Well, it's been a while.
And things are, of course, no different. The wagon is still careening off the cliff and no one seems to have packed parachutes.
I finally decided to meander through the many posts that didn't make it.
I found this one and thought of the soldiers now coming forward and telling of the atrocities they did commit while invading and occupying Gaza for a month. They, themselves are coming forth - and now it's in the news, now it's being listened to - it sure didn't when it was happening.
Is this thier out? Is this the 'legal' way to conclude, given the outright testimonies of both solider and civilian, that war crimes were never committed?
It could well be.
Hence, I'm throwing this up out of the memory hole:
(Yes it's the full piece - because this is exactly the kind of stuff that gets flushed).
Consent and Advice
On the first day of Operation Cast Lead, the air force bombed the graduation ceremony of a police course, killing dozens of policemen. Months earlier, an operational and legal controversy was already swirling around the planned attack. According to a military source who was involved in the planning, bombing the site of the ceremony was authorized with no difficulty,but questions were raised about the intent to strike at the graduates of the course. Military Intelligence, convinced the attack was justified, pressed for its implementation. Representatives of the international law division (ILD) in the Military Advocate General's Office at first objected, fearing a possible violation of international law.
"This was a very large group of people who at that moment were ostensibly civilians and the next day would become legitimate military targets," says an operational source. "You take these dozens of policemen and put them in your gunsights. That certainly came up in all the discussions and soul-searching."
Over the course of several months, the operational echelons, particularly Military Intelligence, kept up the pressure on the army's legal staff. In the end, ILD authorized the air strike as it was carried out. The "incrimination" of the policemen (that is, justifying an attack on them) was based on their categorization as a resistance force in the event of an Israeli incursion into the Gaza Strip; not on information about any of them as individuals.
"Underlying our rationale was the way Hamas used the security forces," says a senior ILD figure. "Actually, one can look at the totality as the equivalent of the enemy's armed force, so they were not perceived as police. In our eyes, all the armed forces of Hamas are the equivalent of the army, just as in the face of the enemy's army every soldier is a legitimate target."
Experts in international law term the justification for the bombing raid problematic. "In a properly run state, attacking policemen as though they are soldiers is prohibited," says Prof. Yuval Shany, who teaches public international law at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. "When we are dealing with a government like Hamas, in which the boundaries between the different forces are not clear, the police force may have a combat role. But if you follow that line, there is not much that differentiates them from [Israeli] reservists or even from 16-year-olds who will be drafted in two years. You have to draw the line and restrict attacks to those in active service. This is not the only case in which the IDF offered a flexible interpretation of the law. The army attacked the infrastructure of the Hamas government and hit ministries. But unless you can show that there was military equipment in those offices, an attack on structures that do not serve a military purpose is a violation of the rules of war. The buildings are civilian sites and must not be attacked."
However, after entertaining initial doubts, ILD authorized the bombing of Hamas governmental targets. "As we understand it," says a senior figure in ILD, "the way Hamas operates is to use the entire governmental infrastructure for the organization's terrorist purposes, so that the distinctions are a bit different. We adjust the targets to the case of a terrorist regime."
Civilian on the roof
The ILD is based in a neglected building in the Kirya, the defense establishment compound in Tel Aviv. The unit consists of about 20 officers who hold a legal education. The department has existed in its present form and name since the start of the 1990s. Until then the unit was known as the International Law Branch, or 'Debil' in the Hebrew acronym, a word that means imbecile, until a senior officer in the unit demanded a change of name.
ILD takes pride in the influence its officers exerted on the character of the war in Gaza. For example, the unit induced the IDF to warn people before their homes were bombed by means of a procedure known as 'knock on the roof'; echoing the 'knock on the door campaign' in Israel in which funds are raised to fight cancer; in which munitions are fired harmlessly at roof corners. Sources in the unit say they tried to draw lessons from the warnings that were given in the Second Lebanon War. According to human rights organizations, the civilians in Lebanon were not told which places were safe and the roads on which they fled were bombed and became death traps. Once a warning is issued, say senior ILD officers, a strike against civilians who are bodily defending a structure can be validated as though they were combatants. Other legal experts dispute this. Among them is Colonel (res.) Daniel Reisner, who headed ILD until about five years ago. In his view, as he told Haaretz after Operation Cast Lead, such civilians retain their civilian status. I don't think you can incriminate someone who is standing on a roof just because he is there," Reisner said. "Possibly the attack on him will be considered legitimate -collateral damage," but he will not be a target."
A senior ILD figure explains: "The people who go into a house despite a warning do not have to be taken into account in terms of injury to civilians, because they are voluntary human shields. From the legal point of view, I do not have to show consideration for them. In the case of people who return to their home in order to protect it, they are taking part in the fighting."
What about a civilian who positions himself in front of a tank?
"If someone stands in front of a tank in order to block its progress, he is participating in warfare." But he says that in practice, the IDF does not attack civilians in such cases.
