| Author | Message | | Alpha | | Posted: Fri Aug 04, 2006 9:41 pm Post subject: IN WAKE OF QANA, ISRAEL AND U.S. SEEN AS TERRORISTS |
| IN WAKE OF QANA, ISRAEL AND U.S. SEEN AS TERRORISTS
by Paul Findley
The ghastly human carnage at Qana, Lebanon, should awaken everyone to the grim reality that our nation’s attachment to Israel is bad news. It entangles America in one awful mess after another: first 9/11, then Afghanistan, then Iraq, and now Lebanon. None would have occurred if our government had refused to support Israel’s long subjugation of the Palestinians.
Instead of continuing to ignore this entanglement with near-total silence, our citizens should now seek a way out through civilized open debate and discussion. If so, Qana will be a silver lining--although a bloody one--in this otherwise engulfing cloud.
Striving as usual to live by the sword, Israelis seem unwilling to face the stark fact that they will never be truly secure until Palestinians feel secure in an independent state of their own. Hezbollah’s recent border skirmish was motivated partly by leader Hassan Nasrallah’s desire to show solidarity with the Palestinians in their lonely, desperate struggle for survival in Gaza.
Using the skirmish as a pretext for war, Israel is now trying to wipe out northern resistance to their colonialism. The initial goal is the destruction of the Hezbollah, a popular Lebanese Shi’ite organization that has long provided social services for local citizens along with armed resistance to Israeli occupation policies. Six years ago, Hezbollah handed Israel its only battlefield defeat in history by forcing it to withdraw its forces from South Lebanon. Perhaps Israelis believe that bombing Hezbollah and much of Lebanon back to the Stone Ages will ease the memory of defeat. Israel’s major objective in its latest war-making is the installation of a compliant new regime in Beirut.
The U.S. government is not a bystander in this gruesome enterprise. President Bush strongly supports Israel’s invasion and publicly opposes an immediate ceasefire until Israel finishes its long-planned schedule of killings and destruction. U.S. Secretary of State Condoleessa Rice smilingly calls these horrors the “birth pangs of a new Middle East.”
If past is prologue, with the help of Congress, Bush will provide further evidence of U.S. complicity by sending Israel a U.S. Treasury check big enough to cover Israel’s expenses in this latest of seven invasions of Lebanon. Our government has already expedited a new supply of laser-guided missiles to Israel and donated $150 million worth of aviation fuel, a gift that will help finance, among other ugly missions, the deliberate recurrent terrifying sonic booms that deny sleep for hapless Palestinians in Gaza.
The Bush team may seriously view Hezbollah as a bunch of evil terrorists, but the organization rides high as heroes in the Arab/Muslim world and far beyond. Polls show close to 90 percent support throughout Lebanon, even in government circles and among Christians, and strong majority “street” support in other Arab/Muslim countries. Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas, a similar group recently elected to leadership in Palestine, are broadly admired for standing tall against Israel, the United States and other Western powers.
In the wake of the ghastly tide of blood at Qana, the people of the Middle East--except in Israel--view Israel and Washington as the real terrorists. In recent years, anti-American passions have focused mainly against President Bush and his team, but the recent near-unanimous approval of congressional resolutions endorsing Israel’s war in Lebanon now put Americans generally on the hate list. Only eight of the 435 members in the U.S. House of Representatives—self-styled as “the people’s” branch of government—had the courage and decency to vote no. No wonder Americans are hated as never before.
Surely, the American people are wise and resolute enough to elect a government that will suspend all government aid until Israel sheathes its sword, lives by the rule of law, and vacates all Arab territory it has illegally held since the June 1967 Israeli-Arab war.
America’s dangerous attachment to Israel must end. We should have made a clean break from this warrior state years ago, but better late than never. -0-
[Published Aug 3, 2006 on op-ed page State Journal-Register, Springfield, Illinois, the state’s largest newspaper outside Chicago.]
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Paul Findley, Member of Congress 1961-93, lectures widely and is author of three books on Middle East Affairs. “They Dare to Speak Out People and Institutions Confront Israel's Lobby,” is a seven-week Washington Post bestseller. He resides in Jacksonville, Illinois.
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Israel's attack on Lebanon resulted in 9/11:
http://www.warwithoutend.co.uk/wake-up-america-your-government-is-hijacked-by-zionism/2006/07/17/israel-s-attack-on-lebanon-resulted-in-9-11.php
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August 16, 2006
"Look What You've Done!"
