New York Times headlined its article on the attack Grief and Rage at Stricken Gaza School

But Al Fakhura, set in the northern part of the densely packed Jabaliya refugee camp north of Gaza City, is in a crowded neighborhood full of Hamas fighters. Israel said that a preliminary investigation showed that mortar fire from the school compound prompted Israeli forces to return fire. The Israeli mortar rounds killed as many as 40 people outside the school; Palestinian hospital officials said Tuesday that 10 of the dead were children and 5 were women.

Residents of the neighborhood said two brothers who were Hamas fighters were in the area at the time of the attack. The military identified them as Imad Abu Asker and Hassan Abu Asker, and said they had been killed. But the residents also said the mortar fire had not come from the school compound, but from elsewhere in the neighborhood.

The Times noted the presence of terrorists among the civilians but didn’t give the level of detail that the Washington Post provided. Still the Times failed to explicitly report that Hamas’s embedding of fighters among the civilian population was a war crime.

In a column where he defended the coverage of Israel’s war against Hamas by his paper, the New York Times, Clark Hoyt gave the following background:

When Israeli bombs killed dozens at a United Nations school on Tuesday, it was too dangerous for the newspaper’s Palestinian stringer, Taghreed El-Khodary, who has worked for The Times for seven years, to go to the scene. She went instead to a hospital, where an official told her that 40 were killed, including 10 children and 5 women. The head surgeon and an ambulance driver said 45 were dead. United Nations officials, who were not on the scene, said 30 were killed. The Times emphasized the hospital’s count of 40.

And as we now know, that death toll was inflated.

Now Israel has released the results of the IDF’s investigation into the conduct of its troops during the war against Hamas. Here are the results of its investigation into the strike at the school.

335. The following illustrative examples demonstrate both the process of investigation undertaken thus far in Israel with respect to certain incidents involving U.N. facilities, and the application of the proper legal standards to the facts currently available. As discussed above, the Law of Armed Conflict turns not on the simple fact that certain sites were damaged in the course of battlefield operations, but rather on whether military forces targeted military objectives, and whether in doing so they took into account considerations of proportionality, in weighing the possibility of incidental (but unintended) harm to civilian facilities or persons.
(i) UNRWA School in Jabaliya (Fahoura School): 6 January 2009
336. In this incident, which occurred on 6 January 2009, IDF mortar shells landed outside a school being used as a UNRWA shelter. No mortar rounds hit the school itself, but landed in the road outside the school and at a nearby compound, resulting in flying shrapnel that reportedly injured several people inside the school, and killed or injured others nearby.
337. The IDF’s ‘investigation of the incident found that, on 6 January 2009, an IDF force operating in the El-Attatra-Jabaliya area came under an effective barrage of 120mm mortars launched from a site about 3.5 km. from the force. The launching site was situated only 80 metres west of the UNRWA school. The mortar attack lasted for almost an hour, with one mortar being fired every few minutes. As reported in the media, local residents later confirmed that mortar fire was coming from the vicinity of the school.
338. Soon after the source of fire was detected, a scouting unit was dispatched to confirm the location. Approximately 50 minutes after the mortar attack had begun, two independent sources cross-verified the location of the mortars. Only subsequent to this, and after verification of a safety margin of at least 50 metres between the target (i.e., the identified source of mortar fire) and the UNRWA school, did the force respond to the ongoing barrage, by using the most accurate weapon available to it — 120mm mortars.
339. The IDF force that was under attack fired four mortars, about 5-10 minutes after the cross-checked identification of the source of fire, and while Hamas mortars were still being fired towards the forces. The IDF response succeeded in stopping the Hamas mortar attack. Indeed, as a result of the response, five Hamas operatives were killed. The effectiveness of the mission in achieving its military objective is thus indisputable.
340. The IDF acted to defend the lives of soldiers under fire, in order to stop continuing mortar attack. The defensive action targeted an identified source of mortar fire which represented a concrete and immediate threat to the force. The IDF executed the responsive fire with as much precision as possible, given the available munitions. Indeed, the fact that all the Israeli shells landed outside the school grounds demonstrates the care Israel took not to hit the school itself, consistent with its obligations under the Law of Armed Conflict.

I suspect by now, most people who are questioned about the attack on the school, will respond that 40 people were killed. That’s what they read in the newspapers with no significant followup.

The Israeli investigation more or less confirmsthe correctness of its initial response. (Though in response to some charges, the IDF did allow that it may have made a mistake.)