ILD's permissive posture comes as no surprise to jurists who monitor the unit's legal opinions. According to one of them, the unit is considered -more militant than any other legal body in Israel, and is ready to adopt the most flexible interpretations of the law in order to justify IDF operations." Pressure from operational elements and an understanding of their considerations on the part of ILD appear to affect the unit's legal opinions. "The army knows what it wants. For the operational echelon things are very clear," says an IDF operational source. "When the legal advisers thought something was objectionable or problematic, they definitely came under pressure to produce a positive bottom line."
"Our goal is not to fetter the army, but to give it the tools to win in a lawful manner," says an ILD officer. Reisner, the unit's former commander, says he understands why it has acquired a reputation for permissiveness: "We defended policy that is on the edge: the "neighbor procedure" [making a neighbor knock on the door of a potentially dangerous house], house demolitions, deportation, targeted assassination; we defended all the magic formulas for dealing with terrorism. In that sense, ILD is a body that restrains action, but does not stop it. The army says, "Here is a magic formula, is it within the bounds of what is possible? To which I will reply, I am ready to try to defend it, but I am not sure I will succeed. If it's white I will allow it, if it's black I will prohibit it, but in cases of gray I will be part of the dilemma: I do not stop at gray."
The dilemma of the gray areas and ILD's attempts to discover untapped potential in international law may perhaps explain the unit's great enthusiasm for providing legal advice to the army and the glint in advisers' eyes when certain terms roll off their tongue: 'proportional equilibrium,' 'legitimate military target,' 'illegal combatants.' 'What we are seeing now is a revision of international law,' Reisner says. 'If you do something for long enough, the world will accept it. The whole of international law is now based on the notion that an act that is forbidden today becomes permissible if executed by enough countries. If the same process occurred in private law, the legal speed limit would be 115 kilometers an hour and we would pay income tax of 4 percent. So there is no connection between the question 'Will it be sanctioned?' and the act's legality. After we bombed the reactor in Iraq, the Security Council condemned Israel and claimed the attack was a violation of international law. The atmosphere was that Israel had committed a crime. Today everyone says it was preventive self-defense. International law progresses through violations. We invented the targeted assassination thesis and we had to push it. At first there were protrusions that made it hard to insert easily into the legal moulds. Eight years later it is in the center of the bounds of legitimacy."
Did the attacks of September 11 influence your legal situation?
"Absolutely. When we started to define the confrontation with the Palestinians as an armed confrontation, it was a dramatic switch, and we started to defend that position before the Supreme Court. In April 2001 I met the American envoy George Mitchell and explained that above a certain level, fighting terrorism is armed combat and not law enforcement. His committee [which examined the circumstances of the confrontation in the territories] rejected that approach. Its report called on the Israeli government to abandon the armed confrontation definition and revert to the concept of law enforcement. It took four months and four planes to change the opinion of the United States, and had it not been for those four planes I am not sure we would have been able to develop the thesis of the war against terrorism on the present scale."
Individual approach
One of the core reasons for ILD's permissive approach may be its desire to preserve a modicum of relevance and influence in periods when the atmosphere in the General Staff and the territorial commands is particularly militant. A former senior commander notes that in the period when Daniel Reisner; an articulate, charismatic officer; headed the unit, its staff, and above all Reisner himself, acquired a respected status within the IDF officer corps. By the same token, the influence of the current staff, under the command of Colonel Pnina Sharvit-Baruch, is not self-evident. Sources involved in the work of Southern Command note that the commanding general, Yoav Gallant, is quite suspicious of the advisers and is known as a 'wild man,' a 'cowboy' or a 'sheriff' in terms of the importance; meaning lack of importance; he attaches to legal advice. The legal adviser to Southern Command was not invited to the situation appraisal ahead of the Gaza offensive and was excluded from smaller planning forums. Yet it was actually Operation Cast Lead that led to something of an improvement in relations between ILD and Gallant.
****
Ahh well, read it and weep. This is their out.
Twist and shout!
Showing posts with label Apartheid. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Apartheid. Show all posts
Thursday, March 19, 2009
Wednesday, March 4, 2009
Lev Leviev in the news again
Well it seems that dear old Lev's building in Tel Aviv will not be used by the British Embassy afterall! This is a good thing of course and shows what a little spreading of knowledge and a good public petition can do:
U.K. embassy nixes move to building of company behind West Bank construction
good good and good again.
That said, still no word whether the Quebec Supreme court will hear the charges against him and his company brought by the city of Bi'lin. We can cross our fingers.
U.K. embassy nixes move to building of company behind West Bank construction
good good and good again.
That said, still no word whether the Quebec Supreme court will hear the charges against him and his company brought by the city of Bi'lin. We can cross our fingers.
Friday, January 30, 2009
Thank goodness for the Law!
Well, it's been a while.
And things are, of course, no different. The wagon is still careening off the cliff and no one seems to have packed parachutes.
I finally decided to meander through the many posts that didn't make it.
I found this one and thought of the soldiers now coming forward and telling of the atrocities they did commit while invading and occupying Gaza for a month. They, themselves are coming forth - and now it's in the news, now it's being listened to - it sure didn't when it was happening.
