I
World
NEWS ANALYSIS
Propaganda War
Facts, fiction and fury in the battle of human rights groups vs. Israel.
Ron Kampeas
Jewish Telegraphic Agency
Washington
ir
he fighting in Gaza ended eight
months ago, but the fight over
,
the war rages on between Israel
and non-governmental organizations
(NGOs).
NGOs have been issuing reports accus-
ing Israeli of war crimes. In response, the
Israeli army recently released a 163-page,
460-point account seeking to rebut such
claims and discredit those making them.
At issue is the three-week Israeli inva-
sion of Gaza starting in late December
2008, launched in response to thousands
of Palestinian rocket attacks against
civilian targets in the south of Israel.
Approximately 1,300 Palestinians were
killed in the fighting, many of them mili-
tant fighters associated with Hamas, the
Palestinian group in control of Gaza. But
hundreds of Palestinian civilians are also
believed to have been killed.
Thirteen Israelis were killed, including
several civilians. Hamas rockets during
the war reached as far as the Israeli cities
of Yavneh, Beersheva and Kiryat Gat.
Some of the arguments between Israel
and the NGOs revolve around alternating
versions of the facts of the war, others
address theories of the laws of war, and
still others lunge with ferocity at the very
legitimacy of one side or the other to even
make an argument.
The stakes are high — as high as the
threat of charges against Israeli officers
and an effort by some Israeli officials to
use the law as a weapon to limit interna-
tional funding of human rights groups.
From the outset, the Israeli report cites
an array of international law readings
to show that Israel's war was just. It also
takes aim at what it describes as the ten-
dency of some critics to rush to draw con-
clusions of national guilt from scattered
evidence. "Often," the Israeli report stated,
"these leaps of logic bypass the most basic
steps, such as identification of the specific
legal obligation at issue and explanation of
how it was violated:'
To buttress its case, the Israeli army
paper cited a wealth of recommended
practice from U.S., British and Dutch mili-
tary manuals, as well as rulings concern-
ing the NATO action against Yugoslavia in
Kosovo in 1999; the goal was to establish
30 September 24 • 2009
that there is a legally tolerable threshold
of civilian death, particularly in cases of
urban warfare.
Two-Sided
At times, the Israeli report devolves into
petty sniping at critics. Meanwhile,
in recent weeks, top
Israeli officials have
smeared critics with
ancient guilt-by-asso-
ciation accusations.
It's not much prettier
on the human rights side:
Reconstructions of the
horrific death of civilians
replete with painstakingly
gathered evidence are cou-
pled with bewildering omis-
sions of context and blended
into a package that assumes an
inherent Israeli immorality.
The Israeli report repeatedly
expressed frustration with efforts to
turn criticism of individual officers and
soldiers into a wholesale indictment of
Israel's military establishment and Israel's
decision to resort to military force.
It's a pattern that is in evidence in
three successive reports published
by Human Rights Watch, perhaps
the most prominent of the groups
engaged by the government
since the end of the war. One in
March dealt with the use of
white phosphorous; another
in June dealt with high-pre-
cision missiles fired from
pilotless drones; the
most recent, in August,
dealt with the killings
of individuals bear-
ing white flags.
Only the first
report, on the use of
phosphorous, chronicles what
could be described as an alleged pat-
tern of abuse.
The other two reports from Human
Rights Watch focus on a relatively small
number of cases: six instances of Israeli
drones allegedly hitting civilian targets
isolated from fighting and seven shootings
resulting in 11 deaths. Still, even in those
reports, Human Rights Watch uses lan-
guage suggesting pervasive violations.
The HRW reports fail to assess evidence
— including videos of Israeli forces hold-
ing their fire because of the presence
of civilians — that Israel has provided
to show that critical incidents were the
exception to the rule; they fail to examine
what measures Israel took to prevent civil-
ian deaths, which would be pertinent in
examining any claim of war
crimes.
Israeli officials are also
guilty of omissions. The
army report cites ton-
nage of food and medical
equipment allowed into
Gaza during the opera-
tion for humanitarian
relief; it does not, how-
ever, translate these
raw figures into pro-
portions and fails to
address claims by
an array of groups
— including
Human Rights Watch — that
Israel used humanitarian relief as lever-
age, and the result has been malnutrition
and want.
Similarly, in describing the lead up
to the war, the Israeli army provides a
persuasive, blow-by-blow account of the
intensification of indiscriminate rocket
fire that led it to launch its invasion; but it
omits any mention of the three-year
siege Israel has imposed on
Gaza, or that Hamas rul-
ers in Gaza used
the siege as a
pretext for the
rocket fire.
In one line, the
Israeli report states
that Gaza is free of
Israeli occupation, but
fails to note that Israel
continues to control all
but one point of entry into
the area.
One of the more bizarre
omissions in the Israeli army
report is how it deals with the
deaths of 42 police cadets in a
missile strike in the first days of fighting.
Human rights groups allege that the police
were not a legitimate target; they were
recruits, drawn from the massive ranks of
Gaza's unemployed, who were "at rest" at a
graduation ceremony. Moreover, they were
supposedly slated for non-combat patrol
roles.
The Israeli army report does not men-
tion the strike at all, or the deaths. Instead,
it spends five pages generally justifying
attacks on police, and noting that in some
cases terrorists have doubled as police
— although groups, including Israel's
B'Tselem, have proffered evidence showing
that this was precisely not the case in the
matter of the cadets.
Myths, Facts
Israeli spokesmen also repeatedly question
the reliability of the human rights reports,
saying witnesses were compromised by fear
of Hamas retaliation. "Human Rights Watch
is relying on testimony from people who
are not free to speak out against the Hamas
regime,' Mark Regev, the prime minister's
spokesman, told the BBC on Aug. 13.
In fact, HRW attempts to get witnesses
alone, and corroborates their accounts with
medical examinations and forensic evidence.
Israeli government spokesman, moreover,
do not account for the fear of retaliation —
albeit of a less lethal kind, involving social
ostracization — when they dismiss accounts
of atrocities compiled from Israeli soldiers
by groups such as Breaking the Silence.
Then there are the examples where facts
simply diverge:
•Israel says it used white phosphorous as
an obscurant when it faced Hamas anti-tank
forces; human rights groups have alleged
that the presence, in some cases, of armed
forces was minimal and did not justify the
use of the phosphorous, which upon skin
contact may maim and kill.
• Israel says the number of civilians killed
numbered in the low hundreds; human
rights groups place it at closer to 1,000.
Some divergences have to do with the
perspective of the claimant. The Israeli army
report says warnings to civilians to leave an
area were as precise as they could be without
betraying tactics and putting soldiers in
danger; Human Rights Watch says the warn-
ings, while welcome, were often too general-
ized and even confusing.
Such differences might have been
addressed by dialogue and an exchange of
information that would observe limits aimed
at preserving Israeli tactical secrecy. Israeli
officers, for instance, have said that they have
names to attach to fatalities that show that
the vast majority were combatants; but they
have not provided these to human rights
groups.
Human rights groups have constantly
pressed Israeli authorities to address specific
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