AIPAC Congratulates Itself on the Slaughter in Lebanon
By JOHN WALSH
"My fellow American," Howard Friedman, President of AIPAC, begins his letter of July 30 to friends and supporters of AIPAC, "Look what you've done"! After warning that "Israel is fighting a pivotal war for its life," by which he means Israel's wanton slaughter and all-out destruction in Lebanon, Freiedman condemns "the expected chorus of international condemnation of Israel's actions" and Europe's call for "a cease-fire immediately." Then he exults: "only ONE nation in the world came out and flatly declared: Let Israel finish the job. . That nation is the United States of America--and the reason it had such a clear, unambiguous view of the situation is YOU and the rest of America Jewry." (All emphases in the original here and below.) Here I must take issue with President Friedman since I bet that most Jewish Americans, in contrast to the AIPAC crowd, were horrified by the slaughter in Lebanon. In fact if anyone other than President Friedman wrote this, he would be accused of fabricating a Jewish plot and labeled a nutty conspiracy theorist and scurrilous anti-semite.)
"How do we do it"? President Friedman asks a little further on. The answer is "decades of long hard work which never ends." Not only is it hard work--but it's eternal. However, President Friedman is not content with generalities and gives us some of AIPAC's trade secrets. Here are two notables:
"AIPAC meets with every candidate running for Congress. These candidates receive in-depth briefings to help them completely understand the complexities of Israel's predicament and that of the Middle East as a whole. We even ask each candidate to author a 'position paper' on their views of the U.S.-Israel relationship--so it's clear where they stand on the subject." (Would it not be great to see these "position papers"? I wonder how many candidates would release them? And what do the candidates get for all this effort? A pat on the back?)
"Members of Congress, staffers and administration officials have come to rely on AIPACs memos. They are VERY busy people and they know that they can count on AIPAC for clear-eyed analysis.. We present this information in concise form to elected officials. The information and analyses are impeccable--after all our reputation is at stake. This results in policy and legislation that make up Israel's lifeline." (Another way to read this is that the pea-brained hillbillies who make up most of the Congress can be led by the nose if the memos are simple enough. Testimony to this fact enters my mailbox, as I write, in the form of a must-read interview with Noam Chomsky, which details just how distorted the discussion of Israel and the war on Lebanon has become in the U.S.)
President Friedman's letter continues with more headliners: "Unfortunately, our work has just begun"! "Hizballah must be defeated." And finally, "The war is a diversion"!!!! This last section argues that the war in Lebanon is a "distraction," to "divert attention away from Iran's nuclear weapons program"! (In case you haven't noticed President Friedman loves exclamation points, which leads one to wonder whether a good dose of lithium might not be in order.) But this "analysis' is hopelessly confused since Israel started the war on Lebanon using a minor border skirmish as an excuse - as Chomsky points out in the interview alluded to above. It leaves one wondering about AIPAC's analyses. Are they "clear-eyed" as Friedman claims, or wild-eyed?
President Friedman closes with the exhortation: "Now is the time for us, American Jews, to stand up and tell our elected officials that they must demand Iran halt its pursuit of atomic arms." In other words, next stop Iran if AIPAC can swing it. And in that lies a great danger. The Bush administration is losing ever more of its base and only the neocon establishment and AIPAC remain securely in its camp. (Even some of the born-agains are deserting.) With the November elections coming, Rove and Bush desperately need AIPAC support, and so they may be even more susceptible than usual to its demands for going after Iran. Indeed this is a dangerous time.
Last edited by Alpha on Thu Aug 17, 2006 1:58 am; edited 3 times in total | |  | | Alpha | | Posted: Sat Aug 05, 2006 9:43 pm Post subject: The Moral Culpability for Qana |
| August 1, 2006
The Moral Culpability for Qana
by Patrick J. Buchanan
"Everyone in southern Lebanon is a terrorist and is connected to Hezbollah," roared Israeli Justice Minister Haim Ramon on July 27.
"Every village from which a Katyusha is fired must be destroyed," bellowed an Israeli general in a quote bannered by the nation's largest newspaper, Yedioth Ahronoth.
The Israeli paper then summarized what the justice minister and general were saying: "In other words, a village from which rockets are fired at Israel will simply be destroyed by fire." That was Thursday.
