by Dr. Joel Fishman for Makor Rishon
Two weeks ago, the disclosures of the Zionist student group, Im Tirtsu, shocked the Israeli public when they revealed that sixteen organizations supported by the New Israel Fund contributed most of the information upon which the Goldstone Report was based. These disclosures were part of another unpleasant revelation, the Goldstone Report, which delivered a harsh political blow to the legitimacy of the State. Israel's leaders failed to anticipate the political consequences of last winter's Operation Cast Lead: that Israel would be accused of perpetrating war crimes and that its respectable position in the world would be endangered. The resulting damage to Israel’s image has been unprecedented.
This grave misperception by Israel's leadership is the result of their viewing the conflict primarily in military terms and intentionally disregarding the political dimension. In an interview with Israel Television's Ayala Hasson on 21 January 2009, Defense Minister Ehud Barak confidently declared that Israel had delivered an unprecedented blow to the Hamas, and if necessary, Israel would not hesitate to send the army back to Gaza to deliver more such blows.
Slowly but surely, the game has changed. Because Israel's enemies have failed to win militarily, they have begun waging a war by indirect means. Their main political goal is to destroy Israel's legitimacy and convey it to the Palestinian Authority. Their tactics include undermining Israel's political structure, eroding its traditional values of family and religion, crippling its legal system and law enforcement agencies, weakening the armed forces, paralyzing the government's ability to use its military force and thus limit her options for self defense. In the wake of the Goldstone Report, the government has publicly acknowledged the challenge this political warfare poses. Prime Minister Netanyahu declared his determination to counter what he termed the "Goldstone Effect."
Accordingly, the NIF must be viewed as an important link and conduit in a cultural and political network whose real purpose is to undermine the Jewish State and replace it with another entity. The NIF is neither democratically elected nor does it represent a constituency. Although its professed goal is to "strengthen democracy" in Israel, the nature of its activities does not support this claim. An organization such as the NIF receives donations from private donors, foundations abroad and foreign governments. In turn, it distributes funds to smaller organizations that are active among Jews and Arabs, who cultivate discontentment to create political capital of their grievances.
The New Israel Fund is much more than a charitable foundation. It wages political warfare and operates as a front organization "that serves as a cover for aims and activities other than its professed ones." During the thirties, Willi Muenzenberg, the propaganda genius of the Comintern devised this type of organizational form (New Fontana Dictionary of Modern Thought). Although the Comintern has disappeared, front organizations in Israel and elsewhere continue to operate and use these traditional methods, in line with the ideology of Marxism-Leninism.
Like other front organizations that avow one goal, but seek another, the New Israel Fund claims it strives for social justice and progressive change in Israeli society. Yet they conceal the ultimate goal, namely, The New Israel, which can only be achieved by destroying Israel as we know it. The logical outcome of this program is a coup d'Etat through a process of discrediting the Zionist ideal, gutting its political and social institutions, and disfranchising the current middle-class holders of power in Israeli society. The front organizations of our time obscure their true objectives and intentionally operate in a decentralized manner in order to escape the attention of law enforcement agencies. They may be recognized, nonetheless, by the uniformity of the message they project.
The problem of the New Israel Fund is that by providing information to the Goldstone Report in cooperation with its allied organizations, it succeeded in drawing attention to its formidable strength and its successful penetration within Israeli society. If any good is to come from this unhappy and dangerous experience, it is that we should grasp the true objectives of these groups and the real threat they represent to the stability of Israel's society, to its legally constituted democracy and to our future as a Jewish state. For years it has been almost axiomatic that the "extreme right" is a lethal danger to the state. The lesson which we should learn from the recent and dramatic disclosures of the Im Tirtsu report is that the well-organized and affluent radical left may represent an even more perilous threat to the State of Israel.
See this article at Israel Behind the News
Showing posts with label Goldstone Report. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Goldstone Report. Show all posts
Friday, February 12, 2010
NIF-Funded NGOs: Goldstone’s Building Blocks
From NGO Monitor
NIF-funded groups and their publications were featured centrally in the Goldstone report, which focused on alleged Israeli “war crimes” in the 2009 Gaza war. The report referenced B’Tselem more than 56 times; Adalah, 38; and Breaking the Silence, 27.
Many of these citations referred to speculative issues unrelated to the conflict in Gaza, seeking to brand Israeli democracy as “repressive” and to widen the scope of the condemnations.
Since the initial publication of the Goldstone report on September 15, 2009, these NIF-supported NGOs - including B’Tselem, ACRI, Gisha, PHR-I, and Yesh Din - have continued supporting Goldstone and lobbying the governments of the United States, the European Union, and others to legitimize the report’s extreme biases and endorse its recommendations.
In response to the controversy over their support for Goldstone, these organizations and the NIF launched an offensive against critics. NIF supporters accused NGO Monitor of “silenc[ing] expression,” and being “extremist,” “incendiary,” the “rotten fruit of Israeli democracy,” and “McCarthyite.”
In addition to involvement with Goldstone, several organizations funded by NIF, including Adalah, campaign against the legitimacy of Israel as a Jewish democratic state. Others such as Mossawa and Coalition of Women for Peace are active in worldwide boycotts, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) campaigns targeting Israel.
The political impact of NIF-supported NGOs, based on NIF’s annual budget of $32 million, is bolstered by additional funds from European governments and church groups that allocate funds to the same recipient organizations.
Contents:
1) NIF-grantees and the delegitimization of Israel
2) NIF-funded NGOs and the Goldstone indictment
3) Summary of activities by 20 major NIF grantees active in the Arab-Israeli conflict
Introduction:
The New Israel Fund (NIF) supports more than 100 organizations involved in a wide range of areas in Israel, including political activism related to the Arab-Israeli conflict.
As highlighted recently, NIF-funded groups and their publications were featured centrally in the Goldstone report, which focused on alleged Israeli “war crimes” in the 2009 Gaza war. During the fighting, as shown in NGO Monitor analyses, these NGOs issued daily reports claiming to document Israeli “human rights” violations. NGO officials, widely quoted in the media, lobbied intensively for an international inquiry.
After the Goldstone commission was established, three major and long-time NIF grantees (Public Committee against Torture in Israel, Physicians for Human Rights-Israel, and Adalah) participated in a May 2009 NGO “town hall meeting” in Geneva that helped shape the course of Goldstone’s ”investigation”. In addition, seven NIF-funded NGOs (including the Association for Civil Rights in Israel, Gisha, HaMoked, and Yesh Din) submitted a joint statement to Goldstone, and a representative from PCATI “testified” at the July 2009 Goldstone hearings, referring to “collective punishment” and “[Palestinian] martyrs.”
The resulting Goldstone report referenced B’Tselem more than 56 times; Adalah, 38; and Breaking the Silence, 27. Significantly, many of these citations referred to speculative issues unrelated to the conflict in Gaza, seeking to brand Israeli democracy as “repressive,” and to widen the scope of the condemnations and the resulting political campaigns.
In turn, B’Tselem, Adalah, and PHR-I, among others, have lobbied Israeli and foreign governments to support Goldstone’s report and its recommendations. Adalah, for example, joined the Palestinian NGOs Al Mezan, Al-Haq, and the Palestinian Center for Human Rights (PCHR) in a press release urging countries to “re-evaluate their relationship with Israel.”
In response to the controversy over their support for Goldstone, these organizations and the NIF launched an offensive against critics, including NGO Monitor, that brought the relationship to light. Through coarse smears, NIF supporters accuse NGO Monitor of “silenc[ing] expression,” and being “extremist,” “incendiary,” and the “rotten fruit of Israeli democracy,” and “McCarthyite.”
NGO Monitor’s many calls for debates with NIF officials and grantees have been rebuffed. In July 2009, an NIF employee posted a vulgar cartoon on his blog directed at NGO Monitor President Gerald Steinberg in July 2009, and in 2008 another NIF grantee frivolously sued NGO Monitor for libel - apparently, to quash reporting and public debate on its activities.
1. NIF-grantees and the delegitimization of Israel
In addition to involvement with Goldstone, several organizations funded by NIF campaign against the legitimacy of Israel as a Jewish democratic state, and are active in worldwide boycotts, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) and similar campaigns targeting Israel.
NIF has justified its funding decisions, claiming to promote pluralism and dialogue, and to support free expression of differing views in Israel. In contrast, NGO Monitor’s research demonstrates the damage to democracy resulting from these NIF-supported NGO activities, and the lack of effective guidelines in NIF’s funding processes. From correspondence, it is clear that many NIF donors, both individuals and via Jewish federations, are unaware of these political campaigns.
The political impact of NIF-supported NGOs, based on an annual budget of $32 million, is increased via additional funds from European governments and church groups that allocate funds to the same recipient organizations. Through the media, via legal processes, and elsewhere, NIF grantees are therefore in a position to manipulate the marketplace of ideas to a degree that is entirely disproportionate to the general level of support for their agendas.
This preliminary report presents an overview of how NIF-funded NGOs contributed to the Goldstone Report and promoted it after publication. Also included are brief summaries of the activities of 20 NGOs funded by NIF.
2. NIF-funded NGOs and the Goldstone indictment
Written submission
A group of Israeli NGOs -ACRI, Adalah, Bimkom, Gisha, HaMoked, PHR-I, PCATI, and Yesh Din - submitted a one-sided written statement to the Goldstone Commission (June 30, 2009) that does not address alleged Hamas war crimes, “but rather offers our own distinct perspective - human rights violations for which Israel must be held accountable.”[1 ] This NGO document makes entirely speculative assertions about the motivation for the IDF operation against Hamas, claiming that “[t]o the extent that this was planned as a punitive operation which main purpose was not the achievement of actual military objectives, but the inflicting of deliberate damage as a deterrent and punitive measure” - despite their lacking requisite information to make such an assertion.[2 ]
The submission accuses the IDF of having “deliberately and knowingly shelled civilian institutions,” supporting the coalition’s incorrect legal claim that “Israel deviated from the principle that allows harm only to military objectives, and carried out strikes against civilian sites in an effort to achieve political ends.”[3 ] References and evidence are missing for many accusations, such as the allegation that “[m]any prisoners... were held in pits in the ground... apparently dug by the army”[4 ]; details are sourced to “information in our possession.”[5 ]
NGO support for Goldstone
Since April 2009, when Judge Richard Goldstone was appointed to lead the UN Human Rights Council’s fact-finding mission into the Gaza war, NIF-funded NGOs were among those that led the campaign demanding that the Israeli government cooperate with the investigation, supporting misleading claims that the mandate was “balanced” and the panel was fair.
In turn, Goldstone bolstered the credibility of these groups by relying heavily on their publications, uncritically repeating claims, calling NGO activists to “testify,” praising their “high professional standard” while working in “extremely difficult circumstances,” and defending them against alleged “repression” from the Israeli government.
Since the initial publication of the Goldstone report on September 15, 2009, and throughout the proceedings at the UN, these NIF-supported NGOs have continued supporting Goldstone and lobbying the governments of the United States, the European Union, and others to legitimize the report’s extreme biases and endorse its recommendations.
B’Tselem, which receives a substantial percentage of its budget from NIF, the EU, and European governments, has been campaigning against the IDF and demanding an “independent and credible investigation ” of the Gaza war since January 2009, urged Israel to cooperate with Goldstone, and “provided assistance to the investigative staff of the Goldstone mission from the beginning to the end of its research.”
Disingenuously, and erasing her own role in the process, B’Tselem Executive Director Jessica Montell claimed that “Israel has only itself to blame ” for the report’s conclusions and recommendations. She also stated that Israel was “shoot[ing] the messenger and bury[ing] its head in the sand.”
When the report was released, B’Tselem mildly criticized Goldstone for “framing of Israel’s military operation as part of ‘an overall policy aimed at punishing the Gaza population for its resilience’” and “the very careful phrasing regarding Hamas abuses.” However, this NIF-funded political NGO continues to “advocate[] for... its principal recommendation: that Israel investigate suspicions that its forces breached international humanitarian law.”
Other NIF grantees - Adalah, ACRI, B’Tselem, Gisha, HaMoked, PHR-I, PCATI, and Yesh Din - issued a joint statement calling on Israel to “take the report seriously” and “cooperate with an international monitoring mechanism that would guarantee both the independence of that investigation and the implementation of its conclusions.”
3. Summary of activities by 20 major NIF grantees active in the Arab-Israeli conflict
•Adala h (NIF grants authorized in 2006-2008: $1,045,292) advances “war crimes” charges against Israel at the UN Human Rights Council, in reports cited in the media, in Israeli courts, and in campaigns conducted with other political NGOs. Adalah officials promote the false claim that “the Israeli legal and judicial systems have consistently failed in providing any legal remedies to the Palestinian people.” Adalah, itself, has prevailed several times in cases filed in Israeli courts.
In 2007, Adalah proposed a constitution for Israel that calls for replacing the Jewish framework of the state with a “democratic, bilingual and multicultural” framework. This “Democratic Constitution ” - based on the concept of “a one-state solution” - would permit Jewish immigration for “humanitarian reasons” only.
Adalah campaigns against national community service for Arabs in Israel, even within the Arab sector, although such service is widely supported by Israeli Arabs. In a 2005 publication, for instance, Adalah claimed “national/military service in Israel... constitutes the Jewish Zionist identity” and forces Arabs to “to submit to a rationale that further grounds discrimination and oppression.”
Adalah officials, in conjunction with radical Palestinian NGO Al-Haq, wrote and edited large portions of a May 2009 publication, initiated by anti-Israel ideologue John Dugard, entitled “Occupation, Colonialism, Apartheid?: A re-assessment of Israel´s practices in the occupied Palestinian territories under international law.” The document refers to Israeli occupation as a “colonial enterprise which implements a system of apartheid.”
Goldstone excerpt: “Not allowing prisoners to use the telephone “violates detainees’ right to dignity and their right to family life, and ‘transforms their imprisonment to a humiliating and degrading experience that contradicts international norms and conventions.” (para. 1458)
• Coalition of Women for Peace (CWP) (grants authorized in 2006-2008: $285,509) is a highly politicized umbrella organization that systematically condemns Israeli policies. CWP projects include Machsom Watch (grants authorized in 2006-2008: $165,198) and others that use “apartheid” and “Naqba” rhetoric to delegitimize Israel.
CWP is responsible for the “Who Profits? ” divestment project tracking Israeli and international corporations that allegedly “are directly involved in the occupation.” Who Profits? influenced the anti-Israel divestment campaign in Norway and a similar project in the UK.
