Israel needs to invade The Hague

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While the government and IDF strenuously strove to implement lessons learned from the last war and provide the troops in Gaza with every possible means to shield themselves against enemy fire,
they negligently allowed our soldiers’ flanks to be exposed to danger from a different quarter.

The international campaign accusing officers of war crimes against Palestinian civilians has steadily been gathering steam over the past decade. The short-sighted reluctance of elected officials and the
IDF’s legal department to confront the issue head-on has left the government and its senior officers scurrying to develop an effective strategy and play catch up.

Indeed, no sooner had the first F-16 been fueled up and the netting pulled off the first Merkava tank than the United Nations and its backup chorus at Human Rights Watch, Physicians for Human Rights and B’Tselem began yodeling their malicious assertions that Israel was violating international law; targeting innocent civilians; shelling disproportionably; inflicting collective punishment and utilizing illegal armaments. Our troops couldn’t fire a bullet anywhere in the terrorist-controlled enclave without some human rights expert flaming on CNN and the BBC that they had wounded an innocent Palestinian.

A “humanitarian crisis” was announced by the UN within the opening hours of the operation and the canard was repeated daily for the next 21 days. Even before the smoke had cleared in Gaza City, UNRWA and UN Rapporteur Richard Falk had concluded that war crimes had
been committed.

IT SHOULD have been obvious to our leaders given their experiences in Lebanon, when similar allegations were loudly being cast and even earlier - during Operation Defensive Shield when Palestinian officials were swearing to the media that 1,500 civilians had been massacred in Jenin - that the IDF had a serious problem. A comprehensive strategy was needed to shield soldiers from criminal prosecutions.

Indeed, a disaster had just narrowly been averted in the UK. On September 10, 2005, Maj.-Gen. (res.) Doron Almog was disembarking from an El Al flight in London when he was warned at the last
moment by the embassy’s military attaché that a warrant had been issued by a British magistrate for his arrest for allegedly violating the Geneva Convention in carrying out house demolitions in Gaza.
Almog remained on the plane and returned to the country unharmed. Although, British foreign minister Jack Straw eventually apologized for the incident and the warrant was canceled, IDF officers are still wary of visiting the UK.

In another, better publicized affair, in 2001 prosecutors in Belgium filed a war crimes indictment