I know the boast of the news industry made by Phil Graham, that it is the first rough draft of history. A rough draft, though, requires many corrections. News people nowadays aren’t much concerned with correcting mistaken first impressions or as Yaacov Lozowick, in his synopsis of his summary (Google Doc) of the IDF’s findings, writes:

Self anointed human rights organizations, followed by much of the media, have cast Israel as a serial transgressor against international law. The most recent case of this was Israel’s incursion into Hamas-controlled Gaza in January 2009, which was widely portrayed as criminal from inception to smallest detail. Defenders of Israel’s actions, generally not well versed in the minutiae of international law, have allowed themselves to be wrong footed, claiming that facts are wrong, or mooting the unacceptability of international law itself if it forbids Israel to defend its citizens.

The State of Israel has now published its legal and factual rebuttal. The authors of the report emphatically embrace international law and insist that its principles guide the IDF as it trains, plans, executes and investigate; they demonstrate all these actions on the case of the Gaza incursion.

The report is serious and learned, which means it is open to discussion and disagreement. Yet such a discussion must be informed and reasoned – precisely as much of the criticism leveled at Israel isn’t.

In his classic postmortem of Israel’s 1982 war against the PLO in Lebanon, Lebanon Eyewitness, Martin Peretz began:

MUCH OF WHAT you have read in the newspapers and newsmagazines about the war in Lebanon– and even more of what you have seen and heard on television–is simply not true.

Remarkably, 27 years later, though the specifics have changed, outrageous charges against Israel’s military operations persist, and are accepted not just into the “first rough draft” but into the accepted narrative. Maybe it’s time for the media and those who depend on it to engage a little self reflection.

Crossposted on Soccer Dad.

03/22/2009

When page A6 says something

Filed under: Israel, Israel Derangement Syndrome, Media Bias — Tags: , — Soccerdad @ 8:00 am

When allegations of the IDF’s conduct first emerged, Yaacov Lozowick observed:

Haaretz has just launched a series (so they say) of articles in which soldiers who fought in Gaza tell of wrongdoings. I’m linking to the first article here, and may link to the next. As war crimes go, these stories published so far are not particularly horrendous; they tell of lax orders and lack of care, not of an intention to kill civilians, but let’s see what the next installments tell. I expect Haaretz will publish the whammies in their weekend (=Friday) edition.

Friday has come and gone and Yaacov hasn’t yet followed up. But Ethan Bronner of the New York Times has.

On Friday, Ethan Bronner of the New York Times reported on allegations of misconduct on the part of the IDF during the recent war against Hamas. (I previously blogged about it here.) For the most part he did little reporting on his own. He mostly repeated the information that appeared in the Ha’aretz article. In one case he apparently interviewed someone new.

Amir Marmor, a 33-year-old history graduate student in Jerusalem and a military reservist, said in an interview with The New York Times that he was stunned to discover the way civilian casualties were discussed in training discussions before his tank unit entered Gaza in January. “Shoot and don’t worry about the consequences,” was the message from the top commanders, he said. Speaking of a lieutenant colonel who briefed the troops, Mr. Marmor said, “His whole demeanor was extremely gung ho. This is very, very different from my usual experience. I have been doing reserve duty for 12 years, and it was always an issue how to avoid causing civilian injuries. He said in this operation we are not taking any chances. Morality aside, we have to do our job. We will cry about it later.”

Bronner gives no idea where he came upon Mr. Marmor. Was he one of those who was profiled by Ha’aretz? I doubt that Bronner came upon him randomly. But Marmor’s account serves to add credibility to the charges in Ha’aretz.

Before that Bronner also reported something else.

It was clear that Mr. Zamir felt that his concerns, which he had raised earlier in a letter to the military chief of staff, Lt. Gen. Gabi Ashkenazi, had not been taken seriously and that was why he published the testimonies.

I’m not going to comment on Zamir’s allegation until later, so just file it away.

Before we go to the followup, I just want to point out the fine print at the bottom of the article.

A version of this article appeared in print on March 20, 2009, on page A1 of the New York edition.

In one of his followups, More Allegations Surface in Israeli Accounts of Gaza War

The account, in the left-leaning Haaretz newspaper, expanded on shorter excerpts printed Thursday in Haaretz and Maariv, a center-right newspaper, and came from a taped conversation among Gaza war veterans at an institute that prepares soldiers before their service. After the materials were published, the military advocate general began an investigation into the allegations.

