Hampshire has now done the right thing

Hampshire has now done the right thing. It has made it unequivocally clear that it did not and will not divest from Israel.

Indeed, it will continue to hold stock in companies that do business with Israel as well as with Israeli companies, so long as these companies meet the general standards that Hampshire applies to all of its holdings. 

As I previously wrote to President Hexter, if Hampshire did the right thing and made its position crystal clear I would urge contributors to continue to contribute to this fine school. I now do so. 

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Dear President Hexter of Hampshire College

Dear President Hexter

I appreciate your note and your efforts to clarify the actions of Hampshire. The reality, however, is that the media and much of the world believes that Hampshire has become the first college to divest from Israel.

This perception is being used by enemies of Israel to get other universities to divest. I am deeply committed to seeing that bigoted effort fail. Neither Hampshire nor you, nor Mr. Roos has done enough to make it clear that you rejected the SJP's campaign to divest from Israel.

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Stop contributing to Hampshire College

Several months ago, a rabidly anti-Israel group on the Hampshire College campus began a campaign to try to get the college to divest from six companies that they claim helped "the Israeli occupation of Palestine." Those who came up with this formulation regard all of Israel, including Tel Aviv, Haifa and Ben Gurion Airport, as "occupied Palestine." In other words, their goal is to end the existence of Israel. This divestment effort is part of an international campaign against Israel.

Until now, every American university administration has categorically rejected this attempt to single out Israel in a world filled with massive human rights abusers. But Hampshire caved in to student and faculty pressure and as Board of Directors agreed to divest from these six companies along with a series of others that did not meet the standards of Hampshire College. The student group, supported by many faculty members, claimed total victory, issuing a press release that boasted that Hampshire has become the first college in the United States to divest from Israel. It urged other universities to follow its lead.

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For the ICC to work, the worst must come first

There are efforts now underway to try to bring Israel before the International Criminal Court (ICC) in The Hague on charges of alleged war crimes. Neither Israel nor the United States has signed on to this court, primarily out of fear that its power would be used against democracies that try their best to avoid war crimes, rather than against dictatorships and terrorist nations that routinely engage in them. This has certainly been the experience with many United Nations organizations, even including the International Court of Justice, which is largely a sham when it comes to Israel and other democracies under attack. 

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The moral blindness of some "religious leaders"

Bill Moyers holds himself out to be a moral arbiter, based in large part on his commitment to Christian principles. Cardinal Renato Martino is a prince of the Catholic church and President of the Council for Justice and Peace. Former President Jimmy Carter preaches peace, based on the teachings of Jesus. Yet when it comes to the conflict between Israel and Hamas, all three are morally blind. 

In a widely watched television assessment of the recent conflict in Gaza, here is what Moyers said: "By killing indiscriminately the elderly, kids, entire families, by destroying schools and hospitals, Israel did exactly what terrorists do..." (emphasis added) Of course he also included the obligatory hedge that: "Every nation has the right to defend its people." Cardinal Martino went even further, making an obscene and historically ignorant, comparison between Israel's self-defense actions against rockets fired by Hamas at Israeli children, and the Nazi genocide against the Jews during the Holocaust. He said that the conditions in Gaza "resemble a big concentration camp."

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Israel, Gaza and International Law

The cease fire on the ground has not ended the war of words against Israel. Indeed, efforts to charge Israel with war crimes and other violations of international law are escalating. The time has come, therefore, for a common sense legal and moral analysis of the events in Gaza and southern Israel. 

Let us begin with an argument that is frequently made against Israel. It is pointed out by supporters of Hamas that the official governing authority of Gaza is Hamas, because Hamas won the election. To the extent this is true, however, it is an argument in justification of Israel's actions. If Hamas is the official government of Gaza and if Hamas ordered the firing of more of than 6,000 deadly rockets at Israeli civilians, then it follows that the government of Gaza has engaged in an armed attack against Israel under Article 51 of the United Nations Charter. In other words, the government of Gaza has declared war against the government and people of Israel. This should not be surprising, since the Hamas Charter calls for the military destruction of Israel. 

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The phony war crimes accusation against Israel

Every time Israel seeks to defend its civilians against terrorist attacks, it is accused of war crimes by various United Nations agencies, hard left academics and some in the media.  It is a totally phony charge concocted as part of Hamas' strategy - supported by many on the hard left - to delegitimate and demonize the Jewish state. Israel is the only democracy in the world ever accused of war crimes when it fights a defensive war to protect its civilians. This is remarkable, especially in light of the fact that Israel has killed far fewer civilians than any other country in the world that has faced comparable threats.  In the most recent war in Gaza fewer than a thousand civilians - even by Hamas' skewed count - have been killed. This, despite the fact that no one can now deny that Hamas had employed a deliberate policy of using children, schools, mosques, apartment buildings and other civilian areas as shields from behind which to launch its deadly anti-personnel rockets. The Israeli Air Force has produced unchallengeable video evidence of this Hamas war crime.

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Israel is well within its rights

What if Israel defended its citizens the way the British, the French, the Americans and the Russians did? When German rockets hit British cities during the World War II, Prime Minister Winston Churchill retaliated by bombing German cities, killing thousands of German civilians, and promised to continue until Germany's unconditional surrender. The United States did the same following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. The French did much worse in Algeria and the Russians showed no concern for civilian life in Chechnya or Georgia.

The IDF, on the other hand, has gone to extraordinary lengths to minimize civilian casualties, despite the reality that Hamas deliberately fires its rockets from densely populated civilian areas and hides its rocket launchers in schools, hospitals and mosques.

Every Hamas rocket attack against Israeli civilians - and there have been more than 6,500 of them since Israel ended its occupation of Gaza - is an armed attack against Israel under Article 51 of the United Nations Charter, which authorizes member nations to respond militarily to armed attacks against it.

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Israel's actions are lawful and commendable

Israel's military actions in Gaza are entirely justified under international law, and Israel should be commended for its act of self-defense against international terrorism. Article 51 of the United Nations Charter reserves to every nation the right to engage in self-defense against armed attacks. The only limitation international law places on a democracy is that its actions must satisfy the principle of proportionality. Israel's actions certainly satisfy that principles.

When Barack Obama visited the city of Sderot this summer, he saw the same things that I had seen during my visit on March 20 of this year. Over the last four years, Palestinian terrorists - in particular, Hamas and Islamic Jihad - have fired more than two thousand rockets at this civilian area, which is home to mostly poor and working-class people. The rockets are designed exclusively to maximize civilian deaths, and some have barely missed schoolyards, kindergartens, hospitals, and school buses. But others hit their targets, killing more than a dozen civilians since 2001, including in February 2008 a father of four who had been studying at the local university. These anticivilian rockets have also injured and traumatized countless children.

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Israel's entry ban of Richard Falk

Imagine the UN appointing David Duke to report on how Blacks are victimizing whites, or Hugo Chavez to report on American foreign policy, or Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to investigate whether the Holocaust occurred.

Well the UN has done something comparable by appointing Richard Falk as its supposedly impartial "rapporteur" on Israeli actions in the Palestinian territories. For those of you who don't know who Richard Falk is, he is a notorious crackpot who believes that the United States is hiding the truth about 9/11, implying that our government has "complicity" in that terrorist attack and that its role "taints the legitimacy of the American government" which he has characterized as "fascist." His rants have become fodder for conspiracy nuts all over the world who claim that America and Israel orchestrated the attacks. 

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