The Warped Mirror: Israel, war crimes and the media

When it comes to accusing Israel of war crimes, you don't have to go looking for the international headlines. It's a very different matter when Israel defends itself against such accusations, or when Israel's enemies are accused of war crimes.

What do you know - it only took a few years and some ten thousand rocket and mortar attacks on Israel for Human Rights Watch (HRW) to come out with the statement:

Hamas forces violated the laws of war both by firing rockets deliberately or indiscriminately at Israeli cities and by launching them from populated areas and endangering Gazan civilians."

Indeed, HRW even got around to devoting a slim report to the "Rockets from Gaza", and this report acknowledges:

Since 2001, Hamas and other Palestinian armed groups in Gaza have fired thousands of rockets deliberately or indiscriminately at civilian areas in Israel. ...Palestinian rocket attacks... are an ongoing threat to the nearly 800,000 Israeli civilians who live and work in range of the rockets. ...Statements from the leaders of Hamas and other armed groups indicate that many of these attacks are deliberately intended to strike Israeli civilians and civilian structures. Individuals who willfully authorize or carry out deliberate or indiscriminate attacks against civilians are committing war crimes."

Of course, since the media aren't all that interested in Palestinian war crimes, this report wasn't really global front page news. It shared this fate of being largely ignored by the media with another report that includes some passages strikingly similar to the HRW report – like this one:

Hamas committed clear, grave violations of international law. The Paper documents Hamas' deliberate rocket and mortar attacks against Israel's civilian population, which violated the international law prohibition on deliberate attacks against civilians and civilian objects. It also documents deliberate Hamas tactics that put Gaza's civilian population in grave danger. These included the launching of rocket attacks from within densely populated areas near schools and protected U.N. facilities, the commandeering of hospitals as bases of operations and ambulances for transport, the storage of weapons in mosques, and the booby-trapping of entire civilian neighbourhoods so that an attack on one structure would devastate many others."

This quote, however, is not from HRW or a similar organization, but from an official Israeli government report that was published at the end of July. Under the title "The Operation in Gaza - Factual and Legal Aspects", the report responds to the flood of war crime accusations that have been leveled against the IDF ever since the military campaign against Hamas.

It is of course rather interesting - though hardly a surprise - to see that the media that were so eager to accuse Israel of committing war crimes don't seem to find it worthwhile now to report about Israel's comprehensive response to these accusations.
 
As Yaacov Lozowick noted on his blog, "If there was anyone out there who bases their opinion on Israel in facts, it [the Israeli report] would be a game-changer. Since most no-one does that... the writing of it was probably mostly a waste."

Despite this rather pessimistic take, Lozowick's own commentary on the report not only offers some choice passages and interesting observations for all those who don't have the time or patience to read through the full report, but it also illustrates very well that the Israeli response successfully addresses what is perhaps the central issue by showing how frivolous the war crimes accusations against the IDF often are.

Just as there is a difference between premeditated murder, manslaughter and killing in self-defense, civilian casualties incurred during military operations do not automatically justify accusations of war crimes. As paragraph 34 of the Israeli document states:

Reports by non-governmental organisations and rapporteurs and committees acting under mandates from international organisations too often jump from reporting tragic incidents involving the death or injury of civilians during armed combat, to the assertion of sweeping conclusions within a matter of hours, days or weeks, that the reported casualties ipso facto demonstrate violations of international law, or even 'war crimes'."

Of course all those who just love "international law" whenever it can ostensibly be used to bash Israel will be taken aback by Israel's chutzpah in claiming the right to respond to accusations of war crimes by pointing out that the use of legal concepts requires a careful analysis that takes into account the relevant legal framework and demonstrates convincingly why specific actions violated specific legal provisions.

The Israeli report is written as a serious legal document, and is doubtlessly intended to address not only the accusations already leveled against Israel, but also those that can be expected when Richard Goldstone presents the findings of his UN Human Rights Council mission investigating alleged Israeli war crimes during Operation Cast Lead.

Goldstone's report, which is due in the coming weeks, will certainly get a lot of media attention. Maybe then all those media outlets that have so far ignored the Israeli report will finally get around to mentioning that oh, by the way, the Israeli government has published a rather thorough response that addresses many of those accusations?