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CAMERA writes:

Charges of IDF “Wanton Killing” Crumble

The brigade commander of the unit linked to alleged “wanton killings” in Gaza launched his own investigation after hearing of the charges, speaking with actual eyewitnesses, all of whom said that the alleged killings did not took place. The original charges, based only on hearsay and rumors, have therefore been refuted and should be retracted.

The brigade commander’s findings were reported in the Israeli newspaper Maariv, in a story titled “IDF Investigation Refutes the Testimonies About Gaza Killings.” [Hebrew text here] According to the story:

Two central incidents that came up in the testimony, which Danny Zamir, the head of the Rabin pre-military academy presented to Chief of Staff Gaby Ashkenazi, focus on one infantry brigade…

Regarding the incident in which it was claimed that a sniper fired at a Palestinian woman and her two daughters, the brigade commander’s investigation cites the sniper: “I saw the woman and her daughters and I shot warning shots. The section commander came up to the roof and shouted at me, ‘Why did you shoot at them.’ I explained that I did not shoot at them, but I fired warning shots.”

Officers from the brigade surmise that [Israeli] fighters that stayed in the bottom floor of the Palestinian house thought that he hit them, and from here the rumor that a sniper killed a mother and her two daughters spread.

The other alleged incident, the killing by a sniper of an elderly woman, also seems not to have taken place:

Regarding the second incident, in which it was claimed that soldiers went up to the roof to entertain themselves with firing and killed an elderly Palestinian woman, the brigade commander investigation found that there was no such incident.

Another blood libel, like the Mohammad al-Dura affair, like the Jenin Massacre, like the shooting of the truck drivers, and on and on.

But this time the perpetrator of the slander was not a Palestinian. It was an Israeli, Danny Zamir, along with the Ha’aretz newspaper and its reporter Amos Harel. Here’s what CAMERA had to say about Zamir:

Since, as Ha’aretz put it, Zamir “does not hide his political opinions,” it seems likely that his former students at the left-leaning Kibbutz-affiliated school knew what Zamir wanted to hear at the meeting, and that only a self-selected group attended. In any event, some of the attendees certainly did not disappoint Zamir, who had been imprisoned by the IDF in 1990 for refusing to serve in the West Bank. They recounted tales of “murder in cold blood,” including seemingly eyewitness accounts of a sniper shooting a woman and two of her children merely because they made a wrong turn, and another sniper killing an old woman.

Zamir wrote an article about the discussion for the academy’s newsletter, which he then provided to the Israeli newspapers Ha’aretz and Maariv, triggering in Ha’aretz alone multiple stories extremely critical of the Israeli army’s alleged conduct (here, here, here, here and here), as well as numerous stories in the foreign press, such as the New York Times, which put its initial report on page one above the fold (here and here). Both the Ha’aretz and the New York Times reports ignored detailed testimony by soldiers of exemplary conduct by the IDF, such as soldiers leaving an envelope of cash for the Palestinian homeowner whose house they had occupied.
(the complete article is here)

Now I’m going to repeat something that I wrote on February 6 in the article about al-Dura linked above. I can’t find a better way to say it:

Many important people in Israel have internalized the propaganda of Israel’s enemies. They are prepared to believe that IDF soldiers would continue to fire on a target like al-Dura and his father, who are obviously not firing back and not even armed, for 40 minutes. This is not the same as saying that ‘accidents happen’, it is agreeing that the IDF is either criminally negligent or deliberately murderous, which is what the Arab and European press constantly say.

It seems to me that some Israelis and Jews have a moral inferiority complex. Even though they would not admit this, deep down they are not sure that Israel has a right to exist. Although they understand intellectually that Israel is in a life and death struggle with the Arab world and Iran, emotionally there is a feeling that we are wrong.

I’ve often criticized people who seem prepared to believe anything bad about Israel, even if it doesn’t make sense, like the accusations that the IDF deliberately targeted civilians in Gaza.  Apparently many Israelis, even those that believe themselves to be Zionists, share this propensity.

If I am not for myself, who will be for me?

Technorati Tags: blood libel, war crimes, IDF, Israel, Danny Zamir

Developments in the info-war:

• Palestinians claim that most Gaza casualties were civilians, more than 900 out of 1400, while the IDF puts the figure at about 300 out of 1200.
• Ha’aretz publishes a series of articles containing ‘testimonies’ of IDF soldiers about improper behavior in Gaza. In most cases the reports are hearsay, in some cases by soldiers who were not in Gaza; and the person collecting the stories is a reserve soldier who was punished for refusing to serve in the territories.
• The Guardian pushes a propaganda film about ‘war crimes’ disguised as reportage.
• And now the UN weighs in:

IDF soldiers used an 11-year-old Palestinian boy as a human shield during the Operation Cast Lead against Hamas in Gaza, a group of UN human rights experts said Monday. The army ordered the boy to walk in front of soldiers being fired on in the Gaza neighborhood of Tel al-Hawa and enter buildings before them, said the UN secretary-general’s envoy for protecting children in armed conflict.