In 2009, CWP published an article asking: “How is it that our consolation is that we hurt, we demolished, we killed?.... The truth is that we really do like wars, that's our language, that's our culture... we will find all the explanations in the world to justify any war. Even this one, the spare one, in Gaza.” During the war, CWP joined the “Remove the Siege-Stop the War ” coalition, and organized protests against Israeli policy. It also participated in public commemorations of the “59th anniversary of the Naqba” on Israel’s Independence Day in 2007.
Goldstone excerpt (Machsom Watch): “The restriction on the ability to move freely, without obstacle or delay, or without another person’s authorization, is often perceived as a humiliating experience.” (para. 1509)
• Physicians for Human Rights-Israel (PHR-I) (grants authorized in 2006-2008: $503,537) supports often violent protests at the security barrier near Bil’in as an “act of solidarity with the people who fight against the occupation and the building of the wall.” PHR-I campaigned in international forums against Israel’s actions during the Gaza War, appearing before the UN Committee on the Exercise of the Inalienable Rights of the Palestinian People andlobbying the European Union to support condemnations of Israel. This NGO was a major source of accusations contained in the Goldstone report.
Goldstone excerpt: “The Mission also investigated and confirmed allegations about the use of weapons whose potential long-term impact on individual victims’ health raises concern. They include allegations of the use of weapons containing chemical pollutants such as tungsten and white phosphorus.” (para. 1258)[6 ]
• Breaking the Silence (BtS) (grants authorized in 2006-2008: $200,855) says it “voices the experiences ” of Israeli soldiers “in order to force Israeli society to address the reality which it created.” Although claiming to target “Israeli society,” this NGO’s lobbying and media advocacy focus on international audiences. Amos Harel wrote in Haaretz: “Breaking the Silence... has a clear political agenda, and can no longer be classed as a ‘human rights organization.’”
In addition to collecting anonymous testimony from soldiers some of it based on hearsay and widely cited as evidence of “war crimes” in Gaza by publications including the Goldstone report BtS conducts tours to Hebron and the South Hebron Hills to support its claim that in Hebron there is “a reality of Apartheid and a kind of ‘ethnic cleansing.’”
Goldstone excerpt: “Breaking the Silence issued a statement in which it accused the Foreign Ministry of a ‘witch-hunt’, saying that it testified to the erosion of the ‘democratic culture’ in Israel.” (para. 1731)
•B’Tselem (grants authorized in 2006-1008: $785,285) “acts primarily to change Israeli policy in the Occupied Territories,” a political objective bolstered by B’Tselem’s office in Washington, DC, which brings its agenda directly to U.S. officials. While widely considered Israel’s premier human-rights organization, B’Tselem has faced serious criticism for its misrepresentations of international law, inaccurate research, skewed statistics (includingcasualty lists ), and selective coverage of violations against Israelis. These problematic methodologies reinforce the Palestinian narrative of victimization and portray Israel as the sole impediment to peace.
Goldstone excerpt: “In the face of the recently increase in violence by the Israeli security forces in the West Bank, B’Tselem stated that condemnations by Ministers and other officials “remain solely declarative. Security forces, meanwhile, misusing their power, continue to abuse and beat Palestinians, among them, minors.... If a message is sent to security forces, it is that even if the establishment does not accept acts of violence, it will not take measures against those who commit them. The effect of such a message is that the lives and dignity of Palestinians are meaningless and that security forces can continue, pursuant to the function they serve, to abuse, humiliate, and beat Palestinians with whom they come into contact.” (para. 1405)
• Bimkom (grants authorized in 2006-2008: $923,221)aims “to achieve the right to equality and social justice in matters of planning, development, and the allocation of land resources” and to “[assist] communities and minorities affected by social and economic disadvantage.” In reality, Bimkom promotes the Palestinian narrative. Activities include acampaign against the security barrier ; petitions against “collective punishment ” in Gaza; and input to press releases, reports, and a website detailing allegations of Israeli “violations” during the fighting in Gaza - most of which involved issues outside Bimkom’s remit and stated mandate.
Goldstone excerpt: “In a recent report reviewed by the Mission, Bimkom concluded that the Israeli Civil Administration applied ‘a deliberate and consistent policy in Area C with the goal of restricting Palestinian construction and development and limiting its spatial dispersion.’” (para. 1539)
• Public Committee Against Torture in Israel (PCATI) (grants authorized in 2006-2008: $48,888) claims to campaign against torture and for prisoner rights. PCATI’s reports condemn alleged Israeli abuses, and its officials appear before international frameworks to promote anti-Israel agendas. In 2009, a PCATI official testified in Geneva before the UN’s Goldstone inquiry on the Gaza war, referring to Israel’s “unacceptable collective punishment” and to Palestinian “martyrs.” In a 2009 report submitted to the UN Committee Against Torture, PCATI accused Israel of attacks on “civilians and civilian objects” during the Gaza fighting. The group appears to have participated in only one statement in support of Gilad Shalit, the Israeli soldier kidnapped by Hamas in June 2006 and consistently denied his rights under the Geneva Conventions.
Goldstone excerpt: “A PCATI lawyer representing detainees, Mr. Bader, who spoke at the Mission’s public hearings in Geneva, interviewed a number of the detainees in Israeli prisons and relayed their testimonies. These include stories from prisoners who said they were used as human shields or held in sandpits.” (para. 1110)
•Gisha (grants authorized in 2006-2008: $35,625) promotes the false claim that Gaza remains “occupied” under international law, and that Israel has a legal obligation to grant unfettered “freedom of movement” to Gaza residents. Gisha’s claims were quoted in the Goldstone report in order to accuse Israel of enacting policies “in the pursuance by Israel of political goals at the expense of the civilian population, in blatant violation of international humanitarian law.”
Gisha’s highly publicized 2008 campaign condemning Israel for barring Palestinian students’ travel from Gaza to Israel and to the United States under the Fulbright program erased Israel’s legitimated security concerns. Indeed, most of these “students” were refused entry by the American government on security grounds. In addition, in frequent condemnations of Israeli policy on Gaza, Gisha has largely ignored the tons of humanitarian aid provided by Israel despite massive rocket barrages from Gaza.
Goldstone excerpt: “Gisha call[s] this regulation an additional measure in a deliberate Israeli policy to deepen the separation between the West Bank and Gaza ‘in the pursuance by Israel of political goals at the expense of the civilian population, in blatant violation of international humanitarian law.’” (para. 1527)
•HaMoked (grants authorized in 2006-2008: $499,765) accuses Israel of “war crimes,” with only a token reference to Hamas’ “sporadic” rocket fire against Israeli civilians. HaMokedcalled the Gaza war a “punitive operation,” and promoted the unverified claim that “[m]any prisoners... were held in pits in the ground... apparently dug by the army.” During the Gaza war, HaMoked distorted international law to criminalize Israeli actions, falsely claiming that “phosphorous and cluster bombs” are “illegal weapons prohibited by International Humanitarian Law.”
•Association for Civil Rights in Israel (ACRI) (grants authorized in 2006-2008: $2,671,443) has a wide agenda in Israel, but frequently employs rhetoric that contributes to demonization and delegitimization. For example, its 2008 annual report labeled Israel’s policies in the West Bank “Apartheid,” and ACRI representatives have referred to “institutional racism” in Palestinian forums. Many legal claims in its reports are distortions or selective interpretations of international humanitarian law.
Goldstone excerpt: “In a report reviewed by the Mission, the Association for Civil Rights in Israel stated that, in Jerusalem “discrimination in planning and building, expropriation of lands, and minimal investment in physical infrastructure and government and municipal services - these are concrete expressions of an Israeli policy designed to secure a Jewish majority in Jerusalem and push Palestinian residents outside the city's borders.” (para. 1536)
• Ir Amim (grants authorized in 2006-2008: $958,237) focuses on “legal advocacy aimed at halting or mitigating unilateral actions that harm the fabric of life in Jerusalem, and create obstacles to reaching an agreed-upon future for the city and the region.” In reality, Ir Amimadvocates and campaigns exclusively for the Palestinian narrative on Jerusalem, adopting the offensive PLO rhetoric of “Judaization ”, and directing these efforts at influencing foreign journalists, diplomats, and opinion-makers.
View the report at Israel Behind the News.
NIF-funded groups and their publications were featured centrally in the Goldstone report, which focused on alleged Israeli “war crimes” in the 2009 Gaza war. The report referenced B’Tselem more than 56 times; Adalah, 38; and Breaking the Silence, 27.
Many of these citations referred to speculative issues unrelated to the conflict in Gaza, seeking to brand Israeli democracy as “repressive” and to widen the scope of the condemnations.
Since the initial publication of the Goldstone report on September 15, 2009, these NIF-supported NGOs - including B’Tselem, ACRI, Gisha, PHR-I, and Yesh Din - have continued supporting Goldstone and lobbying the governments of the United States, the European Union, and others to legitimize the report’s extreme biases and endorse its recommendations.
In response to the controversy over their support for Goldstone, these organizations and the NIF launched an offensive against critics. NIF supporters accused NGO Monitor of “silenc[ing] expression,” and being “extremist,” “incendiary,” the “rotten fruit of Israeli democracy,” and “McCarthyite.”
In addition to involvement with Goldstone, several organizations funded by NIF, including Adalah, campaign against the legitimacy of Israel as a Jewish democratic state. Others such as Mossawa and Coalition of Women for Peace are active in worldwide boycotts, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) campaigns targeting Israel.
The political impact of NIF-supported NGOs, based on NIF’s annual budget of $32 million, is bolstered by additional funds from European governments and church groups that allocate funds to the same recipient organizations.
Contents:
1) NIF-grantees and the delegitimization of Israel
2) NIF-funded NGOs and the Goldstone indictment
3) Summary of activities by 20 major NIF grantees active in the Arab-Israeli conflict
Introduction:
The New Israel Fund (NIF) supports more than 100 organizations involved in a wide range of areas in Israel, including political activism related to the Arab-Israeli conflict.
As highlighted recently, NIF-funded groups and their publications were featured centrally in the Goldstone report, which focused on alleged Israeli “war crimes” in the 2009 Gaza war. During the fighting, as shown in NGO Monitor analyses, these NGOs issued daily reports claiming to document Israeli “human rights” violations. NGO officials, widely quoted in the media, lobbied intensively for an international inquiry.
After the Goldstone commission was established, three major and long-time NIF grantees (Public Committee against Torture in Israel, Physicians for Human Rights-Israel, and Adalah) participated in a May 2009 NGO “town hall meeting” in Geneva that helped shape the course of Goldstone’s ”investigation”. In addition, seven NIF-funded NGOs (including the Association for Civil Rights in Israel, Gisha, HaMoked, and Yesh Din) submitted a joint statement to Goldstone, and a representative from PCATI “testified” at the July 2009 Goldstone hearings, referring to “collective punishment” and “[Palestinian] martyrs.”
The resulting Goldstone report referenced B’Tselem more than 56 times; Adalah, 38; and Breaking the Silence, 27. Significantly, many of these citations referred to speculative issues unrelated to the conflict in Gaza, seeking to brand Israeli democracy as “repressive,” and to widen the scope of the condemnations and the resulting political campaigns.
In turn, B’Tselem, Adalah, and PHR-I, among others, have lobbied Israeli and foreign governments to support Goldstone’s report and its recommendations. Adalah, for example, joined the Palestinian NGOs Al Mezan, Al-Haq, and the Palestinian Center for Human Rights (PCHR) in a press release urging countries to “re-evaluate their relationship with Israel.”
In response to the controversy over their support for Goldstone, these organizations and the NIF launched an offensive against critics, including NGO Monitor, that brought the relationship to light. Through coarse smears, NIF supporters accuse NGO Monitor of “silenc[ing] expression,” and being “extremist,” “incendiary,” and the “rotten fruit of Israeli democracy,” and “McCarthyite.”
NGO Monitor’s many calls for debates with NIF officials and grantees have been rebuffed. In July 2009, an NIF employee posted a vulgar cartoon on his blog directed at NGO Monitor President Gerald Steinberg in July 2009, and in 2008 another NIF grantee frivolously sued NGO Monitor for libel - apparently, to quash reporting and public debate on its activities.
1. NIF-grantees and the delegitimization of Israel
In addition to involvement with Goldstone, several organizations funded by NIF campaign against the legitimacy of Israel as a Jewish democratic state, and are active in worldwide boycotts, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) and similar campaigns targeting Israel.
NIF has justified its funding decisions, claiming to promote pluralism and dialogue, and to support free expression of differing views in Israel. In contrast, NGO Monitor’s research demonstrates the damage to democracy resulting from these NIF-supported NGO activities, and the lack of effective guidelines in NIF’s funding processes. From correspondence, it is clear that many NIF donors, both individuals and via Jewish federations, are unaware of these political campaigns.
The political impact of NIF-supported NGOs, based on an annual budget of $32 million, is increased via additional funds from European governments and church groups that allocate funds to the same recipient organizations. Through the media, via legal processes, and elsewhere, NIF grantees are therefore in a position to manipulate the marketplace of ideas to a degree that is entirely disproportionate to the general level of support for their agendas.
This preliminary report presents an overview of how NIF-funded NGOs contributed to the Goldstone Report and promoted it after publication. Also included are brief summaries of the activities of 20 NGOs funded by NIF.
2. NIF-funded NGOs and the Goldstone indictment
Written submission
A group of Israeli NGOs -ACRI, Adalah, Bimkom, Gisha, HaMoked, PHR-I, PCATI, and Yesh Din - submitted a one-sided written statement to the Goldstone Commission (June 30, 2009) that does not address alleged Hamas war crimes, “but rather offers our own distinct perspective - human rights violations for which Israel must be held accountable.”[1 ] This NGO document makes entirely speculative assertions about the motivation for the IDF operation against Hamas, claiming that “[t]o the extent that this was planned as a punitive operation which main purpose was not the achievement of actual military objectives, but the inflicting of deliberate damage as a deterrent and punitive measure” - despite their lacking requisite information to make such an assertion.[2 ]
The submission accuses the IDF of having “deliberately and knowingly shelled civilian institutions,” supporting the coalition’s incorrect legal claim that “Israel deviated from the principle that allows harm only to military objectives, and carried out strikes against civilian sites in an effort to achieve political ends.”[3 ] References and evidence are missing for many accusations, such as the allegation that “[m]any prisoners... were held in pits in the ground... apparently dug by the army”[4 ]; details are sourced to “information in our possession.”[5 ]
NGO support for Goldstone
Since April 2009, when Judge Richard Goldstone was appointed to lead the UN Human Rights Council’s fact-finding mission into the Gaza war, NIF-funded NGOs were among those that led the campaign demanding that the Israeli government cooperate with the investigation, supporting misleading claims that the mandate was “balanced” and the panel was fair.
In turn, Goldstone bolstered the credibility of these groups by relying heavily on their publications, uncritically repeating claims, calling NGO activists to “testify,” praising their “high professional standard” while working in “extremely difficult circumstances,” and defending them against alleged “repression” from the Israeli government.
