Analysis from Israel

Just about everything that’s wrong with the current conception of “international humanitarian law” was encapsulated in a UN official’s response to the recent escalation between Israel and Hamas in Gaza.

Surprisingly, it started off well. The agency’s special coordinator for the Middle East peace process, Robert Serry, condemned the rocket attacks from Gaza, saying they were “in clear violation of international humanitarian law and endanger civilians.” Then, noting Israel’s retaliatory air strikes, he even declared that Israel had “a right to self-defense.”

Had the sentence ended there, it would have been fine. But it didn’t. Israel, said Serry, has “a right to self-defense consistent with international humanitarian law” [emphasis added] — which requires it to “exercise maximum restraint and take every precaution to ensure Israeli forces do not endanger civilians in Gaza.”

And that’s where the whole concept breaks down. Because what happens when “maximum restraint” and taking “every precaution” fail to stop the rocket fire? After all, we already know they will: Israel tried precisely this kind of pinpoint strike — in which pilots are strictly forbidden to fire if there’s any chance of hitting civilians — for three years after leaving Gaza in 2005, but it had no effect whatsoever on the daily rocket fire.

That’s why Israel finally went to war two years ago. It still worked hard to avoid hurting civilians: with even Hamas now admitting that it lost some 700 combatants, it’s clear that civilians constituted only about 40 percent of fatalities — far below the 90 percent norm for modern warfare. But this certainly wasn’t an exercise in “maximum restraint.” It was a full-scale military operation.

The war produced two results. One was a dramatic reduction in rocket and mortar strikes on southern Israel, from about 4,000 in 2008 to 180 this year. The other was the Goldstone Report, which accused Israel of “war crimes” and urged its prosecution in the International Criminal Court.

In short, under the modern conception of “international humanitarian law,” countries have two choices: either use “maximum restraint” and take “every precaution” to avoid hurting enemy civilians, with the result that lethal attacks against your own civilians continue undisturbed, or take effective military action to protect your own civilians and be branded a war criminal.

This is a travesty. International humanitarian law was never meant to strip countries of the ability to protect their own citizens, nor was it meant to force countries to protect enemy civilians at the expense of their own. The statesmen who drafted the agreements from which this law ostensibly derives, like the Hague Conventions and the Geneva Conventions, all understood that a country’s first duty is to protect its citizens. And nothing in the actual text of these documents would prevent any country from doing so.

The West needs to return to these original texts and abandon the warped interpretation promulgated by so-called human rights organizations and international bodies like the UN. Otherwise, it will find itself defenseless against any aggressor, from al-Qaeda to North Korea. For aggressors share one common denominator: they don’t consider themselves bound by any kind of international law.

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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.

Moreover, even after acknowledging that test-and-trace was necessary, ministry bureaucrats insisted for months that their ministry do the tracing despite its glaringly inadequate manpower. Only in August was the job finally given to the army, which does have the requisite personnel. And the system still isn’t fully operational.

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