[img]1|left|||no_popup[/img]Unless you follow Israeli politics more closely than most Americans, you may not be aware of extraordinary precautions Israel’s army took to protect innocent — as distinct from civilian — Gazans during last winter’s brief war.
Israel typically practices moral principles of war unheard of in any other land, no known exceptions.
Before Israel struck from the air and before their troops invaded on the ground during the 4-week offensive, the army individually warned Gazans to flee, that fire was coming shortly.
One Israeli campaign called for littering widespread neighborhoods with flyers, warning families in harm’s way that bombing was imminent, and they should vacate, or hide, immediately.
Tell Everybody You Know
A separate mass campaign was to call the cell phones and landlines of strategically placed Gazans — now how did Israel get their numbers? — and, in Arabic yet, warn that gunfire soon would begin. They should swiftly dash for cover.
This is establishing an astonishing moral threshold for war.
I was thinking of this extraordinary approach to rooting out Arab terrorists while digesting the following recent announcement:
Some 210 different groups and countries have filed war-crimes charges against Israel with the kangaroo International Criminal Court — which the Los Angeles Times thinks America should join.
Gad, how the world hates Jews.
Against this backdrop, we arrive at a Page 1 story in this morning’s Times, “Israeli troops report Gaza civilian abuse,” by Bureau Chief Richard Boudreaux. Blindly, he gleefully reported an anonymous, unresearched story that came fourth-hand from an unsavory character who turns out to have an anti-war agenda.
Oh, That’s Who You Are
Imagine this scenario: A former Mrs. Noonan, hoping to deceive you by slyly using her maiden name, levels a bevy of accusations against me from 25 years ago. Wouldn’t it be helpful to know that we were once married, and she walked away bitterly?
Something similarly deceitful is going on here.
But first you should know:
Israel’s 4-week war was against the global Muslim terrorist band known as Hamas, organized in the late1980s as an offshoot of the dreaded Egypt-based Muslim Brotherhood, a death gang that even makes the dictator Mubarak tremble and kow-tow.
Throughout the first decade of this century, the America- and Israel-hating boys of Hamas, often on a daily basis, fired rockets from Gaza into Israeli border towns, hoping to kill some Israelis and scare the rest into nervous wrecks. Hamas has succeeded beautifully. In fact, the terrorists continue, as you read this, to launch deadly rockets into Israel every day.
Slick Triumphant Strategy
Eight years along, Israel became fed up with the uncontested rattling of its citizens. Finally, finally, at the end of December, Israel swung back hard.
The Arab culture never has been known for breeding young men of valor. This cultural failing comes in handy, however. It explains why the un-brave terrorists of Hamas can walk anywhere in the world, unnoticed. Lacking the courage to wear the traditional garb of warriors, instead they dress in civilian clothes, as if they were as normal, as innocent, as you and me.
This brazen, schizophrenic tactic yields a double-barreled dividend that provides a massive advantage over any sensible government that would challenge them:
The boys of Hamas can hide in plain view. (In Culver City, we know exactly where to find homegrown analogs.)
By disdaining combat uniforms, the boys of Hamas gain the brilliant advantage of fooling both the Good Guys and the Bad Guys, their own people.
Therefore, when Israel began unloading against the vile official terrorists and their thousands of supporters in the general population of wretched Gaza, Hamas was able to claim that any casualty, pick a number, was a “civilian.”
It Must be True, Isn’t It?
Throughout the war, the non-American, non-Israeli world was hungry to believe any claim laid down by these proven liars.
Such a scenario was a dream come true for the usually pathetic people we call “human rights activists.” They will believe any claim, as long as it folds into their horribly sideways view of the world.
Hamas claimed that about 1,400 Gazans died in the war, and roughly 1,000 were “civilians.”
Who ever heard of this amazing category of “civilians,” except for wars in which Israel and America have fought? The effect of the outrageous claim was immediate, to discredit the validity of Israel’s assertion that this was a just war any (democratic) country would have waged.
Don’t They Look Innocent?
Between the Gazans who enthusiastically fight with Hamas and those whom the un-brave terrorists intimidated into being human shields, the outlandish accusation seems to crumble, if only because you can’t discern “fighters” from genuine innocents.
Contrary to what you may have read nearly everywhere, particularly in the Times, this was not a random unprovoked slaughter of the innocents.