Since the initial publication of the Goldstone report on September 15, 2009, and throughout the proceedings at the UN, these NIF-supported NGOs have continued supporting Goldstone and lobbying the governments of the United States, the European Union, and others to legitimize the report’s extreme biases and endorse its recommendations.
B’Tselem, which receives a substantial percentage of its budget from NIF, the EU, and European governments, has been campaigning against the IDF and demanding an “independent and credible investigation ” of the Gaza war since January 2009, urged Israel to cooperate with Goldstone, and “provided assistance to the investigative staff of the Goldstone mission from the beginning to the end of its research.”
Disingenuously, and erasing her own role in the process, B’Tselem Executive Director Jessica Montell claimed that “Israel has only itself to blame ” for the report’s conclusions and recommendations. She also stated that Israel was “shoot[ing] the messenger and bury[ing] its head in the sand.”
When the report was released, B’Tselem mildly criticized Goldstone for “framing of Israel’s military operation as part of ‘an overall policy aimed at punishing the Gaza population for its resilience’” and “the very careful phrasing regarding Hamas abuses.” However, this NIF-funded political NGO continues to “advocate[] for... its principal recommendation: that Israel investigate suspicions that its forces breached international humanitarian law.”
Other NIF grantees - Adalah, ACRI, B’Tselem, Gisha, HaMoked, PHR-I, PCATI, and Yesh Din - issued a joint statement calling on Israel to “take the report seriously” and “cooperate with an international monitoring mechanism that would guarantee both the independence of that investigation and the implementation of its conclusions.”
3. Summary of activities by 20 major NIF grantees active in the Arab-Israeli conflict
•Adala h (NIF grants authorized in 2006-2008: $1,045,292) advances “war crimes” charges against Israel at the UN Human Rights Council, in reports cited in the media, in Israeli courts, and in campaigns conducted with other political NGOs. Adalah officials promote the false claim that “the Israeli legal and judicial systems have consistently failed in providing any legal remedies to the Palestinian people.” Adalah, itself, has prevailed several times in cases filed in Israeli courts.
In 2007, Adalah proposed a constitution for Israel that calls for replacing the Jewish framework of the state with a “democratic, bilingual and multicultural” framework. This “Democratic Constitution ” - based on the concept of “a one-state solution” - would permit Jewish immigration for “humanitarian reasons” only.
Adalah campaigns against national community service for Arabs in Israel, even within the Arab sector, although such service is widely supported by Israeli Arabs. In a 2005 publication, for instance, Adalah claimed “national/military service in Israel... constitutes the Jewish Zionist identity” and forces Arabs to “to submit to a rationale that further grounds discrimination and oppression.”
Adalah officials, in conjunction with radical Palestinian NGO Al-Haq, wrote and edited large portions of a May 2009 publication, initiated by anti-Israel ideologue John Dugard, entitled “Occupation, Colonialism, Apartheid?: A re-assessment of Israel´s practices in the occupied Palestinian territories under international law.” The document refers to Israeli occupation as a “colonial enterprise which implements a system of apartheid.”
Goldstone excerpt: “Not allowing prisoners to use the telephone “violates detainees’ right to dignity and their right to family life, and ‘transforms their imprisonment to a humiliating and degrading experience that contradicts international norms and conventions.” (para. 1458)
• Coalition of Women for Peace (CWP) (grants authorized in 2006-2008: $285,509) is a highly politicized umbrella organization that systematically condemns Israeli policies. CWP projects include Machsom Watch (grants authorized in 2006-2008: $165,198) and others that use “apartheid” and “Naqba” rhetoric to delegitimize Israel.
CWP is responsible for the “Who Profits? ” divestment project tracking Israeli and international corporations that allegedly “are directly involved in the occupation.” Who Profits? influenced the anti-Israel divestment campaign in Norway and a similar project in the UK.
In 2009, CWP published an article asking: “How is it that our consolation is that we hurt, we demolished, we killed?.... The truth is that we really do like wars, that's our language, that's our culture... we will find all the explanations in the world to justify any war. Even this one, the spare one, in Gaza.” During the war, CWP joined the “Remove the Siege-Stop the War ” coalition, and organized protests against Israeli policy. It also participated in public commemorations of the “59th anniversary of the Naqba” on Israel’s Independence Day in 2007.
Goldstone excerpt (Machsom Watch): “The restriction on the ability to move freely, without obstacle or delay, or without another person’s authorization, is often perceived as a humiliating experience.” (para. 1509)
• Physicians for Human Rights-Israel (PHR-I) (grants authorized in 2006-2008: $503,537) supports often violent protests at the security barrier near Bil’in as an “act of solidarity with the people who fight against the occupation and the building of the wall.” PHR-I campaigned in international forums against Israel’s actions during the Gaza War, appearing before the UN Committee on the Exercise of the Inalienable Rights of the Palestinian People andlobbying the European Union to support condemnations of Israel. This NGO was a major source of accusations contained in the Goldstone report.
Goldstone excerpt: “The Mission also investigated and confirmed allegations about the use of weapons whose potential long-term impact on individual victims’ health raises concern. They include allegations of the use of weapons containing chemical pollutants such as tungsten and white phosphorus.” (para. 1258)[6 ]
• Breaking the Silence (BtS) (grants authorized in 2006-2008: $200,855) says it “voices the experiences ” of Israeli soldiers “in order to force Israeli society to address the reality which it created.” Although claiming to target “Israeli society,” this NGO’s lobbying and media advocacy focus on international audiences. Amos Harel wrote in Haaretz: “Breaking the Silence... has a clear political agenda, and can no longer be classed as a ‘human rights organization.’”
In addition to collecting anonymous testimony from soldiers some of it based on hearsay and widely cited as evidence of “war crimes” in Gaza by publications including the Goldstone report BtS conducts tours to Hebron and the South Hebron Hills to support its claim that in Hebron there is “a reality of Apartheid and a kind of ‘ethnic cleansing.’”
Goldstone excerpt: “Breaking the Silence issued a statement in which it accused the Foreign Ministry of a ‘witch-hunt’, saying that it testified to the erosion of the ‘democratic culture’ in Israel.” (para. 1731)
•B’Tselem (grants authorized in 2006-1008: $785,285) “acts primarily to change Israeli policy in the Occupied Territories,” a political objective bolstered by B’Tselem’s office in Washington, DC, which brings its agenda directly to U.S. officials. While widely considered Israel’s premier human-rights organization, B’Tselem has faced serious criticism for its misrepresentations of international law, inaccurate research, skewed statistics (includingcasualty lists ), and selective coverage of violations against Israelis. These problematic methodologies reinforce the Palestinian narrative of victimization and portray Israel as the sole impediment to peace.
Goldstone excerpt: “In the face of the recently increase in violence by the Israeli security forces in the West Bank, B’Tselem stated that condemnations by Ministers and other officials “remain solely declarative. Security forces, meanwhile, misusing their power, continue to abuse and beat Palestinians, among them, minors.... If a message is sent to security forces, it is that even if the establishment does not accept acts of violence, it will not take measures against those who commit them. The effect of such a message is that the lives and dignity of Palestinians are meaningless and that security forces can continue, pursuant to the function they serve, to abuse, humiliate, and beat Palestinians with whom they come into contact.” (para. 1405)
• Bimkom (grants authorized in 2006-2008: $923,221)aims “to achieve the right to equality and social justice in matters of planning, development, and the allocation of land resources” and to “[assist] communities and minorities affected by social and economic disadvantage.” In reality, Bimkom promotes the Palestinian narrative. Activities include acampaign against the security barrier ; petitions against “collective punishment ” in Gaza; and input to press releases, reports, and a website detailing allegations of Israeli “violations” during the fighting in Gaza - most of which involved issues outside Bimkom’s remit and stated mandate.
Goldstone excerpt: “In a recent report reviewed by the Mission, Bimkom concluded that the Israeli Civil Administration applied ‘a deliberate and consistent policy in Area C with the goal of restricting Palestinian construction and development and limiting its spatial dispersion.’” (para. 1539)
• Public Committee Against Torture in Israel (PCATI) (grants authorized in 2006-2008: $48,888) claims to campaign against torture and for prisoner rights. PCATI’s reports condemn alleged Israeli abuses, and its officials appear before international frameworks to promote anti-Israel agendas. In 2009, a PCATI official testified in Geneva before the UN’s Goldstone inquiry on the Gaza war, referring to Israel’s “unacceptable collective punishment” and to Palestinian “martyrs.” In a 2009 report submitted to the UN Committee Against Torture, PCATI accused Israel of attacks on “civilians and civilian objects” during the Gaza fighting. The group appears to have participated in only one statement in support of Gilad Shalit, the Israeli soldier kidnapped by Hamas in June 2006 and consistently denied his rights under the Geneva Conventions.
Goldstone excerpt: “A PCATI lawyer representing detainees, Mr. Bader, who spoke at the Mission’s public hearings in Geneva, interviewed a number of the detainees in Israeli prisons and relayed their testimonies. These include stories from prisoners who said they were used as human shields or held in sandpits.” (para. 1110)
•Gisha (grants authorized in 2006-2008: $35,625) promotes the false claim that Gaza remains “occupied” under international law, and that Israel has a legal obligation to grant unfettered “freedom of movement” to Gaza residents. Gisha’s claims were quoted in the Goldstone report in order to accuse Israel of enacting policies “in the pursuance by Israel of political goals at the expense of the civilian population, in blatant violation of international humanitarian law.”
Gisha’s highly publicized 2008 campaign condemning Israel for barring Palestinian students’ travel from Gaza to Israel and to the United States under the Fulbright program erased Israel’s legitimated security concerns. Indeed, most of these “students” were refused entry by the American government on security grounds. In addition, in frequent condemnations of Israeli policy on Gaza, Gisha has largely ignored the tons of humanitarian aid provided by Israel despite massive rocket barrages from Gaza.
Goldstone excerpt: “Gisha call[s] this regulation an additional measure in a deliberate Israeli policy to deepen the separation between the West Bank and Gaza ‘in the pursuance by Israel of political goals at the expense of the civilian population, in blatant violation of international humanitarian law.’” (para. 1527)
•HaMoked (grants authorized in 2006-2008: $499,765) accuses Israel of “war crimes,” with only a token reference to Hamas’ “sporadic” rocket fire against Israeli civilians. HaMokedcalled the Gaza war a “punitive operation,” and promoted the unverified claim that “[m]any prisoners... were held in pits in the ground... apparently dug by the army.” During the Gaza war, HaMoked distorted international law to criminalize Israeli actions, falsely claiming that “phosphorous and cluster bombs” are “illegal weapons prohibited by International Humanitarian Law.”
•Association for Civil Rights in Israel (ACRI) (grants authorized in 2006-2008: $2,671,443) has a wide agenda in Israel, but frequently employs rhetoric that contributes to demonization and delegitimization. For example, its 2008 annual report labeled Israel’s policies in the West Bank “Apartheid,” and ACRI representatives have referred to “institutional racism” in Palestinian forums. Many legal claims in its reports are distortions or selective interpretations of international humanitarian law.
Goldstone excerpt: “In a report reviewed by the Mission, the Association for Civil Rights in Israel stated that, in Jerusalem “discrimination in planning and building, expropriation of lands, and minimal investment in physical infrastructure and government and municipal services - these are concrete expressions of an Israeli policy designed to secure a Jewish majority in Jerusalem and push Palestinian residents outside the city's borders.” (para. 1536)
• Ir Amim (grants authorized in 2006-2008: $958,237) focuses on “legal advocacy aimed at halting or mitigating unilateral actions that harm the fabric of life in Jerusalem, and create obstacles to reaching an agreed-upon future for the city and the region.” In reality, Ir Amimadvocates and campaigns exclusively for the Palestinian narrative on Jerusalem, adopting the offensive PLO rhetoric of “Judaization ”, and directing these efforts at influencing foreign journalists, diplomats, and opinion-makers.
View the report at Israel Behind the News.
New Revelations About the UN Goldstone Report that Seriously Undermine its Credibility
Col. (ret.) Desmond Travers was one of the four members of the UN Fact Finding Mission that produced what is widely called the Goldstone Report. The Mission investigated Operation Cast Lead in the Gaza Strip between December 27, 2008 and January 18, 2009. Travers joined the Irish Defense Forces in 1961 and retired after forty years. As the only former officer who belonged to Justice Richard Goldstone's team, he was the senior figure responsible for the military analysis that provided the basis for condemning Israel for war crimes.
After following his repeated public appearances with the other mission members in July 2009, and especially in light of his most recent interviews, serious flaws have now become evident in the methodology he followed, in his collection and processing of data, and in the conclusions he draws. In the past, the flaws in the Goldstone report, and especially its lack of balance, have been criticized by the London Times, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, and the Economist, but the fundamental problems of its military analysis have not been fully addressed. In the material presented here, this becomes evident in four specific ways:
1. A Fundamental Bias against the Israel Defense Forces
During the Mission's collection of testimonies from Palestinian psychologists in the Gaza Strip, Travers asked them straight out to explain how Israeli soldiers could kill Palestinian children in front of their parents. In an interview with Middle East Monitor, on February 2, 2010, he asserted that in the past Israeli soldiers had "taken out and deliberately shot" Irish peacekeeping forces in Southern Lebanon. Both of these statements by Travers are completely false. It should be stressed that one of the most vicious and unsubstantiated conclusions in the Goldstone Report is the suggestion that Israel deliberately killed Palestinian civilians.
While Travers assumes the worst of intentions on the part of the Israel Defense Forces, he praises Hamas for their cooperation with the Mission. When he was asked about Hamas intimidation that affected the Mission's inquiries, he replied that that there was "none
whatsoever." Yet the Goldstone Report itself noted in Paragraph 440 that those interviewed in Gaza appeared reluctant to speak about the presence of Palestinian armed groups because of a "fear of reprisals." He rejects the notion that Hamas shielded its forces in the civilian population and does not accept the idea that Israel faced asymmetric warfare.
2. False Information Reported About Weapons Systems
Travers comes up with a story that the IDF had unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV's) that could obtain a "thermal signature" on a Gaza house and detect that there were large numbers of people inside. Incredibly, he then suggests that with this information that certain houses were "packed with people," the Israeli military would then deliberately order a missile strike on these populated homes. The primary technical problem with his theory is that Israel does not have UAV's that can see though houses and pick up a thermal signature. More importantly, Israel used UAV's to monitor that Palestinian civilians left houses that had received multiple warnings, precisely because Israel sought to minimize civilian casualties, a fact that Travers could not fathom, because of his own clear biases.
