[GushShalom] Avnery on War Crime Scandal

[Gush Shalom (Israeli Peace Bloc)]

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

[This is an update about the War Crime Scandal. With all the pressures of the past 
week we didn't send out the billboard as usual. We intend to take it up again before 
the weekend.]

  The act of unknown persons who wrote the words "war criminal" on the cars of three 
combat pilots is attributed by the media to Gush Shalom without of course a shread of 
proof. 
  Meanwhile, Sharon was again today reported to be insisting on legal action against 
Gush Shalom by the Attorney General. This while persistent rumors from within the 
Ministry of Justice have it that "under the present law there is nothing illegal in the 
warning letters sent to officers by Gush Shalom." (The Justice Minister therefore has 
suggested to change the law!)

  Uri Avnery's "article of the week" deals with the matter.

Uri Avnery
10.8.02

                               A Phone Call froeam Hell

     There is a direct telephone connection between heaven and hell. I can 
prove it.
     The idea crossed my mind last Sunday, when I was climbing to a 
snow-covered peak in the alpine region of Italy, where I was the guest at 
a political conference. The sun was shining, the temperature hovered 
around zero centigrade, around me was a breathtaking landscape of 
white peaks. Far away below, calm cowherds led their animals to their 
green pasture. Heaven on earth.
     And then the cellular phone rang. The call came from Tel-Aviv, where 
the barometer was climbing to 32 degrees and above. The radio news 
from Israel, which I managed  to receive from time to time, told of people 
killed and wounded, attacks and retaliation, bombs and bombardments, 
demolition of homes and deportations, and, on top of that, factory 
closures, mass dismissals, economic disaster. A real hell.
     My colleagues at home called to tell me about an exciting 
development: that morning, öHaaretz¯ had published on its front-page a 
hair-raising sensation: öGush Shalom has threatened officers: We 
collect material against you for The Hague¯. (This is the original 
headline in Hebrew. In the English edition of Haaretz, it was slightly 
toned down.)
     Following the news item, I was told, the Prime Minister has ordered 
his obedient servant, the Attorney General, to start criminal proceedings 
against us. The Minister of Justice, Me1ir Shitreet, a third-rate politician, 
declared that we were a öfifth column¯. The Minister for Communication, 
Rubi Rivlin, considered by many to be a clown, solemnly asserted that 
öThis is Treason!¯ 
     Any number of politicians and commentators started a lynch 
campaign. Expressions like "traitors", öinformers¯, öCapo¯ (the Jewish 
öcamp police¯, which served the Nazis in the concentration camps), 
öJudenrat¯ (the Jewish committees appointed by the Nazis in the 
ghettos) were freely bandied about.
     There was, indeed, good reason for all this commotion.
     At the beginning of the year, the Gush Shalom peace movement, like 
many people in Israel and abroad, decided that it could no longer ignore 
the fact that in the course of the IDF operations in the occupied 
territories terrible acts, violating both Israeli and international law, were 
being committed. Some of these appeared to be war crimes. We in the 
Gush decided that it was our duty, as Israeli citizens who bear 
responsibility for the acts of our government and our army, to raise our 
voice and deliver a stringent warning.
     On January 9 we convened a conference on war crimes in a big hall 
in Tel-Aviv. Several professors of international law and two senior 
(retired) army officers were on the panel. One of the speakers was a war 
hero, air force Colonel Yig1al Shohat, who had been shot down over 
Egypt and lost a leg. In a voice trembling with emotion, he called upon 
his comrades, the combat pilots, to refuse to obey illegal orders, such 
as bombarding civilian neighborhoods. 
     All the TV and radio stations and the two major newspapers ignored 
the conference, to which they were invited. It was clear that all of the 
enlisted media had decided to suppress the issue of war crimes.
      That became quite clear when we submitted to Kol Israel, the 
state-run radio network, a paid ad, informing soldiers about their duty to 
refuse ömanifestly illegal orders¯ « literally repeating the wording of the 
judgment of the military court following the Kafr Kassem massacre of 
1956. Kol Israel refused to broadcast it. We asked the Supreme Court to 
order the Broadcasting Authority to air the ad, but the court decided that 
it was unable to do so.
     So we decided to take direct action. We distributed among the 
soldiers a pocket manual, setting out the prohibitions of the Geneva 
Convention, which was signed by Israel. Among them: Executions 
