Updates from AIJAC

"No Massacre in Jenin" - HRW

Sorry to obsess about Jenin, but in this I am merely mirroring the Australian press. Here is an incredibly important story about Jenin. Human Rights Watch is an human rights organisation with a long history of anti-Israel bias in the form of taking every Palestinian claim as evidence of guilt until Israel is proven innocent. But their field worker in Jenin says "There is simply no evidence of a massacre," that almost certainly less than 80 Palestinians died overall, and exactly one person has been found who was crushed by a bulldozer knocking down a home, everyone else died in the fighting. This very strong evidence that the claim of a massacre is false, from an unimpeachable source has had, as far as we can determine, exactly zero exposure in the Australian media.

Next is a piece from The New Republic magazine by Robert Hochman points out that Palestinian claims of a massacre of civilians in Jenin ring particularly hollow since "All civilised people agree on the premise of the Palestinian leadership's argument about Jenin. There is a vast moral difference between targeting civilians and combatants...But this is an odd principle for terrorists, and those who harbour them, to preach."

Finally, the popular former US presidential candidate Senator John McCain has some interesting things to say about Israel and US Middle East policy in general in a speech over the weekend reproduced in The Wall Street Journal. Particularly good is what he has to say about rejecting the hypocrisy of Arab leaders who demand the US "deliver" Israel, but refuse absolutely to do anything about Palestinian terror, even verbally.

Jerusalem, Apr. 28, 2002

Human Rights Watch: No evidence of massacre in Jenin

By Matthew Guttman

As a UN fact-finding mission prepares to investigate allegations of a massacre in Jenin, most aid workers in the city say that they have come to one major conclusion - though massive destruction took place in the refugee camp, there was clearly no massacre.

Aid workers and local doctors have found 52 corpses so far. The workers believe that 21 of them were civilians, including four women, two 14 year old boys, two invalids, and two or three elderly men.

"The majority of those killed," said Peter Bouckaert, a senior researcher at US-based Human Rights Watch posted to Jenin, "were killed by snipers. Only one man, that we know of, was crushed in his home by a bulldozer." Bouckaert, whose group has worked closely with medical teams at Jenin Hospital, believes that very few corpses remain buried beneath the tons of rubble. The area of the worst destruction has come to be known among foreign rescue workers, Palestinians, and IDF soldiers alike, as "Ground Zero." Bouckaert was almost certain, he told The Jerusalem Post, that the death toll will not rise beyond 80.

"There is simply no evidence of a massacre. But we are worried that Israel will use this fact to whitewash the enormous amount of damage done to the civilian sector." There is still no electricity in the camp, burst water pipes have flooded low lying areas, and the camp's two schools remain closed.

Posters of "martyrs" and Hamas and Islamic Jihad flags are again in evidence on the few structures left standing at "Ground Zero." Aid groups, including UNWRA, B'Tselem, LAW, Amnesty International, and Human Rights Watch are still tallying lists of dead, injured, and displaced, as well as the number of houses destroyed, rendered unlivable, or simply damaged.

Nearly every building in the refugee camp, and many in Jenin city itself, were damaged in the fierce two-week battle waged in the town. The IDF estimates that about 10 percent of the structures in the camp were destroyed, while Jenin Governor Zuneir Munasra said about 40% of the camp's buildings were destroyed and another 20% rendered unlivable.

The Jenin Governorate and other Palestinian Authority bodies have halted the removal of debris ahead of today's arrival of the UN commission headed by headed by former Finnish president Martti Ahtisaari, despite the desire of UNWRA and other aid organizations to restore the camp to normal

Also hindering search and rescue work, says UNWRA Deputy Director Charles Capes, is the large number of unexploded ordinance lying about the camp. Last week British and Norwegian sappers remove some of the booby traps, but they returned home leaving most of the job undone. A French Civil Guard rescue team began Friday to mark and isolate buildings or areas believed to be unsafe.

Capes said Palestinian gunmen planted many of the booby traps while other ordinance had been left behind by IDF. Since April 19 one person has been killed and at least 12 were wounded by unexploded ordinance in the camp.