3. Completely Inaccurate Data
Travers rejects that Israel began military operations against the Gaza Strip on December 27, 2008 as an act of self-defense in response to Hamas rockets. He bases this idea on a "fact" that he presents that in the month prior to start of the war, there were only "something like two" rockets that fell on Israel. Israeli military sources found that there were in fact 32 rockets fired from Gaza at Israel over three days alone--between December 16 and 18, 2008. He adds to his analysis that at this time Hamas sought to extend the tahdiya, or lull arrangement--which he called a cease-fire. Yet the Izz al-Din al-Qassam Brigades of Hamas announced on December 17 that the lull would come to an end two days later and would not be renewed. The head of the Hamas political bureau in Damascus, Khaled Mashaal, announced the end of the lull on December 14. To say that Hamas wanted to continue the lull is a complete distortion of events.
In his Middle East Monitor interview, Travers states that he "only came across two incidents of where there was an actual combat situation" - the exchange of fire between Israel and Hamas. Because he minimizes the possibility that Israel was engaged in real combat in the Gaza Strip, it follows that he naturally conclude that Israel was essentially attacking non-combatants during Operation Cast Lead.
4. Lack of Professionalism in Conducting Thorough Investigations
Travers relies on his own prejudices when he looks into the question of whether Gazan Mosques had been militarized by Hamas and turned into weapons depots. In an interview with Harpers, published on October 29, 2009, Travers makes a sweeping generalization: "We found no evidence that mosques were used to store munitions." He then dismissed those who suggested that was the case by saying: "Those charges reflect Western perceptions in some quarters that Islam is a violent religion." How many mosques did Travers investigate? He admits that the Mission only checked two mosques.
Of course, srael produced photographic proof that large amounts of weapons were stored in mosques, like the Zaytun Mosque. In a subsequent interview, Travers rejected the Israeli proof: "I do not believe the photographs." He described the photographs as "spurious." Travers appears to be bothered by proof that contradicts the conclusions he reaches on the basis of a very limited investigation. In early 2010, Colonel Tim Collins, a British veteran of the Iraq War, visited Gaza for BBC Newsnight and inspected the ruins of a mosque that Israel had destroyed because it had been a weapons depot. He found that there was evidence of secondary explosions cause by explosives stored in the mosque cellar. Travers clearly did not make the effort that Collins made.
In his questioning of Palestinian witnesses in the Gaza Strip, Travers does not ask the questions that a military advisor should raise. He did not ask those giving testimony if they were member of the Izz al-Din al-Qassam units of Hamas and were combatants. He also failed to ask them straight out if their homes had been used to store munitions, like Grad rockets. Instead, his questions reflected his ideological bias.
Travers most recent interview also had a disturbing additional element. When addressing the role of British officers in defending Israel's claims, Travers suddenly adds: "Britain's foreign policy interests in the Middle East seem to be influenced strongly by Jewish lobbyists." Travers implies that British Jews have interests that differ from Britain's own national interests and that Prime Minister Gordon Brown's government is influenced by these considerations. This statement, unless corrected, places Travers is a position in which his views are suspect of being motivated by anti-Semitic prejudices. Even without this last statement, he clearly emerges as an individual who is not qualified to take part in any serious fact-finding mission and the U.N. should not seek his services in the future. Given his statements, Justice Richard Goldstone should repudiate Col. Travers and completely reject the conclusions that he reached as a result of his work.
For an expanded version of this report in Hebrew, see Unprofessional Conduct of the Goldstone Commission's Military Expert - Jonathan D. Halevi.
Dr. Dore Gold
Ambassador Dore Gold is President of the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs. He was the eleventh Permanent Representative of Israel to the United Nations (1997-1999). Previously he served as Foreign Policy Advisor to the former Prime Minister of Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu. He has served as an advisor to Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, who asked him to accompany his entourage to Washington and the 2003 Aqaba Summit with President George W. Bush.
Ambassador Gold was a member of the Israeli delegation at the 1998 Wye River negotiations between Israel and the PLO, outside of Washington. He negotiated the Note for the Record, which supplemented the 1997 Hebron Protocol, and in 1996 concluded the negotiations with the U.S., Lebanon, Syria, and France for the creation of the Monitoring Group for Southern Lebanon.
Dore Gold speaks at the UK Parliament on October 12, 2009
Lt. Col. (ret.) Jonathan D. Halevi
Lt. Col. (res.) Jonathan Dahoah-Halevi is a senior researcher of the Middle East and radical Islam at the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs. He is a co-founder of the Orient Research Group Ltd. and is a former advisor to the Policy Planning Division of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
View this article at Israel Behind the News
After following his repeated public appearances with the other mission members in July 2009, and especially in light of his most recent interviews, serious flaws have now become evident in the methodology he followed, in his collection and processing of data, and in the conclusions he draws. In the past, the flaws in the Goldstone report, and especially its lack of balance, have been criticized by the London Times, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, and the Economist, but the fundamental problems of its military analysis have not been fully addressed. In the material presented here, this becomes evident in four specific ways:
1. A Fundamental Bias against the Israel Defense Forces
During the Mission's collection of testimonies from Palestinian psychologists in the Gaza Strip, Travers asked them straight out to explain how Israeli soldiers could kill Palestinian children in front of their parents. In an interview with Middle East Monitor, on February 2, 2010, he asserted that in the past Israeli soldiers had "taken out and deliberately shot" Irish peacekeeping forces in Southern Lebanon. Both of these statements by Travers are completely false. It should be stressed that one of the most vicious and unsubstantiated conclusions in the Goldstone Report is the suggestion that Israel deliberately killed Palestinian civilians.
While Travers assumes the worst of intentions on the part of the Israel Defense Forces, he praises Hamas for their cooperation with the Mission. When he was asked about Hamas intimidation that affected the Mission's inquiries, he replied that that there was "none
whatsoever." Yet the Goldstone Report itself noted in Paragraph 440 that those interviewed in Gaza appeared reluctant to speak about the presence of Palestinian armed groups because of a "fear of reprisals." He rejects the notion that Hamas shielded its forces in the civilian population and does not accept the idea that Israel faced asymmetric warfare.
2. False Information Reported About Weapons Systems
Travers comes up with a story that the IDF had unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV's) that could obtain a "thermal signature" on a Gaza house and detect that there were large numbers of people inside. Incredibly, he then suggests that with this information that certain houses were "packed with people," the Israeli military would then deliberately order a missile strike on these populated homes. The primary technical problem with his theory is that Israel does not have UAV's that can see though houses and pick up a thermal signature. More importantly, Israel used UAV's to monitor that Palestinian civilians left houses that had received multiple warnings, precisely because Israel sought to minimize civilian casualties, a fact that Travers could not fathom, because of his own clear biases.
3. Completely Inaccurate Data
Travers rejects that Israel began military operations against the Gaza Strip on December 27, 2008 as an act of self-defense in response to Hamas rockets. He bases this idea on a "fact" that he presents that in the month prior to start of the war, there were only "something like two" rockets that fell on Israel. Israeli military sources found that there were in fact 32 rockets fired from Gaza at Israel over three days alone--between December 16 and 18, 2008. He adds to his analysis that at this time Hamas sought to extend the tahdiya, or lull arrangement--which he called a cease-fire. Yet the Izz al-Din al-Qassam Brigades of Hamas announced on December 17 that the lull would come to an end two days later and would not be renewed. The head of the Hamas political bureau in Damascus, Khaled Mashaal, announced the end of the lull on December 14. To say that Hamas wanted to continue the lull is a complete distortion of events.
In his Middle East Monitor interview, Travers states that he "only came across two incidents of where there was an actual combat situation" - the exchange of fire between Israel and Hamas. Because he minimizes the possibility that Israel was engaged in real combat in the Gaza Strip, it follows that he naturally conclude that Israel was essentially attacking non-combatants during Operation Cast Lead.
4. Lack of Professionalism in Conducting Thorough Investigations
Travers relies on his own prejudices when he looks into the question of whether Gazan Mosques had been militarized by Hamas and turned into weapons depots. In an interview with Harpers, published on October 29, 2009, Travers makes a sweeping generalization: "We found no evidence that mosques were used to store munitions." He then dismissed those who suggested that was the case by saying: "Those charges reflect Western perceptions in some quarters that Islam is a violent religion." How many mosques did Travers investigate? He admits that the Mission only checked two mosques.
Of course, srael produced photographic proof that large amounts of weapons were stored in mosques, like the Zaytun Mosque. In a subsequent interview, Travers rejected the Israeli proof: "I do not believe the photographs." He described the photographs as "spurious." Travers appears to be bothered by proof that contradicts the conclusions he reaches on the basis of a very limited investigation. In early 2010, Colonel Tim Collins, a British veteran of the Iraq War, visited Gaza for BBC Newsnight and inspected the ruins of a mosque that Israel had destroyed because it had been a weapons depot. He found that there was evidence of secondary explosions cause by explosives stored in the mosque cellar. Travers clearly did not make the effort that Collins made.
In his questioning of Palestinian witnesses in the Gaza Strip, Travers does not ask the questions that a military advisor should raise. He did not ask those giving testimony if they were member of the Izz al-Din al-Qassam units of Hamas and were combatants. He also failed to ask them straight out if their homes had been used to store munitions, like Grad rockets. Instead, his questions reflected his ideological bias.
Travers most recent interview also had a disturbing additional element. When addressing the role of British officers in defending Israel's claims, Travers suddenly adds: "Britain's foreign policy interests in the Middle East seem to be influenced strongly by Jewish lobbyists." Travers implies that British Jews have interests that differ from Britain's own national interests and that Prime Minister Gordon Brown's government is influenced by these considerations. This statement, unless corrected, places Travers is a position in which his views are suspect of being motivated by anti-Semitic prejudices. Even without this last statement, he clearly emerges as an individual who is not qualified to take part in any serious fact-finding mission and the U.N. should not seek his services in the future. Given his statements, Justice Richard Goldstone should repudiate Col. Travers and completely reject the conclusions that he reached as a result of his work.
For an expanded version of this report in Hebrew, see Unprofessional Conduct of the Goldstone Commission's Military Expert - Jonathan D. Halevi.
Dr. Dore Gold
Ambassador Dore Gold is President of the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs. He was the eleventh Permanent Representative of Israel to the United Nations (1997-1999). Previously he served as Foreign Policy Advisor to the former Prime Minister of Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu. He has served as an advisor to Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, who asked him to accompany his entourage to Washington and the 2003 Aqaba Summit with President George W. Bush.
Ambassador Gold was a member of the Israeli delegation at the 1998 Wye River negotiations between Israel and the PLO, outside of Washington. He negotiated the Note for the Record, which supplemented the 1997 Hebron Protocol, and in 1996 concluded the negotiations with the U.S., Lebanon, Syria, and France for the creation of the Monitoring Group for Southern Lebanon.
Dore Gold speaks at the UK Parliament on October 12, 2009
Lt. Col. (ret.) Jonathan D. Halevi
Lt. Col. (res.) Jonathan Dahoah-Halevi is a senior researcher of the Middle East and radical Islam at the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs. He is a co-founder of the Orient Research Group Ltd. and is a former advisor to the Policy Planning Division of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
View this article at Israel Behind the News
Hey New Israel Fund, Criticism is a Democratic Right
by Anne Herzberg for the Jerusalem Post
It’s strange that groups claiming to be well-versed in human rights seem so unfamiliar with the concept of free speech.
Talkbacks (1)
Those who make a full-time pursuit of criticizing others probably should grow thicker skin. Yet the New Israel Fund (NIF) and its NGO grantees have launched a thin-skinned offensive against an Israeli student group that criticized them. And they have dragged NGO Monitor into the fray.
As soon as Im Tirtzu released its report detailing how Israeli human rights organizations contributed to the Goldstone Report, NIF backers unleashed ad hominem attacks against the student group and against NGO Monitor (though we were not involved in the report). NIF has threatened to sue Im Tirtzu and any newspaper that repeats its findings. It also sent a letter to Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu calling NGO Monitor “the rotten fruit of Israeli democracy.”
The record needs to be set straight regarding many troubling aspects of NIF’s combative reaction. To avert criticism of their activities, many of the non-governmental organizations highlighted in Im Tirtzu’s report - such as B’Tselem, the Association for Civil Rights in Israel and Physicians for Human Rights-Israel - are promoting the canard that if only Israel had cooperated with Richard Goldstone and his UN fact-finding mission on the Gaza war, his report would not have been as outrageously one-sided as it turned out to be.
In truth, there is no evidence that Israeli participation in the Goldstone mission would have changed the outcome of the widely panned report.
Goldstone’s mission was the product of a political war conducted against Israel in the UN Human Rights Council. Led by some of the world’s most abusive regimes - including China, Cuba and Saudi Arabia - this corrupt body has ignored mass atrocities such as the genocide in Darfur, the slaughter of more than 25,000 Sri Lankans and the forced starvation and enslavement of North Koreans. Indeed, the Goldstone mission was created by the Organization of the Islamic Conference to deflect attention from the horrific abuses of its member states and their supporters. In fact, according to the International Criminal Court prosecutor, Goldstone’s mission was financed by the Arab League.
FOR HIS part, Goldstone went along with the farce. Where facts exonerating the IDF existed - whether from the UN, the Israeli Foreign Ministry or independent sources - Goldstone apparently ignored or twisted such evidence, choosing instead to credit Hamas sources.
Israeli NGOs played a central role in laying the foundation for Goldstone’s untenable report. During the fighting in Gaza, these groups issued nonstop allegations of “war crimes,” “collective punishment” and intentional murder of civilians. They delivered countless publications containing speculative and unconfirmed claims used to bolster the HRC’s predetermined conclusions. Much of the Goldstone Report was based directly on these inflammatory charges.
Rather than admit their role, these organizations now seek to absolve themselves of responsibility. While NGO assertions of Goldstone’s fairness are perhaps rooted in naiveté, the attempts by the NIF and its grantees to muzzle critics are far more pernicious. Since NGO Monitor first raised the issue of European government funding for supposedly “nongovernmental” organizations (many of which also receive financial and other support from the NIF), these groups have resorted to childish attacks. They have bizarrely characterized NGO Monitor as “extremist” and “right-wing” (whatever those terms mean), and complained that simply reporting on their funding and activities amounts to “repression of dissent.”
But the right of expression always comes with the potential for disapproval. It is strange that groups claiming to be so well-versed in human rights seem so unfamiliar with the concept of free speech.
These attacks must not divert attention from the massive power that NIF and its beneficiaries wield. NIF has an annual budget of $32 million. Its Israeli grantees also receive tens of millions annually from the EU, European governments, the US-based Ford Foundation and George Soros’s Open Society Institute.