The director of the institute where the discussion occurred, Dany Zamir, published the accounts in his newsletter and leaked them to the newspapers to draw attention to what he considered to be troubling revelations. Mr. Zamir is known to be on the left of Israel’s political spectrum.

He is quoted in the excerpts as saying to the soldiers who spoke: “I think it would be important for parents to sit here and hear this discussion. I think it would be an instructive discussion, and also very dismaying and depressing. You are describing an army with very low norms of value, that’s the truth.”

There is a lot here to comment on, but first of all describing Mr. Zamir “be(ing) on the left” is a bit of an understatement. Here’s what Herb Keinon wrote in a must read analysis for the Jerusalem Post.

Zamir, in an interview on Israel Radio on Thursday, said that the soldiers from Operation Cast Lead who spoke at the meeting reflected an atmosphere inside the army of “contempt for, and forcefulness against, the Palestinians.”

Zamir himself appears in a 2004 book titled Refusnik, Israel’s Soldiers of Conscience, compiled and edited by Peretz Kidron, with a forward by Susan Sontag. The book, which earned commendation from no less a personage than Noam Chomsky, includes a section by Zamir, described as “an officer in the reserves from Kibbutz Ayelet Hashahar who was sentenced to 28 days for refusal to serve in Nablus and now heads the Kibbutz Movement’s preparatory seminary for youngsters ahead of their induction in the army.”

“With stupid resolve and the smugness of the all-knowing, primitive preachers and unbridled nationalists are leading and misleading us to calamity, while Pompeii is preoccupied with watching boxing matches and with banquets in advance of the disaster,” he wrote.

This is an extreme left-wing position for an Israeli. (Contrast Bronner’s delicacy here with the Times’ penchant for referring to an Israeli party that believes in territorial compromise as being “far-right.”) And perhaps it’s the reason that that the Chief of Staff was apparently unimpressed by Zamir’s allegations at first. Zamir, though, knew that there were local and foreign media who would happily publicize his allegations without scrutinizing their source.

But Keinon concludes:

That was what Zamir wrote in 1990, reprinted in 2004. The testimonies of the soldiers that he brought to the public’s attention seem to corroborate – what a coincidence – his thesis.

Exactly, Zamir has a pretty big axe to grind with Israeli society. And yet his own beliefs didn’t become part of the story at all. Bronner didn’t investigate whether the allegations were true or if they were the result of some understandable confusion during combat, he just looked for sources to corroborate Zamir’s thesis that the misconduct was a result of some flaw in Israel’s national soul.

But there’s something that’s very telling here. This followup claims that the second day of Ha’aretz coverage was more complete. But if you look at the bottom the article you see the following words:

A version of this article appeared in print on March 21, 2009, on page A6 of the New York edition.

So the more complete article is buried in the first section of the paper but the initial article was front page news. I think that Bronner’s acknowledgment of Zamir’s political leanings, plus the less prominent position suggest that Bronner and/or his editors realized that this story may not be as damning as Ha’aretz does. If the followup was really more complete, it should also have been on page A1.

Anyway, Zamir has provided Bronner with the fodder for another article about the influence of religion in Israeli society. I’m not going to address it, however My Right Word has made a few observations about a related story. Elder of Ziyon deconstructs the Bronner article head on.

I don’t know the truth about the allegations, but neither, apparently does Ethan Bronner. And yet he accepts them as the premises for three articles.

Others who have commented on the issue include Barry Rubin (at Augean Stables), Daled Amos. Meanwhile Random Thoughts and Elder of Ziyon take on Richard Falk.

Crossposted on Yourish.

01/23/2009

An inflated toll?

Filed under: Israel — Tags: — Soccerdad @ 10:00 am

A number of bloggers have pointed to the story of the Gaza doctor who reported that the death toll claimed by Hamas and swallowed by the MSM was significantly inflated.

Elder of Ziyon points out how difficult it would be to figure out the actual death toll. Jonathan Tobin asks if this death inflation is Shades of the al-Dura Case? Subsequently there’s been another report that the IDF is confirming that really over 1300 Gazans were killed the fighting. This leads Tobin to compare this case to the al-Dura case and wonder:

But whether that’s true or not, had the IDF been a bit more skeptical about the false claims made regarding the case, it’s possible that the story wouldn’t have become such a big propaganda success for the anti-Israel crowd.

But maybe the IDF believes that the death toll matches the higher figure and that they have an interest in letting Hamas know. The later report contained this information:

Israeli defense officials on Thursday said there were around 1,300 Palestinians killed during the fighting in Gaza and that a majority of them were Hamas operatives.

