The Case Against Israel's Enemies by Alan Dershowitz

Author:Alan Dershowitz
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Published: 2010-05-10T16:00:00+00:00

During the four-week war Hezbollah fired 3,900 rockets at Israeli towns and cities with the aim of inflicting maximum civilian casualties.

The Israeli government says that 44 Israeli civilians were killed in the bombardments and 1,400 wounded.

AI has not issued a report accusing Hezbollah of war crimes.44

Amnesty International does not even seem to understand the charges it is making. Take, for example, this paragraph from its report: “Israeli government spokespeople have insisted that they were targeting Hizbullah positions and support facilities, and that damage to civilian infrastructure was incidental or resulted from Hizbullah using the civilian population as a ‘human shield.’ However, the pattern and scope of the attacks, as well as the number of civilian casualties and the amount of damage sustained, makes the justification ring hollow.”45

But the issues of human shields and infrastructure are different. The first relates to civilian casualties; the second concerns property damage. Of course, Israel intentionally targeted bridges and roads. It would have been militarily negligent not to have done so under the circumstances. But it did not target innocent civilians. It would have given Israel no military benefit to do so.

The allegations become even more tenuous, as when Amnesty International wrote, “A road that can be used for military transport is still primarily civilian in nature.”46 By this reasoning, terrorists could commandeer any structure or road initially constructed for civilian use, and Israel could not touch those bridges or buildings because they were once, and still could be, used by civilians. This is not, and should not be, the law.

Consider another example: “While the use of civilians to shield a combatant from attack is a war crime, under international humanitarian law such use does not release the opposing party from its obligations towards the protection of the civilian population.”47 Well, that certainly sounds nice. But what does it mean? What would Amnesty International suggest a country do in the face of daily rocket attacks launched from civilian populations? Nothing, apparently. The clear implication of Amnesty International’s arguments is that the only way Israel could have avoided committing “war crimes” would have been if it had taken only such military action that carried with it no risk to civilian shields—that is, to do absolutely nothing.

The real problem with Amnesty International’s paper is that its blanket condemnations do not consider the consequences of its arguments. (It doesn’t have to; it would never advance these arguments against any country but Israel.)

Amnesty International’s conclusions are not based on sound legal arguments. They’re certainly not based on compelling moral arguments. They’re simply anti-Israel arguments. Amnesty International reached a predetermined conclusion—that Israel committed war crimes—and it is marshaling whatever sound-bites it can to support that conclusion.

Amnesty International is not only sacrificing its own credibility when it misstates the law and omits relevant facts in its obsession over Israel. It also harms progressive causes that Amnesty International should be championing.

In 2005, for example, Amnesty International blamed Palestinian rapes and “honor killings” on—you guessed it—the Israeli occupation. 48 When I pointed out

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