NIF-funded NGOs regularly engage in public relations blitzes, often facilitated by professional media consultants. They hold press conferences, issue glossy publications in multiple languages, and contribute regular op-eds and articles to high-profile media outlets such as Ma’ariv, Haaretz, The New York Times, and Huffington Post. They regularly submit reports at the UN and send representatives to conferences in Europe and America. B’Tselem has a growing lobbying office in Washington and a representative in the UK.
NGO Monitor researchers have analyzed NIF funding practices for years. While the organization does some positive work in Israel that should be applauded, it refuses to engage in debate regarding several of its grantees that demonize Israel at the UN, support boycott and divestment campaigns, promote “lawfare” cases against Israeli officials, and even advocate erasing the Jewish character of the state. Significantly, many NIF donors are unaware of these activities. NIF has rebuffed all of NGO Monitor’s attempts to discuss appropriate “red lines” for the groups they fund.
Perhaps if NIF would stop name-calling and threatening lawsuits, the path would be open for a constructive debate about the role several NIF-supported NGOs have played in the demonization of Israel, and their exploitation by reactionary and totalitarian forces at the UN. Instead of blocking healthy discussion, NIF and its grantees should welcome this conversation - a conversation that would benefit NIF donors, the Israeli public and, ultimately, Israeli democracy.
The writer, Anne Herzberg, is the legal adviser of NGO Monitor.
View the article at Israel Behind the News
It’s strange that groups claiming to be well-versed in human rights seem so unfamiliar with the concept of free speech.
Talkbacks (1)
Those who make a full-time pursuit of criticizing others probably should grow thicker skin. Yet the New Israel Fund (NIF) and its NGO grantees have launched a thin-skinned offensive against an Israeli student group that criticized them. And they have dragged NGO Monitor into the fray.
As soon as Im Tirtzu released its report detailing how Israeli human rights organizations contributed to the Goldstone Report, NIF backers unleashed ad hominem attacks against the student group and against NGO Monitor (though we were not involved in the report). NIF has threatened to sue Im Tirtzu and any newspaper that repeats its findings. It also sent a letter to Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu calling NGO Monitor “the rotten fruit of Israeli democracy.”
The record needs to be set straight regarding many troubling aspects of NIF’s combative reaction. To avert criticism of their activities, many of the non-governmental organizations highlighted in Im Tirtzu’s report - such as B’Tselem, the Association for Civil Rights in Israel and Physicians for Human Rights-Israel - are promoting the canard that if only Israel had cooperated with Richard Goldstone and his UN fact-finding mission on the Gaza war, his report would not have been as outrageously one-sided as it turned out to be.
In truth, there is no evidence that Israeli participation in the Goldstone mission would have changed the outcome of the widely panned report.
Goldstone’s mission was the product of a political war conducted against Israel in the UN Human Rights Council. Led by some of the world’s most abusive regimes - including China, Cuba and Saudi Arabia - this corrupt body has ignored mass atrocities such as the genocide in Darfur, the slaughter of more than 25,000 Sri Lankans and the forced starvation and enslavement of North Koreans. Indeed, the Goldstone mission was created by the Organization of the Islamic Conference to deflect attention from the horrific abuses of its member states and their supporters. In fact, according to the International Criminal Court prosecutor, Goldstone’s mission was financed by the Arab League.
FOR HIS part, Goldstone went along with the farce. Where facts exonerating the IDF existed - whether from the UN, the Israeli Foreign Ministry or independent sources - Goldstone apparently ignored or twisted such evidence, choosing instead to credit Hamas sources.
Israeli NGOs played a central role in laying the foundation for Goldstone’s untenable report. During the fighting in Gaza, these groups issued nonstop allegations of “war crimes,” “collective punishment” and intentional murder of civilians. They delivered countless publications containing speculative and unconfirmed claims used to bolster the HRC’s predetermined conclusions. Much of the Goldstone Report was based directly on these inflammatory charges.
Rather than admit their role, these organizations now seek to absolve themselves of responsibility. While NGO assertions of Goldstone’s fairness are perhaps rooted in naiveté, the attempts by the NIF and its grantees to muzzle critics are far more pernicious. Since NGO Monitor first raised the issue of European government funding for supposedly “nongovernmental” organizations (many of which also receive financial and other support from the NIF), these groups have resorted to childish attacks. They have bizarrely characterized NGO Monitor as “extremist” and “right-wing” (whatever those terms mean), and complained that simply reporting on their funding and activities amounts to “repression of dissent.”
But the right of expression always comes with the potential for disapproval. It is strange that groups claiming to be so well-versed in human rights seem so unfamiliar with the concept of free speech.
These attacks must not divert attention from the massive power that NIF and its beneficiaries wield. NIF has an annual budget of $32 million. Its Israeli grantees also receive tens of millions annually from the EU, European governments, the US-based Ford Foundation and George Soros’s Open Society Institute.
NIF-funded NGOs regularly engage in public relations blitzes, often facilitated by professional media consultants. They hold press conferences, issue glossy publications in multiple languages, and contribute regular op-eds and articles to high-profile media outlets such as Ma’ariv, Haaretz, The New York Times, and Huffington Post. They regularly submit reports at the UN and send representatives to conferences in Europe and America. B’Tselem has a growing lobbying office in Washington and a representative in the UK.
NGO Monitor researchers have analyzed NIF funding practices for years. While the organization does some positive work in Israel that should be applauded, it refuses to engage in debate regarding several of its grantees that demonize Israel at the UN, support boycott and divestment campaigns, promote “lawfare” cases against Israeli officials, and even advocate erasing the Jewish character of the state. Significantly, many NIF donors are unaware of these activities. NIF has rebuffed all of NGO Monitor’s attempts to discuss appropriate “red lines” for the groups they fund.
Perhaps if NIF would stop name-calling and threatening lawsuits, the path would be open for a constructive debate about the role several NIF-supported NGOs have played in the demonization of Israel, and their exploitation by reactionary and totalitarian forces at the UN. Instead of blocking healthy discussion, NIF and its grantees should welcome this conversation - a conversation that would benefit NIF donors, the Israeli public and, ultimately, Israeli democracy.
The writer, Anne Herzberg, is the legal adviser of NGO Monitor.
View the article at Israel Behind the News
Endangering Lives to Sell Newspapers: Misrepresenting a Professional Critique of the Goldstone Report
by Professor Alan Dershowitz
Professor of Law, Harvard University
It all began with an innocent enough request for an interview about the Goldstone report and my 49 page response [1] to it. The Israeli Army radio station asked to interview me. The interview was conducted by an experienced host, Razi Barkai. Unbeknownst to me, Barkai had an agenda. He wanted to get me to say that I thought that Goldstone was a “moser.” He wanted me to use this Hebrew word, whose meaning I did not understand, because in Israel, this obscure theological term has taken on a meaning of its own. According to The Forward, “the term moser entered Israeli political discourse in 1995 in the wake of Rabin’s assassination by radical settler supporter Yigal Amir, when Amir cited some rabbis’ designation of Rabin as a moser as part of his justification for carrying out the murder.” The Forward quoted Michael Karpin, an Israeli journalist and the author of a book on Rabin’s assassination, as follows: “After the assassination, when Amir was interviewed by the police and he mentioned the term moser, people tried to find out what it is...Nobody used it here before the assassination.”
Unfortunately, I was totally unfamiliar with the “inside baseball”-or in this case “inside Israel”-use of this esoteric term.
Several times during the interview, Barkai tried to get me to agree that Goldstone was a moser, a word he pronounced with a thick accent. Since the interview was being conducted in English, I thought he was asking me to agree with him that Goldstone was a “monster.” I would never use the term “monster” since it suggests an inherent, even genetic, flaw in a person, without regard to what he has said or done. I was clear throughout my interview that I believed that Goldstone had exploited his Jewishness to lend illegitimate credibility to a false report [2]. In this respect, he had betrayed his people and deserved to be condemned in the marketplace of ideas. Accordingly, when Barkai asked me the following question, “Do you hint, Professor, that he is a moser, someone who betrays his own people?,” I focused on the part of the question I understood. Believing that he is someone who betrays his own people, I answered the question in the affirmative. Barkai had sprung the trap. Now he had me. He could send out press releases indicating that I had called Goldstone a moser, even though I never used the word and had no idea what it meant.
The story spread quickly around the world, and I was condemned, largely by the extreme left, for advocating Goldstone’s murder. As soon as I heard this, I immediately demanded a clarification from Barkai, which he ran on the air. I repeatedly emphasized, in subsequent interviews, that “I certainly did not mean to imply that any physical harm should come to Goldstone.” But this didn’t stop the incitement by those in the media more interested in sensationalism than truth.
M.J. Rosenberg, the former Director of Policy Analysis for Israel Policy Forum, wrote in his Palestine Note blog that I was “calling for Goldstone’s murder.” Even more insidiously, the Forward, a mainstream Jewish newspaper, ran a lengthy piece strongly implying that I must have known the theological (or “Halachic”) implications of “moser.” They went so far as to find an elementary school classmate at Etz Chayim Yeshiva in Boro Park who told them, quite erroneously, that I “must have heard it as a child.” (Another classmate wrote the Forward a letter confirming that he too had never heard it-and he was a good Yeshiva student!) The Forward then went on to quote another rabbi to the effect that “a moser can become a capital crime” under certain circumstances. At the very bottom of the article, so as not to detract from its sensationalism, the Forward included the following disclaimer:
“I do not want any harm to come to Richard Goldstone,” Dershowitz said. “I want him to be responded to in the marketplace of ideas.”
An article in the Jewish Telegraphic Agency by Ron Kampares was even more irresponsible. It “reported” the following:
“Most recently, Alan Dershowitz likened him to a “moser”, a Jewish traitor deemed in some interpretations as worthy of a death sentence.”
This was written days after I had made it clear that I wanted no harm to befall Goldstone. A response to the JTA article by Debra DeLee, President and CEO of Americans For Peace Now, accused me-also days after I made my position clear-of calling Goldstone a “moser,” which she said is “a term reserved in traditional Jewish law for a Jewish traitor who should be killed.”
She also showed her ignorance of the fact that I had written a 49 page substantive response to the Goldstone report, by saying that I “could have-and should have-aired substantive disagreements about the report that Judge Goldstone authored following the Gaza War.”
Finally, a columnist for the Israeli newspaper Haaretz (Bradley Burston) described me as “Kahane-sounding,” a reference for the radical rabbi who did in fact call for violence-as contrasted for my call for peace based on a two-state solution and the end of civilian settlements. But no matter, its sells newspapers.
It’s bad enough that there are some religious extremists on both sides who actually incite their followers to commit violence. But when elements of the mainstream Israeli and Jewish media twist the truth in the interest of sensationalism to imply-or state outright-that I am calling for the murder of Richard Goldstone, it is those irresponsible members of the media (and of Americans For Peace Now) who become the inciters.
See this article at Israel Behind the News
Professor of Law, Harvard University
It all began with an innocent enough request for an interview about the Goldstone report and my 49 page response [1] to it. The Israeli Army radio station asked to interview me. The interview was conducted by an experienced host, Razi Barkai. Unbeknownst to me, Barkai had an agenda. He wanted to get me to say that I thought that Goldstone was a “moser.” He wanted me to use this Hebrew word, whose meaning I did not understand, because in Israel, this obscure theological term has taken on a meaning of its own. According to The Forward, “the term moser entered Israeli political discourse in 1995 in the wake of Rabin’s assassination by radical settler supporter Yigal Amir, when Amir cited some rabbis’ designation of Rabin as a moser as part of his justification for carrying out the murder.” The Forward quoted Michael Karpin, an Israeli journalist and the author of a book on Rabin’s assassination, as follows: “After the assassination, when Amir was interviewed by the police and he mentioned the term moser, people tried to find out what it is...Nobody used it here before the assassination.”
Unfortunately, I was totally unfamiliar with the “inside baseball”-or in this case “inside Israel”-use of this esoteric term.
Several times during the interview, Barkai tried to get me to agree that Goldstone was a moser, a word he pronounced with a thick accent. Since the interview was being conducted in English, I thought he was asking me to agree with him that Goldstone was a “monster.” I would never use the term “monster” since it suggests an inherent, even genetic, flaw in a person, without regard to what he has said or done. I was clear throughout my interview that I believed that Goldstone had exploited his Jewishness to lend illegitimate credibility to a false report [2]. In this respect, he had betrayed his people and deserved to be condemned in the marketplace of ideas. Accordingly, when Barkai asked me the following question, “Do you hint, Professor, that he is a moser, someone who betrays his own people?,” I focused on the part of the question I understood. Believing that he is someone who betrays his own people, I answered the question in the affirmative. Barkai had sprung the trap. Now he had me. He could send out press releases indicating that I had called Goldstone a moser, even though I never used the word and had no idea what it meant.
The story spread quickly around the world, and I was condemned, largely by the extreme left, for advocating Goldstone’s murder. As soon as I heard this, I immediately demanded a clarification from Barkai, which he ran on the air. I repeatedly emphasized, in subsequent interviews, that “I certainly did not mean to imply that any physical harm should come to Goldstone.” But this didn’t stop the incitement by those in the media more interested in sensationalism than truth.
M.J. Rosenberg, the former Director of Policy Analysis for Israel Policy Forum, wrote in his Palestine Note blog that I was “calling for Goldstone’s murder.” Even more insidiously, the Forward, a mainstream Jewish newspaper, ran a lengthy piece strongly implying that I must have known the theological (or “Halachic”) implications of “moser.” They went so far as to find an elementary school classmate at Etz Chayim Yeshiva in Boro Park who told them, quite erroneously, that I “must have heard it as a child.” (Another classmate wrote the Forward a letter confirming that he too had never heard it-and he was a good Yeshiva student!) The Forward then went on to quote another rabbi to the effect that “a moser can become a capital crime” under certain circumstances. At the very bottom of the article, so as not to detract from its sensationalism, the Forward included the following disclaimer:
“I do not want any harm to come to Richard Goldstone,” Dershowitz said. “I want him to be responded to in the marketplace of ideas.”
An article in the Jewish Telegraphic Agency by Ron Kampares was even more irresponsible. It “reported” the following:
“Most recently, Alan Dershowitz likened him to a “moser”, a Jewish traitor deemed in some interpretations as worthy of a death sentence.”
This was written days after I had made it clear that I wanted no harm to befall Goldstone. A response to the JTA article by Debra DeLee, President and CEO of Americans For Peace Now, accused me-also days after I made my position clear-of calling Goldstone a “moser,” which she said is “a term reserved in traditional Jewish law for a Jewish traitor who should be killed.”
She also showed her ignorance of the fact that I had written a 49 page substantive response to the Goldstone report, by saying that I “could have-and should have-aired substantive disagreements about the report that Judge Goldstone authored following the Gaza War.”
