Evelyn Gordon
Analysis from Israel

The Laws of War Must Not Apply to Israel

Published May 6, 2011

The international response to the Fatah-Hamas unity deal provides yet another example of a troubling development. Alone among the nations, Israel is increasingly denied the protections of the laws of war.

Thus, for instance, the West denounces Israel’s targeted killings of Hamas leaders even as it correctly deems America’s targeted killing of Al-Qaida’s leader perfectly legitimate (a double standard skewered by Alan Dershowitz this week).

Now the same double standard is being applied to Israel’s suspension of fund transfers to the Palestinian Authority. The U.S. and Europe have both demanded that Israel resume the transfers. Even the usually sensible Tony Blair, the Quartet’s Middle East envoy, echoed this demand. “The money is Palestinian money so it must be transferred,” Blair told Haaretz. “That is a Quartet position. Hillary Clinton made the same point.”

The money is indeed Palestinian: customs duties that, under a 1994 agreement, Israel collects on the PA’s behalf at its ports to spare importers the hassle of dealing with two separate customs offices. But under the laws of war, this fact is totally irrelevant.

The laws of war permit a country at war to freeze enemy assets in its territory lest they be used to finance the enemy’s campaign. And all countries do so. For instance, the U.S. and other NATO countries now bombing Libya have all frozen Libyan government assets.

No reasonable person would deny that Israel is at war with Hamas. Missiles are routinely fired at Israel from Hamas-controlled Gaza, and the Islamist organization still refuses to recognize Israel’s existence. Contrary to Washington’s wishful thinking, the Hamas-Fatah accord hasn’t softened this position, as senior Hamas official Mahmoud Zahar made clear on the very day it was signed. According to the Jerusalem Post, he told Al Jazeera that his organization “will never recognize Israel,” as Palestinians reject “the rule of Poles and Ethiopians in their land.”

Nor can Hamas be part of a new PA government without benefiting from PA funds. No matter what mechanisms are created to prevent direct transfers from the PA to Hamas, money is fungible. The very fact that the PA will now finance governmental outlays in Gaza for which Hamas previously had to foot the bill frees up funds for Hamas’s war on Israel.

Thus the moment the deal was signed to bring Hamas into the PA government, Israel was entirely justified under the laws of war in freezing fund transfers to the PA. Indeed, none of the Western countries now sanctimoniously protesting the freeze would hesitate a moment to freeze the assets of any government that included a terrorist organization committed to their own destruction.

As far as the West is concerned, though, the laws of war don’t apply to Israel. Unlike other nations, it has no right to take reasonable, legal steps in its own defense. The West may preach equality before the law, but it falls back Orwell’s definition of equality: Some countries are clearly more equal than others.

Originally Published in: Commentary
Original Link: http://www.commentarymagazine.com/2011/05/06/laws-of-war-must-not-apply-to-israel/
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Why Israel Needs a Better Political Class

Note: This piece is a response to an essay by Haviv Rettig Gur, which can be found here

Israel’s current political crisis exemplifies the maxim that hard cases make bad law. This case is desperate. Six months after the coronavirus erupted and nine months after the fiscal year began, Israel still lacks both a functioning contact-tracing system and an approved 2020 budget, mainly because Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is more worried about politics than the domestic problems that Israel now confronts. The government’s failure to perform these basic tasks obviously invites the conclusion that civil servants’ far-reaching powers must not only be preserved, but perhaps even increased.

This would be the wrong conclusion. Bureaucrats, especially when they have great power, are vulnerable to the same ills as elected politicians. But unlike politicians, they are completely unaccountable to the public.

That doesn’t mean Haviv Rettig Gur is wrong to deem them indispensable. They provide institutional memory, flesh out elected officials’ policies, and supply information the politicians may not know and options they may not have considered. Yet the current crisis shows in several ways why they neither can nor should substitute for elected politicians.

First, bureaucrats are no less prone to poor judgment than politicians. As evidence, consider Siegal Sadetzki, part of the Netanyahu-led triumvirate that ran Israel’s initial response to the coronavirus. It’s unsurprising that Gur never mentioned Sadetzki even as he lauded the triumvirate’s third member, former Health Ministry Director General Moshe Bar Siman-Tov; she and her fellow Health Ministry staffers are a major reason why Israel still lacks a functional test-and-trace system.

Sadetzki, an epidemiologist, was the ministry’s director of public-health services and the only member of the triumvirate with professional expertise in epidemics (Bar Siman-Tov is an economist). As such, her input was crucial. Yet she adamantly opposed expanding virus testing, even publicly asserting that “Too much testing will increase complacence.” She opposed letting organizations outside the public-health system do lab work for coronavirus tests, even though the system was overwhelmed. She opposed sewage monitoring to track the spread of the virus. And on, and on.

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