By Robert Fisk

February 07, 2009 “The Independent:” — The “normality” of war, part two. We had a great storm in Beirut this week, thunder-cracks like gunfire, great green waves crashing below my balcony, rain like hail. So I curled up on my balcony sofa – coat and red scarf and thick socks – and opened a book sent by a kindly Independent reader, a much bent copy of Snyder and Morris’s 1949 A Treasury of Great Reporting. And I began to wonder – in an age when the BBC can refuse help to the suffering because of its “impartiality” – whether we still report war with the same power and passion as the men and women of an earlier generation.

“‘Turn back! Retreat!’ shouted the men from the front, ‘we’re whipped, we’re whipped!’ They cursed and tugged at their horses’ heads and struggled with frenzy to get past.” This is William Howard Russell covering the Union rout at Bull Run for The Times. “Soon I met soldiers who were coming through the corn, mostly without arms… The ambulances were crowded with soldiers, but it did not look as if there were many wounded… Men literally screamed with rage or fright when their way was blocked… At every shot a convulsion, as it were, seized upon the morbid mass of bones, sinew, wood, and iron, and thrilled through it, giving new energy and action to its desperate efforts to get free from itself… In silence I passed over the long bridge.”

And here is Archibald Forbes reporting the collapse of the Paris Commune in 1871 for the London Daily News. “The Parisians of civil life are caitiffs to the last drop of their thin, sour, white blood. But yesterday they had cried ‘Vive la Commune!’… Today they rubbed their hands with livid currish joy to have it in their power to denounce a Communard and reveal his hiding place. Very eager at this work are the dear creatures of women… They have found him, the misérable!… a tall, pale, hatless man with something not ignoble in his carriage. His lower lip is trembling, but his brow is firm, and the eye of him has some pride and defiance in it. They yell – the crowd – ‘Shoot him; shoot him!’… men club their rifles and bring them down on that head. They are firing on the flaccid carcass now, thronging about it like blowflies…”

The first German war crime of the 1914-18 war – the sack of the Belgian city of Louvain – was covered by Richard Harding Davis of the New York Tribune, forced by the Germans to stay aboard his military train as it circled the burning city. “When by troop train we reached Louvain, the entire heart of the city was destroyed and fire had reached the Boulevard Tirlemont, which faces the railroad station. The night was windless, and the sparks rose in steady, leisurely pillars, falling back into the furnace from which they sprang… Outside the station in the public square the people of Louvain passed in an unending procession, women bare-headed, weeping men carrying the children asleep on their shoulders… Once they were halted, and among them were marched a line of men. They well knew their fellow townsmen. These were on their way to be shot.”

Now a slightly selfish Quentin Reynolds at the fall of Paris in 1940: “I had stayed behind to write the story of the siege of Paris… Now it developed that there would be no siege of Paris. The Grand Boulevard was almost deserted this morning. One middle-aged woman was sitting at a table at a sidewalk café, one of the very few where one could still get coffee and bread. She had driven into the city that morning in her small one-seated (sic) car. She wanted to sell her car. I bought it on the spot. Now I was mobile.”

And Ed Murrow for CBS in the London Blitz: “Millions of people ask only, ‘What can we do to help? Why must there be 800,000 unemployed when we need these shelters?… What are the war aims of this country? What shall we do with victory when it’s won? What sort of Europe will be built when and if this stress has passed?’ These questions are being asked by thoughtful people in this country. Mark it down that in the three weeks of the air Blitz against this country, more books and pamphlets have been published on these subjects than in any similar period of the war… Mark it down that these people are both brave and patient, that all are equal under the bomb… You are witnessing the beginning of a revolution, maybe the death of an age.”

Finally, the sharp tongue of Rebecca West for The New Yorker at the Nuremberg trials. “Though one has read surprising news of Göring for years, he still surprises. He is, above all things, soft. He wears either a German air-force uniform or a light beach-suit in the worst of playful taste, and both hang loosely on him, giving him an air of pregnancy. He has thick brown young hair, the coarse, bright skin of an actor who has used grease paint for decades, and the preternaturally deep wrinkles of the drug addict; it adds up to something like the head of a ventriloquist’s dummy. His appearance makes a pointed but obscure reference to sex… it appears in the Palace of Justice that it is only the Americans and the British who can hold up a mirror to Germany and help her to solve her own perplexing mystery – that mystery which, in Nuremberg and the countryside around it, is set out in flowers, flowers which concert by being not only lovely but beloved… ‘The people where I live now send me in my breakfast tray strewn with pansies,’ says the French doctor who is custodian of the relics at the Palace of Justice (the lampshade made of human skin, the shrunken head of the Polish Jew).”

It’s not just the power of the writing I’m talking about here; the screaming soldiers, the dying Communard, the condemned men, the woman wanting to sell her car, the death of an age, the flowers. These reporters were spurred, weren’t they, by the immorality of war. They cared. They were not frightened of damaging their “impartiality”. I wonder if we still write like this.

By Robert Bryce

Editor’s note: Generous support for this article was provided by the Investigative Fund at the Nation Institute.

January 31, 2009 “Salon” Jan. 16, 2009— Israel’s current air and ground assault on the Gaza Strip has left about 1,000 Palestinians dead, including 400 women and children. Several thousand people have been wounded and dozens of buildings have been destroyed. An estimated 90,000 Gazans have abandoned their homes. Israel’s campaign in Gaza, which began more than two weeks ago, has been denounced by the Red Cross, multiple Arab and European countries, and agencies from the United Nations. Demonstrations in Pakistan and elsewhere have been held to denounce America’s support for Israel.It’s well known that the U.S. supplies the Israelis with much of their military hardware. Over the past few decades, the U.S. has provided about $53 billion in military aid to Israel. What’s not well known is that since 2004, U.S. taxpayers have paid to supply over 500 million gallons of refined oil products — worth about $1.1 billion –- to the Israeli military. While a handful of countries get motor fuel from the U.S., they receive only a fraction of the fuel that Israel does — fuel now being used by Israeli fighter jets, helicopters and tanks to battle Hamas.

According to documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act, between 2004 and 2007 the U.S. Defense Department gave $818 million worth of fuel to the Israeli military. The total amount was 479 million gallons, the equivalent of about 66 gallons per Israeli citizen. In 2008, an additional $280 million in fuel was given to the Israeli military, again at U.S. taxpayers’ expense. The U.S. has even paid the cost of shipping the fuel from U.S. refineries to ports in Israel.