Finally, a columnist for the Israeli newspaper Haaretz (Bradley Burston) described me as “Kahane-sounding,” a reference for the radical rabbi who did in fact call for violence-as contrasted for my call for peace based on a two-state solution and the end of civilian settlements. But no matter, its sells newspapers.
It’s bad enough that there are some religious extremists on both sides who actually incite their followers to commit violence. But when elements of the mainstream Israeli and Jewish media twist the truth in the interest of sensationalism to imply-or state outright-that I am calling for the murder of Richard Goldstone, it is those irresponsible members of the media (and of Americans For Peace Now) who become the inciters.
See this article at Israel Behind the News
Thursday, February 11, 2010
NGO Monitor Calls on New Israel Fund to Draw "Red Lines"
JERUSALEM - The research and watchdog group NGO Monitor (ngo-monitor.org) today called on the New Israel Fund (NIF) to implement clear "red lines" regarding the activities and rhetoric of the non-governmental organizations (NGOs) that it funds. NIF has been widely criticized for supporting advocacy groups that contribute centrally to demonization through allegations of "war crimes" and intense lobbying on behalf of the Goldstone Report.
"Instead of using its relationship with NGOs to advance constructive agendas, NIF has been supporting and defending campaigns that demonize and delegitimize Israel," charged Prof. Gerald Steinberg, president of NGO Monitor. "In many cases, it appears that NIF donors are unaware of the activities of these groups and their damaging impact. It is essential that powerful organizations like NIF establish clear guidelines and implement them in a unequivocal and transparent manner."
NGO Monitor proposes that NIF adopt "red lines" that prevent funding for organizations that support activities designed to promote the NGO "Durban strategy" to isolate Israel:
1. BDS: Boycotts, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) campaigns.
2. Demonization and delegitimization: Expressions including "apartheid," Nazi rhetoric, "war crimes," and deliberate misrepresentations of international law, as well as the use of UN frameworks for these goals.
3. Lawfare: Legal threats or activities in courts outside Israel directed against Israeli officials, "Zionist" or "parastatal" groups, or companies that do business in Israel.
4. Anti-Zionism: Opposition to the definition of Israel as a "Jewish and democratic state," including demands for a "one-state solution," the revocation of the Law of Return, and the elimination of national Jewish symbols.
"For an organization that claims that 'our supporters love Israel,' these red lines should be self-evident," said Steinberg.
He added that NGO Monitor has raised these topics in reports and correspondence with NIF officials on several occasions, but NIF has been unwilling to engage in substantive debate. "We remain committed to serious dialogue with the NIF, to address and debate these important issues and develop effective guidelines for funding," Steinberg said.
NGO Monitor, 1 Ben Maimon Blvd, Jerusalem 92262, Israel
Tel: +972-2-566-1020 +972-2-566-1020 Fax: +972-77-511-7030
For further info contact comms@ngo-monitor.org
www.ngo-monitor.org
"Instead of using its relationship with NGOs to advance constructive agendas, NIF has been supporting and defending campaigns that demonize and delegitimize Israel," charged Prof. Gerald Steinberg, president of NGO Monitor. "In many cases, it appears that NIF donors are unaware of the activities of these groups and their damaging impact. It is essential that powerful organizations like NIF establish clear guidelines and implement them in a unequivocal and transparent manner."
NGO Monitor proposes that NIF adopt "red lines" that prevent funding for organizations that support activities designed to promote the NGO "Durban strategy" to isolate Israel:
1. BDS: Boycotts, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) campaigns.
2. Demonization and delegitimization: Expressions including "apartheid," Nazi rhetoric, "war crimes," and deliberate misrepresentations of international law, as well as the use of UN frameworks for these goals.
3. Lawfare: Legal threats or activities in courts outside Israel directed against Israeli officials, "Zionist" or "parastatal" groups, or companies that do business in Israel.
4. Anti-Zionism: Opposition to the definition of Israel as a "Jewish and democratic state," including demands for a "one-state solution," the revocation of the Law of Return, and the elimination of national Jewish symbols.
"For an organization that claims that 'our supporters love Israel,' these red lines should be self-evident," said Steinberg.
He added that NGO Monitor has raised these topics in reports and correspondence with NIF officials on several occasions, but NIF has been unwilling to engage in substantive debate. "We remain committed to serious dialogue with the NIF, to address and debate these important issues and develop effective guidelines for funding," Steinberg said.
NGO Monitor, 1 Ben Maimon Blvd, Jerusalem 92262, Israel
Tel: +972-2-566-1020 +972-2-566-1020 Fax: +972-77-511-7030
For further info contact comms@ngo-monitor.org
www.ngo-monitor.org
Monday, February 8, 2010
How Hamas has Responded to Goldstone's Charges
by Jonathan Dahohah Halevi for Yediot Ahronot
Israel has recently delivered to the United Nations Secretary-general Ban Ki-moon its official response to the UN’s fact finding mission to Operation Cast Lead, headed by Judge Richard Goldstone. Hamas’ government is also preparing to submit its official response before the grace period of six months set to the parties by the Goldstone committee is overIn sharp contrast to the genuine fears expressed by Israel, Hamas does not seem to feel any threat in the legal arena. On the contrary, Hamas demonstrates self-confidence based on the understanding that the Goldstone committee strived only to incriminate Israel and all other limited references to the other side were just for lip service without any legal significance.
Musa Abu Marzouq, Hamas’ second in command, said in this regard in an interview to al-Mashahid al-Siyasi newspaper (December 8, 2009) that “All paragraphs in the Goldstone report convict Israel and totally exonerate Hamas from any misconduct... Likewise, the (Goldstone) report exonerated Hamas from all other accusations mentioned by Israel and even when the (Goldstone) report is dealing with the rockets which were launched from the Gaza Strip it speaks about military groups without naming Hamas.”
Hamas’ line of defense vis-Ã -vis the Goldstone report has been shaped by a group of Palestinian jurists headed by Diya Al-Din Muhsin Al-Madhoun, former legal adviser to Ismail Haniyeh (Hamas prime minister) and today chairman of the Tawtheeq (documentation) organization that was the key factor assigned by Hamas’ government, on which the Goldstone committee relied for sources of information in its fact finding mission. In series of interviews to the media, Madhoun elaborated as follows Hamas’ main legal arguments of its would-be response to the Goldstone report assumed to be delivered in the near future to the UN secretary general.
The armed struggle is legitimate
Madhoun asserts that all historic Palestine is an occupied land and that the international law legitimizes the right of self defense and resistance of the Palestinian people, who are living under 61 years of occupation. Therefore, Madhoun argues that “resistance operations conducted by the Palestinian resistance organizations, including launching rockets and mortar shells at the occupying Zionist forces, and all other military operations, are legitimate according the international law under the principle of defending our people and liberating our occupied land.”
Israel has no right to self defense
Madhoun entirely rebuts Israel’s claim for self defence, arguing that it constitutes a grave violation of the Palestinian people’s right for self defence as reflected in its armed struggle to liberate the land of Palestine. And in his words (translated from Arabic): “the war against Gaza was illegitimate... as the international law rules that there isn’t legitimate defence (of the occupier) against the legitimate defence (of the occupied) embodied in the defence through struggle.”
Hamas didn’t want to kill Israeli civilians
According to Madhoun, Hamas and the other “Palestinian resistance organizations” were systematically prudent in implementing the international law and avoided intentionally targeting Israeli civilians. Referring to the many hundreds of rockets which struck Israeli communities during the war, Madhoun explained that the Palestinian organizations launched the rockets only at “military targets,” such as tanks positions, military airports and concentrations of Israeli military forces on their way to invade the Gaza Strip. He finds evidence in the low number of Israeli fatalities totaling only three people who were killed by the “inaccurate rockets when they missed their original targets.” Furthermore, Madhoun stressed that Hamas spared the lives of Israeli civilians, claiming that if they were targeted dozens of them may have been killed.
Rockets were launched only at occupied territories
Madhoun argues that Israel’s claim that Hamas and other Palestinian terrorist organizations launched rockets at its sovereign territory is groundless. Relying on UN resolution 181 (known as the Partition Plan for Palestine), but without accepting it, Madhoun said that all rockets targeted only areas which were designated to the “Arab state” by the UN resolution, and as Israel has no internationally recognized borders with the Palestinian territories, their areas are still under conflict. Consequently, he concludes that Israel violated the rights of the Israeli civilians for security in settling them illegally in this military disputed area and thus risking their life.
No legitimate targets in Gaza
Madhoun unconditionally negates justification for any Israeli military operation in the Gaza Strip. In addition to the aforementioned arguments denying Israel’s right for self defence, Madhoun noted that t international law prohibits attacks on any target when there is a doubt whether it is combatant or civilian. “My stand is that all targets bombed in the Gaza Strip are under the category of doubt”, he said.
Goldstone’s accusations against Hamas are meaningless
Madhoun regards the Goldstone report as a one sided document against Israel, saying that more than 500 pages were dedicated to describing a myriad of widely documented accusations against Israel, while for the Palestinian side only 10 pages were allocated and even they didn’t include any evidence or documentation. Confidently, he asserts: “I can say as a jurist that all allegations mentioned in the (Goldstone) report do not mount to significant accusations of violating the humanitarian international law and the (Hamas) independent investigative committees will prove it.”
War criminals only in Israel
Madhoun boasted of Hamas’ cooperation with international jurists, human rights organizations, the Goldstone committee and UN delegates, which helped in establishing the argument that Israel committed war crimes. The next stage in Hamas’ strategy, according to Madhoun, is prosecuting Israeli “war criminals” worldwide and submitting lawsuits to the International Criminal Court against Israel.
Tawtheeq organization, headed by Madhoun, is backed by the Law Committee of the Palestinian parliament and its Hamas members include Dr. Yunis al-Astal who advocates the extinction of all the Jewish people, Dr. Ahmad Abu Halabia, who urged suicide attacks in Jerusalem, and Jamila al-Shanti, who identifies with terrorist attacks against Israel.
The reality is illusive and strikes time and time again in our faces. A declared terrorist organization, which adheres to the Islamic law (sharia) as the only source of legitimacy and promotes ideology of genocide, receives legal support from human rights organizations and internationally respected jurists in its lawfare waged against a democratic state.
Even more peculiar is Judge Richard Goldstone’s decision to rely without reservations on Tawtheeq and its experts in preparing its report, while they publicly make a travesty of the international law and argue that Israel violated the Palestinians’ rights to kill Israelis in the armed struggle for the liberation of the land of Palestine and to destroy Israel.
Lt. Col. (res.) Jonathan Dahoah-Halevi is a senior researcher of the Middle East and radical Islam at the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs. He is a co-founder of the Orient Research Group Ltd. and is a former advisor to the Policy Planning Division of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
Israel has recently delivered to the United Nations Secretary-general Ban Ki-moon its official response to the UN’s fact finding mission to Operation Cast Lead, headed by Judge Richard Goldstone. Hamas’ government is also preparing to submit its official response before the grace period of six months set to the parties by the Goldstone committee is overIn sharp contrast to the genuine fears expressed by Israel, Hamas does not seem to feel any threat in the legal arena. On the contrary, Hamas demonstrates self-confidence based on the understanding that the Goldstone committee strived only to incriminate Israel and all other limited references to the other side were just for lip service without any legal significance.
Musa Abu Marzouq, Hamas’ second in command, said in this regard in an interview to al-Mashahid al-Siyasi newspaper (December 8, 2009) that “All paragraphs in the Goldstone report convict Israel and totally exonerate Hamas from any misconduct... Likewise, the (Goldstone) report exonerated Hamas from all other accusations mentioned by Israel and even when the (Goldstone) report is dealing with the rockets which were launched from the Gaza Strip it speaks about military groups without naming Hamas.”
Hamas’ line of defense vis-Ã -vis the Goldstone report has been shaped by a group of Palestinian jurists headed by Diya Al-Din Muhsin Al-Madhoun, former legal adviser to Ismail Haniyeh (Hamas prime minister) and today chairman of the Tawtheeq (documentation) organization that was the key factor assigned by Hamas’ government, on which the Goldstone committee relied for sources of information in its fact finding mission. In series of interviews to the media, Madhoun elaborated as follows Hamas’ main legal arguments of its would-be response to the Goldstone report assumed to be delivered in the near future to the UN secretary general.
The armed struggle is legitimate
Madhoun asserts that all historic Palestine is an occupied land and that the international law legitimizes the right of self defense and resistance of the Palestinian people, who are living under 61 years of occupation. Therefore, Madhoun argues that “resistance operations conducted by the Palestinian resistance organizations, including launching rockets and mortar shells at the occupying Zionist forces, and all other military operations, are legitimate according the international law under the principle of defending our people and liberating our occupied land.”
Israel has no right to self defense
Madhoun entirely rebuts Israel’s claim for self defence, arguing that it constitutes a grave violation of the Palestinian people’s right for self defence as reflected in its armed struggle to liberate the land of Palestine. And in his words (translated from Arabic): “the war against Gaza was illegitimate... as the international law rules that there isn’t legitimate defence (of the occupier) against the legitimate defence (of the occupied) embodied in the defence through struggle.”
Hamas didn’t want to kill Israeli civilians
According to Madhoun, Hamas and the other “Palestinian resistance organizations” were systematically prudent in implementing the international law and avoided intentionally targeting Israeli civilians. Referring to the many hundreds of rockets which struck Israeli communities during the war, Madhoun explained that the Palestinian organizations launched the rockets only at “military targets,” such as tanks positions, military airports and concentrations of Israeli military forces on their way to invade the Gaza Strip. He finds evidence in the low number of Israeli fatalities totaling only three people who were killed by the “inaccurate rockets when they missed their original targets.” Furthermore, Madhoun stressed that Hamas spared the lives of Israeli civilians, claiming that if they were targeted dozens of them may have been killed.
Rockets were launched only at occupied territories
Madhoun argues that Israel’s claim that Hamas and other Palestinian terrorist organizations launched rockets at its sovereign territory is groundless. Relying on UN resolution 181 (known as the Partition Plan for Palestine), but without accepting it, Madhoun said that all rockets targeted only areas which were designated to the “Arab state” by the UN resolution, and as Israel has no internationally recognized borders with the Palestinian territories, their areas are still under conflict. Consequently, he concludes that Israel violated the rights of the Israeli civilians for security in settling them illegally in this military disputed area and thus risking their life.
No legitimate targets in Gaza
Madhoun unconditionally negates justification for any Israeli military operation in the Gaza Strip. In addition to the aforementioned arguments denying Israel’s right for self defence, Madhoun noted that t international law prohibits attacks on any target when there is a doubt whether it is combatant or civilian. “My stand is that all targets bombed in the Gaza Strip are under the category of doubt”, he said.
