Adloyada

Hamas leader promises even greater war crimes against Israel

Yes, he's done it again.

Regular readers of Adloyada will recognise our old friend Mohammed Al-Zahar, "Foreign Minister" of the Hamas Gaza regime,  the star spokesman of many earlier posts highlighting Hamas' commitment to terrorism and anti-semitism.

Two days ago, I posted on the need to recognise the centrality of Hamas' commitment not just to terrorism but to the use of war crimes against both Israelis and the Palestinian people as a deliberately chosen tactic.

It was driving home tonight listening to BBC Radio 4's 6PM news programme that I heard their report that Al-Zahar's latest speech had promised that Hamas would now target synagogues and kindergartens because the Israelis had hit mosques and schools in Gaza. When I got home, I found the report pictured above, issued by a Palestinian news agency. I don't think by any stretch of the imagination Al-Zahar can be trying to suggest that Israel stores bombs and rockets or stations combat troops in its synagogues and kindergartens, or that his promises are purely rhetorical. 

As it happens, a Hamas Grad rocket hit a kindergarten in Ashdod today. It was almost certainly a chance hit, rather than a triumph of sophisticated targeting. But no children were murdered, because the Israeli government has installed warning systems and shelters to ensure its citizens in the target areas for Hamas' rockets are in shelters, and it has closed schools and kindergartens for the duration of the present conflict, to avoid exactly such tragedies.

The deliberate targeting of synagogues and kindergartens, simply as a tit-for-tat revenge tactic, as he promises is, beyond doubt a war crime, and will be doubly a war crime if the targeting is launched from a crowded civilian area like Gaza City. By contrast, where combatants are using mosques, schools and other civilian areas to store weapons and hide combatants, as Israel seeks to demonstrate through its Youtube video campaign,  targeting them is not a war crime.

Meanwhile, Clive Davis, whose featured image of a Hamas rocket being launched at Israel from the midst of Gaza City inspired my post on the need to recognise Hamas as the war criminals they are, has put up a post in response.

Clive's response seems defensive. He argues he was one of the first to pick up the propaganda use of images of the death of Mohammed Al-Dura and to criticise the pro-Palestinian campaigners' exploitation of Rachel Corrie's death as a stick to beat Israel with. He simply repeated the agency-supplied caption on the image he put up. But why did he choose to make no further comment, given the enormity of what that image showed?

My aim in any case was not to focus on Clive as a particularly biased commentator; he's far from that. It's more that the universe of discourse of UK commentators as a whole is very ready to focus on Israel in any conflict with the Palestinians as actor,  initiator, aggressor and breaker of international law, including committer of war crimes. Coverage of Hamas in relation to Israel and the Palestinians it rules presently tends to focus on them as either outgunned and bullied victims of Israel, elected and embattled resistance fighters or maybe irrational terrorists. They are almost never identified by UK media sources as committing war crimes against both Israelis and their own people.

To me the image that Clive featured is the clearest possible evidence which shows the Hamas regime in the course of committing a war crime. In that sense it's as significant as the famous Vietnam war image of a South Vietnamese officer summarily shooting the brains out of a prisoner. So in my view to refrain from some sort of reflection on its significance is representative of a more general UK mainstream media reluctance to call Hamas' war criminality what it is. By contrast, the same mainstream media is very ready to assume that Israel's actions fall under the war crime of disproportionality, ignoring the scholarly work which shows that Israel does in its struggle to defeat Hamas and other terror groups' attacks corresponds to what is permitted of legitimate states in self defence.

If you look at the whole of my post, it also focuses on the fact that even the most pro-Israel commentators--and the Israeli PR operation-- focuses on Hamas as terrorists rather than committers of war crimes as their key operational tactic. A routine offloading of ethical responsibility of the UK media re terrorism is to claim, as BBC spokesmen have famously done, that "one man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter."

Interestingly, there doesn't seem to be an equivalent ethical relativising gambit re war crimes, along the lines of "one man's war criminal is another man's......". It becomes instead an issue of whether or not particular actions count as war crimes as agreed under commonly recognised international conventions. So highlighting the decisive evidence that Hamas is a deliberate committer of war crimes should make it less tenable to defend through relativist arguments.

And maybe the folk responsible for BBC News have been reading Adloyada too. Just today the BBC News web site has a new post which tries to argue that Hamas' war crimes may not be war crimes after all. Or they might be "justifiable war crimes". Or that it might be Israel who's committing the war crimes. And, apart from the very partisan anti-US activist Professor Phillippe Sands,  the "experts" it cites are not scholarly experts in the law of war criminality. They are representatives of pressure groups like Human Rights Watch and B'Tselem, both of which have agendas which historically have been heavily biased against Israel and in favour of "resistance groups."

I think commentators and the news media in the UK would be a great deal less "understanding"/sympathetic--or even neutral-- towards Hamas if they recognized the extent to which they systematically use war crimes as a tactic.