Radhika Coomaraswamy said the incident on Jan. 15, after IDF tanks had rolled into the neighborhood, was a violation of Israeli and international law. It was included in a 43-page report published Monday, and was just one of many verified human rights atrocities during the three-week war between Israel and Hamas that ended Jan. 18, she said. Coomaraswamy accused IDF soldiers of shooting Palestinian children, bulldozing a home with a woman and child still inside, and shelling a building they had ordered civilians into a day earlier. — Jerusalem Post

Although I have so far been unable to find the actual report, one wonders exactly how the UN ‘verified’ the above stories. Did they just take Hamas’ word for it?

The war-crimes frenzy is even worse than I had imagined it could get, with every accusation — no matter how absurd — getting headlines in a gleeful anti-Israel press.

Meanwhile, at least 45 Qassam or Grad rockets have hit Israel so far this month, in a real, verifiable, honest-to-goodness war crime — one which seems to have gone completely unreported in the press.

Technorati Tags: Israel, Gaza

Caroline Glick, today:

Today Hamas stands on the cusp of international acceptance. It may take a week or a month or a year, but today Hamas stands where Fatah and the PLO stood in the late 1980s. The genocidal jihadist terror group is but a step away from an invitation to the Oval Office…

…last Saturday, The Boston Globe reported that Paul Volcker, who serves as President Barack Obama’s economic recovery adviser, and several former senior US officials have written a letter to Obama calling for the US to recognize Hamas. As one of the signatories, Brent Scowcroft, who was national security adviser under president George H.W. Bush, explained, “I see no reason not to talk to Hamas.”

Scowcroft further argued, “The main gist is that you need to push hard on the Palestinian peace process. Don’t move it to end of your agenda and say you have too much to do. And the US needs to have a position, not just hold their coats while they sit down.”

Congressional sources claim that Obama has selected Scowcroft to replace Chas Freeman as chairman of the National Intelligence Council.

This last, if it turns out to be true,  is in one way shocking — Scowcroft, if anything, is even more anti-Israel than Freeman — and in another way unsurprising. After all, what did you think would be the reaction to a perceived defeat by the pernicious ‘Israel Lobby’?

But leaving this aside, Glick’s worries about a coming recognition of Hamas are very, very troubling. She continues,

The US and Europe said they would recognize Hamas if it announced that it forswore terror, accepted Israel’s right to exist, and committed itself to carrying out previous agreements signed between the PLO and Israel. The Americans and the Europeans undoubtedly viewed these conditions as a low bar to cross. After all, the PLO crossed it.

The West’s conditions were given with a wink and a nod. Everyone understood that the only thing it wanted was for Hamas to say the magic words. They didn’t have to be true. If Khaled Mashaal and Ismail Haniyeh would just tell the US and Europe what they wanted to hear, all would be forgiven. Hamas – like the PLO before it – would be removed from the US and European terror lists. Billions would pour into the bank accounts of Hamas leaders in Gaza and Damascus. The CIA might even agree to train its terror forces.

It is obvious that all that the West wanted was for Hamas to lie to it, because that is all it ever required from the PLO. After Yasser Arafat said the magic words, the Americans and the Europeans were only too happy to ignore the fact that he was lying…

But Hamas, despite the urging of ‘pragmatists’ like Mahmoud Dahlan — read Glick’s whole piece, it’s good — won’t even pretend to find any outcome short of Israel’s destruction acceptable.

Here’s more about the letter to Obama, from the Boston Globe (linked above):

The bipartisan group, which includes economic recovery adviser Paul A. Volcker and former national security advisers Brent Scowcroft and Zbigniew Brzezinski, made the recommendation in a letter handed to Obama days before he took office, according to Scowcroft.

The group is preparing to meet this weekend to decide when to release a report outlining a proposed US agenda for talks aimed at bringing all Palestinian factions into the Mid east peace process, according to Henry Siegman, the president of the US/Middle East Project, who brought the former officials together and said the White House promised the group an opportunity to make its case in person to Obama.

Siegman said the letter, which was handed to Obama by Volcker but has not been made public, said the administration should “at least explore the possibility” that Hamas, which took control of the Palestinian territory of Gaza after elections in 2006, might be willing to transition into a purely political party and join with its rival, Fatah, which holds the Palestinian presidency in the West Bank. [! — ed.]

We know our friend Zbig, but who is Henry Siegman? A guy with a long history of Israel-bashing, of course, but look at this:

It turns out that much of the funding for the Council’s “U.S./Middle East Project” comes from overseas, including the European Commission, the government of Norway, Kuwaiti and Saudi businessmen, a Lebanese politician, and, for one year, an official of the commercial arm of the Palestinian Authority, Munib Masri.