Sunday, in Qana, 57 of Haim Ramon's "terrorists," 37 of them children, were massacred with precision-guided bombs. Apparently, Katyushas had been fired from Qana, near the destroyed building.
"One who goes to sleep with rockets shouldn't be surprised if he doesn't wake up in the morning," said Israel's ambassador to the United Nations, Dan Gillerman.
Today, we hear unctuous statements about how Israel takes pains to avoid civilian casualties, drops leaflets to warn civilians to flee target areas, and conforms to all the rules of civilized warfare.
But Israel's words and deeds contradict her propaganda. As the war began, Ehud Olmert accused Lebanon, which had condemned Hezbollah for the killing and capture of the Israeli soldiers, of an "act of war." Army Chief of Staff Lt. Gen. Dan Halutz publicly threatened "to turn back the clock in Lebanon by 20 years."
Gillerman, at a pro-Israel rally in New York, thundered, "[T]o those countries who claim that we are using disproportionate force, I have only this to say: You're damn right we are."
"His comments drew wild applause," said the Jerusalem Post.
Though Israel is dissembling now, Gillerman spoke the truth then. No sooner had Hezbollah taken the two Israeli soldiers hostage than Israel unleashed an air war – on Lebanon. The Beirut airport was bombed, its fuel storage tanks set ablaze. The coast was blockaded. Power plants, gas stations, lighthouses, bridges, roads, trucks, and buses were all hit with air strikes.
Within 48 hours, it was apparent Israel was exploiting Hezbollah's attack to execute a preconceived military plan to destroy Lebanon – i.e., the collective punishment of a people and nation for the crimes of a renegade militia they could not control. It was the moral equivalent of a municipal police going berserk, shooting, killing, and ravaging an African-American community, because Black Panthers had ambushed and killed cops.
If Israel is not in violation of the principle of proportionality, by which Christians are to judge the conduct of a just war, what can that term mean? There are 600 civilian dead in Lebanon, 19 in Israel, a ratio of 30-1, though Hezbollah is firing unguided rockets, while Israel is using precision-guided munitions.
Thousands of Lebanese civilians are injured. Perhaps 800,000 are homeless.
Yet, whatever one thinks of the morality of what Israel is doing, the stupidity is paralyzing. Instead of maintaining the moral and political high ground it had – when even Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Jordan were condemning Hezbollah, and privately hoping Israel would inflict a humiliating defeat on Nasrallah – Israel launched an air war on an innocent people. Now, 87 percent of Lebanese back Hezbollah, and the entire Arab and Islamic world, Shia and Sunni alike, is rallying behind Nasrallah.
And how does one defend the behavior of the United States?
When Gillerman was exulting in the disproportionality of Israel's attack on Lebanon, U.S. Sen. Hillary Clinton was smiling smugly beside him. When the UN Security Council tabled a resolution condemning Hezbollah's igniting of the war and Katyusha attacks, but also the excesses of Israel's reprisals, U.S. Ambassador John Bolton vetoed it. When a few congressmen sought to moderate a pro-Israeli resolution by adding words urging "all sides to protect innocent life and infrastructure," GOP leader John Boehner ordered the words taken down.
Why? Because, says Zbigniew Brzezinski, AIPAC, the Israeli lobby, had prepared the resolution and wanted it passed the way they wrote it. Our Knesset complied. It sailed through the House 410-8.
For two weeks, Bush seemed unable to find a word of criticism for what our friends in Israel were doing to our friends in Lebanon. He publicly sent more bombs to Israel. He and Condi emphasized that America did not want a cease-fire – yet.
And because America provides Israel with the bombs it uses on Lebanon, and we refused to restrain the Israelis, and we opposed every effort for a cease-fire before Sunday, America shares full moral and political responsibility for the massacre at Qana.
Rubbing our noses in our own cravenness, "Bibi" Netanyahu took time out, a week ago, from his daily appearances on American television, denouncing terrorism, to commemorate the 60th anniversary of the terror attack on the King David Hotel by Menachem Begin's Irgun, an attack that killed 92 people, among them British nurses.
This was not a terrorist act, Bibi explained, because Irgun telephoned a 15-minute warning to the hotel before the bombs went off. Right. And those children in that basement in Qana should not have ignored the Israeli leaflets warning them to clear out of southern Lebanon.