Is this thier out? Is this the 'legal' way to conclude, given the outright testimonies of both solider and civilian, that war crimes were never committed?
It could well be.
Hence, I'm throwing this up out of the memory hole:
(Yes it's the full piece - because this is exactly the kind of stuff that gets flushed).
Consent and Advice
On the first day of Operation Cast Lead, the air force bombed the graduation ceremony of a police course, killing dozens of policemen. Months earlier, an operational and legal controversy was already swirling around the planned attack. According to a military source who was involved in the planning, bombing the site of the ceremony was authorized with no difficulty, but questions were raised about the intent to strike at the graduates of the course. Military Intelligence, convinced the attack was justified, pressed for its implementation. Representatives of the international law division (ILD) in the Military Advocate General's Office at first objected, fearing a possible violation of international law.
"This was a very large group of people who at that moment were ostensibly civilians and the next day would become legitimate military targets," says an operational source. "You take these dozens of policemen and put them in your gunsights. That certainly came up in all the discussions and soul-searching."
Over the course of several months, the operational echelons, particularly Military Intelligence, kept up the pressure on the army's legal staff. In the end, ILD authorized the air strike as it was carried out. The "incrimination" of the policemen (that is, justifying an attack on them) was based on their categorization as a resistance force in the event of an Israeli incursion into the Gaza Strip; not on information about any of them as individuals.
"Underlying our rationale was the way Hamas used the security forces," says a senior ILD figure. "Actually, one can look at the totality as the equivalent of the enemy's armed force, so they were not perceived as police. In our eyes, all the armed forces of Hamas are the equivalent of the army, just as in the face of the enemy's army every soldier is a legitimate target."
Experts in international law term the justification for the bombing raid problematic. "In a properly run state, attacking policemen as though they are soldiers is prohibited," says Prof. Yuval Shany, who teaches public international law at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. "When we are dealing with a government like Hamas, in which the boundaries between the different forces are not clear, the police force may have a combat role. But if you follow that line, there is not much that differentiates them from [Israeli] reservists or even from 16-year-olds who will be drafted in two years. You have to draw the line and restrict attacks to those in active service. This is not the only case in which the IDF offered a flexible interpretation of the law. The army attacked the infrastructure of the Hamas government and hit ministries. But unless you can show that there was military equipment in those offices, an attack on structures that do not serve a military purpose is a violation of the rules of war. The buildings are civilian sites and must not be attacked."
However, after entertaining initial doubts, ILD authorized the bombing of Hamas governmental targets. "As we understand it," says a senior figure in ILD, "the way Hamas operates is to use the entire governmental infrastructure for the organization's terrorist purposes, so that the distinctions are a bit different. We adjust the targets to the case of a terrorist regime."
Civilian on the roof
The ILD is based in a neglected building in the Kirya, the defense establishment compound in Tel Aviv. The unit consists of about 20 officers who hold a legal education. The department has existed in its present form and name since the start of the 1990s. Until then the unit was known as the International Law Branch, or 'Debil' in the Hebrew acronym, a word that means imbecile, until a senior officer in the unit demanded a change of name.
ILD takes pride in the influence its officers exerted on the character of the war in Gaza. For example, the unit induced the IDF to warn people before their homes were bombed by means of a procedure known as 'knock on the roof'; echoing the 'knock on the door campaign' in Israel in which funds are raised to fight cancer; in which munitions are fired harmlessly at roof corners. Sources in the unit say they tried to draw lessons from the warnings that were given in the Second Lebanon War. According to human rights organizations, the civilians in Lebanon were not told which places were safe and the roads on which they fled were bombed and became death traps. Once a warning is issued, say senior ILD officers, a strike against civilians who are bodily defending a structure can be validated as though they were combatants. Other legal experts dispute this. Among them is Colonel (res.) Daniel Reisner, who headed ILD until about five years ago. In his view, as he told Haaretz after Operation Cast Lead, such civilians retain their civilian status. I don't think you can incriminate someone who is standing on a roof just because he is there," Reisner said. "Possibly the attack on him will be considered legitimate -collateral damage," but he will not be a target."
A senior ILD figure explains: "The people who go into a house despite a warning do not have to be taken into account in terms of injury to civilians, because they are voluntary human shields. From the legal point of view, I do not have to show consideration for them. In the case of people who return to their home in order to protect it, they are taking part in the fighting."
What about a civilian who positions himself in front of a tank?
"If someone stands in front of a tank in order to block its progress, he is participating in warfare." But he says that in practice, the IDF does not attack civilians in such cases.
ILD's permissive posture comes as no surprise to jurists who monitor the unit's legal opinions. According to one of them, the unit is considered -more militant than any other legal body in Israel, and is ready to adopt the most flexible interpretations of the law in order to justify IDF operations." Pressure from operational elements and an understanding of their considerations on the part of ILD appear to affect the unit's legal opinions. "The army knows what it wants. For the operational echelon things are very clear," says an IDF operational source. "When the legal advisers thought something was objectionable or problematic, they definitely came under pressure to produce a positive bottom line."