In 2008, the fuel shipped to Israel from U.S. refineries accounted for 2 percent of Israel’s $13.3 billion defense budget. Publicly available data shows that about 2 percent of the U.S. Defense Department’s budget is also spent on oil. A senior analyst at the Pentagon, who requested anonymity because he is not authorized to speak to the press, says the Israel Defense Force’s fuel use is most likely similar to that of the U.S. Defense Department. In other words, the Israeli military is spending about the same percentage of its defense budget on oil as the U.S. is. Therefore it’s possible that the U.S. is providing most, or perhaps even all, of the Israeli military’s fuel needs.

What’s more, Israel does not need the U.S. handout. Its own recently privatized refineries, located at Haifa and Ashdod, could supply all of the fuel needed by the Israeli military. Those same refineries are now producing and selling jet fuel and other refined products on the open market. But rather than purchase lower-cost jet fuel from its own refineries, the Israeli military is using U.S. taxpayer money to buy and ship large quantities of fuel from U.S. refineries.

The Israeli government obtains the fuel through the Defense Department’s Foreign Military Sales (FMS) program, and pays for the fuel and the shipping with funds granted to it through Foreign Military Financing (FMF), another Defense Department program. (In 2008, Congress earmarked $2.4 billion in FMF money for Israel, and $2.5 billion for 2009.) The dimensions of the FMS fuel program are virtually unknown among America’s top experts on Middle East policy. For his part, the Pentagon analyst was surprised to learn that FMS money was even being used to supply fuel to Israel. “That’s not the purpose of the program,” he says. “FMS was designed to allow U.S. weapons makers to sell their goods to foreign countries. The idea that fuel is being bought under FMS is very, very odd.”

The fuel program, in fact, raises a number of pressing questions. The shipments have occurred during times of record-high oil prices, when American consumers have been angered by motor fuel prices that in 2008 exceeded $4 per gallon. Given those high prices, it appears to make little sense for the U.S. government to be promoting policies that reduce the volume of — and potentially raise the price of — motor fuel available for sale to U.S. motorists.

The U.S. fuel shipments are part of a sustained policy that has widened the energy gap between Israel and its neighbors. Over the past few years, the Israel Defense Force has cut off fuel supplies and destroyed electricity infrastructure in the Gaza Strip and Lebanon. Those embargoes and attacks on power plants have exacerbated a huge gap in per-capita energy consumption between Israelis and Lebanon, the West Bank and Gaza. And that sharp disparity helps explain why the Palestinians have never been able to build a viable economy.

Edward S. Walker, former president of the Middle East Institute, a Washington-based think tank, says the fuel supply program is emblematic of U.S. military support for Israel. Walker, who has served as U.S. ambassador to the United Arab Emirates, Egypt and Israel, explains that the FMF money allows the Israelis to “do with it what they want. They can buy equipment or fuel. It’s their choice, not the government’s choice. It’s the only program where we give someone a blank check and they can use it any way that they choose.”

Given the recent spike in oil prices, which helped send the U.S. and the world economy into a tailspin, and Americans still smarting from paying $4 at the pump, says Walker, “Why are we supplying fuel to Israel when we are paying such high prices?”

Since 1948, oil has been a critically important commodity for both the Israel Defense Forces and the Israeli economy. And Israeli leaders have long worried about their energy security. In 1957, Israeli Prime Minister David Ben Gurion wrote in his diary, “The only sanctions which could defeat or break us are oil sanctions.”

In 1967, Egypt’s blockade of the Straits of Tiran precipitated the Six Day War. The Straits, writes Israeli historian Michael Oren in his book on the conflict, “Six Days of War,” were “a lifeline for the Jewish state, the conduit to its quiet import of Iranian oil.” In 1973, the Yom Kippur War (Arabs call it the Ramadan War) led to the Arab Oil Embargo, an event that still reverberates in the U.S., particularly in the fanciful political rhetoric about the desire for “energy independence.”

The U.S.-Israel oil relationship goes back to 1975. In September of that year, Henry Kissinger, who was then secretary of state, struck a deal with Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin that led the Israelis to partially withdraw from the Sinai Peninsula. The agreement required Israel to pull out of the Giddi and Mitla passes and relinquish the Sinai oilfields the Israelis had captured during the 1967 war.

In return, Kissinger agreed that America would provide multibillion-dollar economic and military subsidies to Israel. He also agreed that the U.S. would supply Israel with oil in case of any emergency. That agreement was formalized in 1979 about the time of the Camp David peace talks. It says that the U.S. will “make every effort to help Israel secure the necessary means of transport” for the oil that it purchases. The agreement concludes by saying that the U.S. and Israel will “meet annually, or more frequently at the request of either party, to review Israel’s continuing oil requirement.”

Since 1979, the agreement has been quietly renewed every five years. (The most recent approval of the document was done by the U.S. State Department in November of 2005.) The U.S. does not provide any other country the same insurance.

Nor does any other country get anything close to the volume of fuel that Israel does under FMS. In 2004, more than 140 countries received FMS aid from the U.S. Of that group, only about 13 countries received fuel of any kind through the FMS program and the biggest recipient, after Israel, was Singapore, which got $7.3 million in fuel. That year, Israel received 17 times more FMS fuel than all of the other countries combined.

Why did the U.S. Defense Department begin providing oil to Israel in 1986? And why does the program persist, particularly given that Israel no longer sees its refineries as strategic assets? The Defense Security Cooperation Agency, which manages the FMS and FMF programs, referred questions about the program to the Israeli government. The press office of the Israeli Embassy in Washington did not respond to numerous requests about the program.

While the rationale for the oil transfers remains elusive, the facts behind Israel’s refinery privatization are freely available. In 2006, the government sold the Ashdod refinery to Israeli tycoon Zadik Bino for about $500 million. And in early 2007, it sold the larger refinery in Haifa to a group led by Israel Corp., the shipping and chemicals conglomerate, for $1.5 billion.

The sale of the refineries marked a major turning point in Israel’s attitude toward oil. In its earliest years as an independent nation, Israel’s survival was made possible by using crude from the Soviet Union and Venezuela. From the 1950s to the late 1970s, Iranian crude was the lifeblood of the Zionist state. Later still, the Israelis relied on the Kuwaitis. Today, the Russians are providing much of Israel’s crude needs. And the sale of the refineries is indicative of the Israeli government’s confidence in its ongoing ability to purchase the oil it needs on the international market.