Our Israeli friends appear to be playing us for fools.
COPYRIGHT CREATORS SYNDICATE, INC.
Find this article at:
http://www.antiwar.com/pat/?articleid=9453 | | | | Alpha | | Posted: Sun Aug 06, 2006 8:43 am Post subject: |
| Robert Fisk: Slaughter in Qana
In his weekly dispatch from the front line, our veteran war reporter witnesses the aftermath of a massacre
Published: 06 August 2006
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/fisk/article1215967.ece
Sunday, 30 July
Qana again. AGAIN! I write in my notebook. Ten years ago, I was in the little hill village in southern Lebanon when the Israeli army fired artillery shells into the UN compound and killed 106 Lebanese, more than half of them children. Most died of amputation wounds - the shells exploded in the air - and now today I am heading south again to look at the latest Qana massacre.
Fifty-nine dead? Thirty-seven? Twenty-eight? An air strike this time, and the usual lies follow. Ten years ago, Hizbollah were "hiding" in the UN compound. Untrue. Now, we are supposed to believe that the dead of Qana - today's slaughter - were living in a house which was a storage base for Hizbollah missiles. Another lie - because the dead were all killed in the basement, where they would never be if rockets were piled floor-to-ceiling. Even Israel later abandons this nonsense. I watch Lebanese soldiers stuffing the children's corpses into plastic bags - then I see them pushing the little bodies into carpets because the bags have run out.
But the roads, my God, the roads of southern Lebanon. Windows open, listen for the howl of jets. I am astonished that only one journalist - a young Lebanese woman - has died so far. I watch the little silver fish as they filter through the sky.
On my way back to Beirut, I find the traffic snarled up by a bomb-smashed bridge, where the Lebanese army is trying to tow a vegetable-laden truck out of a river. I go down to them and slosh through the water to tell the army sergeant that he is out of his mind. He's got almost 50 civilian cars backed up in a queue, just waiting for another Israeli air attack. Leave the lorry till later, I tell him.
Other soldiers arrive, and there is a 10-minute debate about the wisdom of my advice, while I am watching the skies and pointing out a diving Israeli F-16. Then the sergeant decides that Fisk is not as stupid as he looks, cuts the tow-rope and lets the traffic through. I am caked in dust, and Katya Jahjoura, a Lebanese photographer colleague, catches sight of me and bursts into uncontrollable laughter. "You look as if you have been living in rubble!" she cries, and I shoot her a desperate look. Better get out of this place, in case we get turned into rubble, I reply.
Monday, 31 July
Benjamin Netanyahu tries another lie, an old one reheated from 1982, when Menachem Begin used to claim that the civilian casualties of Israel's air raids were no different from the civilians killed in Denmark in an RAF raid in the Second World War. Ho hum, nice try, Benjamin, but not good enough.
First, the story. RAF aircraft staged an air raid on the Nazi Gestapo headquarters in Copenhagen, but massacred more than 80 children when their bombs went astray. The Israelis are slaughtering the innocent of southern Lebanon from high altitude - high enough to avoid Hizbollah missiles. The reason the RAF killed 83 children, 20 nuns and three firemen on 21 March 1945 was that their Mosquitoes were flying so low to avoid civilian casualties that one of the British aircraft clipped its wing on a railroad tower outside Copenhagen central station, and crashed into the school. The other aircraft assumed the smoke from its high-octane fuel was the target.
Interesting, though, the way Israel's leaders are ready to manipulate the history of the Second World War. No Israeli aircraft has been lost over Lebanon in this war and the civilians of Lebanon are dying by the score, repeatedly and bombed from a great height.
Tuesday, 1 August
Electricity off, my fridge flooded over the floor again, my landlord Mustafa at the front door with a plastic plate of figs from the tree in his front garden. The papers are getting thinner. However, Paul's restaurant has reopened in East Beirut where I lunch with Marwan Iskander, one of murdered ex-prime minister Rafiq Hariri's senior financial advisers.
Marwan and his wife Mona are a source of joy, full of jokes and outrageous (and accurate) comments about the politicians of the Middle East. I pay for the meal, and Marwan produces - as I knew he would - a huge Cuban cigar for me. I gave up smoking years ago. But I think the war allows me to smoke again, just a little.
Wednesday, 2 August
Huge explosions in the southern suburbs of Beirut shake the walls of my home. A cauldron of fire ascends into the sky. What is there left to destroy in the slums which scribes still call a "Hizbollah stronghold"?