"Our goal is not to fetter the army, but to give it the tools to win in a lawful manner," says an ILD officer. Reisner, the unit's former commander, says he understands why it has acquired a reputation for permissiveness: "We defended policy that is on the edge: the "neighbor procedure" [making a neighbor knock on the door of a potentially dangerous house], house demolitions, deportation, targeted assassination; we defended all the magic formulas for dealing with terrorism. In that sense, ILD is a body that restrains action, but does not stop it. The army says, "Here is a magic formula, is it within the bounds of what is possible? To which I will reply, I am ready to try to defend it, but I am not sure I will succeed. If it's white I will allow it, if it's black I will prohibit it, but in cases of gray I will be part of the dilemma: I do not stop at gray."
The dilemma of the gray areas and ILD's attempts to discover untapped potential in international law may perhaps explain the unit's great enthusiasm for providing legal advice to the army and the glint in advisers' eyes when certain terms roll off their tongue: 'proportional equilibrium,' 'legitimate military target,' 'illegal combatants.' 'What we are seeing now is a revision of international law,' Reisner says. 'If you do something for long enough, the world will accept it. The whole of international law is now based on the notion that an act that is forbidden today becomes permissible if executed by enough countries. If the same process occurred in private law, the legal speed limit would be 115 kilometers an hour and we would pay income tax of 4 percent. So there is no connection between the question 'Will it be sanctioned?' and the act's legality. After we bombed the reactor in Iraq, the Security Council condemned Israel and claimed the attack was a violation of international law. The atmosphere was that Israel had committed a crime. Today everyone says it was preventive self-defense. International law progresses through violations. We invented the targeted assassination thesis and we had to push it. At first there were protrusions that made it hard to insert easily into the legal moulds. Eight years later it is in the center of the bounds of legitimacy."
Did the attacks of September 11 influence your legal situation?
"Absolutely. When we started to define the confrontation with the Palestinians as an armed confrontation, it was a dramatic switch, and we started to defend that position before the Supreme Court. In April 2001 I met the American envoy George Mitchell and explained that above a certain level, fighting terrorism is armed combat and not law enforcement. His committee [which examined the circumstances of the confrontation in the territories] rejected that approach. Its report called on the Israeli government to abandon the armed confrontation definition and revert to the concept of law enforcement. It took four months and four planes to change the opinion of the United States, and had it not been for those four planes I am not sure we would have been able to develop the thesis of the war against terrorism on the present scale."
Individual approach
One of the core reasons for ILD's permissive approach may be its desire to preserve a modicum of relevance and influence in periods when the atmosphere in the General Staff and the territorial commands is particularly militant. A former senior commander notes that in the period when Daniel Reisner; an articulate, charismatic officer; headed the unit, its staff, and above all Reisner himself, acquired a respected status within the IDF officer corps. By the same token, the influence of the current staff, under the command of Colonel Pnina Sharvit-Baruch, is not self-evident. Sources involved in the work of Southern Command note that the commanding general, Yoav Gallant, is quite suspicious of the advisers and is known as a 'wild man,' a 'cowboy' or a 'sheriff' in terms of the importance; meaning lack of importance; he attaches to legal advice. The legal adviser to Southern Command was not invited to the situation appraisal ahead of the Gaza offensive and was excluded from smaller planning forums. Yet it was actually Operation Cast Lead that led to something of an improvement in relations between ILD and Gallant.
****
Ahh well, read it and weep. This is their out.
Twist and shout!
And things are, of course, no different. The wagon is still careening off the cliff and no one seems to have packed parachutes.
I finally decided to meander through the many posts that didn't make it.
I found this one and thought of the soldiers now coming forward and telling of the atrocities they did commit while invading and occupying Gaza for a month. They, themselves are coming forth - and now it's in the news, now it's being listened to - it sure didn't when it was happening.
Is this thier out? Is this the 'legal' way to conclude, given the outright testimonies of both solider and civilian, that war crimes were never committed?
It could well be.
Hence, I'm throwing this up out of the memory hole:
(Yes it's the full piece - because this is exactly the kind of stuff that gets flushed).
Consent and Advice
On the first day of Operation Cast Lead, the air force bombed the graduation ceremony of a police course, killing dozens of policemen. Months earlier, an operational and legal controversy was already swirling around the planned attack. According to a military source who was involved in the planning, bombing the site of the ceremony was authorized with no difficulty, but questions were raised about the intent to strike at the graduates of the course. Military Intelligence, convinced the attack was justified, pressed for its implementation. Representatives of the international law division (ILD) in the Military Advocate General's Office at first objected, fearing a possible violation of international law.
"This was a very large group of people who at that moment were ostensibly civilians and the next day would become legitimate military targets," says an operational source. "You take these dozens of policemen and put them in your gunsights. That certainly came up in all the discussions and soul-searching."
Over the course of several months, the operational echelons, particularly Military Intelligence, kept up the pressure on the army's legal staff. In the end, ILD authorized the air strike as it was carried out. The "incrimination" of the policemen (that is, justifying an attack on them) was based on their categorization as a resistance force in the event of an Israeli incursion into the Gaza Strip; not on information about any of them as individuals.