Nevertheless, the FMS fuel shipments to Israel have continued. The most recent shipments for which records are readily available occurred in July and October 2008.

On July 7, 2008, the spot price for U.S. crude oil hit a near-record of $141. That same day, the San Antonio Business Journal reported that San Antonio-based refiner Valero Energy Corp. had been awarded a contract by the Defense Energy Support Center (DESC) worth $46 million to provide fuel to Israel. Valero has won a number of lucrative contracts from the DESC, the Defense Department agency that handles all of the Pentagon’s bulk fuel purchases. On Oct. 9, the Journal reported that Valero had been awarded a $235 million contract under FMS. Bill Day, a spokesman for Valero, says that the company “doesn’t talk publicly about its contracts.”

Documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act show that U.S. taxpayers are paying the shipping costs to move the fuel from refineries — many of them on the Texas Gulf Coast — to Israeli ports at Haifa or Ashkelon. Shipping costs vary but one specific bid called for shipping costs of $.30 per gallon. Officials with the Defense Security Cooperation Agency, the arm of the Pentagon that manages programs that “strengthen America’s alliances and partnerships,” has confirmed that the costs to ship the fuel from U.S. refineries to Israel have been paid for with FMF money designated for Israel by Congress.

The huge FMS fuel shipments are puzzling to the Israelis. Amit Mor, CEO of Eco Energy, an Israeli consulting and investment firm, has worked on energy issues in his home country for about two decades. In a recent e-mail, Mor says that “there is a paradox” in the fuel shipments that Israel gets from the U.S. He said that the privately owned Israeli refineries export jet fuel in “FOB prices,” while the defense ministry imports jet fuel in “high CIF prices,” with the funds of U.S. military assistance.

FOB, short for “free on board,” means that customers must take possession of the fuel at the refinery and then pay for all shipping and related costs to get the fuel to its final destination. On the other hand, as Mor explains, the Israeli military is importing fuel from U.S. refineries located 7,000 miles away, while incurring the CIF, short for “cost, insurance and freight,” of moving the fuel that distance.

Mor says Israeli refiners have “complained about this issue” but have had no luck with the Israeli government. He goes on to say that “it is the U.S. government that insisted for some reason to continue with this historical, costly and inefficient arrangement.”

Energy analysts squabble about a myriad of issues. But if there is one truism that draws near-universal agreement, it’s this: As energy consumption increases, so does wealth. And while that truism holds for oil use, it is particularly apt for electricity. As Peter Huber and Mark Mills point out in their 2005 book, “The Bottomless Well,” “Economic growth marches hand in hand with increased consumption of electricity — always, everywhere, without significant exception in the annals of modern industrial history.”

That statement underscores the significance of the FMS fuel shipments to Israel, many of which have occurred at or near the time that the Israeli military has attacked the electric power plants of its neighbors.

In late June 2006, Israeli aircraft fired nine missiles at the transformers at the Gaza City Power Plant, the only electric power plant in the Occupied Territories. (One of the original partners in the project was Enron, but that’s another story.) The missiles caused damage estimated at $15 million to $20 million and, for a time, made Gaza wholly reliant on electricity flows from Israel. The 140-megawatt power plant, owned by the Palestine Electric Co., was insured by the Overseas Private Investment Corp., an arm of the U.S. government. Thus the U.S. was providing fuel and materiel to the Israeli military, which destroyed the plant, but it was also paying to fix the damage. Call it cradle-to-grave service.

The Israeli attack on the Gaza City Power Plant offers a stark example of how the FMS fuel helps assure that Israel stays energy rich while many of the citizens in neighboring regions live in energy poverty.

Two weeks after the attack on the Gaza City plant in 2006, during Israel’s monthlong war against Hezbollah forces in Lebanon, Israeli aircraft attacked the 346-megawatt Jiyyeh power plant, the oldest electric power plant in Lebanon. Those attacks resulted in the largest-ever oil spill in the eastern Mediterranean. About 100,000 barrels of fuel oil that was stored in tanks at the Jiyyeh site flowed into the sea, creating an oil slick that stretched for more than 150 kilometers.

The attacks on the Jiyyeh plant occurred on July 13 and July 15. Those dates are important because they underscore the timing of the U.S. fuel transfers to Israel.

On July 14, 2006, the U.S. military issued two press releases. In one of them, the Defense Security Cooperation Agency announced that it would be providing up to $210 million in JP-8 jet fuel to the Israeli government. The other release, put out at 5 p.m. Eastern time, came from the Defense Logistics Agency, which said that it had awarded a $36.7 million contract to Valero as part of another JP-8 supply deal for Israel.

The July 14 release contains this rather bland description of the fuel deal: “The proposed sale of the JP-8 aviation fuel will enable Israel to maintain the operational capability of its aircraft inventory. The jet fuel will be consumed while the aircraft is in use to keep peace and security in the region. Israel will have no difficulty absorbing this additional fuel into its armed forces.” The release goes on to claim that the “proposed sale of this JP-8 aviation fuel will not affect the basic military balance in the region.”

While the attacks on the Jiyyeh plant were important, Lebanese citizens could get electricity from other power plants in the country. That was not true in Gaza, a province in which electricity has always been in short supply. According to the CIA Fact Book, the Gaza Strip ranks dead last — 214th out of 214 countries and territories listed — in the amount of electricity consumed. According to the Palestinian Energy and Natural Resources Agency, in 2004, the average Gazan used about 654 kilowatt-hours of electricity. By contrast, the 7.1 million residents of Israel consume about 6,295 kilowatt-hours of electric power per person per year, nearly 10 times as much as the average Gazan.

Although more recent energy consumption data for Gaza is not available, there’s no question that the endemic poverty in the West Bank and particularly in Gaza, is due, largely, to a continuing lack of energy resources. And the Israelis have frequently cut off the flow of fuel and electricity, which has exacerbated the Palestinians’ energy poverty.

Over the past few years, the Israelis have cut off the flow of energy to Gaza as retribution for various transgressions. And those cutoffs have forced the Gaza City Power Plant to shut down for lack of the fuel oil it needs to operate. When the power plant is idled, most of the residents of Gaza City are left without power and overall power supplies in the Gaza Strip decline by about 25 percent.

