Evidence of Israeli 'cowardly blending' comes to light

By Jonathan Cook in Nazareth

It apparently never occurred to anyone in our leading human rights organisations
or the Western media that the same moral and legal standards ought be applied
to the behaviour of Israel and Hizbullah during the war on Lebanon 18 months
ago. Belatedly, an important effort has been made to set that right.

A new report, written by a respected Israeli human rights organisation, one
representing the country's Arab minority not its Jewish majority, has unearthed
evidence showing that during the fighting Israel committed war crimes not only
against Lebanese civilians -- as was already known -- but also against its own
Arab citizens. This is an aspect of the war that has been almost entirely
neglected until now.

The report also sheds a surprising light on the question of what Hizbullah was
aiming at when it fired hundreds of rockets on northern Israel. Until the report's
publication last month, I had been all but a lone voice arguing that the picture of
what took place during the war was far more complex than generally accepted.

The new report follows a series of inquiries by the most influential human
rights groups, Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, to identify
the ways in which international law was broken during Israel's 34-day assault
on Lebanon. However, both organisations failed to examine, except in the most
cursory and dismissive way, Israel's treatment of its own civilians during the war.
That failure may also have had serious repercussions for their ability to assess
Hizbullah's actions.

Before examining the report's revelations, it is worth revisiting the
much-misrepresented events of summer 2006 and considering what
efforts have been made subsequently to bring the two sides to account.

The war was the culmination of a series of tit-for-tat provocations along the
shared border following Israel's withdrawal from its two-decade occupation
of south Lebanon in 2000. Almost daily for those six years Israel behaved as
though the occupation had not ended, sending war planes into Lebanese air space
to create terrifying sonic booms and spy on the country.
(After the war, it resumed these flights almost immediately.)

In response Hizbullah, a Shia militia that offered the only effective resistance
during Lebanon's period of occupation, maintained its belligerent posture.
It warned repeatedly that it would capture Israeli soldiers, should the chance
arise, in the hope of forcing a prisoner exchange. Israel had held on to a handful
of Lebanese prisoners after its pullback.

Hizbullah also demanded that Israel complete its withdrawal from Lebanon in full
by leaving a fertile sliver of territory, the Shebaa Farms. Israel argues that the
area is Syrian territory, occupied by its army along with the Golan Heights in 1967,
and will be returned one day in negotiations with Damascus. UN catrographers
disagree, backing Hizbullah's claim that the area is Lebanese.

The fighting began with a relatively minor incident (by regional standards) and
one that was entirely predictable: Hizbullah attacked a border post, capturing two
soldiers and killing three more in the operation. Hizbullah's leader Hassan Nasrallah
proposed a prisoner swap. Israel declared war the very same day, unleashing a
massive bombing campaign that over the next month killed nearly 1,200
Lebanese civilians.

An editorial in Israel's leading newspaper Haaretz noted again this week that,
by rejecting Hizbullah's overtures, "Israel initiated the war".

In the last days of the fighting, as a UN-brokered ceasefire was about to come into
effect, Israel dropped more than a million cluster bombs on south Lebanon, of
which several hundred thousand failed to detonate. Since the end of the war, 39
Lebanese civilians have been killed and dozens more maimed from these small
landmines littering the countryside.

Israel's own inquiry into its use of the cluster munitions wrapped up last month
by exonerating the army, even while admitting that many of the bombs had been
directed at civilian population centres. In Israel's books, it seems, international
law sanctions the targeting of civilians during war.

Veteran Israeli reporter Meron Rapoport recently noted that his newspaper,
Haaretz again, has evidence that the army's use of cluster munitions was
"pre-planned" and undertaken without regard to the location of Hizbullah
positions. The only reasonable conclusion is that Israel wanted south
Lebanon uninhabitable at any cost, possibly so that another ground
invasion could be mounted.

Human Rights Watch, which has carried out the most detailed examination of
the war, was less forgiving than Israel's own investigators -- as might have
been expected in the case of such a flagrant abuse of the rules of war. Still,
it has failed to condemn Israel's actions unreservedly. In a typical press release
it noted the wide dispersal of cluster bombs over civilian areas of south
Lebanon but concluded only that their use by Israel "may violate the
prohibition on indiscriminate attacks contained in international humanitarian law".

In this and other respects, HRW's reports have revealed troubling double standards.

During the war two charges were levelled against Hizbullah, mainly by Israel's
supporters, and investigated by the human rights group: that the Shia militia
fired rockets on northern Israel either indiscriminately or in a deliberate
attempt to target civilians; and that it hid its fighters and weapons among
its own Lebanese civilians (thereby conveniently justifying Israel's bombing of
those civilians).

Hizbullah was found guilty of the first charge, with HRW arguing that it was
irrelevant whether or not Hizbullah was trying to hit military targets in Israel
as its rockets were not precision-guided. All its rockets, whatever they were
aimed at, were therefore considered indiscriminate by the organisation and
a violation of international law. Worthy of note is that HRW expressed
certainty about the impermissibility of Hizbullah firing imprecise rockets
but not about Israel's use of even less precise cluster bombs.