Goldstone’s accusations against Hamas are meaningless
Madhoun regards the Goldstone report as a one sided document against Israel, saying that more than 500 pages were dedicated to describing a myriad of widely documented accusations against Israel, while for the Palestinian side only 10 pages were allocated and even they didn’t include any evidence or documentation. Confidently, he asserts: “I can say as a jurist that all allegations mentioned in the (Goldstone) report do not mount to significant accusations of violating the humanitarian international law and the (Hamas) independent investigative committees will prove it.”
War criminals only in Israel
Madhoun boasted of Hamas’ cooperation with international jurists, human rights organizations, the Goldstone committee and UN delegates, which helped in establishing the argument that Israel committed war crimes. The next stage in Hamas’ strategy, according to Madhoun, is prosecuting Israeli “war criminals” worldwide and submitting lawsuits to the International Criminal Court against Israel.
Tawtheeq organization, headed by Madhoun, is backed by the Law Committee of the Palestinian parliament and its Hamas members include Dr. Yunis al-Astal who advocates the extinction of all the Jewish people, Dr. Ahmad Abu Halabia, who urged suicide attacks in Jerusalem, and Jamila al-Shanti, who identifies with terrorist attacks against Israel.
The reality is illusive and strikes time and time again in our faces. A declared terrorist organization, which adheres to the Islamic law (sharia) as the only source of legitimacy and promotes ideology of genocide, receives legal support from human rights organizations and internationally respected jurists in its lawfare waged against a democratic state.
Even more peculiar is Judge Richard Goldstone’s decision to rely without reservations on Tawtheeq and its experts in preparing its report, while they publicly make a travesty of the international law and argue that Israel violated the Palestinians’ rights to kill Israelis in the armed struggle for the liberation of the land of Palestine and to destroy Israel.
Lt. Col. (res.) Jonathan Dahoah-Halevi is a senior researcher of the Middle East and radical Islam at the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs. He is a co-founder of the Orient Research Group Ltd. and is a former advisor to the Policy Planning Division of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
Israel on Canadian college campuses; an up-hill battle
by Noam Bedein, Director of the Sderot Media Center, www.SderotMedia.org.il
Presenting the human side of Sderot, Israel and the western Negev would seem innocuous enough, as it is the only region in the western world where rockets and missiles target a civilian population. The people of southern Israel have their own story to share.
Yet after a 10-day visit to Canadian college campuses, organized by Hillel Canada and the CIJA umbrella organization of Canadian Jewry, I discovered that even Sderot residents must fight for their legitimate right to live in the land of Israel.
The purpose of this trip was to balance the after-effects of the “Gaza narrative”, exactly one year after Israel's 21-day Operation Cast Lead in the Gaza Strip.
On Canadian college campuses, the challenge became to justify the very existence of the city of Sderot.
This was best exemplified by an article published in a Winnipeg student newspaper, penned by a Palestinian-Canadian sociology student. This student amazingly attacked the credibility of another student for sharing her experiences visiting Sderot. This student had described her shock at the ’15 second’ alarm, known as the “Color Red,” which warns Sderot residents of only a few seconds to escape to safety from the time the missile is fired from Gaza to the time it explodes in Sderot.
The Palestinian student showed little sympathy for Sderot under fire:
“Sderot’ is actually a settlement on the Palestinian land of Najd, an illegally occupied territory stolen from Palestinians. It is a town created on the ashes of an ethnically cleansed and defaced Palestinian village....You want to talk about ‘terror’? Najd’s Palestinian villagers were expelled on May 13th, 1948 by Israeli forces before Israel was even declared a state.”
Here is a well-educated student born in Canada, with Palestinian descent, that calls the Israeli town of Sderot an illegitimate “settlement” constructed on the ruins of an Arab village abandoned during the 1948 war. Indeed this same student makes no acknowledgement of the historical fact that between 1951-1953, the Jews that settled in Sderot were from among the 850,000 Jews expelled in masses from Arab countries in the Middle East. During and after the 1948 war, 670,000 Palestinian Arab refugees were fled or forced from their homes.
Indeed, this Canadian-Palestinian college student is not the first to rationalize the thousands of aerial attacks and terrorizing of Sderot and southern Israel civilians.
“You know why Sderot is under rocket fire? Because there was an Arab village called Najd,” began a BBC reporter in an interview. I recall the reporter sitting in our Sderot Media Center office trying to find a ‘reasonable excuse’ to justify rocket fire against a civilian population.
Ironically, most Israelis/Jews do not even know that Palestinians and their leadership define Sderot as an illegal ‘settlement,’ while under international law it is undisputedly a city in the State of Israel.
Indeed, the first question I often ask student audiences during presentations is the following:
“If Sderot is a settlement and two miles northeast of Sderot lies the ruins of the Arab village called Najd, which the Palestinians say had a population of 30 families, who now live in the United Nations refugee camps in Gaza, what’s the justification for Jews to live in Sderot or anywhere else in Israel?”
The challenge today is to first actually ask these basic questions, before throwing around answers or solutions for the modern Arab-Israeli conflict.
“What is our right, as Jews and as Israelis, to this country in our homeland? Do we have any rights to this land at all?”
This is the way I was able to get across and present Israel’s perspective to Muslims, to pro-Palestinians, Israel critics and to the international press. By asking this basic question, we ask everyone to realize that Israel is the only independent country in the world whose legitimacy as a state is being questioned.
The leadership and governing bodies of the Palestinian side do not recognize Sderot's establishment in the first years of the creation of the Jewish state, while most Israelis/Jews have accepted a two- state solution.
As another Canadian-Palestinian student expressed himself during my presentation at Carleton University in Ottawa, quite matter of fact:
”You Jews dreamt to go back to your home land after 2,000 years... Why do you think we will stop teaching our children to dream to return to our homes in Al-Majdal (Ashkelon) only after 60 years?”
In other words, educated Canadian born Palestinian students living comfortably abroad, view Sderot quite simply as an illegal settlement and do not recognize the Jewish State of Israel. They do not accept my existence as an Israeli. So does the opposite apply to a Palestinian raised in a United Nations refugee camp, who has not been given any solution or hope for the past 60 years- (even though the UN has resettled more than 50 million refugees worldwide since World War II), will that Palestinian recognize my existence as an Israeli?
Instead, Palestinian education focuses on the preparation of the Palestinian people for the ‘right of return’ to homes and villages from 1948 in Israel which no longer exist. Homes and villages for example in and around cities like Sderot, Ashkelon, Ashdod, Beersheba, and more which have all been under terrorist missile fire.
“So, what’s your solution to this reality?” asked students on each of the Canadian campuses that I visited. In the hundreds of presentations I have given in the past three years I always answer, “I’m not here to present you a solution, I’m here to present the problem.”
The answer to that logical question is that there may not be any instant “solution.” Yet that should not exempt students from knowing the reality of what people in Israel have to cope with - and, in the case of Sderot, that their unique miraculous rocket reality is like no other in the world right now. Rockets have become a daily routine of life in Israel, where one civilian population is being targeted by rockets, rocket-launchers take cover under another civilian population on the other side of the border.
Can this definition of terrorism be understood from a typical 5-second daily news broadcast in Israel in the past four years?
“Two rockets fell outside of Sderot today. No injuries, and no damages,” is how the typical broadcast or news update would read, followed by a weather report in Israel.
These five-second news reports have now tallied up to 311 attacks and including 20 different types of rockets, Iranian missiles and mortars fired from Gaza towards southern Israel, since the END of the military operation in Gaza on January 18, 2009.
If things were truly clear about our rights as Jews to live in Israel, I would not have found myself providing a testimony to a Jew, Judge Richard Goldstone in Geneva. I was allowed a 30-minute presentation where I described to the Goldstone Commission the eight-years of life under rocket fire and concluded by raising my hands in front of them:
“I do not have enough fingers on my hands to count the amount of times rockets exploded only 10 meters from a kindergarten packed with children...”
“Why do we have to wait until a kindergarten or classroom full of children suffers a direct hit by a rocket, in order for us Israel, to have the international support and sympathy to do what is right to protect our own citizens?”
This was the question I put forth to Judge Goldstone and the rest of the panel of UN judges, which was met only with stone silence.
The time has come to raise these questions to college students around the world, and to provide them with proper and accurate answers for them to stand up for Israel and for themselves as proud supporters of Israel.
By generating such awareness, we promote peace without instant solutions and we force the world of public opinion to acknowledge the real barriers for peace, beginning with the continuing refusal of the Arab world to recognize the legitimacy of Sderot and of Israel in their neighborhood.
Noam Bedein is the director of the Sderot Media Center.
Presenting the human side of Sderot, Israel and the western Negev would seem innocuous enough, as it is the only region in the western world where rockets and missiles target a civilian population. The people of southern Israel have their own story to share.
Yet after a 10-day visit to Canadian college campuses, organized by Hillel Canada and the CIJA umbrella organization of Canadian Jewry, I discovered that even Sderot residents must fight for their legitimate right to live in the land of Israel.
The purpose of this trip was to balance the after-effects of the “Gaza narrative”, exactly one year after Israel's 21-day Operation Cast Lead in the Gaza Strip.
On Canadian college campuses, the challenge became to justify the very existence of the city of Sderot.
This was best exemplified by an article published in a Winnipeg student newspaper, penned by a Palestinian-Canadian sociology student. This student amazingly attacked the credibility of another student for sharing her experiences visiting Sderot. This student had described her shock at the ’15 second’ alarm, known as the “Color Red,” which warns Sderot residents of only a few seconds to escape to safety from the time the missile is fired from Gaza to the time it explodes in Sderot.
The Palestinian student showed little sympathy for Sderot under fire:
“Sderot’ is actually a settlement on the Palestinian land of Najd, an illegally occupied territory stolen from Palestinians. It is a town created on the ashes of an ethnically cleansed and defaced Palestinian village....You want to talk about ‘terror’? Najd’s Palestinian villagers were expelled on May 13th, 1948 by Israeli forces before Israel was even declared a state.”
Here is a well-educated student born in Canada, with Palestinian descent, that calls the Israeli town of Sderot an illegitimate “settlement” constructed on the ruins of an Arab village abandoned during the 1948 war. Indeed this same student makes no acknowledgement of the historical fact that between 1951-1953, the Jews that settled in Sderot were from among the 850,000 Jews expelled in masses from Arab countries in the Middle East. During and after the 1948 war, 670,000 Palestinian Arab refugees were fled or forced from their homes.
Indeed, this Canadian-Palestinian college student is not the first to rationalize the thousands of aerial attacks and terrorizing of Sderot and southern Israel civilians.
“You know why Sderot is under rocket fire? Because there was an Arab village called Najd,” began a BBC reporter in an interview. I recall the reporter sitting in our Sderot Media Center office trying to find a ‘reasonable excuse’ to justify rocket fire against a civilian population.
Ironically, most Israelis/Jews do not even know that Palestinians and their leadership define Sderot as an illegal ‘settlement,’ while under international law it is undisputedly a city in the State of Israel.
Indeed, the first question I often ask student audiences during presentations is the following:
“If Sderot is a settlement and two miles northeast of Sderot lies the ruins of the Arab village called Najd, which the Palestinians say had a population of 30 families, who now live in the United Nations refugee camps in Gaza, what’s the justification for Jews to live in Sderot or anywhere else in Israel?”
The challenge today is to first actually ask these basic questions, before throwing around answers or solutions for the modern Arab-Israeli conflict.
“What is our right, as Jews and as Israelis, to this country in our homeland? Do we have any rights to this land at all?”
This is the way I was able to get across and present Israel’s perspective to Muslims, to pro-Palestinians, Israel critics and to the international press. By asking this basic question, we ask everyone to realize that Israel is the only independent country in the world whose legitimacy as a state is being questioned.
The leadership and governing bodies of the Palestinian side do not recognize Sderot's establishment in the first years of the creation of the Jewish state, while most Israelis/Jews have accepted a two- state solution.
As another Canadian-Palestinian student expressed himself during my presentation at Carleton University in Ottawa, quite matter of fact:
”You Jews dreamt to go back to your home land after 2,000 years... Why do you think we will stop teaching our children to dream to return to our homes in Al-Majdal (Ashkelon) only after 60 years?”
In other words, educated Canadian born Palestinian students living comfortably abroad, view Sderot quite simply as an illegal settlement and do not recognize the Jewish State of Israel. They do not accept my existence as an Israeli. So does the opposite apply to a Palestinian raised in a United Nations refugee camp, who has not been given any solution or hope for the past 60 years- (even though the UN has resettled more than 50 million refugees worldwide since World War II), will that Palestinian recognize my existence as an Israeli?
Instead, Palestinian education focuses on the preparation of the Palestinian people for the ‘right of return’ to homes and villages from 1948 in Israel which no longer exist. Homes and villages for example in and around cities like Sderot, Ashkelon, Ashdod, Beersheba, and more which have all been under terrorist missile fire.
“So, what’s your solution to this reality?” asked students on each of the Canadian campuses that I visited. In the hundreds of presentations I have given in the past three years I always answer, “I’m not here to present you a solution, I’m here to present the problem.”
The answer to that logical question is that there may not be any instant “solution.” Yet that should not exempt students from knowing the reality of what people in Israel have to cope with - and, in the case of Sderot, that their unique miraculous rocket reality is like no other in the world right now. Rockets have become a daily routine of life in Israel, where one civilian population is being targeted by rockets, rocket-launchers take cover under another civilian population on the other side of the border.
Can this definition of terrorism be understood from a typical 5-second daily news broadcast in Israel in the past four years?
“Two rockets fell outside of Sderot today. No injuries, and no damages,” is how the typical broadcast or news update would read, followed by a weather report in Israel.
These five-second news reports have now tallied up to 311 attacks and including 20 different types of rockets, Iranian missiles and mortars fired from Gaza towards southern Israel, since the END of the military operation in Gaza on January 18, 2009.
If things were truly clear about our rights as Jews to live in Israel, I would not have found myself providing a testimony to a Jew, Judge Richard Goldstone in Geneva. I was allowed a 30-minute presentation where I described to the Goldstone Commission the eight-years of life under rocket fire and concluded by raising my hands in front of them:
“I do not have enough fingers on my hands to count the amount of times rockets exploded only 10 meters from a kindergarten packed with children...”
“Why do we have to wait until a kindergarten or classroom full of children suffers a direct hit by a rocket, in order for us Israel, to have the international support and sympathy to do what is right to protect our own citizens?”
This was the question I put forth to Judge Goldstone and the rest of the panel of UN judges, which was met only with stone silence.
The time has come to raise these questions to college students around the world, and to provide them with proper and accurate answers for them to stand up for Israel and for themselves as proud supporters of Israel.