"Underlying our rationale was the way Hamas used the security forces," says a senior ILD figure. "Actually, one can look at the totality as the equivalent of the enemy's armed force, so they were not perceived as police. In our eyes, all the armed forces of Hamas are the equivalent of the army, just as in the face of the enemy's army every soldier is a legitimate target."
Experts in international law term the justification for the bombing raid problematic. "In a properly run state, attacking policemen as though they are soldiers is prohibited," says Prof. Yuval Shany, who teaches public international law at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. "When we are dealing with a government like Hamas, in which the boundaries between the different forces are not clear, the police force may have a combat role. But if you follow that line, there is not much that differentiates them from [Israeli] reservists or even from 16-year-olds who will be drafted in two years. You have to draw the line and restrict attacks to those in active service. This is not the only case in which the IDF offered a flexible interpretation of the law. The army attacked the infrastructure of the Hamas government and hit ministries. But unless you can show that there was military equipment in those offices, an attack on structures that do not serve a military purpose is a violation of the rules of war. The buildings are civilian sites and must not be attacked."
However, after entertaining initial doubts, ILD authorized the bombing of Hamas governmental targets. "As we understand it," says a senior figure in ILD, "the way Hamas operates is to use the entire governmental infrastructure for the organization's terrorist purposes, so that the distinctions are a bit different. We adjust the targets to the case of a terrorist regime."
Civilian on the roof
The ILD is based in a neglected building in the Kirya, the defense establishment compound in Tel Aviv. The unit consists of about 20 officers who hold a legal education. The department has existed in its present form and name since the start of the 1990s. Until then the unit was known as the International Law Branch, or 'Debil' in the Hebrew acronym, a word that means imbecile, until a senior officer in the unit demanded a change of name.
ILD takes pride in the influence its officers exerted on the character of the war in Gaza. For example, the unit induced the IDF to warn people before their homes were bombed by means of a procedure known as 'knock on the roof'; echoing the 'knock on the door campaign' in Israel in which funds are raised to fight cancer; in which munitions are fired harmlessly at roof corners. Sources in the unit say they tried to draw lessons from the warnings that were given in the Second Lebanon War. According to human rights organizations, the civilians in Lebanon were not told which places were safe and the roads on which they fled were bombed and became death traps. Once a warning is issued, say senior ILD officers, a strike against civilians who are bodily defending a structure can be validated as though they were combatants. Other legal experts dispute this. Among them is Colonel (res.) Daniel Reisner, who headed ILD until about five years ago. In his view, as he told Haaretz after Operation Cast Lead, such civilians retain their civilian status. I don't think you can incriminate someone who is standing on a roof just because he is there," Reisner said. "Possibly the attack on him will be considered legitimate -collateral damage," but he will not be a target."
A senior ILD figure explains: "The people who go into a house despite a warning do not have to be taken into account in terms of injury to civilians, because they are voluntary human shields. From the legal point of view, I do not have to show consideration for them. In the case of people who return to their home in order to protect it, they are taking part in the fighting."
What about a civilian who positions himself in front of a tank?
"If someone stands in front of a tank in order to block its progress, he is participating in warfare." But he says that in practice, the IDF does not attack civilians in such cases.
ILD's permissive posture comes as no surprise to jurists who monitor the unit's legal opinions. According to one of them, the unit is considered -more militant than any other legal body in Israel, and is ready to adopt the most flexible interpretations of the law in order to justify IDF operations." Pressure from operational elements and an understanding of their considerations on the part of ILD appear to affect the unit's legal opinions. "The army knows what it wants. For the operational echelon things are very clear," says an IDF operational source. "When the legal advisers thought something was objectionable or problematic, they definitely came under pressure to produce a positive bottom line."
"Our goal is not to fetter the army, but to give it the tools to win in a lawful manner," says an ILD officer. Reisner, the unit's former commander, says he understands why it has acquired a reputation for permissiveness: "We defended policy that is on the edge: the "neighbor procedure" [making a neighbor knock on the door of a potentially dangerous house], house demolitions, deportation, targeted assassination; we defended all the magic formulas for dealing with terrorism. In that sense, ILD is a body that restrains action, but does not stop it. The army says, "Here is a magic formula, is it within the bounds of what is possible? To which I will reply, I am ready to try to defend it, but I am not sure I will succeed. If it's white I will allow it, if it's black I will prohibit it, but in cases of gray I will be part of the dilemma: I do not stop at gray."
The dilemma of the gray areas and ILD's attempts to discover untapped potential in international law may perhaps explain the unit's great enthusiasm for providing legal advice to the army and the glint in advisers' eyes when certain terms roll off their tongue: 'proportional equilibrium,' 'legitimate military target,' 'illegal combatants.' 'What we are seeing now is a revision of international law,' Reisner says. 'If you do something for long enough, the world will accept it. The whole of international law is now based on the notion that an act that is forbidden today becomes permissible if executed by enough countries. If the same process occurred in private law, the legal speed limit would be 115 kilometers an hour and we would pay income tax of 4 percent. So there is no connection between the question 'Will it be sanctioned?' and the act's legality. After we bombed the reactor in Iraq, the Security Council condemned Israel and claimed the attack was a violation of international law. The atmosphere was that Israel had committed a crime. Today everyone says it was preventive self-defense. International law progresses through violations. We invented the targeted assassination thesis and we had to push it. At first there were protrusions that made it hard to insert easily into the legal moulds. Eight years later it is in the center of the bounds of legitimacy."