In May 2006, Israel cut off the flow of oil into the Occupied Territories after the Islamic group Hamas won local elections. In January 2008, the Israelis closed the border crossings into Gaza, which resulted in a fuel shortage that closed the Gaza power plant. In April 2008, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency stopped distributing aid in Gaza after it ran out of fuel. The Israelis stopped the fuel flow as retribution for attacks that killed two Israeli civilians and three Israeli soldiers. In November 2008, the U.N. Relief and Works Agency was again forced to suspend work due to lack of fuel. The fuel shortage occurred after Israel closed the border into Gaza in response to rockets and mortar shells that had been fired into Israel from Gaza.

The disparity in energy consumption between the Palestinians living in the West Bank and Gaza and their counterparts in Israel is just one element in the centuries-old story of tragedy and conflict in the region. But with the U.S. squarely on the side of the Israelis in the Gaza campaign, the potential for an angry backlash against the U.S. appears to be growing.

And that anger will likely only increase when Arabs begin to understand that much of the fuel that the U.S. is giving to Israel is being refined from Arab oil. The Valero refinery in Corpus Christi, Texas, which has won several of the FMS contracts for Israel, is a big buyer of Mideast crude. During the second quarter of 2006, according to data collected by the U.S. Energy Information Administration, the refinery got about 40 percent of its crude oil from Kuwait or Saudi Arabia.

In short, U.S. taxpayers are paying for U.S. energy companies to buy Arab crude, ship it across the Atlantic to refineries in the U.S., refine it, and then ship it back across the Atlantic so that the Israel Defense Force can use it in its wars.

While the origination point of the crude may only matter to part of the Arab world, it is becoming apparent that bloodshed in Gaza is further complicating America’s efforts to gain credibility as an honest broker in the region. Anti-U.S. sentiment is not in America’s long-term interest, says former diplomat Chas Freeman, a man whose résumé in international affairs extends back nearly four decades.

Freeman is a former U.S. ambassador to Saudi Arabia, as well as a former assistance secretary of defense. He served as Richard Nixon’s chief interpreter during Nixon’s visit to China in 1972. Now the president of the Middle East Policy Council, a Washington think tank, Freeman says the FMS fuel program for Israel runs counter to long-term goals of resolving the Palestinian conflict and America’s stated goal of protecting the flow of oil out of the Persian Gulf. The Defense Department has assumed “unilateral responsibility for the protection of the oil trade in the Persian Gulf, and yet it’s assuming responsibility for the delivery of aviation fuel for the Israeli military,” he says. “That’s confused and contradictory.” The program, he adds, is “one of many elements of our relationship with Israel that is very hard to explain.”

Freeman may be correct, but the House of Representatives has scant doubt about continued U.S. support for Israel. Nor has Congress shown much interest in the fuel shortages among Palestinians. On Jan. 9, the 14th day of the fighting in Gaza, the House passed a resolution sponsored by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, “recognizing Israel’s right to defend itself against attacks from Gaza.” The vote was 390 to 5.

Two days before the vote, UNICEF estimated that 800,000 Gazans did not have running water and 1 million were living without electricity.

“They try to make the Israeli policy an ugly story,” a frustrated Peres was quoted by the Associated Press at a session of the World Economic Forum on Thursday night.

He explained that his outburst was the result of repeated criticism over Israel’s Gaza operation.

Tel Aviv launched Operation Cast Lead on December 27 to put an end to rocket attacks against southern Israeli towns. At least 1,330 Palestinians died during the offensive, while some 5,450 others were hospitalized.

The Israeli army, meanwhile, is accused of committing war crimes and using unconventional weapons during its three-week-long aggression.

The UN Human Rights Watch has confirmed that it has observed the use of white phosphorus by the Israeli military in the densely populated strip.

White phosphorus, classified as a ‘chemical weapon’ by US intelligence, is an incendiary material that causes horrific burns, severe injuries or death when it comes in contact with human skin.

The Israeli president, however, maintains that Tel Aviv is fighting a noble war against Hamas — the democratically-elected ruler of the Gaza Strip.

“Israel is a democracy. It is fighting one of the most dangerous, terroristic, dictatorial groups. All of a sudden to be a humanitarian is to support dictators, to support terror, to support killing innocent people,” he said at the forum.

Meanwhile, UK aid agencies say as a result of the Israeli operation in the beleaguered coastal sliver, at least 60 percent of the Gaza population is now living in poverty, with more than one million people dependant on aid to survive.

An angry exchange between President Peres and Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan had forced the latter to storm off the stage at the World Economic Forum.

Erdogan had become incensed after the moderator curtailed his response to Peres’ angry remarks regarding the recent Israeli military campaign.

The Turkish premier has vowed never to return to the annual gathering.

MD/AA

The French Foreign Ministry said Friday that Tel Aviv had blocked the entry of a much-needed water purification station into Gaza and had forced its repatriation.

Ministry of Foreign Affairs spokesman Eric Chevallier said the move has sparked an outcry in the Elysée, prompting it to summon the Israeli ambassador to Paris to explain why the system was denied access.

“There were a very great number of steps taken at all levels to try to get the water purification station into Gaza,” he said, adding that Israel’s explanation was not satisfactory.

The United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs recently warned that Israel’s 23-day onslaught on Gaza has pushed its sewage system on the brink of collapse and thus increased risks of groundwater contamination in the Palestinian territory.

“The most dangerous thing is the contamination of drinking water with sewage. We need an international organization like the World Health Organization to investigate the matter,” said Monther Shoblak, head of the Coastal Municipalities Water Utility (CMWU).

According to the UN, Israel’s three week-long saturation bombing of the Palestinian territory has seriously damaged pipes and has left drinking water in very short supply.

Warning of the serious public health risks, the World Bank has urged the Israeli government to allow enough fuel into Gaza to operate some 170 water and sewage pumps there.

The bank called on Israel to allow maintenance crews to shore up a sewage lake in northern Gaza before it overflows at the expense of the 1.5 million Palestinians living in the area.

My eleven year-old son asked me — why turn your back on Obama?

I threw back at him Martin Luther King — It’s not the color of his skin, it’s the content of his character.

What does it say about Obama’s character that he sides with the Israeli slaughter machine against those that it slaughters?

What does it say about the character of his “progressive” supporters, who cry for joy at his inauguration, but say not a peep about the slaughter machine and its victims?

(See, for example, former AIPAC staffer and “progressive Democratic” columnist David Sirota, who broke down and cried watching Obama’s inauguration, but has not written one word about the slaughter in Gaza.)