By generating such awareness, we promote peace without instant solutions and we force the world of public opinion to acknowledge the real barriers for peace, beginning with the continuing refusal of the Arab world to recognize the legitimacy of Sderot and of Israel in their neighborhood.
Noam Bedein is the director of the Sderot Media Center.
Sunday, October 18, 2009
The Philadelphia Bulletin: Report Charges Israel with War Crimes
by David Bedein
Jerusalem - The Goldstone report, which accuses Israel of war crimes in the course of Operation Cast Lead, was raised Thursday for discussion at the UN Human Rights Council, at the request of the Palestinian Authority.
Ahead of the discussion and the subsequent vote that will decide if the report will be adopted by the UN, Israel is getting into high gear.
Despite the low chances of obtaining a majority in Israel’s favor in the vote, politicians and diplomats are trying to influence a few countries in order to recruit them to Israel’s side.
Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu said last week that the Israeli battle against the report is very difficult because of the majority against Israel in the UN and in a number of UN committees.
He says that this battle will preoccupy Israel in the coming years.
High-ranking government sources said that as of now, the chances of the Goldstone report not being adopted are very low and it appears that the Palestinians will succeed in obtaining a majority.
At the moment, Israel is focusing its public relations activity in the countries belonging to the European Union, the African states, Asia and South America.
As part of the Israeli PR campaign, the work was divided between four people: President Shimon Peres, Prime Minister Netanyahu, Defense Minister Ehud Barak and Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman. Each of them received a list with a number of heads of state with whom they will talk and ask them not to support the report.
Israel will warn that adopting the Goldstone report means ending the peace process, because Israel will not agree to wage a legal-diplomatic battle along with conducting a peace process.
“The Goldstone report will be part of the international discourse for a long time yet and will be a heavy burden on Israel in the international arena,” said a high-ranking Israeli source.
“We can cope with its ramifications but the problem is that it turns Israel into the defendant and makes the state into a leper. It’s not good for Israel when it is spoken about as if it is a country that commits war crimes.”
What particularly irks Israel is that Palestinian Authority Chairman Abu Mazen and UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon are now aligned. The UN secretary general expressed his support for discussing the report at the U.N. Human Rights Council.
View the original article in the Philadelphia Bulletin
Jerusalem - The Goldstone report, which accuses Israel of war crimes in the course of Operation Cast Lead, was raised Thursday for discussion at the UN Human Rights Council, at the request of the Palestinian Authority.
Ahead of the discussion and the subsequent vote that will decide if the report will be adopted by the UN, Israel is getting into high gear.
Despite the low chances of obtaining a majority in Israel’s favor in the vote, politicians and diplomats are trying to influence a few countries in order to recruit them to Israel’s side.
Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu said last week that the Israeli battle against the report is very difficult because of the majority against Israel in the UN and in a number of UN committees.
He says that this battle will preoccupy Israel in the coming years.
High-ranking government sources said that as of now, the chances of the Goldstone report not being adopted are very low and it appears that the Palestinians will succeed in obtaining a majority.
At the moment, Israel is focusing its public relations activity in the countries belonging to the European Union, the African states, Asia and South America.
As part of the Israeli PR campaign, the work was divided between four people: President Shimon Peres, Prime Minister Netanyahu, Defense Minister Ehud Barak and Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman. Each of them received a list with a number of heads of state with whom they will talk and ask them not to support the report.
Israel will warn that adopting the Goldstone report means ending the peace process, because Israel will not agree to wage a legal-diplomatic battle along with conducting a peace process.
“The Goldstone report will be part of the international discourse for a long time yet and will be a heavy burden on Israel in the international arena,” said a high-ranking Israeli source.
“We can cope with its ramifications but the problem is that it turns Israel into the defendant and makes the state into a leper. It’s not good for Israel when it is spoken about as if it is a country that commits war crimes.”
What particularly irks Israel is that Palestinian Authority Chairman Abu Mazen and UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon are now aligned. The UN secretary general expressed his support for discussing the report at the U.N. Human Rights Council.
View the original article in the Philadelphia Bulletin
Tuesday, October 6, 2009
The Philadelphia Bulletin: Netanyahu Denounces the UN
by David Bedein
Jerusalem - Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu made the following remarks on Thursday to the media:
“In the next 24 hours, a vote will take place in Geneva in the framework of the council known as the United Nations Human Rights Council. I remind you that in recent years, this council has made more decisions against Israel than against all other 180 countries in the world.”
The Israeli Prime Minister threatened that “if it should decide to forward what is known as the Goldstone report, it will strike a severe blow to three things:
“First of all, it will strike a severe blow to the war against terrorism since it will afford total legitimization to terrorists who fire upon civilians and who hide behind civilians. To those who - from international platforms, and using international law - attack and condemn the victim who legitimately defends himself, this is a mortal blow to the war on terrorism.
“Secondly, it will strike a mortal blow to the stature of the United Nations. It will return it to its darkest days, in which it could make the most absurd decisions, which would empty it of all substance and significance.
“Thirdly, and perhaps the most immediate and obvious of all, forwarding the decision of what is known as the Goldstone report, would strike a fatal blow to the peace process because Israel will no longer be able to take additional steps and take risks for peace if its right to self-defense is denied.”
The Israeli Prime Minister concluded his remarks by saying that “the decision on whether to forward this report which will impair both the struggle against terrorism and stature of the United Nations, and strike a mortal blow to the peace process.”
View the original article in the Philadelphia Bulletin
Jerusalem - Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu made the following remarks on Thursday to the media:
“In the next 24 hours, a vote will take place in Geneva in the framework of the council known as the United Nations Human Rights Council. I remind you that in recent years, this council has made more decisions against Israel than against all other 180 countries in the world.”
The Israeli Prime Minister threatened that “if it should decide to forward what is known as the Goldstone report, it will strike a severe blow to three things:
“First of all, it will strike a severe blow to the war against terrorism since it will afford total legitimization to terrorists who fire upon civilians and who hide behind civilians. To those who - from international platforms, and using international law - attack and condemn the victim who legitimately defends himself, this is a mortal blow to the war on terrorism.
“Secondly, it will strike a mortal blow to the stature of the United Nations. It will return it to its darkest days, in which it could make the most absurd decisions, which would empty it of all substance and significance.
“Thirdly, and perhaps the most immediate and obvious of all, forwarding the decision of what is known as the Goldstone report, would strike a fatal blow to the peace process because Israel will no longer be able to take additional steps and take risks for peace if its right to self-defense is denied.”
The Israeli Prime Minister concluded his remarks by saying that “the decision on whether to forward this report which will impair both the struggle against terrorism and stature of the United Nations, and strike a mortal blow to the peace process.”
View the original article in the Philadelphia Bulletin
Sunday, September 20, 2009
The Philadelphia Bulletin: UN Report Outrages Israel
by David Bedein
Jerusalem - Officials in Jerusalem are mobilizing for battle in an attempt to undermine the standing of the UN report on "Israel's crimes in Gaza," with the hope that it will not come before the UN Security Council or the International Court of Justice at The Hague.
Despite a certain criticism of Hamas, the report deals mainly with "proof of significant violations of international human rights law that Israel committed in the Gaza war, and possibly crimes against humanity as well." Experts in Israel who examined the work of the commission and followed the recorded testimonies published on the UN web site, say that the commission members chose not to make things difficult for the witnesses.
"I listened closely to the testimonies, but also to the questions of the commission members," explained Jonathan Dahoah-Halevi, a senior researcher at the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, "the commission members didn't try to confront them with other information that they held. They were asked questions that were irrelevant to clarifying the facts of whether war crimes were committed or not."
For example, Dahoah-Halevi relates, in the case of the attack on the mosque in the town Beit Lahiya, the commission members asked many questions on the prayer arrangements, but did not ask even a single question on the presence of armed men or weapons at the site. The Goldstone report admits that it identified "reluctance" by the witnesses to deliver information on the activity of terrorist elements within armed [sic] areas. The report states that it is unable to determine the reason for this "reluctance," but notes that it could not discount the possibility that "the interviewees' reluctance may have stemmed from a fear of reprisals."
The commission approached the Hamas government and requested details on the activity of the organization's activity in populated sites from which rockets were fired. The response of the Hamas government, however, was: We have no data. However, the report determines that the fire constitutes "a deliberate attack against the civilian population.
These actions would constitute war crimes and may amount to crimes against humanity." This sparked great anger on the part of Hamas.
"Resistance is a legitimate right that is anchored in international law," said Hamas Spokesman Fawzi Barhoum.
Israeli President Shimon Peres also rallied yesterday for the Israeli attack against the report.
"The Goldstone report makes a mockery of history, and fails to distinguish between aggressor and defender," the president said, attaacking the author of the report. "He would not have written this if his children lived in Sderot and experienced the terror of the rockets there." Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu said, "the report is a drumhead court martial, the outcome of which was known in advance, and it makes it difficult for democratic countries to fight terror."
Israeli Deputy Foreign Minister Danny Ayalon, who is currently in New York, has already initiated talks with senior members of the US administration and Congress on the report, and is expected to meet with US Ambassador to the United Nations Susan Rice, with the aim of recruiting her to the battle against having the report reach the UN Security Council.
View the original article in the Philadelphia Bulletin
Jerusalem - Officials in Jerusalem are mobilizing for battle in an attempt to undermine the standing of the UN report on "Israel's crimes in Gaza," with the hope that it will not come before the UN Security Council or the International Court of Justice at The Hague.
Despite a certain criticism of Hamas, the report deals mainly with "proof of significant violations of international human rights law that Israel committed in the Gaza war, and possibly crimes against humanity as well." Experts in Israel who examined the work of the commission and followed the recorded testimonies published on the UN web site, say that the commission members chose not to make things difficult for the witnesses.
"I listened closely to the testimonies, but also to the questions of the commission members," explained Jonathan Dahoah-Halevi, a senior researcher at the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, "the commission members didn't try to confront them with other information that they held. They were asked questions that were irrelevant to clarifying the facts of whether war crimes were committed or not."
For example, Dahoah-Halevi relates, in the case of the attack on the mosque in the town Beit Lahiya, the commission members asked many questions on the prayer arrangements, but did not ask even a single question on the presence of armed men or weapons at the site. The Goldstone report admits that it identified "reluctance" by the witnesses to deliver information on the activity of terrorist elements within armed [sic] areas. The report states that it is unable to determine the reason for this "reluctance," but notes that it could not discount the possibility that "the interviewees' reluctance may have stemmed from a fear of reprisals."
The commission approached the Hamas government and requested details on the activity of the organization's activity in populated sites from which rockets were fired. The response of the Hamas government, however, was: We have no data. However, the report determines that the fire constitutes "a deliberate attack against the civilian population.
These actions would constitute war crimes and may amount to crimes against humanity." This sparked great anger on the part of Hamas.
"Resistance is a legitimate right that is anchored in international law," said Hamas Spokesman Fawzi Barhoum.
Israeli President Shimon Peres also rallied yesterday for the Israeli attack against the report.
"The Goldstone report makes a mockery of history, and fails to distinguish between aggressor and defender," the president said, attaacking the author of the report. "He would not have written this if his children lived in Sderot and experienced the terror of the rockets there." Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu said, "the report is a drumhead court martial, the outcome of which was known in advance, and it makes it difficult for democratic countries to fight terror."
Israeli Deputy Foreign Minister Danny Ayalon, who is currently in New York, has already initiated talks with senior members of the US administration and Congress on the report, and is expected to meet with US Ambassador to the United Nations Susan Rice, with the aim of recruiting her to the battle against having the report reach the UN Security Council.
View the original article in the Philadelphia Bulletin
Sunday, September 13, 2009
The Philadelphia Bulletin: Calls at the UN to Bring Israel to Trial
by David Bedein
Jerusalem - Tension is mounting in Israel as it awaits the publication of the Goldstone Commission’s report, which inquired into allegations directed against Israel relating to Operation Cast Lead in the Gaza Strip. The report is set to be published in the next few days.
The commission, headed by a South African judge, was established by the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva and is largely regarded as anti-Israel. Israel has refused to cooperate with the commission and argues that it has predicated much of its findings on false and biased information that it obtained from Hamas. There is concern that the findings will be quite harsh and serve as a basis for litigation against Israel for “war crimes”.
UN High Commissioner of Human Rights Navanethen Pillay, the South African judge, who hosted the anti-Israel Durban 2 conference last April, has already made clear her hope that the UN will ask The Hague to begin proceedings against Israel.
Pillay’s position is based on the Darfur precedent, since Israel has not ratified the international court’s charter and is not a member of it. The UN Security Council is authorized to order the start of litigation against countries that are not members of the court, and in the case of Darfur, the council did indeed instruct the court to start procedures against senior Sudanese officials for crimes against humanity, war crimes and genocide. She said she hoped that the UN Security Council would respond in kind if the Goldstone Commission found possible war crimes.
Meanwhile the current president of the UN Human Rights Council rejected the demand of the “UN Watch” that British jurist Christine Chinkin be disqualified from the Goldstone Commission. The group argued that statements and articles by Chinkin in which she accused Israel of war crimes even before the commission had begun its work, which indicated that she held a predetermined bias.
View the original article in the Philadelphia Bulletin
Jerusalem - Tension is mounting in Israel as it awaits the publication of the Goldstone Commission’s report, which inquired into allegations directed against Israel relating to Operation Cast Lead in the Gaza Strip. The report is set to be published in the next few days.
The commission, headed by a South African judge, was established by the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva and is largely regarded as anti-Israel. Israel has refused to cooperate with the commission and argues that it has predicated much of its findings on false and biased information that it obtained from Hamas. There is concern that the findings will be quite harsh and serve as a basis for litigation against Israel for “war crimes”.
UN High Commissioner of Human Rights Navanethen Pillay, the South African judge, who hosted the anti-Israel Durban 2 conference last April, has already made clear her hope that the UN will ask The Hague to begin proceedings against Israel.
Pillay’s position is based on the Darfur precedent, since Israel has not ratified the international court’s charter and is not a member of it. The UN Security Council is authorized to order the start of litigation against countries that are not members of the court, and in the case of Darfur, the council did indeed instruct the court to start procedures against senior Sudanese officials for crimes against humanity, war crimes and genocide. She said she hoped that the UN Security Council would respond in kind if the Goldstone Commission found possible war crimes.
Meanwhile the current president of the UN Human Rights Council rejected the demand of the “UN Watch” that British jurist Christine Chinkin be disqualified from the Goldstone Commission. The group argued that statements and articles by Chinkin in which she accused Israel of war crimes even before the commission had begun its work, which indicated that she held a predetermined bias.
View the original article in the Philadelphia Bulletin
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
Posts