The IDF’s Gaza Coordination and Liaison Administration have already compiled a list with 900 names of Palestinians killed during the operation, out of which 750 are believed to be Hamas operatives.

Keep in mind that if Israel has a list that shows that 750 out of 900 killed were Hamas operatives that means that Israel hit the terrorists with an 83% accuracy rate.

Edward Luttwak wrote two weeks ago:

Consider: According to Gaza sources, until the ground fighting started some 25% of the 500 dead were innocent civilians. The Israelis claimed that 20% of the casualties from the aerial attack were civilians. Either way, this was an extremely accurate bombing campaign. (Even in the 1991 and 2003 U.S. air campaigns against Iraq, when most of the bombs were already precision-guided, gross targeting errors killed many civilians.)

A targeting accuracy of 75% — by the lowest estimate — cannot have been merely obtained by overhead photography from satellites or reconnaissance aircraft, because few Hamas objectives were classic “high-contrast” targets such as bunkers or headquarters. Most targets were small groups of people in nondescript civilian vehicles that blend in with traffic, or inside unremarkable buildings. Nor could telephone intercepts have yielded much intelligence, because all Palestinians know that the Israelis have long combined voice recognition with cellular-grid location in order to aim missiles very accurately at single vehicles in traffic, or even at individuals standing about with their cellphones switched off.

So how did Israel do it? The only possible explanation is that people in Gaza have been informing the Israelis exactly where Hamas fighters and leaders are hiding, and where weapons are stored. No doubt some informers are merely corrupt, paid agents earning a living. But others must choose to provide intelligence because they oppose Hamas, whose extremism inflicts poverty, suffering and now death on the civilian population for the sake of launching mostly ineffectual rockets into Israel. Hamas completely disregards the day-to-day welfare of all Gazans in order to pursue its millenarian vision of an Islamic Palestine.

If Israel has compiled a list of those it killed it shows an intelligence gathering capability in Gaza. Similarly after the 2006 war against Hezbollah, Yaacov Amidror wrote:

Hizballah is still functioning and was functioning during the entire war. We have identified by name and address 440 members of Hizballah who were killed during the war. From my experience, this figure is between half and two-thirds of the actual casualties, which were not less than 500 and may have reached 700 – a figure greater than all the casualties Hizballah has suffered during the last twenty years. It will take Hizballah at least two years to rebuild its capabilities and to recruit and train new people. This is why Hizballah is keeping the cease-fire.

Both the recent Jerusalem Post article and the Amidror article suggest that Israel knows who they are targeting. And if the 83% accuracy is correct, as Luttwak wrote, it suggests that Israel has spies on the ground helping them. Maybe the army has figured that the difference between the numbers don’t really matter, but that they have a way of telling Hamas that its support has been compromised. Maybe this is a warning to Haniyeh and company that they can claim victory, but that they ought not to rest too comfortably.

Crossposted on Soccer Dad.

01/02/2009

The IDF has a blog

Filed under: Bloggers, Israel — Tags: — Meryl Yourish @ 5:00 am

Granted, it’s not a blog like yours and mine, but still: Linked.

09/12/2008

A piece of peace

Filed under: Israel, Media Bias, palestinian politics — Tags: , — Soccerdad @ 8:30 am

One thing that reporters in the Middle East enjoy is irony. So that’s the angle Ethan Bronner takes about Jenin in A West Bank Ruin, Reborn as a Peace Beacon.

But a quiet revolution is stirring here in this city, once a byword for the extremes of violence between Israelis and Palestinians. In 2002, in response to a wave of suicide bombers from Jenin, Israeli tanks leveled entire neighborhoods.

From that rubble, now newly trained and equipped Palestinian security officials have restored order. Israeli soldiers have pulled back from bases and are in close touch with their Palestinian colleagues. Civilians are planning economic cooperation — an industrial zone to provide thousands of jobs, mostly to Palestinians, and another involving organic produce grown by Palestinians and marketed in Europe by Israelis. Ministers from both governments have been visiting regularly, often joined by top international officials. Israeli Arabs are playing a key role.

The aim is to stand conventional wisdom on its head. Instead of a shaky negotiated peace treaty imposing coexistence from the top down, a bottom-up set of relationships that lock the two societies together should, proponents argue, lead to a real two-state solution.

There are some positive aspects to this report and some negative ones. On the negative side, Bronner writes “Israeli tanks leveled entire neighborhoods.” Well did that really happen?