Earlier this month, the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) took out full page ads in major newspapers around the country.

The ad was titled: What if Hamas Was in Your Neighborhood? (link to ad at: http://www.adl.org/Israel/posters/HamasAd_Phoenix.pdf)

The ad showed missiles reigning down on Phoenix, or Boston, or Washington, D.C.

“Imagine if Hamas terrorists were targeting you and your family,” the ad read. “No country would allow such danger on its border, and neither will Israel. That’s why Israel is fighting back.”

In response, the American Arab Anti-Defamation Committee (ADC) last week put up an ad on its web site titled — What If Israel Were in Your Neighborhood? (Link to ad at: http://www.adc.org/PDF/gazaposter.pdf)

Answer?

Death and Destruction with American built F-16 fighter jets and Apache helicopters.

Yes, when Hamas launches rockets that kill innocent civilians, it engages in war crimes.

But Hamas has no Army, no Navy, no Air Force.

The slaughter machine has a modern military with hundreds of nuclear weapons and U.S. supplied F-16s and Apache helicopters.

So, there is a balance of terror.

And the Palestinian bodies tip the scales in the slaughter machine’s favor.

Since the first rocket was launched into Israel in 2002 up until the December 17, 2008 invasion of Gaza, the Israel body count was maybe two dozen.

The Palestinian body count was 2,700.

That would be about 100 to one.

Since the invasion, the Israeli body count is 14.

The Palestinian body count was more than 1,400.

That would be about 100 to one.

As the ADC ad puts it: “Israel’s assault on the Gaza Strip cannot be justified by self-defense. An armed attack that is not justified by self-defense is a war of aggression. Under the Nuremberg Principles affirmed by U.N. Resolution 95, aggression is a crime against peace. Prosecute Israel for War Crimes.”

So, here’s one concrete thing you can do to counter the slaughter machine’s propaganda.

If you are interested in placing the “What If Israel Were in Your Neighborhood?” ad in your local newspaper, contact ADC’s Nabil Mohammad at organizing@adc.org.

Turn the tide of terror.

In a statement issued by the Israeli Defense Ministry on Thursday, Ehud Barak said he would do everything in his power to block an inquiry against former Israeli defense minister Benjamin Ben-Eliezer and six other Israeli officials.

On July 22, 2002, Israel dropped a one-ton bomb over the al-Daraj neighborhood in the Gaza Strip and assassinated Salah Shehadeh, a leader of the Palestinian Hamas.

The incident killed 15 Palestinians, including Shehadeh, eight children and three women, and wounded more than 150 others.

“The minister intends to fight vigorously against the accusations in Spain and do everything possible to get the investigation dismissed,” reads the statement.

The Spanish National Court on Thursday began assessing charges that were brought against the former Israeli authorities by the Palestinian Center for Human Rights (PCHR).

A court order on Thursday confirmed that initial evidence suggests that the bombing “should be considered a crime against humanity”.

The court says it has asked Israel for information, but “as of today, Israeli authorities have not complied with the request for international judicial cooperation”.

If the court rules in favor of the complainants, the suspects can be arrested upon entry into Spanish territory.

For two weeks, the Iran Shahed carrying two-thousand tons of medical and food supplies was held 50km off the coast of Gaza by Egyptian authorities.

The Iran Shahed arrived in the Lebanese capital port city of Beirut at 7:14 pm (17:14 GMT) local time, a Press TV correspondent reported on Thursday.

Ghazanfar Rokn-Abadi, the spokesman for the Gaza Reconstruction Committee of Iran, explained on Thursday that the ship was forced to change course after Egypt denied it entry.

“We gave the Egyptians a 24-hour deadline to conclude the matter. After they refused to accommodate, the ship changed its course to Lebanon,” he said.

The Egyptian government has officially refused to give the relief ship permission to unload aid at the Egyptian seaport of Al-Areesh, an informed source at the Organization of the Islamic Conference confirmed on Wednesday.

Earlier this week, Egyptian officials justified their decision to deny the ship entry by accusing the Iranian ship of carrying weapons for the Hamas resistance movement.

Israel also joined Egypt, which neighbors the Gaza Strip, in its anti-Iran efforts on the issue, claiming that Tehran was trying to supply Hamas with new Grad-model Katyusha rockets.

Cairo is seen throughout the Middle East as Tel Aviv’s main accomplice in denying the 1.5 million population of the Gaza Strip vital supplies such as food and medicine.

January 28, 2009 “Information Clearinghouse” — Barack Obama is recognized to be a person of acute intelligence, a legal scholar, careful with his choice of words. He deserves to be taken seriously - both what he says, and what he omits. Particularly significant is his first substantive statement on foreign affairs, on January 22, at the State Department, when introducing George Mitchell to serve as his special envoy for Middle East peace.

Mitchell is to focus his attention on the Israel-Palestine problem, in the wake of the recent US-Israeli invasion of Gaza. During the murderous assault, Obama remained silent apart from a few platitudes, because, he said, there is only one president - a fact that did not silence him on many other issues. His campaign did, however, repeat his statement that “if missiles were falling where my two daughters sleep, I would do everything in order to stop that.” He was referring to Israeli children, not the hundreds of Palestinian children being butchered by US arms, about whom he could not speak, because there was only one president.

On January 22, however, the one president was Barack Obama, so he could speak freely about these matters - avoiding, however, the attack on Gaza, which had, conveniently, been called off just before the inauguration.

Obama’s talk emphasized his commitment to a peaceful settlement. He left its contours vague, apart from one specific proposal: “the Arab peace initiative,” Obama said, “contains constructive elements that could help advance these efforts. Now is the time for Arab states to act on the initiative’s promise by supporting the Palestinian government under President Abbas and Prime Minister Fayyad, taking steps towards normalizing relations with Israel, and by standing up to extremism that threatens us all.”

Obama is not directly falsifying the Arab League proposal, but the carefully framed deceit is instructive.

The Arab League peace proposal does indeed call for normalization of relations with Israel - in the context - repeat, in the context of a two-state settlement in terms of the longstanding international consensus, which the US and Israel have blocked for over 30 years, in international isolation, and still do. The core of the Arab League proposal, as Obama and his Mideast advisers know very well, is its call for a peaceful political settlement in these terms, which are well-known, and recognized to be the only basis for the peaceful settlement to which Obama professes to be committed. The omission of that crucial fact can hardly be accidental, and signals clearly that Obama envisions no departure from US rejectionism. His call for the Arab states to act on a corollary to their proposal, while the US ignores even the existence of its central content, which is the precondition for the corollary, surpasses cynicism.