On the second charge Hizbullah was substantially acquitted, with HRW failing
to find evidence that, apart from in a handful of isolated instances, the militia
hid among the Lebanese population.

Regarding Israel, the human rights organisations investigated the charge that it
violated international law by endangering Lebanese civilians during its bombing
campaigns. Given that Israel's missiles and bombs were supposed to have pinpoint
accuracy, the large death toll of Lebanese civilians provided indisputable
evidence of Israeli war crimes. HRW agreed.

Strangely, however, after submitting both Israel and Hizbullah to the same test
of whether their firepower targeted civilians, HRW deemed it inappropriate to
investigate Israel on the second allegation faced by Hizbullah: that it committed
a war crime by blending in with its own civilian population. Was there so little
prima facie evidence of such behaviour on Israel's side that the organisation
decided it was not worth wasting its resources on such an inquiry?

HRW produced two lengthy reports in August 2007, one examining events in
Lebanon and the other events in Israel. But the report on what happened inside
Israel, "Civilians under Assault", failed to examine Israel's treatment of its own
civilians and focused instead only on proving that Hizbullah's firing of its rockets
violated international law.

HRW did made a brief reference to the possibility that Israeli military installations
were located close to or inside civilian communities. It cited examples of a naval
training base next to a hospital in Haifa and a weapons factory built in a civilian
community. Its researchers even admitted to watching the Israeli army firing
shells into Lebanon from a residential street of the Jewish community of Zarit.

This act of "cowardly blending" by the Israeli army -- to echo the UN envoy Jan
Egeland's unwarranted criticism of Hizbullah -- was a war crime. It made Israeli
civilians a potential target for Hizbullah reprisal attacks.

So what was HRW's position on this gross violation of the rules of war it had
witnessed? After yet again denouncing Hizbullah for its rocket attacks, the
report was mealy-mouthed: "Given that indiscriminate fire [by Hizbullah],
there is no reason to believe that Israel's placement of certain military assets
within these cities added appreciably to the risk facing their residents."

In other words, Israel's culpability in hiding its war machine inside civilian
communities did not need to be assessed on its own terms as a violation of
international law. Instead Israel was let off the hook based on the assumption
that Hizbullah's rockets were incapable of hitting such positions. It is dubious,
to put it mildly, whether this is a legitimate reading of international law.

An additional criticism, one that I made on several occasions during the war,
was that Israel failed to protect its Arab communities from rocket attacks by
ensuring they had bomb shelters or early warning systems -- unlike Jewish
communities. On this issue, the HRW report had only this to say: "Human
Rights Watch did not investigate whether Israel discriminated among Jewish
and Arab residents of the north in the protection it provided from Hezbollah
attacks."

Of Hizbullah's indiscrimination, HRW was certain; of Israel's discrimination,
it held back from judgment.

Fortunately, we no longer have to rely on Human Rights Watch or Amnesty
International for a full picture of what took place during what Israelis call the
Second Lebanon War. Last month the Arab Association for Human Rights,
based in Nazareth, published its own report, "Civilians in Danger", covering
the ground its much bigger cousins dared not touch.

The hostile climate in Israel towards the fifth of the population who are Arab
has made publication of the report a risky business. Azmi Bishara, Israel's
leading Arab politician and a major critic of Israel's behaviour during the
Lebanon war, is currently in exile under possible death sentence. Israel has
accused him of treason in helping Hizbullah during the fighting, though the
secret services have yet to produce the evidence they have supposedly amassed
against him. Nonetheless they have successfully intimidated most of the Arab
minority into silence.

Also, much of the report's detail, including many place-names and maps
showing the location of Hizbullah rocket strikes, has had to be excised to
satisfy Israel's strict military censorship laws.

But despite these obstacles, the Human Rights Association has taken a brave
stand in unearthing the evidence to show that Israel committed war crimes by
placing much of its military hardware, including artillery positions firing into
Lebanon, inside and next to Arab towns and villages. These were not isolated
instances but a discerible pattern.

The threat to which this exposed Arab communities was far from as theoretical
as HRW supposes. Some 660 Hizbullah rockets landed on 20 Arab communities
in the north, apparently surprising Israeli officials, who believed Hizbullah would
not target fellow Arabs. Of the 44 Israeli civilians killed by the rockets, 21 were
Arab citizens.

Israel has cited these deaths as further proof that Hizbullah's rocket fire was
indiscriminate. The Human Rights Association, however, reaches a rather
different conclusion, one based on the available evidence. Its research shows
a clear correlation between an Arab community having an Israeli army base
located next to it and the likelihood of it being hit by Hizbullah rockets.
In short, Arab communities targeted by Hizbullah were almost exclusively
those in which the Israeli army was based.

