Published in The Spectator :

Well waddya know – Ha’aretz is running IDF Gaza atrocity claims. Its story today begins:

During Operation Cast Lead, Israeli forces killed Palestinian civilians under permissive rules of engagement and intentionally destroyed their property, say soldiers who fought in the offensive. The soldiers are graduates of the Yitzhak Rabin pre-military preparatory course at Oranim Academic College in Tivon. Some of their statements made on Feb. 13 will appear Thursday and Friday in Ha’aretz. Dozens of graduates of the course who took part in the discussion fought in the Gaza operation. The speakers included combat pilots and infantry soldiers. Their testimony runs counter to the Israel Defense Forces’ claims that Israeli troops observed a high level of moral behavior during the operation. The session's transcript was published this week in the newsletter for the course’s graduates.

Yet the next paragraph states, as the first example of behaviour that departed from ‘a high level of moral behavior’, that the soldiers’ testimonies

include a description by an infantry squad leader of an incident where an IDF sharpshooter mistakenly shot a Palestinian mother and her two children [my emphasis].

Mistakes happen in war-time. But this is clearly not an example of having ‘killed Palestinian civilians under permissive rules of engagement’.

More soldiers’ testimonies are to be published by Ha’aretz tomorrow. It may be that there are indeed examples of what it claims in its first paragraph -- and which turn out to be true. After all, there isn’t an army anywhere in the world where there are no lapses. Where they do occur, the perpetrators must always be brought to book.

But now look at this from blogger Jameel at The Muqata (via Israel Matzav): 

Channel 2 TV Army correspondent Roni Daniel stated at 6:30 PM this evening, that he personally tracked down one of the soldiers interviewed for the Ha’aretz article. Apparently the soldier’s testimony to Ha’aretz wasn't based on anything he personally saw or witnessed, rather based on rumors and hearsay he heard (and the soldier wasn’t even in Gaza!)

In Ha'aretz, asking

Can Israel dismiss its own troops’ stories from Gaza?

reporter Amos Harel states:

 If the IDF really never heard about these incidents, the reasonable assumption is that it did not want to know... It seems that except for isolated incidents, the rule is ‘you don’t ask, we won’t tell.’

But how can it be reasonable for Ha’aretz to present rumour and hearsay as fact? 

As far as the world’s press is concerned, however, the allegations are all true. The story has already spread, with no note of scepticism or caution, that Israeli soldiers claim they deliberately killed Palestinians in Gaza.  But in the Jerusalem Post, Herb Keinon provides some rather important context for these allegations:

The second piece of context is Dani Zamir, the head of the [pre-military preparatory] program, who had the soldiers’ words transcribed and published. A story in Ha’aretz on Thursday said that in 1990 Zamir, then a parachute company commander in the reserves, was tried and sentenced to prison for refusing to guard a ceremony where ‘right-wingers’ brought Torah scrolls to Joseph’s tomb in Nablus.

Zamir, in an interview on Israel Radio on Thursday, said that the soldiers from Operation Cast Lead who spoke at the meeting reflected an atmosphere inside the army of ‘contempt for, and forcefulness against, the Palestinians.’

Zamir himself appears in a 2004 book titled Refusnik, Israel's Soldiers of Conscience, compiled and edited by Peretz Kidron, with a forward by Susan Sontag. The book, which earned commendation from no less a personage than Noam Chomsky, includes a section by Zamir, described as ‘an officer in the reserves from Kibbutz Ayelet Hashahar who was sentenced to 28 days for refusal to serve in Nablus and now heads the Kibbutz Movement’s preparatory seminary for youngsters ahead of their induction in the army.’

‘With stupid resolve and the smugness of the all-knowing, primitive preachers and unbridled nationalists are leading and misleading us to calamity, while Pompeii is preoccupied with watching boxing matches and with banquets in advance of the disaster,’ he wrote. ‘I see a volcano in the land where one-third of the inhabitants are banned, by dint of their national and ethnic origins and geographical location, from voting as equals, where they don’t have basic civic rights and where thousands are detained under administrative decree - under a military justice system that is farcical.

'A land, a third of whose inhabitants have been subjected to extended military occupation for over 20 years - which means restrictions of rights and a different code of law for Jewish and Arab residents in the selfsame land - is not a democratic country. Accordingly, collaboration with a regime or government that forces or orders me to be part of an anti-democratic apparatus that leads to self-destruction, disintegration and national decay, along with the utter denial of its own foundations, is illegitimate, unjust and immoral, and will remain so as long as the state does not take one of only two feasible actions: annexation of all or most of the territories conquered in 1967 and granting full civil rights to those residing there; or withdrawal from densely populated areas and a settlement that will release us of responsibility for the residents of those areas, who will chose for themselves whatever regime they desire (of course with security arrangements included).’

That was what Zamir wrote in 1990, reprinted in 2004. The testimonies of the soldiers that he brought to the public’s attention seem to corroborate - what a coincidence - his thesis.

That thesis is of course malicious nonsense from start to finish – not least for the blindingly obvious reason that Gaza and the West Bank are not part of Israel, which cannot therefore be expected to treat its inhabitants as if they were its citizens. The IDF is properly holding an inquiry into the soldiers’ claims. But surely the question should be asked of the IDF how a man with Zamir’s insubordinate and bigoted record and unbalanced views can be entrusted to train soldiers at all.

Ha’aretz in turn is driven by an obsessive hatred of ‘the occupation’ which has long distorted its judgment and destroyed its integrity. Its executives have been heard to boast in the past that they had no qualms about manipulating the paper’s news coverage in order to maximise pressure on the government to get out of the West Bank and Gaza.

Israel’s army is the most moral in the world – quite suicidally so, in fact. No other army would  take such pains to avoid killing civilians – in circumstances where they are being used either as human shields or human bombs -- as does the IDF (pictured above helping Palestinians out of their weapons smuggling tunnel).  Maybe these allegations about deviations from those high standards in Operation Cast Lead are true. But if they turn out to be false or exaggerated, then the contribution by Ha’aretz to the frenzied demonisation of Israel now taking place around the world -- weakening it when it is facing a genocidal threat from Iran -- will have been wicked indeed.