Third in a series
Re “There Is No Doubt, Warner Says, That Israel Ignited War with Hamas”
With Sunday afternoon’s next protest by his L.A. Jews for Peace group at the Israeli Consulate just hours away, peace activist Jeff Warner talked about how he concluded that the present war with the Hamas terrorists is Israel’s fault.
“Of course it was a crime that three Israeli teenagers were abducted and killed in June,” Mr. Warner said. “But instead of being treated as a crime, it was grabbed on by the Israelis to instigate a war. Hamas stupidly fell into the trap and responded. That is how this thing started.”
Question: When you watch television reporting on the war, how do you apportion your sympathy for Gaza and for your fellow Jews?
“I have no sympathy for anyone who kills civilians. So the Hamas rockets are very low-tech. They can’t aim them, and they are aimed at… And therefore they go toward civilian areas, and they are a war crime. Israel’s bombing of civilian areas is a war crime. Israel has been bombing civilian areas. Before the cease-fire, they bombed a U.N. shelter killing 16 people,” Mr. Warmer said.
If the rocket launchers deliberately are placed in U.N. schools, what should Israel do? When Hamas deploys women and children as human shields, what is Israel to do?
“Israel claims that in the 2008-2009 bombardment claimed that it was shooting at schools, at hospitals, at mosques because Hamas was hiding rockets there,” Mr. Warner said.
“Then that was all investigated by an Israeli human rights organization, by Human Rights Watch, by Amnesty International, by the U.N. Goldstone Commission and they found that many of Israel’s excuses were not true, that where they said there were rockets – mosques, schools, hospitals — there were not rockets.
“Israel has a history of fibbing, of saying that there were rockets there when they had no evidence. They weren’t there.
“The Goldstone Report was a perfectly good report,” although it was disowned by its namesake, Dr. Richard Goldstone of South Africa. “I read it. Five hundred-and-some-odd pages.
“They took 30-some-odd instances and they investigated. They had eyewitnesses on all sides.”
Do you, Mr. Warner, think the investigation was fairly conducted?
“Yes.”
(To be continued)