Capes said that as many as 3,500 people have been left without shelter. Munasra told the Post that many of them refuse to use the some 800 tents and other equipment sent by US Agency for International Development because they believe the US was "complicit in the attack on their camp."

DAILY EXPRESS

Shifting Blame

by Robert N. Hochman

The New Republic Online Post date: 04.24.02

The Israelis have pulled out of Jenin, but world attention is still focused there. The Palestinians have alleged that the Israelis have committed a massacre of civilians, as many as 500 dead non-combatants, the deaths concealed in mass graves and buried under the rubble of destroyed houses. The Israelis claim that fewer than 100 Palestinians died in Jenin, most of them combatants killed in some of the fiercest fighting since Operation Defensive Shield began. Soon an international inspection team from the United Nations will be on the ground, contemplating its own verdict.

We don't know what that verdict will be--or whether it will be arrived at fairly. For too many, the truth in this conflict is to be asserted, not discovered. Certainly, there are reasons to question the United Nation's impartiality when one of its envoys has already stated that "Israel has lost all moral ground in this conflict." Ominous, too, is the Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erekat's call for an "immediate investigation" into the "massacres" at Jenin--honest investigations don't begin with their conclusions. But we already know enough about what happened in Jenin to establish a few facts and render some preliminary moral judgments. And by the very moral standards the Palestinians themselves are now setting, it's clear that the Palestinians were the ones sacrificing the lives of innocent civilians--while the Israelis, by all appearances, went out of their way to avoid such losses.

All civilized people agree on the premise of the Palestinian leadership's argument about Jenin. There is a vast moral difference between targeting civilians and combatants. It is wrong, even during a war, to target civilians intentionally.

But this is an odd principle for terrorists, and those who harbour them, to preach. After all, terrorists seek to obliterate the distinction between civilian and combatant. And, remember, it is the Palestinian terrorist groups that send human sacrifices as bombers into Israeli restaurants and shopping malls, where the murder of innocent civilians is not just a consequence but the very explicit goal. And it is the official Palestinian leadership--with the apparent support of the vast majority of Palestinians--who hail these bombers as heroes. If targeting civilians is a crime, as the Palestinian leadership now suggests, then the Palestinian terrorists and their supporters have been guilty of it for years.

And they were guilty of it at Jenin, too--only in an even more twisted sense. The large loss of life in Jenin is a tragedy, no doubt. But against whom should we direct our moral outrage? In Jenin, terrorists sprinkled bomb-making factories, storehouses of weapons, and combatants throughout the civilian population. And when the Israelis came in to find the terrorists, the Palestinians didn't hesitate to use civilians as human shields. One Israeli general described a structure with bombs on the first floor, civilians on the second, and snipers on the third. Elsewhere, terrorists placed bombs in ambulances carrying away the wounded. They hid rocket launchers in mosques, employing the sacred structure itself as a shield. In Bethlehem, the terrorists have taken this immoral tactic to a new level, occupying one of Christianity's holiest sites, using both the sacred structure and the civilian occupants as shields from the Israelis. In Jenin, as in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv and Netanya and Haifa, the terrorists employed civilian death intentionally as a weapon in their jihad.

The Israelis, meanwhile, apparently did their best to respect the distinction between combatants and noncombatants. Even more amazingly, they did so despite the fact that it meant putting their own troops in jeopardy. According to news reports, the operation in Jenin began with dangerous house-to-house combat. Why was there house-to-house fighting when it would have been far easier to just fire rockets and mortar shells from afar? Precisely because the Israelis chose not to kill indiscriminately. In short, the Israelis gave away some of their military superiority out of respect for Palestinian civilian life. And it cost them dearly: Thirteen Israeli soldiers died in one particularly fierce battle.

It was after that loss that the Israelis brought in the bulldozers. Realizing that the terrorists were actually taking advantage of the Israeli conscience by elaborately wiring many buildings with explosives, the Israelis refused to simply walk into their traps. But though the Israelis would not let their conscience prevent them from fighting the terrorists effectively, they still did not let their will to fight overcome their conscience. The bulldozers produced much property damage, and that is horribly disruptive of civilian lives. But the Israelis provided ample warning to those inside the structures to get out, which saved civilian lives. Even after a devastating loss of military life, the Israeli military held back out of respect for Palestinian civilian life.