The most significant acts to undermine a peaceful settlement are the daily US-backed actions in the occupied territories, all recognized to be criminal: taking over valuable land and resources and constructing what the leading architect of the plan, Ariel Sharon, called “Bantustans” for Palestinians - an unfair comparison because the Bantustans were far more viable than the fragments left to Palestinians under Sharon’s conception, now being realized. But the US and Israel even continue to oppose a political settlement in words, most recently in December 2008, when the US and Israel (and a few Pacific islands) voted against a UN resolution supporting “the right of the Palestinian people to self-determination” (passed 173 to 5, US-Israel opposed, with evasive pretexts).

Obama had not one word to say about the settlement and infrastructure developments in the West Bank, and the complex measures to control Palestinian existence, designed to undermine the prospects for a peaceful two-state settlement. His silence is a grim refutation of his oratorical flourishes about how “I will sustain an active commitment to seek two states living side by side in peace and security.”

Also unmentioned is Israel’s use of US arms in Gaza, in violation not only of international but also US law. Or Washington’s shipment of new arms to Israel right at the peak of the US-Israeli attack, surely not unknown to Obama’s Middle East advisers.

Obama was firm, however, that smuggling of arms to Gaza must be stopped. He endorses the agreement of Condoleeza Rice and Israeli foreign minister Tzipi Livni that the Egyptian-Gaza border must be closed - a remarkable exercise of imperial arrogance, as the Financial Times observed: “as they stood in Washington congratulating each other, both officials seemed oblivious to the fact that they were making a deal about an illegal trade on someone else’s border - Egypt in this case. The next day, an Egyptian official described the memorandum as `fictional’.” Egypt’s objections were ignored.

Returning to Obama’s reference to the “constructive” Arab League proposal, as the wording indicates, Obama persists in restricting support to the defeated party in the January 2006 election, the only free election in the Arab world, to which the US and Israel reacted, instantly and overtly, by severely punishing Palestinians for opposing the will of the masters. A minor technicality is that Abbas’s term ran out on January 9, and that Fayyad was appointed without confirmation by the Palestinian parliament (many of them kidnapped and in Israeli prisons). Ha’aretz describes Fayyad as “a strange bird in Palestinian politics. On the one hand, he is the Palestinian politician most esteemed by Israel and the West. However, on the other hand, he has no electoral power whatsoever in Gaza or the West Bank.” The report also notes Fayyad’s “close relationship with the Israeli establishment,” notably his friendship with Sharon’s extremist adviser Dov Weiglass. Though lacking popular support, he is regarded as competent and honest, not the norm in the US-backed political sectors.

Obama’s insistence that only Abbas and Fayyad exist conforms to the consistent Western contempt for democracy unless it is under control.

Obama provided the usual reasons for ignoring the elected government led by Hamas. “To be a genuine party to peace,” Obama declared, “the quartet [US, EU, Russia, UN] has made it clear that Hamas must meet clear conditions: recognize Israel’s right to exist; renounce violence; and abide by past agreements.” Unmentioned, also as usual, is the inconvenient fact that the US and Israel firmly reject all three conditions. In international isolation, they bar a two-state settlement including a Palestinian state; they of course do not renounce violence; and they reject the quartet’s central proposal, the “road map.” Israel formally accepted it, but with 14 reservations that effectively eliminate its contents (tacitly backed by the US). It is the great merit of Jimmy Carter’s Palestine: Peace not Apartheid, to have brought these facts to public attention for the first time - and in the mainstream, the only time.

It follows, by elementary reasoning, that neither the US nor Israel is a “genuine party to peace.” But that cannot be. It is not even a phrase in the English language.

It is perhaps unfair to criticize Obama for this further exercise of cynicism, because it is close to universal, unlike his scrupulous evisceration of the core component of the Arab League proposal, which is his own novel contribution.

Also near universal are the standard references to Hamas: a terrorist organization, dedicated to the destruction of Israel (or maybe all Jews). Omitted are the inconvenient facts that the US-Israel are not only dedicated to the destruction of any viable Palestinian state, but are steadily implementing those policies. Or that unlike the two rejectionist states, Hamas has called for a two-state settlement in terms of the international consensus: publicly, repeatedly, explicitly.

Obama began his remarks by saying: “Let me be clear: America is committed to Israel’s security. And we will always support Israel’s right to defend itself against legitimate threats.”

There was nothing about the right of Palestinians to defend themselves against far more extreme threats, such as those occurring daily, with US support, in the occupied territories. But that again is the norm.

Also normal is the enunciation of the principle that Israel has the right to defend itself. That is correct, but vacuous: so does everyone. But in the context the cliche is worse than vacuous: it is more cynical deceit.

The issue is not whether Israel has the right to defend itself, like everyone else, but whether it has the right to do so by force. No one, including Obama, believes that states enjoy a general right to defend themselves by force: it is first necessary to demonstrate that there are no peaceful alternatives that can be tried. In this case, there surely are.

A narrow alternative would be for Israel to abide by a cease-fire, for example, the cease-fire proposed by Hamas political leader Khaled Mishal a few days before Israel launched its attack on December 27. Mishal called for restoring the 2005 agreement. That agreement called for an end to violence and uninterrupted opening of the borders, along with an Israeli guarantee that goods and people could move freely between the two parts of occupied Palestine, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. The agreement was rejected by the US and Israel a few months later, after the free election of January 2006 turned out “the wrong way.” There are many other highly relevant cases.

The broader and more significant alternative would be for the US and Israel to abandon their extreme rejectionism, and join the rest of the world - including the Arab states and Hamas - in supporting a two-state settlement in accord with the international consensus. It should be noted that in the past 30 years there has been one departure from US-Israeli rejectionism: the negotiations at Taba in January 2001, which appeared to be close to a peaceful resolution when Israel prematurely called them off. It would not, then, be outlandish for Obama to agree to join the world, even within the framework of US policy, if he were interested in doing so.

In short, Obama’s forceful reiteration of Israel’s right to defend itself is another exercise of cynical deceit - though, it must be admitted, not unique to him, but virtually universal.

