Updates from AIJAC

The Numbers on Jenin

Sorry to keep dwelling on Jenin, but blame Four Corners and Sixty Minutes. The truth is that no serious and knowledgable person now believes there was a massacre in Jenin, not after statements by Amnesty and Human Rights Watch saying there was no evidence of a massacre, and after Palestinian Fatah investigators claimed the death toll is 56, as announced last week by Kadoura Moussa, the Fatah director for the Northern West Bank. It's just a pity no one would know this from media reports, where many seem to have attempted to justify their earlier claims by surreptitiously shifting to claims, without apology for the earlier massacre pronouncements, that the destruction of houses and false allegations about blocked aid and ambulances are the war crimes of Jenin.

First John Podhoretz of the New York Post points out the current numbers of people reportedly killed in Jenin, and takes the media to task for continuing to give credence to Palestinian spokesmen who clearly blatantly lied on this issue, especially Saeb Erekat.

Next Charles Krauthammer of the Washington Post brings together much of the evidence against a massacre claim in one article, and then asks, given the evidence against it, and argues that persistance with this claim shows an absurd double standard.

And up and coming Israel member of Knesset Yuval Steinitz explains particularly well why Israel has protested against the composition and mandate of the UN Fact-finding Committee on Jenin, which, as constituted, was simply incapable of conducting a fair investigation.

New York Post -- May 3, 2002

"WHY TV NEWS LOVES A LIAR"

by JOHN PODHORETZ

ON April 17, when Israel completed its military action in Jenin, the Palestinian spokesman Saeb Erekat told CNN's Wolf Blitzer, "We have 1,600 missing men in this refugee camp. Mostly women and children, husbands and wives . . . How many people were massacred[?] We say the number will not be less than 500."

Erekat just loves the number 500. A week earlier, he said on CNN: "I'm afraid to say that the number of Palestinian dead in the Israeli attacks have reached more than 500 now."

This week a Palestinian review committee reported a death toll of 56 in Jenin, of whom 34 were combatants. There are no missing women and children, because the Palestinians would be saying so. And they have not disputed Israeli claims that in the entire month-long series of incursions into the West Bank, the overall Palestinian death toll is around 100.

But let's focus on Jenin. The Palestinians themselves say that, in 13 days of vicious urban warfare, some 22 civilians were killed. So here's a question for you: Why are U.S. television networks booking Saeb Erekat to talk about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict when he has repeatedly used their air waves to spread lies and deception?

When sources lie, don't you cut them off? When sources lie, don't you refuse to give them any more of your precious air time?

For example, why did CNN's Blitzer put Erekat on the air Wednesday night to talk about the fire in Bethlehem? Here's a little bit of their exchange:

Yes, it was a good question, Wolf. Erekat answered the question by lying again: "I was in touch with the people inside the church just five minutes ago," he said.

Oh, please. He was on hold with CNN at the time.

And in any case, the evidence yesterday proved yet again that there's no reason to believe a word Erekat says. The pattern in which the glass around the windows near the fire was shattered proves the gunfire came from inside the room, not from the outside. That means Palestinians fired first, as the Israelis said.

Why do CNN and the others book Saeb Erekat? Because he speaks good English. Because producers and reporters there have known him for years. They know he's a strong and confident spokesman and looks good on TV.

That's also why they love to book Hanan Ashrawi to talk about the need for peace. She speaks wonderful English as well.

But Ashrawi is also one of a very few Palestinian "legislators" who actually voted against changing the Palestine National Charter to remove language about the destruction of Israel back in 1993. In other words, what she means by peace is a Palestinian state in place of Israel.

That's what Erekat means by peace as well. In pursuit of his goals, he will say anything, tell any lie, spin any tale and defame a nation and a people in doing so. American TV should not be their unwitting co-conspirator.

Jenin: The Truth

By Charles Krauthammer

The Washington Post, Friday, May 3, 2002

A massacre is the deliberate mass murder of the defenseless. The "Jenin massacre" is more than a fiction. It is a hoax. "Palestinian Authority allegations," reported the Boston Globe (April 29), ". . . appear to be crumbling under the weight of eyewitness accounts from Palestinian fighters who participated in the battle and camp residents who remained in their homes until the final hours of the fighting. . . . All said they were allowed to surrender or evacuate." And yet for weeks the world has been seized with the question of the "Jenin massacre." The U.N. Security Council called emergency meetings. The secretary general appointed a special investigating committee (now disbanded). The European press published the most lurid allegations. To say nothing, of course, of al-Jazeera TV.

All this for a phantom massacre. Yet this same Middle East conflict yields no shortage of real massacres:

• April 27: Adora, Palestinian gunmen enter residential quarters shooting everyone, including a 5-year-old girl shot through the head in her bed.

These are massacres -- actual, recent massacres. Massacres for which the evidence is hard. Massacres for which the perpetrators claimed credit. Where was the Security Council? Where was the Kofi Annan commission? Where was the world?

The United Nations' excuse will be that these murders were perpetrated not by states but by groups. But this is nonsense. The Palestinian Authority is a recognized government. The links of its top leadership to these murders is precisely the kind of question that warrants investigation. Yet the very idea that the United Nations would investigate Palestinian massacres is absurd.