The Israelis are now bombing all roads leading to Syria, especially at the border crossing at Masna (very clever, as if the Hizbollah is bringing its missiles into Lebanon in convoys on the international highway). Then the guerrilla army, which started this whole bloody fiasco, fires off dozens more rockets into Israel.
I put my nose into the suburbs and get a call from a colleague in south Lebanon who describes the village of Srifa as "like Dresden". World War Two again. But the suburbs do look like a scene from that conflict. My grocer laments that he has no milk, no yoghurt, which - as a milkoholic myself - I lament.
Thursday, 3 August
More friends wanting to know if it's safe to return to Lebanon. An old acquaintance tells me that when she insisted on coming back to Beirut, a relative threw a shoe and a book at her. What was the book, I asked? A volume of poetry, it seems.
Electricity back, and I torture myself by watching CNN, which is reporting this slaughterhouse as if it is a football match. Score so far: a few dozen Israelis, hundreds of Lebanese, thousands of missiles, and even more thousands of Israeli bombs. The missiles come from Iran - as CNN reminds us. The Israeli bombs come from the United States - as CNN does not remind us.
Friday, 4 August
The day of the bridges. Abed and I are up the highway north of Beirut with Ed Cody of The Washington Post (he who reads Verlaine) and we manage to drive on side roads through the Christian Metn district, which has inexplicably been attacked (since the Christian Maronites of Lebanon are supposed to be Israel's best friends here). "You cannot believe how angry we are," a woman says to me, surveying her smashed car and smashed home and shattered windows and the rubble all over the road. A viaduct has fallen into a valley, all 200 metres of it, though another side road is left completely undamaged, and we cruise along it to the next destroyed bridge. So what was the point of bombing the bridges?
We drive back to Beirut on empty roads, windows open and the whisper of jets still in the sky. I go to the Associated Press office, where my old mate Samir Ghattas is the bureau chief. "So how were the bridges?" he asks. "I guess you were driving fast." He can say that again.
I do an interview with CBC in Toronto and talk openly of Israeli war crimes, and no one in the Canadian studio feels this is impolitic or frightening or any of the other usual fears of television producers, who think they will be faced with the usual slurs about "anti-Semitic" reporters who dare to criticise Israel.
I turn on the television, and there is Hassan Nasrallah, Hizbollah's boss, threatening Israel with deeper missile penetrations if Israel bombs Beirut. I listen to Israel's Prime Minister, saying much the same thing in reverse.
I call these people the "roarers", but I leaf through my tatty copy of King Lear to see what they remind me of. Bingo. "I shall do such things I know not, but they shall be the terrors of the earth." Shakespeare should be reporting this war.
Saturday, 5 August
Lots of stories about a massive Israeli ground offensive, which turn out to be untrue. The UN in southern Lebanon suspects that Israel is manufacturing non-existent raids to pacify public opinion as Hizbollah missiles continue to fly across the frontier. But a friend calls to tell me that Hizbollah might be running out of rockets. Possibly true, I reflect, and think of all the bridges which haven't yet been blown to pieces.
More gruesome photographs of the dead in the Lebanese papers. We in the pure "West" spare our readers these terrible pictures - we "respect" the dead too much to print them, though we didn't respect them very much when they were alive - and we forget the ferocious anger which Arabs feel when these images are placed in front of them. What are we storing up for ourselves? I wrote about another 9/11 in the paper this morning. And I fear I'm right. | | | | Alpha | | Posted: Wed Aug 16, 2006 9:37 am Post subject: Israeli Military Policy Under Fire After Qana Attack |
| FORWARD (No URL)
Israeli Military Policy Under Fire After Qana Attack
Ori Nir | Fri. August 04, 2006
WASHINGTON — As Jerusalem defends itself against worldwide condemnation over a deadly air strike that killed dozens of Lebanese children, current and former Israeli officials acknowledge that the Israeli military has loosened the restrictions on targeting militants in populated areas.
After an Israeli air force raid Sunday on the Lebanese village of Qana left dozens of civilians dead, many of them children, human rights groups accused Israel of committing a “war crime.” Many critics — including Israeli ones — are questioning the military’s policy of bombing in densely populated Lebanese areas. As of earlier this week, more than 550 civilians had been killed in Lebanon during the current conflict, with Lebanese officials claiming that the civilian death toll has exceeded 750.
