Column One: Gaza's long shadow
Caroline Glick, THE JERUSALEM POST Sep. 15, 2005
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Less than a week after the IDF's final retreat from Gaza, Israel's senior
military brass found itself warding off attacks on two
fronts.
In Gaza, now empty of all Jewish presence, the Palestinians lost no time in
taking charge of events in their own special way. First came the firebombing
of the synagogues. We were asked indignantly by such paragons of virtue as
PA chairman Mahmoud Abbas, "Well, what did you expect to happen?" As if it
should go without saying that the Palestinians will exploit any opportunity
to show us their contempt for all things Jewish.
After the firebombing came the looting of the destroyed Jewish communities.
Then came the looting of the hothouses which had been bought for the
Palestinians by wealthy Jews in the US who decided to buy them so that the
Palestinians could reap what the expelled Israelis had sown.
Sometime between destroying the abandoned synagogues, looting the destroyed
Jewish villages, tearing apart the hothouses,
throwing grenades at IDF patrols guarding Moshav Netiv Ha'asara and shooting
mortars at Sderot, the Palestinians discovered Egypt. At the direction of
Hamas, and with the help of PA militias and Egyptian soldiers, thousands of
Palestinians
crossed the wall separating Palestinian Rafah from Egyptian Rafah. Among the
merrymakers, unknown numbers of terrorists crossed back and forth shuttling
arms and reinforcements into Gaza in unknown quantities. IDF commanders
looked on, and impotently stated that there is a high probability that
al-Qaida operatives are among the newcomers. Oh well.
For his part, Defense Minister Shaul Mofaz fecklessly railed against the
Palestinians and Egyptians for doing nothing to seal the border. The
beautiful agreement he negotiated with Egyptian Intelligence Chief Omar
Suleiman fell apart in 30 seconds and suddenly Mofaz was faced with the
meaning of retreat: When you retreat, others take over and you have no
ability to stop them because you are not there. Oh well.
The Palestinians minced no words about their goals for the future. Hamas
wants to liquidate all of Israel. Hamas leader Mahmoud al-Zahar said on
Tuesday, "We know our nation is expecting us to continue the liberation
journey until the flag of Islam is raised over Jerusalem. This land should
not have any Zionists on it." That is, Zahar called for genocide. Oh well.
As the IDF was attempting to make sense of the new security insanity forced
upon it by Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, Sharon himself was ignoring the
reality he created back home as he basked in the glory bestowed upon him in
New York by US President George W. Bush for his "courageous" surrender to
Palestinian terrorism.
Yet, before our generals had a chance to catch their breath, they received a
gut punch from an unforeseen direction.
On Tuesday, Maj. Gen. (res.) Doron Almog tried to go to London. But once his
El Al plane landed he was alerted by the Israeli embassy that if he alighted
at Heathrow he would likely be arrested. An anti-Zionist British-Israeli
"human rights" lawyer by the name of Daniel Machover, in cooperation with
the anti-Zionist Israeli group Yesh Gvul, filed a lawsuit against Almog
charging him with war crimes in a British court. So alerted, Almog stayed on
the plane and went home.
Triumphant, Yesh Gvul's spokesmen in Israel announced that in addition to
Almog, they were in the midst of filing complaints for war crimes with
British courts against eight other senior IDF commanders. Among them are
former chief of staff Lt.-Gen. Moshe Ya'alon and current Chief of Staff
Lt.-Gen. Dan Halutz. Hearing this, Ya'alon cancelled his plan to fly to
London next week.
According to Yediot Aharonot, the Israeli defense establishment is in a
state of hysteria over the attacks on its senior officers. Left-wing
commentators and Ha'aretz's editorial board are ecstatic. Like Yesh Gvul,
these extreme leftist media gurus have been arguing - without legal merit -
since the late 1980s that Israel has no right to defend itself in Judea,
Samaria or Gaza. Adopting the baseless Palestinian claims, these legalistic
deviants say that somehow the fact that the Fourth Geneva
Convention states that Israel must protect the rights of non-combatants in
these areas means that Israel cannot take military action to secure its
nationals and its national interests beyond the 1949 armistice lines. The
fact that a simple reading of the texts shows this to be untrue makes no
difference to these political radicals masked as bleeding- heart liberals.
In recent years, these anti-Zionist Israelis have received aid and comfort
from such organizations as Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and the
UN in their quest to demonize their country and criminalize its right to
self-defense. Fabricating the laws of war from whole cloth to advance their
political agendas, these organizations have given the weight of law to
legally meaningless UN General Assembly resolutions and human rights
reports. Assigning legal power to these political groups, the extreme Left
in Israel has created a fiction which many American jurists refer to today
as "lawfare" or the exploitation of the rhetoric of international law to
prosecute a political war against a state to politically deny it its legal
right to defend itself.