Mr. Siegman tells us that his views have been consistent over his career and that his project’s funding sources — which he points out are a matter of public record — haven’t influenced his opinions. — NY Sun, 2005

Siegman, who is an Orthodox rabbi, escaped the Holocaust when his family fled Germany for Belgium when he was three years old. He was the Executive Director of the American Jewish Congress from 1978-1994. He claims that his experiences as a child gave rise to his understanding of the ‘plight of the Palestinians’. Right.

The increasingly evident influence on the Obama Administration by people who could reasonably be called anti-Israel or worse — Brzezinski, Scowcroft and others — has me worried. You should be, too.

Technorati Tags: Israel, Hamas, Scowcroft, Siegman

Speaking about releasing prisoners, what about Jonathan Pollard?

I can’t possibly do justice to the story in a short post, but in a nutshell:

In his job as a naval intelligence analyst, Pollard provided classified information to Israel for several years, culminating in his arrest in 1985. What happened next was a “monumental miscarriage of justice” in the words of professors Angelo Codevilla, Irwin Cotler, Alan Dershowitz and Kenneth Lasson:

First, Pollard was never charged with nor convicted of the crime of treason. Nor was there anything in his indictment to suggest he intended harm to America — or that he compromised the nation’s intelligence-gathering capabilities or caused injury to any of its agents.

Second, in lieu of a trial, the government entered into a plea agreement under which it promised not to seek life imprisonment in return for Pollard’s cooperation. The Justice Department acknowledged in court that he had cooperated fully. Nevertheless, chief prosecutor Joseph DiGenova said immediately after sentencing he hoped Pollard “never sees the light of day.”

Third, Pollard was sentenced on the basis of private statements to the judge that, for all anyone knows, may be lies. The secretary of defense (then Caspar Weinberger) presented the court with a secret memorandum that has never been subject to cross examination. Later he told the press that Pollard was one of the worst traitors in American history. But where’s the evidence?

Pollard received a life sentence, compared to an average sentence of seven years for others convicted of spying for allies.

There have been allegations that Pollard gave information to other governments, that Pollard was responsible for the exposure of US agents in the Soviet Union or the compromise of undersea cables, that Pollard gave away codes. None of this is true; those responsible were Aldrich Ames, John Walker and others. And certainly, none of this was part of the indictment.

Angelo Codevilla believes (see his bio here) that Pollard, a low-level analyst, primarily gave Israel satellite photos of Middle Eastern locales, intelligence which the US had been providing until it was cut off after Israel bombed the Iraqi nuclear reactor in 1981. One use which Israel made of Pollard’s data was to bomb the PLO headquarters in Tunisia in 1985.

So why a life sentence? And why was he kept in solitary confinement for seven years, at the Federal Prison in Marion, Il., which at that time was a ‘supermax’ prison holding the most dangerous and desperate inmates?

There is only one possible explanation, which is that Pollard possesses embarrassing information. Here is what Codevilla suggested in a 1999 interview:

QUESTION: That leads to the next question, what was Caspar Weinberger’s motive in presenting to the judge a false memorandum?

CODEVILLA: This is the most interesting of questions, and it comes down to this: embarrassment over a dumb, failed policy, and moreover a policy in which he had a personal interest. The policy was building up Iraq, a policy to which Weinberger and much of the rest of the U.S. government sacrificed true American interests during the 1980s. Up until the very eve of the Gulf War the U.S. Government was still incredulous that Saddam Hussein would play anything other than the role which the best and the brightest of the Reagan and Bush administrations had assigned him…

CODEVILLA: … The main thing is we permitted, licensed and financed large American corporations to build plants [in Iraq], and we encouraged large European countries to build plants there. The infrastructure that is being bombed right now in Iraq and which was bombed during the Gulf War, is mostly American-built, financed, or licensed. Now we get to the deeply and personally embarrassing part. One of the companies involved was Bechtel, with whom Caspar Weinberger and George Schultz, Secretaries of Defense and State, had close personal relations.

QUESTION: How was this company involved?

CODEVILLA: They built one of the factories that later on made chemical weapons. Now, what is Jonathan Pollard’s role in all of this? He gave to Israel U.S. satellite pictures of these factories, together with U.S. intelligence assessments of what these factories were doing. These pictures and intelligence assessments contradicted what the U.S. government was officially telling Israel. So the Israelis were coming to America, and in official meetings were calling people like Weinberger liars, which of course these officials did not appreciate.

Weinberger was a director and General Counsel of Bechtel from 1975 until President Reagan chose him as Secretary of Defense in 1981, a post he held until 1987. Weinberger, despite his name, was not Jewish by any but Hitler’s criteria, having a paternal grandfather who abandoned Judaism — a fact about which he was reportedly ‘tense’. He died in 2006.

