LONDON
— AS a British officer who had more than his share of fighting in
Afghanistan, Iraq and the Balkans, it pains me greatly to see words and
actions from the United Nations that can only provoke further violence and loss of life. The United Nations Human Rights Council report on last summer’s conflict in Gaza, prepared by Judge Mary McGowan Davis, and published on Monday, will do just that.
The report starts by attributing responsibility for the conflict to Israel’s
“protracted occupation of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip,” as well as
the blockade of Gaza. Israel withdrew from Gaza 10 years ago. In 2007
it imposed a selective blockade only in response to attacks by Hamas
and the import of munitions and military matériel from Iran. The
conflict last summer, which began with a dramatic escalation in rocket
attacks targeting Israeli civilians, was a continuation of Hamas’s war
of aggression.
In
an unusual concession, the report suggests that Hamas may have been
guilty of war crimes, but it still legitimizes Hamas’s rocket and tunnel
attacks and even sympathizes with the geographical challenges in
launching rockets at Israeli civilians: “Gaza’s small size and its
population density make it particularly difficult for armed groups
always to comply” with the requirement not to launch attacks from
civilian areas.
There
is no such sympathy for Israel. Judge Davis accuses the Israel Defense
Forces of “serious violations of international humanitarian law and
international human rights law.” Yet no evidence is put forward to
substantiate these accusations. It is as though the drafters of the
report believe that any civilian death in war must be illegal.
Referring
to cases in which Israeli attacks killed civilians in residential
areas, Judge Davis says that in the absence of contrary information
available to her commission, there are strong indications that the
attacks were disproportionate, and therefore war crimes. But all we get
is speculation and the presumption of guilt.
The report is characterized by a lack of understanding of warfare. That is hardly surprising. Judge Davis admitted, when I testified
before her in February, that the commission, though investigating a
war, had no military expertise. Perhaps that is why no attempt has been
made to judge Israeli military operations against the practices of other
armies. Without such international benchmarks, the report’s findings
are meaningless.
The
commission could have listened to Gen. Martin E. Dempsey, chairman of
the United States Joint Chiefs of Staff, who said last November that the
I.D.F. had taken extraordinary measures to try to limit civilian
casualties. Or to a group of 11 senior military officers from seven
nations, including the United States, Germany, Spain and Australia, who
also investigated the Gaza conflict recently. I was a member of that
group, and our report,
made available to Judge Davis, said: “None of us is aware of any army
that takes such extensive measures as did the I.D.F. last summer to
protect the lives of the civilian population.”
The
report acknowledges that Israel took steps to warn of imminent attacks
but suggests more should have been done to minimize civilian casualties.
Yet it offers no opinion about what additional measures Israel could
have taken. It even criticizes Israel for using harmless explosive
devices — the “knock on the roof” — as a final warning to evacuate
targeted buildings, suggesting that it created confusion. No other
country uses roof-knocks, a munition developed by Israel as part of a
series of I.D.F. warning procedures, including text messages, phone
calls and leaflet drops, that are known to have saved many Palestinian lives.
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