Yesh Gvul is arguably a criminal organization. For years it has been running
public campaigns to convince soldiers to refuse to serve in the IDF. This is
a criminal offense. And yet, the State Prosecutor's Office has refused to
open any investigation against its members.
This is not surprising because for years now, the state prosecution has been
led by men and women - many of whom are now Supreme Court justices - who
sympathize with the views of those waging "lawfare" against Israel.
Attorney-General Menahem Mazuz's latest statements, where he criticized the
government for deciding Sunday not to destroy the synagogues in Gaza are a
case in point. Where is the legal question here? There is none. But in a
legal world where law is just a means to advance a political agenda, no one
questions this unelected civil servant's right to weigh in on such issues.
Then there is the Supreme Court's latest outrage. Thursday, in an opinion
written by President Aharon Barak, the court determined that the
International Court of Justice's advisory opinion last summer on the
legality of the security fence should be given legal weight. The fact that
there is no basis whatsoever in Israeli law for giving legal weight to an
advisory opinion from that politicized court of anti-Israel justices is
completely unimportant. The fact that the opinion itself claimed that Israel
has no right to self-defense is also irrelevant. Barak claimed that the
problem was just that the ICJ hadn't received the evidential basis for
Israel's security needs and as a result judged as it did last July.
Within this poisonous legalistic morass, Israel's generals now find
themselves under fire. What can be done? The first thing that must be firmly
understood is that the battle being launched against them in the British
courts has nothing to do with law. It is simply part of the political
campaign against Israel that these anti-Zionists wage as an adjunct and a
complement to the Palestinian terrorists on the ground. As the Palestinians
use bomb belts and rockets, these extremists use politicized courtrooms to
wage their campaign for Israel's destruction.
The immediate political response to this offensive was made by Dr. Yuval
Steinitz, the chairman of the Knesset's Foreign Affairs and Defense
Committee. This week he submitted a bill to criminalize filing or conspiring
to file legal claims in foreign courts against members of Israel's security
forces for missions they undertook in defense of the country.
This is a welcome initiative, but it misses the larger point. For the past
12 years, Israel has abandoned the offense in the political war being waged
against it. Steinitz's bill is reflective of this trend in two ways. First,
without a serious reform of the State Prosecutor's Office and the manner in
which justices are chosen, (today they largely select themselves), there is
little chance that laws on the books will be enforced against anti-Zionist
political activists who seek to destroy Israel's reputation and weaken
Israel's social cohesion.
Aside from this, the initiative is defensive in nature. Perhaps these people
will be prosecuted, but so what? They will still be setting the political
agenda with their wild legal fantasies. Against their onslaught, the time is
long past for Israel to go on the offensive. And the laws of war, as they
stand are a good place to start.
Zahar's statement, and hundreds like it made by Hamas commanders over that
past dozen years, proves unequivocally that the terror group is engaged in a
campaign of genocide. According to the International Convention on Genocide,
every state signatory must arrest and try any member of Hamas or anyone
providing direct or indirect assistance to Hamas that is present on its
territory. The PA, for instance, in refusing to take action against Hamas
and in paying salaries to Hamas terrorists imprisoned in Israeli jails, is
guilty of assisting Hamas in its genocidal campaign against Israel. As a
result, any PA functionary found on the territory of any state signatory to
the Genocide Convention should be arrested.
If instead of simply collecting photo-opportunities for his campaign for
Likud leadership, Sharon had argued this point at the UN, his presence in
New York - as Gaza is transformed into Taliban Afghanistan - would have made
sense. But the fact that Sharon continues to doggedly refuse to do anything
that would actually advance Israel's national interest doesn't mean that
others shouldn't take on the task with as much enthusiasm as Yesh Gvul and
its British bedfellows work to undermine Israel's right to exist. It isn't
that in the current anti-Israel international climate such arguments -
regardless of their legal merit - will make an immediate difference. But
that doesn't mean that they shouldn't be made - loudly, at every
opportunity.
Israel's military options for dealing with Gaza's rapid transformation into
a base for international terrorism are limited in the wake of its
self-inflicted defeat. What Yesh Gvul did this week was to point out the
path for widening Israel's room for military maneuvering. That path is the
path of political warfare.
As the shadow of Gaza grows and expands to Judea and Samaria and the rest of
the country, Israel is faced with an increasingly dangerous situation.
Without a concerted international and domestic campaign to defend its
rights, Israel will find itself without the means to justify its right to
survive.
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