A JCPA issue brief gives the actual scope:

Still, the level of destruction was limited. Out of 1,896 buildings in the Jenin refugee camp, 130 buildings were destroyed — or less than 10 percent (Israel Defense Forces — Central Command). According to Fatah activist Mousa Kadoura, the area affected was the size of a large football field (Washington Times, May 1, 2002). Moreover, because of the large amounts of Palestinian explosives in the camp, it is difficult to discern what component of this destruction was caused by Israeli forces and what part was a result of Palestinian detonation.

But remember unlike Bronner’s language that suggests the destruction haphazard or disproportionate, Israel was fighting an armed enemy. Less than 10% shows restraint; “whole neighborhood” suggests a massive scale.

It’s good to know that there’s a place where there’s some level of cooperation going on and the Palestinians are taking control of their lives someplace. And Bronner hits on an important reason for that limited success may be due to the bottom approach being taken here. Unfortunately, the rest of his reporting shows that he doesn’t understand the reason why. When Bronner tries to explain why cooperation is occurring in the Jenin area, he gives these reasons:

Jenin, officials on all sides say, offers many advantages for a pilot project, an idea arrived at by American and European officials in February when they sought ways to build peace on the ground.

First, they said, Hamas, the main Palestinian militant opposition in the West Bank, is relatively weak in Jenin. Second, after the evacuation of four Israeli settlements in the region in 2005, the area is essentially free of settlers, a major source of friction elsewhere. Third, the barrier that Israel has been building causes little friction in this area because it is right on the boundary between Israel and the West Bank, not over it so there is little territorial dispute.

There is also a fourth reason. Gilboa, the Israeli region that abuts Jenin, is an unusual and unusually well-suited neighbor. Small and rural with 30,000 people, it is 40 percent Arab and 60 percent Jewish and the inhabitants have worked assiduously to create their own kind of model — of Arab-Jewish coexistence in Israel.

Do you notice what’s missing? Well how about Operation Defensive Shield that destroyed most of the terrorist infrastructure that existed in Jenin? Somehow acknowledging that killing terrorists helps bring peace seems to be beyond his understanding. But of course it’s important to mention that there are no more “settlers” there.

Then there’s this:

There are other concerns. The Palestinians have asked to base their newly trained battalion for Jenin in an abandoned Israeli settlement, a good spot in terms of location and infrastructure. But Israeli officials are worried about how it will play in Israel and have so far said no.

Israeli security officials say their Palestinian colleagues are good at law and order but not at stopping terrorist groups. They say that Islamic Jihad used to be strong here and is no longer because Israel spent years destroying its infrastructure and killing its militants, setting the stage for the Palestinian security takeover. But if they relax their vigilance, the Israelis say, the situation will deteriorate. Early on Wednesday morning, for example, Israeli soldiers and security men raided a home in Jenin and detonated a 30-pound pipe bomb.

The Palestinians complain that they are often urged to arrest someone just because he wears a beard. They add that as long as they are seen as puppets of the Israelis, the project is doomed. The key is for Palestinian security officials to be seen as agents of state building. Then the population will cooperate. This requires the kind of discretion that the Israeli Army has not been known for.

Notice how the Israeli claim that decimating Islamic Jihad played a role in the improvements is qualified by “they say.” The claims about settlers and the security fence are not qualified.

Also problematic is the idea that the Palestinians ought not to be seen as “puppets.” Well maybe that’s important in terms of their constituents, but if they don’t take responsibility to fight terror they’ll have no credibility among the Israelis. Why Israel’s concerns are given a short shrift here is a puzzle.

And the dig at the IDF is uncalled for. Again, if the IDF hadn’t unsubtly destroyed the terrorist infrastructure in Jenin, this experiment could not be taking place.

Finally we have Tony Blair:

“The intifada turned them into enemies in one day,” Mr. Blair said in an interview. “Now we are trying to recreate a sense of mutual confidence after seven years. It is a very slow process. But what is happening in Gilboa and Jenin is exactly the direction we would like to go.”

Blair here, presents the intifada as an independent force that just turned Jews and Arabs into enemies; the intifada, to Blair, just spontaneously generated causing destructive enmity between the two parties seeking peace.