Following the Qana deaths, Israeli authors and intellectuals signed a petition calling for an immediate cease-fire and protesting the killing of civilians. The Association for Civil Rights in Israel called for an official commission of inquiry to investigate the military’s bombing policies in Lebanon.
One of Israel’s top political commentators, Nahum Barnea of Yediot Aharonot, also raised questions in his column Monday. “I am ashamed,” wrote Barnea, whose criticism reverberated in Israel this week. Barnea argued that just because he feels that the war is justified “does not grant me an exemption from torturing myself with questions.” The most piercing question, he wrote, “arose when I heard Defense Minister Amir Peretz boasting about how he has freed the army from limitations regarding the civilian population that lives alongside Hezbollah. One can understand the accidental killing of civilians, in the heat of battle. A sweeping order regarding the civilian population of South Lebanon and the Shi’ite neighborhoods of Beirut is rash, injudicious and will lead to disaster. We saw the results yesterday, with the bodies of women and children being brought out of the bombed house in Qana.”
Barnea was referring to several statements that Peretz, leader of the left-of-center Labor Party, made in the course of the past three weeks, saying that he had directed the Israeli military not to be deterred by Hezbollah’s use of civilians as “human shields.” Other Israeli officials also indicated that the military’s rules of engagement in the current fighting in Lebanon are more permissive than they have been in the past. Some said that Israel is attempting to “inflict pain” on Lebanon’s civilian population to put public pressure on Hezbollah to disarm.
The Israeli military’s chief of staff, Dan Halutz, a lieutenant general, was quoted as saying that for every building hit in Haifa by a Hezbollah rocket, Israel would hit 10 high-rise buildings in the Shi’ite residential neighborhoods of Southern Beirut. And Israeli air force pilots indicated that the process of vetting potential targets to minimize the chance of hitting civilians is less meticulous in the current bombings in Lebanon than it was in previous bombing campaigns.
“There are efforts, as always, to minimize collateral damage, but less so than when [Israel] bombs in Gaza,” said Amos Guiora. A lieutenant colonel (reserve), Guiora is the former commander of the Israeli military’s School of Military Law and currently a professor at Case Western Reserve University School of Law. In this case, he said, rockets are launched into Israel by the thousands from a sovereign neighboring country, and therefore “the rules of the game have been significantly changed.”
In particular, what’s changed are the orders regarding the admissibility of striking buildings or other sites adjacent to residential neighborhoods, from which Hezbollah combatants are suspected to be operating. Hezbollah fighters, according to Israeli military reports and other data, launched rockets from sites adjacent to the building that was hit in Qana on Sunday. In addition, Hezbollah fighters appear to have been launching rockets next to the United Nations observation post in Hiam, in which four international observers were killed by an Israeli strike July 26.
Last week, a colonel, who is an Israeli air force squadron commander gave an unusual interview to Ha’aretz, authorized by the military, in which he laid out some of the bombing policies. Often, he said, one of the militants firing rockets is seen seeking refuge in a residential home in South Lebanon. Such a house, he said, “ought to be struck, even if a family lives in it.” Such a family, he said, has allowed combatants into its home, and “hence joined those who are fighting us.” The lives of Israeli civilians are more important to him than the lives of Lebanese civilians, the squadron commander said on condition of anonymity, a routine practice for Israeli military officers.
Asked about the air strikes that leveled the pro-Hezbollah Shi’ite neighborhood of al-Dahiya in southern Beirut, the senior officer said that the area was a legitimate target because it was inhabited by Hezbollah personnel and their families.
Some experts on humanitarian international law say that the policies described by the senior air force officer are being justified on a blatant misinterpretation of international law. At the same time, they add, international law is open to broad interpretation regarding the admissibility of striking civilians.
While intentionally targeting civilians or civilian property is forbidden, international law takes a more nuanced approach to the unintentional striking of civilians when pursuing military targets.
Targeting sites that are civilian in nature but used by combatants is permissible as long as such sites provide an “effective” contribution to the enemy’s military activities, and as long as their destruction or neutralization provides “a definite military advantage.” When targeting such sites, the impact of the attack on civilians must be carefully weighed against the military advantage that the attack serves. Attacks should not be undertaken if the civilian harm outweighs the military advantage, or if a similar military advantage could be secured with less civilian harm, experts say. Each attack on such a target is required to be weighed individually under these criteria — known in international law as the “proportionality” test. The term has been used frequently in the context of the current confrontation, but seldom in the appropriate context of what international law prescribes regarding civilian casualties.