Let's be clear: The loss of any civilian life is a tragedy, no matter what the motive, and that certainly applies to Palestinian civilians killed in Israeli military campaigns. Friends of Israel must not lose sight of this point, or countenance any effort to obscure what happened there. Some individual soldiers may have shown less respect for civilian life than Israel's military strategists, and those soldiers should be punished. But absent compelling evidence to the contrary, it certainly appears that the ones disregarding civilian life were the Palestinians, not the Israelis. A moral outrage? Yes. But not the one you've been hearing about.

Robert N. Hochman is an attorney in Chicago.

Copyright 2002, The New Republic

United in Freedom

America must stand with Israel against Arab tyranny and terror.

BY JOHN MCCAIN

Friday, April 26, 2002

There will always be an Israel. The terrorist onslaught against her people represents not progress towards a refoundation of historic Palestine but a plunge into an abyss of moral decay perpetrated in the name of the Palestinian people by their own leaders. There will always be an Israel, because the Israeli people will defend their homeland against murderers who pose as martyrs, and will never accept justice imposed on them by leaders who send children to kill their children.

There will always be an Israel, strong and free, because Israel, and her supporters in this country, will never allow the depravity of her enemies to obscure the moral clarity that inspired her founding, 54 years ago last week, as the homeland of a people who understood evil long before Americans saw its more recent expression on September 11.

Terrorism is terrorism, whether in the form of professional killers who crash civilian aircraft into buildings or amateur murderers undistinguished by anything other than their willingness to take innocent lives.

A political solution to the conflict with the Palestinians is the best answer to Israeli insecurity, of course. But no moral nation--neither Israel nor America--can allow terrorists to chart the political course of its people. No freedom-loving nation can tolerate a terrorist state on its border. And no great nation can abandon the obligations of moral clarity for the convenience of situational ethics.

If we are serious about the values we in America and Israel live by, and the opportunities we would like all people in the Middle East to enjoy, we can allow terrorists no role in the political process.

Indeed, we must work to spread our values in the Middle East, first by opposing tyranny in the Arab world. The celebration of freedom in the streets of liberated Baghdad will serve as a counterpoint to the state-directed Arab media's distortion of the Palestinian conflict. It will be a reminder to other Arab tyrants that the United States is a natural ally of Arab people who aspire to freedom. Freeing Arabs from repression by tyrannical regimes is the priority of neither Yasser Arafat nor the dictators he counts as his allies. But bringing liberty's blessings to Arab peoples will do much more to improve their lives than will their jihad against Israel.

Unfortunately, when it comes to advocating freedom and opportunity in the Arab world, our values know few champions. In the monarchies and dictatorships of the Middle East, cynicism is the essence of statecraft. Americans find ourselves handicapped in our Middle East diplomacy by a native regard for moral clarity.

It is our fidelity to the values Arab leaders reject that makes it unmistakably clear to Americans who destroyed the peace process begun in Oslo. The authors of that disaster were the Palestinians themselves--and the Arab leaders who encouraged or accepted Yasser Arafat's rejection of the sweeping settlement offered by former Prime Minister Barak at Camp David, and provided rhetorical and material support for the ensuing intifada waged by suicide bombers.

I don't think our cultural differences with Arab states are so vast that a common recognition of what constitutes real peace and a just settlement is unattainable. I think Arab leaders know exactly what it will take to achieve real peace between Palestinians and Israelis, and that what they currently offer serves only to perpetuate the conflict.

Telethons and poems glorifying suicide bombers are not steps toward peace. Cash payments to the families of suicide bombers are not steps toward peace. Communiqués glorifying the murder of innocents are not steps toward peace. All of this is evil, pure and simple.

It is not peace, but fear of each other that motivates Arab dictators, and fear of their own populations, whose resentments toward Israel and America have been inflamed for generations to distract them from grievances against their own rulers for the economic and political inequities they are expected to endure permanently.