Blair (and Bronner by quoting him uncritically) shows the same cluelessness that the late Scott Shuger described in a different context seven years ago at the start of the intifada:

The headline the Washington Post put over its lead Ramallah story was similarly misguided: “Grief, Anger Spurred Frenzied Crowd to Kill.” With its emphasis on external, even understandable, forces, this is classic responsibility-avoiding language. Note that there are no individuals in either the Times sentence or the Post headline. Even when presented with irrefutable evidence of personal culpability, all too often the papers still try to fuzz it over. Take that unbelievable picture of the guy with the bloody hands. The Los Angeles Times supplied a caption to the photo that managed not to refer to the blood at all. And in fact, neither the Los Angeles Times’ nor the New York Times’ lead story even mentioned the guy with the bloody hands.

The lynching of the soldiers didn’t just happen. It was the result of an orchestrated campaign of violence unleashed by Yasser Arafat a month earlier. The intifada didnt just happen, it was planned and executed by Yasser Arafat. The problem with the top down approach wasn’t in the details; it was in the fundamentally bad faith of the top of the Palestinians leadership. If the project in Jenin works, it will be because, at least in part it has circumvented the Palestinian leadership.

So while the idea of this little piece of peace working out is mildly encouraging, Bronner’s failures to acknowledge the success of the IDF and the perfidy of Arafat and the Palestinan leadership detract from the story.

Crossposted on Soccer Dad.

05/16/2008

Rocket bombardment continues; Barak says not for much longer

Filed under: Israel — Tags: , , , — Meryl Yourish @ 6:00 am

I’ve been reading reports in various Israeli newspapers and other sources about the upcoming Gaza operation. They all seem to have the same background: The IDF will go in, but not in great force. Pinpoint operations to take out the terror infrastructure. If that’s the case, the operation will fail. The IDF went in to do just that months ago, after the bombardment of Sderot and southern Israel increased to fifty-plus rockets per day. The result is what you see now: Hamas and its proxies fire rockets wherever, whenever they want. They lose a crew here or there, but the rockets just keep coming.

“You need to grit your teeth, but not for many more months,” Barak told the residents of Ashkelon during a tour of the scene together with Deputy Defense Minister Matan Vilna’i and OC Home Front Command Maj.-Gen. Yair Golan. “We won’t allow this to continue for much longer. I am not talking about years or many months. We will do what needs to be done.”

Throughout the day a number of rockets were fired into Israel, including a Grad-model Katyusha that hit a field outside Netivot without causing injuries. Two Hamas gunmen were killed when IAF aircraft bombed a terrorist observation post in Gaza City before dawn.

Calev Ben-David of the JPost had this analysis:

Defense Minister Ehud Barak, speaking at the Facing Tomorrow conference Thursday night after returning straight from a visit to Ashkelon, made clear that from his viewpoint a military operation is only a matter of time. If Israel’s luck runs out, and a Hamas rocket attack results in multiple fatalities rather than the individual deaths of the past week, the government will politically have no choice but to mount that response sooner rather than later.

Olmert and Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni, still strongly committed to a negotiating process with the Palestinian Authority that would stop dead in its tracks in the event of such an operation, would clearly prefer to put off that option as long as possible.

And the news article quotes “senior defense officials”—the ones who have been talking about a major operation to other news sources as well:

The IDF plans to escalate its operations against Hamas in the Gaza Strip after US President George W. Bush leaves Israel on Friday, senior defense officials said Thursday.

If they’re not willing to go all-out, then nothing will change. Go back just a couple of months, when Grad rockets were raining down on Ashkelon. The IDF went in, killed a lot of Palestinian terrorists (and a fair number of civilians as well), the world freaked out, the IDF left, and what have you got? Nothing changed.

If Barak thinks that “pinpoint” strikes are going to accomplish anything, he’s mistaken. Unless he kills the Hamas leadership, the war continues. It has ever only stopped when Israel has them on the run 24/7.

“You are mistaken if you thought that targeting buildings, ministries and police stations is going to stop our work,” Haniyeh said, directing his comments at Israel. “We will work under trees, in tents and in the streets.”

Expect world condemnation the moment Israel moves. Say, you know, a thought occurred to me: Two Israeli civilians were killed by terrorist rocket fire in the last week. When Palestinians are killed during IDF operations, UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon is pretty quick to condemn the violence “on both sides” and urge Israel to stop firing in civilian areas. So this is right up his alley, right? He should have issued a statement condemning the deliberate targeting of civilians right? Right? Right?

Wrong.

Not a word. Not a single, solitary word. But watch how much he says when the IDF crosses into Gaza.

I hope they do it right this time. And while they’re at it, send a Hellfire up Meshaal’s ass. If they could find Mugniyeh, they can find Meshaal.

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