Whether Israel’s policies generally pass the proportionality test is a matter of intense controversy.
Michael Walzer, a professor of social science at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, N.J., and a leading authority on morality in warfare, told the Forward that Israel’s conduct is well within the confines of international law. “From a moral perspective, Israel has mostly been fighting legitimately,” Walzer said. If Israeli commanders ever face an international tribunal, he added, “the defense lawyers will have a good case,” mainly because Hezbollah uses civilians as human shields. In several recent articles, Harvard Law School’s Alan Dershowitz has advanced similar arguments.
Human rights groups counter that Hezbollah’s conduct does not relieve Israel from the responsibility to spare civilians, even if they receive adequate warning to flee before their neighborhoods are struck. To argue the opposite “is a complete misunderstanding of international law and is morally bankrupt,” said Kenneth Roth, executive director of the New York-based Human Rights Watch. In a press release issued Monday, the group described the Qana killings as “the latest product of an indiscriminate bombing campaign” in Lebanon, and said that the responsibility for the tragedy “rests squarely with the Israeli military.” The group’s statement argued that Israel had launched indiscriminate bombings that constitute war crimes.
Several groups on the liberal end of the Jewish communal spectrum, including Rabbi Michael Lerner’s Tikkun Community, published a full-page advertisement Monday in The New York Times, demanding that all sides “stop the slaughter in Lebanon, Israel and the occupied territories” and that Israel immediately halt attacks on Lebanon, which are “utterly disproportionate to the initial provocation by Hezbollah.”
The left-leaning New York based Workmen’s Circle/Arbeter Ring this week sent a letter to President Bush, calling for an immediate cease-fire. “Peace cannot be achieved by a war of attrition, which will only cause the death of more and more innocent men, women and children, and increased hatred on both sides,” the letter said.
For the most part, however, few if any of the most influential Jewish organizations are raising any moral objections to Israel’s military tactics. None of the major Jewish groups released statements of condolences, sympathy or regret before or after the Qana incident. In fact, three Jewish communal leaders, in recent conversations with reporters, said that given the large number of aerial strikes and artillery shellings in Lebanon, the number of civilian casualties was rather low.
On Monday, during a New York meeting with Israeli Vice Premier Shimon Peres, not one member of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations asked the veteran Israeli politician about the carnage in Lebanon.
Members seemed to agree when Peres said that whereas some 10,000 civilians were killed in NATO’s 78-day air campaign in Kosovo in 1999, the Lebanese civilian death toll is in the low hundreds. (The number of deaths during the NATO campaign is belived to have been about 500, with Serbian sourcing claiming 1,200 to 5,000 dead.)
“I see 100% support and not an iota of decrease in support in the Jewish community for Israel’s conduct in Lebanon,” said Martin Raffel, associate executive director of the Jewish Council for Public Affairs. The council is a policy coordinating organization that brings together 13 national Jewish agencies and 123 local Jewish communities.
Rabbi Irving “Yitz” Greenberg, a leading thinker on the Jewish and Israeli use of power, said that he couldn’t find flaws in Israel’s conduct. “If I have any criticism of Israel, it is that there was an underestimation of the risk” from Hezbollah, Greenberg said.
As extraordinarily painful and cruel a reality as it is, he added, “there was a need to inflict punishment on the host [Lebanese] population” to turn the population against Hezbollah. Although people in the Jewish community “feel anguish that Jews are killing civilians, they honestly don’t think that there is any serious alternative right now,” he said.
The distinctly dovish president of the Union for Reform Judaism, Rabbi Eric Yoffie, said that although questions regarding the “appropriate policies to protect [Lebanese] civilians” are warranted, “people are overwhelmingly supportive of this war, across the board” and are confident that Israel’s leadership is acting within the requirements of international law.
“We are dealing with a government that is dovish, moderate, and with a defense minister who is a certified moderate,” Yoffie said. “We are confident that even if they did make mistakes, they will know how to deal with them and maintain a positive course.”
Fri. August 04, 2006 | | | | | ©2002-2009 WarWithoutEnd.co.uk |