"The study found that the Arab towns and villages that suffered the most
intensive attacks during the war were ones that were surrounded by military
installations, either on a permanent basis or temporarily during the course
of the war," the report states.

Such findings lend credibility to complaints made during the war by Israel's
Arab legislators, including Bishara himself, that Arab communities were
being used as "human shields" by the Israeli army -- possibly to deter
Hizbullah from targeting its positions.

In early August 2006, Bishara told the Maariv newspaper: "What ordinary citizens
are afraid to say, the Arab Knesset members are declaring loudly. Israel turned
the Galilee and the Arab villages in particular into human shields by surrounding
them with artillery positions and missile batteries."

Such violations of the rules of war were occasionally hinted at in reporting in the
Israeli media. In one account from the front line, for example, a reporter from
Maariv quoted parents in the Arab village of Fassuta complaining that children
were wetting their beds because of the frightening bark of tanks stationed
outside their homes.

According to the Human Rights Association's report, Israel made its Arab
citizens vulnerable to Hizbullah's rockets in the following ways:

* Permanent military bases, including army camps, airfields and weapons
factories, as well as temporary artillery positions that fired thousands of
shells and mortars into southern Lebanon were located inside or next to
many Arab communities.

* The Israeli army trained soldiers inside northern Arab communities before
and during the war in preparation for a ground invasion, arguing that the
topography in these communities was similar to the villages of south Lebanon.

* The government failed to evacuate civilians from the area of fighting, leaving
Arab citizens particularly in danger. Almost no protective measures, such as
building public shelters or installing air raid sirens, had been taken in Arab
communities, whereas they had been in Jewish communities.

Under the protocols to the Geneva Conventions, parties to a conflict must
"avoid locating military objectives within or near densely populated areas"
and must "endeavour to remove the civilian population … from the vicinity
of military objectives". The Human Rights Association report clearly shows
that Israel cynically broke these rules of war.

Tarek Ibrahim, a lawyer and the author of the Association's report, says the most
surprising finding is that Hizbullah's rockets mostly targeted Arab communities
where military installations had been located and in the main avoided those
where there were no such military positions.

"Hizbullah claimed on several occasions that its rockets were aimed primarily at
military targets in Israel. Our research cannot prove that to be the case but it
does give a strong indication that Hizbullah's claims may be true."

Although Hizbullah's Katyusha rockets were not precision-guided, the proximity of
Israeli military positions to Arab communities "are within the margin of error of
the rockets fired by Hizbullah", according to the report. In most cases, such
positions were located either inside the community itself or a few hundred metres
from it.

In its recommendations, the Human Rights Association calls for the removal of all
Israeli military installations from civilian communities.

(Again noteworthy is the fact that Israel has built several weapons factories
inside Arab communities, including in Nazareth. Arab citizens are almost
never allowed to work in Israel's vast military industries, so why build them there?
Part of the reason is doubtless that they provide another pretext for confiscating
Arab communities' lands and "Judaising" them. But is the criticism by Arab
legislators of "human shielding" another possible reason?)

The report avoids dealing with the wider issue of whether the Israeli army
located in Jewish communities too during the war. Ibrahim explains:
"In part the reason was that we are an Arab organisation and that directs the
focus of our work. But there is also the difficulty that Israeli Jews are unlikely
to cooperate with our research."

Israel has longed boasted of its "citizen army", and in surveys Israeli Jews say
they trust the military more than the country's parliament, government and courts.

Nonetheless, the report notes, there is ample evidence that the army based itself
in some Jewish communities too. As well as the eyewitness account of the
Human Rights Watch researcher, it was widely reported during the war that
12 soldiers were killed when a Hizbullah rocket struck the rural community of
Kfar Giladi, close to the northern border.

A member of the kibbutz, Uri Eshkoli, recently told the Israeli media:
"We deserve a medal of honor for our assistance during the war.
We opened our hotel to soldiers and asked for no compensation.
Moreover, soldiers stayed in the kibbutz throughout the entire war."

In another report, in the Guardian newspaper, a 19-year-old British Jew,
Danny Young, recounted his experiences performing military service during the war.
He lived on Kibbutz Sasa, close to the border, which became an army rear base.
"We were shooting missiles from the foot of this kibbutz," he told the paper.
"We were also receiving Katyushas."

So far the Human Rights Association's report has received minimal coverage
in the Hebrew media. "We are facing a very difficult political atmosphere in
Israel at the moment," Ibrahim told me. "Few people inside Israel want to
hear that their army and government broke international law in such a
flagrant manner."

It seems few in the West, even the guardians of human rights, are ready to hear
such a message either.

Jonathan Cook is a journalist and writer based in Nazareth, Israel. His latest book,
"Israel and the Clash of Civilisations: Iraq, Iran and the Plan to Remake the
Middle East", is published by Pluto Press. His website is www.jkcook.net