Israel formally agreed that Pollard was an Israeli agent in 1998. Over the 24 years that Pollard has been imprisoned, there have been several times at which it was thought that he might be released: as part of the Wye River agreement, or by executive clemency by Presidents Reagan, Bush I, Clinton, and Bush II (Clinton did manage to free a Jew, fugitive financier Marc Rich).

Now there is yet another new administration, and it’s time to ask: After 24 years, is it not possible to examine the facts and the handling of this case, and consider letting this man, who has almost certainly been treated unjustly, go free?

Technorati Tags: Jonathan Pollard

This post is not going to make me any friends. So be it; but I feel the need to explain that I am qualified to write it. My two daughters and son all served in the IDF. My son was in what is always referred to as “an elite combat unit” and came under enemy fire in southern Lebanon before the 2000 withdrawal. He is still a reserve soldier in that unit. I haven’t experienced what the Shalit family has, of course, and I am not criticizing them for doing whatever they can to get their son back. I might do the same in their circumstances.

One would think that Israel’s Prime Minister had kidnapped Gilad Schalit himself:

Demonstrators in the protest tent in Jerusalem where the Schalit family is staying to call for the release of captured IDF soldier Gilad Schalit blocked the road to the Prime Minister’s Residence on Friday.

The demonstrators yelled slogans such as “Olmert, you made a promise — now keep it!” and “We want him home, we want him now.” Many carried banners and some used whistles, hoping the sounds will reach the prime minister’s living room…

“Anything that could be done to save his life is the right thing to do,” Education Minister Yuli Tamir (Labor) told the [Jerusalem Post] last Thursday.

She spoke on the fifth day of an intensive campaign launched by Schalit’s parents, Noam and Aviva, who on Sunday pitched a tent outside the prime minister’s residence in a last-ditch effort to sway Olmert to finalize a prisoner exchange before he leaves office…

Hamas has demanded the release of 1,400 prisoners, including 450 who were involved in terrorist attacks that killed Israelis, but Israel has balked, reportedly offering to free half of the 450. — Jerusalem Post, Mar. 12 (my emphasis)

Today, I read that

Hamas toughened its stance during Egyptian-mediated negotiations for Gilad Schalit’s release, went back on understandings that were agreed upon during the past year and raised extreme demands, the Prime Minister’s Office said in a statement released late Monday night, following the return of Shin Bet (Israel Security Agency) head Yuval Diskin and senior negotiator Ofer Dekel from marathon talks in Cairo over the kidnapped soldier…

According to the various accounts Monday night, Israel had agreed to release most of the prisoners on the Hamas list, with Channel 2 reporting 400 out of the 450, and the main point of contention was Israel’s demand to expel several of the prisoners to foreign countries. — Jerusalem Post, Mar. 16

Of course, even when (not ‘if’) Israel agrees to the latest demands, negotiators will find that the goalposts have moved yet again. The process seems to be as much the point as the ultimate outcome for Hamas, which enjoys twisting the knife in  countless Israelis and Jews, not least the Schalit family.

But MK Yuli Tamir is wrong. “Anything” is not the “right thing to do”.  Agreeing to the Hamas demands will

• Surely result in the death and injury of additional Israelis who will be targeted by the murderers who will be freed
• Be followed by additional kidnappings
• Establish for once and for all that Hamas, not Israel, won the war and is in control
• Open the door to international recognition of Hamas, opening the crossings, etc.

Operation Cast Lead was terminated early out of fear: fear of the Obama Administration, fear of additional IDF casualties and fear of world opinion. As a result, Hamas jumped in legitimacy, popularity and influence.

Well, world opinion could not possibly have been worse if Israel had used nuclear bombs (indeed, she was falsely accused of using depleted uranium ammunition in Gaza), and the Obama Administration will do what it thinks best for the US regardless of what Israel does. And if that is to force Israel into an agreement with the Palestinians, so much the better if this happens without Hamas!

Casualties are a true concern. But I think the question is not how high a price Israel will have to pay, but rather whether it will need to paid now or later. I believe that the area between the Jordan and the Mediterranean is not big enough for Israel and Hamas. Hamas will not go away without a confrontation, so the question is “when will it occur and on whose terms”.

It is still possible for Israel to rectify the error of the present government, to go back into Gaza and try to rescue Schalit, and this time destroy the Hamas leadership and its war-making capability.

Another advantage to finishing Hamas now will be to reduce the number of fronts on which Israel will have to fight after the inevitable Iran operation.

I’m sure Yuli Tamir doesn’t think so, but this is the ‘anything’ that should be tried for the sake of Schalit — and for the sake of the Jewish state.

Technorati Tags: Israel, Gilad Schalit, Hamas