Here set out in black and white in the Israeli media is a moral conundrum that\u00a0western politicians, diplomats and international human rights organisations are resolutely failing to address\u00a0– and one I have been highlighting since 2006.<\/p>\n
It was then that Israel implemented for the first time\u00a0its Dahiya doctrine\u00a0– turning Lebanon back to the Stone Age. It launched an\u00a0horrific assault\u00a0that wrecked Lebanon’s\u00a0infrastructure, killed 1,300 Lebanese \u2013 most of them, as ever in Israel’s wars, civilians \u2013 and made refugees of more than a million inhabitants of the country’s south. The exercise has been repeated in Gaza on a regular\u00a0basis ever since.<\/p>\n
Last month the New York Times kindly published an Israeli press release<\/a> masquerading as a news report that the\u00a0Israeli army had photographic evidence that\u00a0Hizbollah\u00a0was\u00a0moving its military bases into villages all over south Lebanon. The evidence was paltry to say the least. And the New York Times, quite bafflingly, said it had not been able to “independently verify” the information, as though it lacked\u00a0reporters\u00a0in Lebanon who could visit the sites named by its correspondent in far-away Tel Aviv.<\/p>\n The clear implication of the story was that, when the next war with Lebanon arrives, as the Israeli army keeps promising is just around the corner, Israel will be able to blame Hizbollah when its\u00a0attacks kill mostly civilians.<\/p>\n As Israel’s Haaretz newspaper pointed out \u2013 possibly inadvertently \u2013 in a headline, the New York was doing Israel’s propaganda work for\u00a0it: “Israel’s secret weapon in the war against Hezbollah: The New York Times”.<\/p>\n Although the NYT’s propaganda role\u00a0was noted by several observers, no\u00a0one seemed to\u00a0make the point\u00a0that, if Hizbollah is only now moving its\u00a0bases\u00a0into these villages, how can\u00a0one make sense of the\u00a0prominent justification for the high civilian death toll in\u00a0Lebanon in 2006? Then Israel argued\u00a0– and was backed by the UN and others \u2013 that the civilian deaths were a result of Hizbollah’s “cowardly\u00a0blending” with the civilian population by firing rockets from built-up areas, though no evidence was produced at the time.<\/p>\n Look at what Amos Harel, Haaretz’s military correspondent, writes\u00a0now:<\/p>\n The [New York] Times reports that Hezbollah, as part of the lessons it drew in the Second Lebanon War, in 2006, moved its \u201cnature reserves\u201d \u2013 its military outposts in the south \u2013 from open farmland into the heart of the Shi\u2019ite villages that lie close to the border with Israel. That in itself is old news.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Tell that to Jan\u00a0Egeland, who was the United Nations Undersecretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs at the time (and later joined Human Rights Watch), as well as\u00a0all those who echoed his accusation against Hizbollah of “cowardly blending”.<\/p>\n There is another, even more vital point unnoticed by most observers but highlighted in Harel’s report for Haaretz.\u00a0One of the problems for those at the receiving end of these savage Israeli attacks has been: how to respond. Or rather: how to respond within the confines of international law. While Israel has been doing most of the killing, western politicians, diplomats and human rights groups like Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International have been more exercised by the efforts of Hizbollah and Hamas to retaliate in kind.<\/p>\n The international law argument supposedly goes something like this: Israel has the right to defend itself and so long as it is aiming for military targets with its precision armaments and acts proportionately then it is within its rights to launch attacks, whether civilians are killed or not.<\/p>\n The argument’s flip side\u00a0goes like this: However terrible the suffering endured by their respective populations under this barrage, Hizbollah and Hamas have no right to respond with their imprecise rockets, whether\u00a0they are aiming for a military target or not, because they cannot be sure their rockets will not hit civilians. In short, anything they fire over the border is a war crime by definition.<\/p>\n