The deceit is particularly striking in this case because the occasion was the appointment of Mitchell as special envoy. Mitchell’s primary achievement was his leading role in the peaceful settlement in northern Ireland. It called for an end to IRA terror and British violence. Implicit is the recognition that while Britain had the right to defend itself from terror, it had no right to do so by force, because there was a peaceful alternative: recognition of the legitimate grievances of the Irish Catholic community that were the roots of IRA terror. When Britain adopted that sensible course, the terror ended. The implications for Mitchell’s mission with regard to Israel-Palestine are so obvious that they need not be spelled out. And omission of them is, again, a striking indication of the commitment of the Obama administration to traditional US rejectionism and opposition to peace, except on its extremist terms.

Obama also praised Jordan for its “constructive role in training Palestinian security forces and nurturing its relations with Israel” - which contrasts strikingly with US-Israeli refusal to deal with the freely elected government of Palestine, while savagely punishing Palestinians for electing it with pretexts which, as noted, do not withstand a moment’s scrutiny. It is true that Jordan joined the US in arming and training Palestinian security forces, so that they could violently suppress any manifestation of support for the miserable victims of US-Israeli assault in Gaza, also arresting supporters of Hamas and the prominent journalist Khaled Amayreh, while organizing their own demonstrations in support of Abbas and Fatah, in which most participants “were civil servants and school children who were instructed by the PA to attend the rally,” according to the Jerusalem Post. Our kind of democracy.

Obama made one further substantive comment: “As part of a lasting cease-fire, Gaza’s border crossings should be open to allow the flow of aid and commerce, with an appropriate monitoring regime…” He did not, of course, mention that the US-Israel had rejected much the same agreement after the January 2006 election, and that Israel had never observed similar subsequent agreements on borders.

Also missing is any reaction to Israel’s announcement that it rejected the cease-fire agreement, so that the prospects for it to be “lasting” are not auspicious. As reported at once in the press, “Israeli Cabinet Minister Binyamin Ben-Eliezer, who takes part in security deliberations, told Army Radio on Thursday that Israel wouldn’t let border crossings with Gaza reopen without a deal to free [Gilad] Schalit” (AP, Jan 22); ‘Israel to keep Gaza crossings closed…An official said the government planned to use the issue to bargain for the release of Gilad Shalit, the Israeli soldier held by the Islamist group since 2006 (Financial Times, Jan. 23); “Earlier this week, Israeli Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni said that progress on Corporal Shalit’s release would be a precondition to opening up the border crossings that have been mostly closed since Hamas wrested control of Gaza from the West Bank-based Palestinian Authority in 2007″ (Christian Science Monitor, Jan. 23); “an Israeli official said there would be tough conditions for any lifting of the blockade, which he linked with the release of Gilad Shalit” (FT, Jan. 23); among many others.

Shalit’s capture is a prominent issue in the West, another indication of Hamas’s criminality. Whatever one thinks about it, it is uncontroversial that capture of a soldier of an attacking army is far less of a crime than kidnapping of civilians, exactly what Israeli forces did the day before the capture of Shalit, invading Gaza city and kidnapping two brothers, then spiriting them across the border where they disappeared into Israel’s prison complex. Unlike the much lesser case of Shalit, that crime was virtually unreported and has been forgotten, along with Israel’s regular practice for decades of kidnapping civilians in Lebanon and on the high seas and dispatching them to Israeli prisons, often held for many years as hostages. But the capture of Shalit bars a cease-fire.

Obama’s State Department talk about the Middle East continued with “the deteriorating situation in Afghanistan and Pakistan… the central front in our enduring struggle against terrorism and extremism.” A few hours later, US planes attacked a remote village in Afghanistan, intending to kill a Taliban commander. “Village elders, though, told provincial officials there were no Taliban in the area, which they described as a hamlet populated mainly by shepherds. Women and children were among the 22 dead, they said, according to Hamididan Abdul Rahmzai, the head of the provincial council” (LA Times, Jan. 24).

Afghan president Karzai’s first message to Obama after he was elected in November was a plea to end the bombing of Afghan civilians, reiterated a few hours before Obama was sworn in. This was considered as significant as Karzai’s call for a timetable for departure of US and other foreign forces. The rich and powerful have their “responsibilities.” Among them, the New York Times reported, is to “provide security” in southern Afghanistan, where “the insurgency is homegrown and self-sustaining.” All familiar. From Pravda in the 1980s, for example.

January 28, 2009 “McClatchy Newspapers” — EZBT ABED RABBO, Gaza Strip — Nasser Abu Freeh was one of the first to see the Israeli soldiers as they entered this pastoral Gaza neighborhood overlooking the Israeli border on Jan. 3, hours after the Israeli government ordered the first ground forces into Gaza.

Abu Freeh’s two-story hilltop home is a favorite spot for Israeli soldiers, who used it as a command post during three previous attempts to deter Gaza militants from firing crude rockets into Israel from the surrounding cattle farms, orange groves and dirt alleys.

Scouts from the militant Islamist group Hamas also favored the hilltop as a place to watch for approaching Israeli soldiers, and the fighters tried to lure the Israelis into a trap by planting land mines outside Abu Freeh’s home.

As the Israelis moved in, neighbors said, the Hamas scouts put up little resistance and quickly fell back into the more densely populated part of the neighborhood.

Within hours, the Israeli soldiers took over Abu Freeh’s house, moved the seven people living there into one room and began interrogating the adults. The questioners were angry because one of their soldiers had been killed nearby in the early hours of the ground offensive, and they wanted to know what traps Hamas had set for the Israeli forces.

“Where are the tunnels?” Abu Freeh said the soldiers asked in Arabic. “I will kill you if you don’t tell me.”

Israeli tanks and bulldozers soon took up hilltop positions around Abu Freeh’s home, and Khaled Abed Rabbo’s five-story house in the valley below was one of those in the line of fire.

More than 70 members of his family crowded into one apartment for days. On Jan. 7, Abed Rabbo said, the shelling intensified, and they heard an Israeli solider calling for people to come out of their homes.

Abed Rabbo said he gathered his wife, their three daughters and his mother, Souad. Souad Abed Rabbo said that she tied a white robe around a mop handle and two of her granddaughters waved white headscarves as they walked outside.

When they opened the door, they saw an Israeli tank parked in their garden about 10 yards away.

“We were waiting for them to give us an order,” Khaled said last week as he stood in the ruins of his home. “Then one came out of the tank and started to shoot.”

