Gaza's long shadow

by Caroline Glick
September 15, 2005 

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 
their expelled Israeli brethren 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 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 of 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 his 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 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 launch their 
campaign against Israel. 

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 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 very 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.