|
By J. Zel Lurie
 DELRAY BEACH, Florida— Benjamin Netanyahu’s American fans have been circulating Netanyahu’s response on British TV to an interviewer who asked:
“How come so many more Palestinians were killed in Gaza than Israelis.” The number of Palestinians killed exceeded Israeli deaths by ten to one.
Netanyahu replied: “Are you sure you want to get into that?”
“Why not?”
“Because,” Bibi replied, “The number of Germans killed in World War II exceeded the British and American deaths combined. And in response to the blitz on London, the British wiped out the entire city of Dresden, burning to death more German civilians than the number of Japanese killed in Hiroshima.”
This colloquy gladdens the heart of those suffering from the recent publication of the Goldstone report that accuses Israel of intentionally targeting Palestinian civilians. Netanyahu’s defense of deaths of civilians in Gaza is to wrap the American and British flags around little Israel.
But is it relevant to the Gladstone report? Is Israel at war with the Palestinian people as the Allies were at war with the German people? No it is not, although some of the actions portrayed in the Gladstone report point in the other direction.
The indiscriminate bombing of Sderot from Gaza, to which Gladstone devotes many pages., show that Hamas and its allies are definitely at war with the Israeli people. The fact that this makes them war criminals is not recognized by the world’s diplomats. But Israel cannot reciprocate without risk of being labeled a war criminal.
Israel is not at war with the Palestinian people. Israel’s goal is to live at peace alongside a peaceful Palestine. This goal is not shared by the settlers and their supporters nor by Hamas and Islamic Jihad.
Besides, and this is most important in considering the Gladstone report, as a result of the wide spread killing of civilians in Dresden, Tokyo and Hiroshima during World War II, in 1949 the powers adopted the International Humanitarian Law, also known as the Fourth Geneva Convention, to give maximum protection to civilians in time of war.
So the high number of civilians killed in World War II cannot be used in defense of the attacks on civilians in Gaza. Although it is welcomed and repeated by the Jewish leaders, it is completely irrelevant to the Gladstone report.
Go to the top of next column
|
|
Netanyahu was just as irrelevant in his stirring speech at the UN General Assembly which the Jewish leaders likened to Winston Churchill.
They are trying to take away our right of self-defense, he cried, citing the suffering of the people of Sderot in years of bombs and rockets coming from Gaza.
As Leonard Fein pointed out in last week’s Jewish Journal of South Florida, the International Humanitarian Act does not distinguish between justified and unjustified wars. It protects civilians in times of war, no matter how justified the war may be. So civilians in Gaza must be protected while children in Gaza are confined to underground shelters.
The Goldstone Commission was appointed by the UN Human Rights Council, which is filled with representatives of dictators who violate the human rights of their subjects daily. As far as Israel is concerned anything emanating from the UN Human Rights Council is treif and Israel refused to cooperate. They would nmot allow Richard Gladstone, an eminent South African jurist, a Jew and a Zionist, to enter Israel and allow officers and soldiers to describe their actions. . But Goldstone quotes tellingly from statements made by Isaeli officers and soldiers on their actions against civilians in Gaza
The Israeli Army has not been idle. An intensive investigation of some of the cases published by Goldstone was issued a month before the publication of the Goldstone report on September 15.
Goldstone recommends that an independent international inquiry commission be organized that will examine both documents. Israel should push this as a way out of its mess.
The Arabs on the UN Human Rights Council have ignored the recommendation. They would vote to transmit the report to the Security Council. The United States persuaded the Palestinians to postpone this action for six months on the grounds that it would interfere with nogtiations now being conducted by George Mitchell.. The deal was reportedly sweetened byIsraeli approval of a new Palestinian cellphone network.
The deal lasted for 24 hours. It aroused a furor from Dubai to Damascus. Hundreds demonstrated against Mahmoud Abbas in the streets of Ramallah, the Palestinian capital. Abbas, who was in Rome, was never more unpopular.
“We have the courage to admit that we made a mistake,” Abed Rebo, the secretary-General of the Palestine Liberatrion Organization, told the official Palestine radio. Mistakes can be repaired, he added.
On the motion of Libya, that great humanitarian and a member of the Security Council, the Council to begin debate on the Gladstone Report on October 14.
|