Speaking of crumbling theses and wishes, we return to the partisan Mr. Boudreaux’s shoddy reporting. His opening sentence will suffice:
“Two months after ending its assault on the Gaza Strip, the Israeli army was confronted Thursday by the first public allegations from within its ranks of unwarranted killings and other abuses of Palestinian civilians.”
Undeniably, this is a juicy premise. One of Mr. Boudreaux’s junior staffers found the story yesterday in Israeli newspapers, journals that lean as far left as the left-wing newspapers in this country.
Can you guess what is coming?
This is one piece of the puzzle in putting together how this seemingly condemnatory story came to breathe universal life, thanks entirely, to one unsavory fellow Dani Zamir. Don’t forget his name or his resume.
While Jews and Christians who are supporters of Israel were choking on the unsourced Boudreaux story over their breakfasts, longtime Jerusalem Post columnist Herb Keinon was telling a quite different version to the English-speaking Jewish world.
(You will not read the essence of the following information in any influential American newspaper because it contradicts their agenda. If only Mr. Boudreaux had conducted himself professionally, and dug, he could have uncovered a more accurate accounting, but that would have ruined his Israel agenda. For shame. )
Here is Mr. Keinon:
“The whole world is against us, goes an old Jewish joke, and now we've joined in.
“That witticism came to mind while reading headlines in the Hebrew press Thursday about the testimony that soldiers who took part in Operation Cast Lead in January gave at the Yitzhak Rabin pre-military preparatory course at Oranim Academic College in Kiryat Tivon in February. Dani Zamir, the head of the program, published the conversations in a newsletter sent to the course's graduates.
“According to the testimony of a number of soldiers who took part in what appears to have been a group therapy session getting the war experiences off their chest, three soldiers told of cases in which civilians were killed by sniper fire, and of the wanton destruction of property.
“The IDF military advocate general instructed the Criminal Investigation Division of the Military Police on Thursday to investigate the claims, and while some may dismiss the investigation as a fig leaf for the rest of the world, it isn't.
“Defense Minister Ehud Barak's response to the story was telling. He said Israel is the most moral army in the world. While the country's detractors around the world would mock at that moniker, we Israelis believe it, and it is extremely important that we continue to do so.
The country fights not because it wants to, but because it has to.
“What is lacking is context.
“Obviously, everyone abroad who wants to accuse Israel of war crimes in Gaza will jump at these stories; every anti-Israel NGO will disseminate them as further proof of our evil.
“First of all, this type of testimony is legendary in Israel. There is even a phrase to describe it: yorim ve'bochim (shoot and weep). The most famous book of this genre, Siach Lochamim, came out immediately after the Six-Day War in 1967, and was translated into English a few years latter under the title The Seventh Day.
“The testimonials from the Rabin preparatory course have a similar feel: soldiers talking about their war experiences — what they saw, what they heard, what they felt good about, what they didn't feel good about.
“It is important to note that none of the testimony was about what the soldiers did themselves, but rather of what they heard or saw other soldiers do. It is also important that what was reported seems to fall within the realm of aberrations by individuals during war against a cruel enemy hiding behind civilians, not a systematic loss by the army of its moral compass.
“The second piece of context is Dani Zamir, the head of the program, who had the soldiers’ words transcribed and published. A story in Ha’aretz on Thursday said that in 1990 Zamir, then a parachute company commander in the reserves, was tried and sentenced to prison for refusing to guard a ceremony where ‘right-wingers’ brought Torah scrolls to Joseph's tomb in Nablus.
“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.
“‘ I see a volcano in the land where one-third of the inhabitants are banned, by dint of their national and ethnic origins and geographical location, from voting as equals, where they don't have basic civic rights and where thousands are detained under administrative decree — under a military justice system that is farcical.
“‘ A land, a third of whose inhabitants have been subjected to extended military occupation for over 20 years — which means restrictions of rights and a different code of law for Jewish and Arab residents in the selfsame land — is not a democratic country.
“‘ Accordingly, collaboration with a regime or government that forces or orders me to be part of an anti-democratic apparatus that leads to self-destruction, disintegration and national decay, along with the utter denial of its own foundations, is illegitimate, unjust and immoral, and will remain so as long as the state does not take one of only two feasible actions: annexation of all or most of the territories conquered in 1967 and granting full civil rights to those residing there; or withdrawal from densely populated areas and a settlement that will release us of responsibility for the residents of those areas, who will choose for themselves whatever regime they desire (of course with security arrangements included).’
“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.”
