[GushShalom] Witch hunt against Gush Shalom continues

[Gush Shalom (Israeli Peace Bloc)]

GUSH SHALOM - pob 3322, Tel-Aviv 61033 - http://www.gush-shalom.org/

Gush Shalom's "heinous act" of sending a warning to specific officers continues to be 
the overriding issue on radio talk-shows. After the government ministers opened the 
witch hunt we got a lot of filth in our direction. But... sometimes a good surprise: in the 
nightly phone-in program of Jojo Abutbul there were appeared suddenly several left-
wingers, all of them women, who defended the democratic right of Gush Shalom to act 
as it did. 

Meanwhile our email box is flooded with the copies of protest letters to the authorities, 
from within Israel and also a lot from abroad. The support of ICAHD, the Women's 
Coalition and Yesh Gvul should be mentioned especially.

We would like to emphasize - especially to Israelis whereever they are - how important 
their protest letter sent by fax - and in Hebrew! - could be. 

At the request of some of you here are some more adresses, in addition to the ones 
sent yesterday.

Office of the Attorney General Elyakim Rubinstein: fax 02-6708727 // 02--6288065 // 02-
6466731 (we found no email )

Minister of Justice Meir Shetreet <sar at justice.gov.il>
Fax : + 972 2 6285 438


The following is the editorial of today's Ha'aretz - and our answer which was sent out. It 
is disappointing to see that a liberal paper has no word of criticism of governmental 
incitement against peace activists - several ministers calling us names, and  Justice 
Minister Shetreet using the word "traitors" on the radio.

The blindness of political purity
Activists from Gush Shalom, the leftist peace group, have sent letters to 15 Israel 
Defense Forces officers, warning that the movement is collecting evidence about 
actions that took place under their command in the territories for submission to the 
International Criminal Court in The Hague, on suspicion that the officers committed war 
crimes. 

This week, the prime minister asked the attorney general to investigate the Gush 
Shalom leaders. Attorney General Elyakim Rubinstein said that the state prosector 
had yet to form an opinion on whether legal steps could be taken against the Gush 
Shalom activists. But irrespective of the legal questions, it is difficult not to regard 
Gush Shalom's action as injudicious and wrong, and its damage is certainly going to 
overs
hadow 
the pure intentions of the activists. 

Gush Shalom is a political movement that promotes the campaign against the occupation in various wa
ys. 
These include organizing rallies and demonstrations, as well as monitoring IDF activity in the terr
itories and 
publishing the results of this monitoring through various media channels. 

This is all acceptable in any democracy. Collecting seemingly incriminating material against office
rs in an 
army that operates under the law in a sovereign state, according to the instructions of an elected 
government, can also be considered worthy civic action, on one condition - that the gathered inform
ation is 
published or presented to the law enforcement agencies in the country. 

A Gush Shalom spokesman told Ha'aretz that the movement was considering passing on the information 
it 
collected to The Hague "only if our appeals to the courts in Israel are to no avail." But even with
 this 
reservation, the decision to warn IDF officers is problematic. The inherent working assumption of t
he 
activists and the implicit threat in the letters to the officers is that those state institutions m
eant to 
implement the principles of democracy and protect the rule of law - including the courts, the parli
ament and 
the press - are insufficient, in Gush Shalom's eyes, as legal institutions. The movement is in effe
ct stating 
that if it is not satisfied (presumably with convictions), it will seek out international forums to
 get what it 
believes would be true justice. 

With this political purity, Gush Shalom is causing great damage to public life in Israel - and harm
 to its own 
cause. Of all people, leftist peace activists are the ones who are needed to strengthen the press a
nd to find 
ways to convince the public and encourage the state prosecutor and the legal system to investigate 
every 
problematic incident in the army. Putting the International Criminal Court - with all the problemat
ics of its 
structure - above the state's legal system is a blunt vote of no confidence in the institutions and
 public 
opinion in Israel. 

The decision to send evidence to the international court in The Hague shows contempt for those who 
have 
not given up the continuing campaign for an end the occupation and for peace - people who also work
 
under difficult conditions in the bitter conflict that has given birth to profound disappointment a
nd a crisis 
in the left, but are interested in doing so in an open and legitimate political debate. 

Handing over evidence to the international court will not inspire Israeli public opinion to turn ag
ainst 
blatantly illegal orders given or executed in the territories. On the contrary, it could even achie
ve the 
opposite result.

[If you want to react, you can do it by writing a letter to the editor: letters at haaretz.co.il - or 
by addressing 
the editors at: editor at haaretz.co.il  What follows is our own reaction:]

Dear Sir

The editorial of Ha'aretz, Tuesday Aug. 6, was devoted to an attack upon 
Gush Shalom, which in fact joins the campaign launched against our movement 
by Prime Minister Sharon. 

It is rather disappointing that the editorial uses factually untrue arguments. 
In it you take the position that "collecting seemingly incriminating material 
against officers in an army that operates under the law in a sovereign state, 
according to the instructions of an elected government, can also be considered 
worthy civic action, on one condition - that the gathered information is published 
or presented to the law enforcement agencies in the country."

The editorial writer(s) seem unaware that Gush Shalom did precisely that. Each 
one of the letters sent to various military officers was simultaneously sent to 
all the papers, including Ha'aretz, and as a matter of fact we made considerable 
efforts at the time to get your reporters interested - to no avail. 
Also, from each of these letters there were copies sent to the military 
prosecution, to the army chief-of-staff and to the Minister of Defence, so that 
the competent authorities had a full chance to take judicial action had they 
wanted to. We were not surprised that they didn't, since the actions about 
which we wrote to various officers mostly constituted part of the official 
policies of the state of Israel and its armed forces. Such acts as the 
demolition of houses, collective punishments and the arrests of family members 
of suspected terrorists for the sole reason of their being family members are 
common and approved parts of official policies - and neverthless, they 
constitute serious violations of international law and specifically of the 
Fourth Geneva Convention. We had no difficulty in finding evidence connecting a 
particular officer to such acts. In most cases, the evidence was provided in 
press interviews in which the officers addmitted - often boasted of - the 
particular act. In such cases, we felt duty bound to write such an officer and 
warn him that his acts, or those which he had ordered his subordinates to do, 
constitute violations of international law. 
It is difficulat for us to believe that the existing Israeli judicial system, 
military or civilian, could deal with offences of this kind - though we will be 
extremely happy to be proven wrong. Possilbly, at some time there will be 
created in Israel an institute similar to the "Truth Commission" of post-
Apartheid South Africa, which could take up this burden. Otherwise, the issue 
is likely to arrive, sooner or later, at a internationa judicial forum of one 
kind or another. 
It is surprising that Ha'aretz did not see fit to refer to the aritcle 
published yesterday (August 5) by your correspondent Amir Oren, in which he 
refered to plans being prepared at the Israeli Army's general staff for "a new 
operation, more harsh than 'Defensive Shield' and 'Detemined Path', whose 
implementation may result in "The death of thousands of Palestinians"(!). 
Without knowing the details, which your correspondent did not enumerate, this 
horrifying news item arouses a terrible suspicion of mass war crimes being 
prepared. If these crimes ever come to perpetrated, the International tribunal 
in the Hague is likely to initiate action on its own, without waiting for "Gush Shalom".    

Adam Keller, spokesperson of Gush Shalom, Tel-Aviv 



	----
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