without trial (called öliquidations¯), shooting of unarmed civilians, 
torture, prevention of medical treatment, killing the wounded  (called 
överification of death¯), starvation, deportation.
     öProtect yourself against indictment abroad!¯  the manual said, öAs a 
soldier in an occupation army, you are particularly exposed to 
indictment for war crimes. Strict adherence to this manual will protect 
you from arrest and indictment abroad!¯
     The manual concluded: öSoldier, remember! During your military 
service, whether on regular or reserve duty, you must refuse manifestly 
illegal orders. If you have witnessed a war crime, you are duty-bound to 
report it!¯
     At the same time we sent individual letters to certain commanders 
and warned them that their actions might lead in future to their 
indictment in an Israeli or international court. (There is no statute of 
limitation on war crimes.) In the letters, we relied solely on material 
published in the media, especially on boasts made by the officers 
themselves, who practically incriminated themselves. 
     Copies were sent to the media, all of whom suppressed the 
information, as well as to the chief legal officer of the army, who did not 
take any action.
      We warned these senior officers that the material collected by us 
would be put at the disposal of an Israeli court, if, at any time in the 
future, the courts start to fulfill their duty, or « as a last resort « to the 
International Criminal Court in The Hague.
     One may assume that it was one of these officers who gave the 
sensational news to the military correspondent of Haaretz. The liberal 
newspaper, which, until that day, had ignored all the information about 
our action (as, indeed, about almost all the activities of the peace 
movements) did publish this story as the main sensation on its front 
page.
     The result was a deluge of defamation. The telephone lines of Gush 
Shalom activists were inundated with curses and death threats. The 
radio talk shows competed with each other over who would bring the 
most fanatical extremists to the microphone, with the hosts egging them 
on and openly supporting them. Gush activists were suddenly invited to 
TV and radio interviews, where they were faced with interviewers who 
behaved like interrogators of prisoners in some Shin-Beth cellar.
     Of all the curses thrown at us, the most instructive was öinformers¯. 
It belongs to the ghetto vocabulary. When Jews were a defenseless 
community, helplessly exposed to the cruelty of Gentile authorities, a 
Jew who denounced another Jew to the Goyim was considered the 
vilest of the vile. The fact that this word is used today, after 54 years of 
having our state, when we have one of the most powerful armies in the 
world, shows that many in our country still live in the world of the 
ghetto. Verily, it seems that it is easier to get the Jews out of the ghetto 
than to get the ghetto out of some Jews. The judges of the International 
Criminal Court look to them like a mob of drunken Cossacks intent on 
carrying out a pogrom. 
     Our aim is, of course, prevention. We wanted to raise awareness of 
this subject among the officers and soldiers. We hoped they and their 
colleagues would take the war crimes issue into consideration  while 
making their plans, supplying perhaps the feather that would turn the 
scales at the moment of decision. We were resolved to turn this subject 
into a public issue, so as to put pressure on the political and military 
leadership.
     Actually, the campaign of incitement unleashed against us did serve 
this very purpose. For a week now, war crimes have become a central 
subject of the public discourse in Israel. No officer or soldier could 
avoid giving serious consideration to his deeds or defaults in the 
occupied territories. Many of them for the first time became aware of 
what war crimes are and how they might affect their own lives. 
     From now on, this subject will not disappear from the agenda. 


PS: Did it occur to you to write a letter to the editor about the witch hunt against Gush 
Shalom -  suggesting for example that the attorney general investigates violations of 
international law - and not those monitoring them? NB: Don't forget to include your 
address and phone number.  
	----
    Full transcript of the war crimes panel available on the Gush site
    For Hebrew   http://www.gush-shalom.org/archives/forum.html
    For English  http://www.gush-shalom.org/archives/forum_eng.html
    French available at request 
           
Also on the site:
    photo's - of action or otherwise informative 
    the weekly Gush Shalom ad - in Hebrew and English 
    the columns of Uri Avnery - in Hebrew, Arab and English	
    (and a lot more) 
		http://www.gush-shalom.org

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