Want a laugh? Compare how BBC reports Israel/Gaza with UK/Afghanistan

Try comparing the language and perspectives of the way the BBC and the mainstream UK press is reporting the Israeli campaign in Gaza with their reports on the British Army campaign in Afghanistan.

No, you won't find references to "the Church of England state" like the many and repeated references to "the Jewish state". You won't find lengthy interviews with Taleban supporters claiming there's a British massacre of Afghanis and explaining how they're going to send the British Army to early graves. And you won't find endless questioning of the real motives of the UK, or attribution of cynical bad faith to the reasons for particular military actions happening at particular times.

In fact, when it comes to the BBC reporting on British army attacks in Afghanistan, you'll find them obligingly offering up whatever the Defence Department has told them. You'll find extended descriptions of British soldiers' self-evaluations in suitably heroic language:

Operation Sond Chara - Pashto for Red Dagger - was named after 3 Commando Brigade's shoulder badge.

It aimed to provide better security in the provincial capital Lashkar Gah following Taleban attacks in October and to pave the way for a forthcoming voter registration programme.
Troops have been revealing details of the gruelling offensive, which involved some marines trudging more than 60km through mud while fighting insurgents at close quarters.
Capt Dave Glendenning, commander of the marines' artillery support team, said: "Almost every day we were involved in intense fire-fights ranging from rocket-propelled grenades and small arms 'shoot-and-scoots' to four-hour battles with the enemy forces as close as 30 metres."

It's true that the BBC does allow for some dissent and questioning of the British role in Afghanistan. But that's always on a side panel set against an upbeat and supportive main panel report of whatever the Ministry of Defence and the Army spokesmen offer, alongside cosy personal-story detail that adds to the humanization of the British soldiers' image.

A clear and present war crime

I've been a regular reader and fan of Clive Davis' blog since before the time when he became one of the Spectator's resident bloggers. He published the photo above on Friday, with just the included caption and no further comment, headlined "In Gaza". 

What so interests me about this image is that you could not have a more blatant image of a war crime in action. Here is a missile very clearly being fired from the midst of a crowded city; it is not as if the territory of Gaza lacks open areas, orchards, farms and other places away from civilian areas. And Hamas openly boasts that its rockets are deliberately targeted at civilians in civilian areas. Both are war crimes. 

Why does Clive Davis ignore this? 

Why does the BBC, which so tirelessly refers to Israel as illegally occupying Palestinian land choose not to mention that when it reports Hamas launchings of rockets from within Gaza City that Hamas is committing a double war crime, both in the location from which it chooses to launch its rockets and in its targeting? 

Clive's caption is also curiously phrased ("rockets are launched") so that it glosses over the role of Hamas as the launcher of the rockets and the enabler of terrorism and war crimes from the territory it controls. 

Meanwhile, the BBC News website has a lengthy feature casting doubt on the widely publicised Israel Defence Forces' Youtube video of its strike on a claimed shipment of Grad rockets. It goes on to refer to the IDF Youtube channel and its use of spokesmen as a "propaganda campaign", a term it does not use when the BBC reports British forces' accounts of their actions in Afghanistan including obviously staged PR interviews with celebrity soldiers like Prince Harry.

One of the curious and regrettable features of the Israeli and IDF campaigns is that they too rarely point up that the rocket launches from Gaza City and their strikes on Israeli cities, towns and villages are double war crimes. It's true that Israeli government spokesmen and supporters regularly refer to Hamas as a terrorist organization, which it is. But in the present situation, it is going beyond terrorist acts, because it is a de facto governing entity. State or quasi-state authorities which station combatants and store military equipment in the midst of civilian populations commit war crimes

Perhaps the Israeli authorities and the IDF could consider repeatedly and invariably using the terms " Hamas war crimes" every time they report or publicize any rocket launched from inside Gaza City and any mortar or rocket launched from Gaza with no other purpose than to hit Israeli civilian areas, including repeated "war crimes" references every time its spokespersons appear on international news media. Maybe the Twitter feed that logs Hamas' Qassam rocket attacks on Israel as they happen could update its name to "Qassam War Crime Count".

The Palestinian cause was hugely furthered by the PLO and subsequently Fatah adherence to its mantra of "illegally occupying Palestinian land."

To some extent, the wider world public can recognise Hamas as a terrorist organization when it's parading masked would-be suicide bombers at mass rallies. But as soon as it goes into victim mode, and puts up quietly spoken "Gaza residents" and spokesmen who rail about Israeli "genocide" operations, it's as if the wider world envisages an embattled, besieged tiny country of democrats whose government is unable to function because of Israeli intransigence and vindictiveness.

"War crimes" continue to resonate with the wider world public. They are all too ready to believe that any bombardment of a group based in a civilian setting is a war crime. Michael Totten's summary of some key scholarly discussions of international law on proportionality in national self-defence actions shows that Israel's actions are not war crimes. But those of Hamas clearly are. And this point is not being made nearly clearly or regularly enough.