Souad Abed Rabbo said she was shot as she pushed her son back inside and her granddaughters fell on the stairs. When the shooting was over, she said, 2-year-old Amal and 7-year-old Souad were dead.

The allegation is one of at least five such white flag incidents that human rights investigators are looking into across the Gaza Strip. It’s part of a growing pattern of alleged abuses that have raised concerns that some Israeli soldiers may have committed war crimes during their 22-day military campaign in Gaza.

“The evidence we’ve gathered in two of the cases so far is exceedingly strong,” said Fred Abrahams, a senior researcher with Human Rights Watch working in the Gaza Strip. “All the research so far suggests they shot civilians that were leaving their homes with white flags.”

Along with the white flag incidents, Human Rights Watch is calling for an international investigation into widespread charges that Israel prevented medical teams from helping wounded Palestinians trapped in their homes and needlessly demolished hundreds of houses, including dozens in Ezbt Abed Rabbo.

“This was not a rogue unit,” said Abrahams. “The needless civilian deaths resulted from concrete decisions made by the military.”

The Israeli military, which Prime Minister Ehud Olmert called “the most moral army in the world,” said it’s investigating the increasing number of war crimes allegations, but it rejected any suggestion that its soldiers had targeted civilians.

“IDF forces have clear firing orders,” the Israel Defense Forces said in a statement in response to questions from McClatchy. “But in the complex situation in which fighting takes place inside towns and cities, placing our forces also at great risk, civilian casualties are regrettably possible.”

Throughout the war, Israeli officials said Hamas militants put Palestinian civilians in danger by booby-trapping homes and firing on soldiers from crowded buildings.

However, residents living near Khaled Abed Rabbo all said that Hamas forces quickly abandoned the outlying neighborhood once the Israeli forces took over.

With his daughters bleeding to death, Abed Rabbo said, the family screamed for help.

Samieh al Sheik, an ambulance driver who lived in an adjacent home, heard the shouting. Without thinking about what could be waiting outside, Sheik said he ran to his ambulance, turned on the emergency lights and drove toward the screams.

As he turned the corner and headed for Abed Rabbo’s home, Sheik said he came face-to-face with the Israeli tank unit. The soldiers ordered him to get out of the ambulance and told him to walk straight out of the neighborhood.

“I didn’t see what happened to the family that day because I couldn’t reach them,” said Sheik, who returned to find the ambulance crushed under a demolished building.

Faced with his dying children, Abed Rabbo gathered up the wounded and sought to escape, even if the Israelis opened fire.

With Israeli soldiers shooting at the ground near their feet, Abed Rabbo said, the family walked more than a mile to the main road, where they finally found help. His surviving 4-year-old daughter, Samer, was one of the few to be allowed out of Gaza to receive special medical care in Brussels.

Halima Badwan was less fortunate. As Abed Rabbo rushed his surviving daughter to the hospital, she lay dying in a house nearby.

Halima and her husband, Ahmed, a retired 63-year-old Palestinian Authority general, were among nine people who’d gathered in one room during the fighting. The previous day, Ahmed Badwan said, a tank round had smashed into the room, killing a neighbor and seriously injuring his wife.

Badwan didn’t think he could carry his wife to safety. Red Cross officials in Gaza said that Israeli military officials repeatedly denied their requests to send medical teams to the neighborhood.

So, when the Israeli military began declaring a short “humanitarian pause” to the shooting each day, Badwan said he took his wife’s gold necklace and left her lying nearly unconscious in the ruins of their home.

As he walked out of his neighborhood, Badwan said, he stopped at a nearby ambulance station and asked for help. The International Committee for the Red Cross was powerless to do anything.

Iyad Nasr, a Red Cross spokesman in Gaza, said Israeli soldiers had fired at ambulances that tried to reach some areas, even when medical officials had received approval from the Israeli military to enter certain neighborhoods.

“Our request for Ezbt Abed Rabbo was just pending and pending and pending and pending day after day,” Nasr said.

Israel’s widespread denial of access to medical crews in Gaza appears to be a breach of humanitarian law, said Yuval Shany, a legal scholar at Hebrew University in Jerusalem.

“In international law, there is obligation to facilitate access to the wounded and even to treat the wounded,” Shany said. “In this area, I think there was a deviation from the international standard and this should be investigated.”

When Badwan, Abed Rabbo and scores of other residents of Ezbt Abed Rabbo finally returned to their neighborhood after Israel declared a unilateral cease-fire on Jan. 17, they were stunned to discover that their neighborhood was reduced to rubble.

Using bulldozers, tank shelling and explosives placed in the houses, the Israeli military had leveled entire blocks of homes.

Badwan found his wife’s body buried under the rubble of their building.

The destruction didn’t come as a complete surprise to Taysir Abed Rabbo, who lived in a two-story home near Badwan’s that Israeli soldiers had used as a temporary post.

Abed Rabbo, a member of the Palestinian Authority presidential guard, was among dozens of men who were rounded up nearly a year ago during an operation called Operation Warm Winter and taken to Israel for interrogation.

The interrogators gave Abed Rabbo a prophetic warning.

“They said if we did not stop the rocket fire, they planned to make this area ‘a red area,’” said Abed Rabbo, who said he wasn’t sure at the time what the Israelis meant.

Israeli leaders are moving swiftly to insulate their soldiers from any penalties for their actions during the offensive, which left more than 1,200 Palestinians dead, destroyed more than 4,000 buildings and caused $2 billion in damage.

The Israeli military has barred reporters from printing the names of military leaders who took part in the Gaza campaign, known as Operation Cast Lead, and Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert has created a legal defense unit to protect any soldiers accused of war crimes.

In a defense of his military on Sunday, Olmert accused Israel’s critics of using “moral acrobatics” to question Israel for using its military to try to halt the Palestinian rocket fire from Gaza that’s killed 12 people since September 2005.

“The soldiers and commanders who were sent on missions in Gaza must know that they are safe from various tribunals, and that the State of Israel will assist them on this issue and defend them just as they bodily defended us during Operation Cast Lead,” Olmert said.

While human rights groups are investigating the allegations, Shany said, Israeli leaders should take the lead and investigate allegations of wrongdoing.

“It makes sense to try to protect the soldiers, but it would also make sense to investigate where needed,” Shany said. “They should investigate, and when actions were justifiable they should protect, and when not, they should prosecute.”

Special correspondent Cliff Churgin contributed to this article from Jerusalem.