It is the unenlightened rule of Arab dictators, not the plight of the Palestinians, that condemns the Arab world to the civilisational crisis in which it finds itself. Which Middle Eastern nation grants its Arab citizens the most political freedom? Israel. Which countries' leaders have the blood of innocents on their hands but hear nothing about it from the Arab League? Iraq, Syria, and Sudan, for starters. Which country has the most egregious record of occupying another today? Syria, in Lebanon. In which countries do Palestinian refugees suffer without rights and the most basic freedoms? Other than Israel, only Jordan has treated these people with any dignity. Which nation in the region has matched its payments to the families of Palestinian murderers with money for health care, education, and other development in the territories? Not one.

How Arab leaders can abide their own hypocrisy is one question. Why they expect us to do so is a better one.

Arab leaders recoil in mock indignation from any suggestion that they have a responsibility to discourage Palestinian treachery. Instead, they demand that the United States pressure the government of Israel into forsaking its obligation to defend its citizens from terrorism that Arab governments celebrate and support.

I'm also distressed that some of our European allies are dismissing Israel's legitimate security concerns. In some quarters, Jews are once again threatened with attacks on their institutions. We are witnessing once again the torching of European synagogues. All world leaders must condemn, in the strongest terms, such despicable behaviour.

Israel has proved its willingness to risk its strategic interests by returning territories captured in war, and living cheek by jowl with a Palestinian state in exchange for peace and acceptance of Israel's right to exist by its Arab neighbours. Yasser Arafat and the Palestinian Authority he claims to lead insist on a settlement that would threaten the eventual extinction of a Jewish state in the Middle East, and accept and support murder as a means to achieve it. Official sponsorship of Palestinian terror is a self-induced mockery of the Palestinian leadership's moral authority, and that of its Nobel Peace Prize-winning chairman.

The Oslo peace process was premised on the notion that Israelis and Palestinians could live together. I believe it is now time to explore ways in which they can live apart. It is time to consider alternatives such as that proposed by former Prime Minister Barak--to erect a security barrier between the Israelis and the Palestinians. This is not to accept the hopelessness of a political solution, but to embrace the hope that Israel's people can live in safety until a Palestinian leadership truly committed to peace emerges from the chaos and despair inflicted on Palestinians for generations by leaders who lack the courage and compassion and wisdom to make a better life for their people.

Friends, I make no claim to wisdom on how to resolve the crisis in the Middle East. Like you, I look for guidance in the values we share with the only democracy in the region. I know this: no American leader should be expected to sell a false peace to our ally, consider Israel's right to self-defense less legitimate than ours, or insist that Israel negotiate a political settlement while terrorism remains the Palestinians' preferred bargaining tool.

The moral clarity you bring to American understanding of Israel's plight is the most effective antidote to the cynicism and hostility that parade as Arab diplomacy in the Middle East today. We will defeat terrorism against America, and we will stand with Israel as she fights the same enemy.

One of the great privileges of my life was the friendship that I developed with the late Sen. Henry "Scoop" Jackson. I got to know Scoop when I was the Navy liaison to the Senate in the late '70s. Scoop was and remains the model of what an American statesman should be.

In 1979, I traveled to Israel with Scoop, where I knew he was considered a hero. I had no idea how great a hero he was until we landed in Tel Aviv. When we arrived, we were transferred to a bus big enough to accommodate our large delegation, as well as the U.S. Ambassador in Israel and several of his staff. About a hundred yards outside the airport, the bus was surrounded by a crowd of seven or eight hundred Israelis screaming for Jackson, waving signs that read "God Bless you, Scoop," "Senator Jackson, thank you," and dozens of other tributes. For a patriot like Scoop, their affection for him was nothing less than affection for America.

Scoop understood a deep truth. The bond between America and Israel is not just a strategic one, though that is important. Today, in the war against terror, we have no stronger ally than Israel. The more profound tie between our two countries, however, is a moral one. We are two democracies whose alliance is forged in our common values. To be proudly pro-American and pro-Israeli is not to hold conflicting loyalties. As Scoop understood, it is about defending the principles that both countries hold dear.

And I stand before you today, proudly pro-American and pro-Israel.

Mr. McCain, a Republican, is a U.S. senator from Arizona. He delivered this speech Tuesday at the American Israeli Public Affairs Committee.