Did the attacks of September 11 influence your legal situation?
"Absolutely. When we started to define the confrontation with the Palestinians as an armed confrontation, it was a dramatic switch, and we started to defend that position before the Supreme Court. In April 2001 I met the American envoy George Mitchell and explained that above a certain level, fighting terrorism is armed combat and not law enforcement. His committee [which examined the circumstances of the confrontation in the territories] rejected that approach. Its report called on the Israeli government to abandon the armed confrontation definition and revert to the concept of law enforcement. It took four months and four planes to change the opinion of the United States, and had it not been for those four planes I am not sure we would have been able to develop the thesis of the war against terrorism on the present scale."
Individual approach
One of the core reasons for ILD's permissive approach may be its desire to preserve a modicum of relevance and influence in periods when the atmosphere in the General Staff and the territorial commands is particularly militant. A former senior commander notes that in the period when Daniel Reisner; an articulate, charismatic officer; headed the unit, its staff, and above all Reisner himself, acquired a respected status within the IDF officer corps. By the same token, the influence of the current staff, under the command of Colonel Pnina Sharvit-Baruch, is not self-evident. Sources involved in the work of Southern Command note that the commanding general, Yoav Gallant, is quite suspicious of the advisers and is known as a 'wild man,' a 'cowboy' or a 'sheriff' in terms of the importance; meaning lack of importance; he attaches to legal advice. The legal adviser to Southern Command was not invited to the situation appraisal ahead of the Gaza offensive and was excluded from smaller planning forums. Yet it was actually Operation Cast Lead that led to something of an improvement in relations between ILD and Gallant.
****
Ahh well, read it and weep. This is their out.
Twist and shout!
Friday, December 12, 2008
For anyone near Toronto
Dr. Norman Finkelstein will be speaking in Toronto on the 15th of January, 2009. The event is free, and being hosted by Canadians for Peace and Justice in the Mid-East.
Having had the opportunity to see Norman myself, I can't recommend this highly enough.
Norman's Site
University of Toronto
Mississauga (UTM)
CCIT 1080
Time:
6pm
If you are in the area, try to attend - you will not be disappointed.
Having had the opportunity to see Norman myself, I can't recommend this highly enough.
Norman's Site
University of Toronto
Mississauga (UTM)
CCIT 1080
Time:
6pm
If you are in the area, try to attend - you will not be disappointed.
Monday, September 8, 2008
Important Message
For those of you in Toronto, Montreal and Ottawa:
Israeli Occupation on Trial
Panel with Mr. Mark Arnold,
Canadian Lawyer for the
Palestinian Village of Bil'in
Please join us September 25, 26, and 27 to explore this important case.
In July, 2008, the Palestinian Village of Bil'in launched a lawsuit in Quebec Superior Court against two Montreal companies: Green Mount International Inc. and Green Park International Inc. The two companies are accused of building condominiums on Palestinian land under Israeli military occupation: actions that are strictly illegal under international, Canadian and Quebec law.
Toronto, Thursday, September 25, 7:30 p.m., at the Steelworkers Hall, 25 Cecil Street, Toronto
Montreal, Friday, September 26, 7:30 p.m., McGill University, New Chancellor Day Hall, 3644 Peel Street, Room: 100 (The "Moot Court"), enter through the Law Library entrance at 3660 Peel St.
Ottawa, Saturday, September 27, 7:30 p.m., Sandy Hill Community Centre, 250 Somerset St. E., off of King Edward St, between Nelson and Sweetland, Ottawa
Please distribute this email widely to your friends and acquaintances across Quebec and Ontario.
Join us for a dynamic panel discussion with the Canadian lawyer for Bil'in Village, Mr. Mark Arnold, and other distinguished panellists as we explore the case and its implications for Canada, Israel and the Palestinians. Attendees at each event will be given the opportunity to donate to the legal fund of Bil'in Village, should they so choose.
An admission of $5 will be charged to cover the costs of hosting the event series.
For a list of our other panellists, and for more info on these exciting events, please see Canadians for Justice and Peace in the Mid-East.
****
I wrote about this here for those interested in a little more background.
I am going to do my darnedest (is that even word?!) to make sure I attend! I'll probable donate a little $$ to, what ever I can afford.
Israeli Occupation on Trial
Panel with Mr. Mark Arnold,
Canadian Lawyer for the
Palestinian Village of Bil'in
Please join us September 25, 26, and 27 to explore this important case.
In July, 2008, the Palestinian Village of Bil'in launched a lawsuit in Quebec Superior Court against two Montreal companies: Green Mount International Inc. and Green Park International Inc. The two companies are accused of building condominiums on Palestinian land under Israeli military occupation: actions that are strictly illegal under international, Canadian and Quebec law.