The fact that such an undertaking is unimaginable is what has made the past several months so deeply, despairingly troubling. The despair comes from the bewilderment of living in a world of monstrous moral inversion.

Take Jenin. What was the real story? That hand-to-hand, door-to-door combat, in an intensely built-up shantytown, among dozens of houses booby-trapped by Palestinian fighters, should have yielded somewhere between seven and 21 scattered civilian casualties is nothing less than astonishing. It testifies to the extraordinary scrupulousness of the Israeli army, which lost 23 soldiers in the battle, precisely because it did not want to cause the civilian casualties that come with aerial bombardment, as has happened everywhere from Grozny to Kabul. And yet Israel was investigated precisely for defending itself against massacres that warrant no investigation.

Palestinian apologists wave away this double standard with the magic mantra of "occupation."

More nonsense. Twenty-one months ago, Israel offered a total end to the occupation, ceding 100 percent of Gaza and 97 percent of the West Bank to the first Palestinian state ever. The Palestinians turned that down and took up the suicide bomb. By the Orwellian logic of today, the Palestinians are justified in perpetrating one massacre after another to end an occupation that Israel offered to remove almost two years ago.

For the "international community," as embodied by the United Nations, such inverted moral logic is the norm. This is what it must have been like living in the false consciousness of Soviet communism, where everyone had to publicly and constantly pretend to believe the official lies, all the while knowing they were lies. This is what it must have been like living in the 1930s, as the necessities of appeasement created a gradual inversion of right and wrong -- the Czechs, for example, pilloried by official opinion in Britain and France for selfishly standing in the way of peace at Munich.

Churchill's great gift to civilization was not just that he rallied good against evil but also that he pierced a suffocating fog of self-deception by speaking truth to lies. Where is the Churchill of today, the official of any government, prepared to tell the United Nations that its frantic hunt for a phantom massacre by Jews -- while ignoring massacre after massacre of Jews -- is grotesque and perverse?

© 2002 The Washington Post Company

May 4, 2002

Israel Has Nothing to Hide

By YUVAL STEINITZ

HAIFA, Israel - What changed Israel's initial decision to accept a United Nations "fact-finding committee" on the Jenin refugee camp into a furious rejection?

>From the beginning, Israel's acceptance of the committee was tinged with grave misgivings. The United Nations has long since lost any claim to impartiality with respect to Israel. The anti-Semitic conference on racism it sponsored in Durban last summer is but one example of ingrained bias against Israel. Nevertheless, Israelis were so confident that an honest fact finding would exonerate Israel of the wild charges being made by Palestinians and humanitarian organizations that they initially acquiesced to the proposal.

However, when the committee mandate and composition were finally revealed, they convinced Israelis across the political spectrum that Secretary General Kofi Annan had set a trap for Israel.

In order to render a fair and unbiased judgment on the conduct of any military operation, two basic conditions must be met. First, the operation must be placed in the context of the causes that gave rise to it. Without that context, no judgment on the proportionality of the response is possible. Second, the operation must be assessed in comparison to other such military actions.

Yet the United Nations committee was asked to examine the Israeli Defense Force's actions in Jenin and the suffering of Jenin's inhabitants without reference to the earlier terrorism coming out of the Jenin camp that had triggered the Israeli action. In short, the committee would evaluate Israel's war on terrorism without any reference to terrorism.

Imagine a team sent to investigate American military action in Afghanistan without reference to the attacks of Sept. 11 or Osama bin Laden's boasts that he would destroy America. And imagine asking that investigation to ignore the sanctuary the Taliban gave Mr. bin Laden and his Qaeda operatives despite previous American warnings.

Stripped of that context, the United States would inevitably be found guilty of having assaulted one of the poorest and most backward countries on the face of the earth and of inflicting unnecessary harm on the civilian population. A similar inquiry into the massive allied bombing of Germany in World War II would have resulted in charges of war crimes against Franklin D. Roosevelt and Winston Churchill.

But this kind of distorted result is exactly what the United Nations' noncontextual fact-hiding strategy would have arrived at. To examine the Israeli operations in Jenin and at similar sites with no reference to the nonstop Palestinian suicide bombings and other terrorist attacks dispatched from those sites - these attacks killed more than 100 Israeli civilians in March alone, a number that translates for tiny Israel to the equivalent of twice the number of Americans killed on Sept. 11 - suggests an intent to find Israel guilty in advance.

The second major flaw was hidden in the committee composition: most of its members possessed no military background. Moreover, there was no indication that the military operation would be assessed in comparison to other military operations with similar missions; for example, by comparing civilian casualties in Jenin to civilian casualties inflicted by the Russian ground forces in Chechnya or by the American air forces in Afghanistan.

Israelis are confident that any fair comparative examination of the Israeli Defense Force actions in Jenin would show that the soldiers made extraordinary efforts to minimize civilian casualties in the nine-day battle there. Twenty-three Israeli infantrymen would be alive today had the army made a decision to use its airplanes and artillery to wipe out the armed opposition more quickly.

Israel has nothing to hide. Israel rejected the United Nations fact-finding committee not because of what the committee sought to explore, but because of what it was determined to ignore.

Yuval Steinitz is chairman of the subcommittee for defense planning and policy of the Israeli Knesset.

Copyright 2002 The New York Times Company.