Toronto, Thursday, September 25, 7:30 p.m., at the Steelworkers Hall, 25 Cecil Street, Toronto
Montreal, Friday, September 26, 7:30 p.m., McGill University, New Chancellor Day Hall, 3644 Peel Street, Room: 100 (The "Moot Court"), enter through the Law Library entrance at 3660 Peel St.
Ottawa, Saturday, September 27, 7:30 p.m., Sandy Hill Community Centre, 250 Somerset St. E., off of King Edward St, between Nelson and Sweetland, Ottawa
Please distribute this email widely to your friends and acquaintances across Quebec and Ontario.
Join us for a dynamic panel discussion with the Canadian lawyer for Bil'in Village, Mr. Mark Arnold, and other distinguished panellists as we explore the case and its implications for Canada, Israel and the Palestinians. Attendees at each event will be given the opportunity to donate to the legal fund of Bil'in Village, should they so choose.
An admission of $5 will be charged to cover the costs of hosting the event series.
For a list of our other panellists, and for more info on these exciting events, please see Canadians for Justice and Peace in the Mid-East.
****
I wrote about this here for those interested in a little more background.
I am going to do my darnedest (is that even word?!) to make sure I attend! I'll probable donate a little $$ to, what ever I can afford.
Sunday, September 7, 2008
What is that Smell?
Enter 'The Skunk'.
What's that you ask? Well, it's a wonderful newly developed (and now deployed) less lethal crowd dispersal weapon! Great you say? Well... I'm not so sure about that.
We have heard often by various pro-Israeli-Firsters that 'if only the Palestinians would hold non-violent protests and demonstrations they might be taken seriously'. Well, they do - often - not that it's reported on of course! What to do, what to do - the poor IDF and police forces must stop all non-violent resistance as well, lest the world catch note of it. Shooting the demonstrators with rubber bullets, water cannons, pepper sprays and tear gas just doesn't go over well in the PR department - they needed something else!
"The Border Police introduced the Skunk - a new tool in the service of the police, which will cause every demonstrator to flee for his life because of the terrible stench," the Israel Police Web site proudly declared on August 17, about a week after it was first tried out.
How nice. How comical - if it weren't really just a tool of oppression of a human's right to resist - peacefully - that which interferes with one's right to live in dignity.
Now the Skunk has become the new hope of the Border Policemen stationed along the route of the fence. "We consider it a new and effective deterrent force," says Azulai. "Until now, for demonstrations on the seam line the police used mainly pepper gas, water cannons and mounted police, but we were looking for less lethal means. The Skunk was born out of a need for a means that would avoid harming the demonstrators insofar as possible, which would limit the damage and the contact between demonstrators and policemen. We have no intention of harming anyone, the police respect the right to demonstrate, but we are in charge of maintaining public order. We intervene in demonstrations that get out of control, as in the case of Na'alin and Bil'in, where demonstrators are systematically attempting to damage the fence or mechanical equipment on the site."
The police respect the 'right' to demonstrate? Well - at least the (sort of) recognise it is a right! But for them any demonstration is always, yes always, out of control. It's important, I think, at this juncture to remind everyone that in the towns of Bil'in and Na'alin the route of the Apartheid Wall cuts deeply into Palestinian lands. As most do know, this Wall has been deemed illegal by the internationl courts - if Israel had built this wall on only Israeli territory I doubt that any of these demonstrations would be happening - but the Wall is not on Israeli lands - it is on stolen Palestinians lands - many of which hold important fertile farmlands and water resources. This is why the brave folks of Na'alin and Bil'in are demonstrating - peacefully - to begin with!!
"It may be legal, but it stinks," adds Sarit Michaeli, the head of public relations at the B'Tselem human rights organization. "The fact that they spray people with such a liquid on a Friday raises questions: Would they do the same thing to settlers on a Friday? I find that hard to believe. I don't think it should be done to anyone, but the limited use of the Skunk against Palestinians and left-wing activists is something that should be recorded. In my opinion, there is a strong and disturbing symbolic dimension to this. Mainly because until today the Skunk has been used primarily against nonviolent groups of people, who did not clash with anyone and were very far away from the fence. So why was it necessary to spray them - in order to dirty them? To punish them? I think that the use of the Skunk contains a very humiliating element - they are marking you. The spray creates a new dimension of humiliation that did not exist before at demonstrations."
A laboratory of experimentation - that is how Snitz describes the villages of Bil'in and Na'alin.
"On the one hand the Skunk really did surprise us to a great degree, but on the other hand I was not surprised when a new weapon was directed against us at demonstrations," he says. "Bil'in and Na'alin have turned into a place for experimentation for the Israeli security forces. The demonstrators have become guinea pigs for various weapons. During the past six months they tried sponge bullets that are fired from short range, salt bullets that are very painful when they come into contact with blood, pepper gas, and even a new device called Tza'aka (Scream). This is actually a large loudspeaker that sits on a truck and emits a dissonant and deafening sound. It penetrates your brain."
But the police were not satisfied with the Scream and it did not return to the hilltops of the West Bank. "And that's part of the issue," adds Snitz. "All these attempts remain attempts, but there is no substitute for the 'daily bread' of the Border Police: gas and rubber bullets."
Well it sure does seem that this IS the testing ground for 'crowd' control. These poor folks are treated this way, and the world does nothing - nothing because it is Israel doing this - nothing because so many leaders are terrified of being labelled by the Lobby (and every country has one!).
Just keep in mind: Israel exports her expertise in these matters to other lands. Canadian and American police forces go there on junkits for training.
So, the question arises: When will this method show up at a demonstration near you? If the recent events in Minneapolis and the extent of police interference and brutality is any indication - the answer is: SOON.
What's that you ask? Well, it's a wonderful newly developed (and now deployed) less lethal crowd dispersal weapon! Great you say? Well... I'm not so sure about that.
We have heard often by various pro-Israeli-Firsters that 'if only the Palestinians would hold non-violent protests and demonstrations they might be taken seriously'. Well, they do - often - not that it's reported on of course! What to do, what to do - the poor IDF and police forces must stop all non-violent resistance as well, lest the world catch note of it. Shooting the demonstrators with rubber bullets, water cannons, pepper sprays and tear gas just doesn't go over well in the PR department - they needed something else!
"The Border Police introduced the Skunk - a new tool in the service of the police, which will cause every demonstrator to flee for his life because of the terrible stench," the Israel Police Web site proudly declared on August 17, about a week after it was first tried out.
How nice. How comical - if it weren't really just a tool of oppression of a human's right to resist - peacefully - that which interferes with one's right to live in dignity.
Now the Skunk has become the new hope of the Border Policemen stationed along the route of the fence. "We consider it a new and effective deterrent force," says Azulai. "Until now, for demonstrations on the seam line the police used mainly pepper gas, water cannons and mounted police, but we were looking for less lethal means. The Skunk was born out of a need for a means that would avoid harming the demonstrators insofar as possible, which would limit the damage and the contact between demonstrators and policemen. We have no intention of harming anyone, the police respect the right to demonstrate, but we are in charge of maintaining public order. We intervene in demonstrations that get out of control, as in the case of Na'alin and Bil'in, where demonstrators are systematically attempting to damage the fence or mechanical equipment on the site."
The police respect the 'right' to demonstrate? Well - at least the (sort of) recognise it is a right! But for them any demonstration is always, yes always, out of control. It's important, I think, at this juncture to remind everyone that in the towns of Bil'in and Na'alin the route of the Apartheid Wall cuts deeply into Palestinian lands. As most do know, this Wall has been deemed illegal by the internationl courts - if Israel had built this wall on only Israeli territory I doubt that any of these demonstrations would be happening - but the Wall is not on Israeli lands - it is on stolen Palestinians lands - many of which hold important fertile farmlands and water resources. This is why the brave folks of Na'alin and Bil'in are demonstrating - peacefully - to begin with!!
"It may be legal, but it stinks," adds Sarit Michaeli, the head of public relations at the B'Tselem human rights organization. "The fact that they spray people with such a liquid on a Friday raises questions: Would they do the same thing to settlers on a Friday? I find that hard to believe. I don't think it should be done to anyone, but the limited use of the Skunk against Palestinians and left-wing activists is something that should be recorded. In my opinion, there is a strong and disturbing symbolic dimension to this. Mainly because until today the Skunk has been used primarily against nonviolent groups of people, who did not clash with anyone and were very far away from the fence. So why was it necessary to spray them - in order to dirty them? To punish them? I think that the use of the Skunk contains a very humiliating element - they are marking you. The spray creates a new dimension of humiliation that did not exist before at demonstrations."
A laboratory of experimentation - that is how Snitz describes the villages of Bil'in and Na'alin.
"On the one hand the Skunk really did surprise us to a great degree, but on the other hand I was not surprised when a new weapon was directed against us at demonstrations," he says. "Bil'in and Na'alin have turned into a place for experimentation for the Israeli security forces. The demonstrators have become guinea pigs for various weapons. During the past six months they tried sponge bullets that are fired from short range, salt bullets that are very painful when they come into contact with blood, pepper gas, and even a new device called Tza'aka (Scream). This is actually a large loudspeaker that sits on a truck and emits a dissonant and deafening sound. It penetrates your brain."
But the police were not satisfied with the Scream and it did not return to the hilltops of the West Bank. "And that's part of the issue," adds Snitz. "All these attempts remain attempts, but there is no substitute for the 'daily bread' of the Border Police: gas and rubber bullets."
Well it sure does seem that this IS the testing ground for 'crowd' control. These poor folks are treated this way, and the world does nothing - nothing because it is Israel doing this - nothing because so many leaders are terrified of being labelled by the Lobby (and every country has one!).
Just keep in mind: Israel exports her expertise in these matters to other lands. Canadian and American police forces go there on junkits for training.
So, the question arises: When will this method show up at a demonstration near you? If the recent events in Minneapolis and the extent of police interference and brutality is any indication - the answer is: SOON.
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