Faulted For Existing

"The extent of the devastation and human suffering in Gaza was unprecedented and will impact generations to come."
"There is also ongoing fear in Israel among communities who come under regular threat."
Mary McGowan Davis, UN report into 2014 Gaza war

The Human Rights Council in Geneva (photo credit: UN/Jean-Marc Ferré)

"Israel does not commit war crimes. Israel defends itself against a terrorist organization that calls for its destruction and carries out many war crimes. We will continue to act forcefully and determinedly against those who seek to harm our citizens and we will do this according to international law."
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu

"We will not accept a comparison between terrorists and IDF soldiers. We will not agree to IDF soldiers and terrorists being mentioned in the same breath, and this distinction is important for any country fighting terrorism."
"IDF soldiers are fighting terrorists, even if sometimes civilians are hurt. Terror organizations do not discriminate and kill civilians and soldiers."
Tzipi Livni, co-leader, Zionist Union

"It is well known that the entire process that led to the production of this report was politically motivated and morally flawed from the outset."
Israeli Foreign Ministry

Israel as a 'light unto the world' is obviously expected to sit tight, twiddle its fingers and patiently await the time when its neighbours will accept its presence without threatening to destroy it. That Israel does as any other country under international law will do, and responds to attacks against its population and its territory, enrages those who feel that the country has no right to exist in the first place.

Historical antecedents apart, heritage and proof of unending and durable existence in a land that living history made their own evidently does not serve to support Israel's insistence on its right of existence.

The finding of the UN report on the last war between the Israel Defence Forces and the Hamas terrorist group holding a million Gazans prisoner to their charter declaration purposing to destroy Israel, is that both the terrorist group and the State of Israel are guilty of war crimes. Equating the existential right of a country to defend itself against incessant violent attacks has become, unique to Israel, a war crime.

The fact that Hamas commonly launches its attacks from crowded civilian enclaves including hospitals, hotels, schools and apartment buildings, inviting a response back from Israel that will exact a number of civilian casualties in an effort to destroy the rocket launching sites is of no account, it seems when the UN sanctimoniously denounces Israel for responding to such assaults and in so doing placing civilians in danger.

No other military of any other country comes to mind that advises those inhabiting areas meant to be bombed in advance of the bombing, to enable the populace to clear out and to reduce the potential for civilian death to a minimum.

Balance that against the Hamas initiative to imbue nobility in death, inciting Gazans to defy the pre-warnings and to assemble on the very rooftops of any targeted areas, courting martyrdom for the 'cause' of Hamas's victory against the 'oppressor' whose status as such has been determined by unending assaults against its sovereign territory.

Over 2,200 Palestinian Gazans were killed, most of them aligned with Hamas as fighters, along with the unfortunate deaths of hundreds of civilians when the conflict began in July of 2014 after Israel had warned that the ongoing barrage of rockets targeting border settlements like Sderot would no longer be tolerated, and after Hamas had arranged for the kidnapping and murder of Israeli teenage boys.

When Israel characterized the report as biased, it was with good reason that it took issue with the UN Human Rights Council. The Council is indeed, like much of the United Nations and its various committees, stacked with representatives of countries through enmity and provocation from Muslim states focusing disproportionately on Israel, despite their own dismal human rights records.

Many of those countries have human rights histories of desperately miserable realities, handily overlooked for the greater targeting of a democratic society embattled by its neighbours.

Hamas authorities are outraged, with senior official Ghazi Hamad insisting that the UN report was guilty of an imbalance "between the victims and the killers". Palestinians and their leaders are just so enamoured of the vision of themselves as victims. It's a credo, that of avenging their victimhood, that advances their agenda of blood-letting, an inherited tribal custom.

Hamas rockets and mortars, he insisted, were targeting Israeli military sites, not civilians, a blatant lie that can be easily disproven, but which plays well with the narrative of the innocence of Hamas of wrong-doing and its Euro-digestible public relations protocols. It is what inspires the various iterations of blockade-breaking flotillas so beloved of the international community.

That Hamas officials took shelter in sophisticated and well-appointed underground shelters to ensure their protection from the IDF response to Hamas shelling assaults, while persuading Palestinians of the nobility of martyrdom for the greater cause of Islam, speaks volumes about the morality of Hamas operatives and leadership.

That Hamas looked forward with anticipation of numbers of deaths of Palestinian children as fallout of the conflict the better to flagellate Israel in international public opinion is proven by responses from that public.

It seems clear enough that Hamas rules ruthlessly through fear and violent intimidation, and that not all Palestinians living in Gaza are enthralled with the rule thrust upon them by Hamas. Post-conflict the number of Palestinians who were accused of being collaborators with Israel and summarily killed exists as testament to the Hamas ideology of Islamist terrorism, of bloodshed and of martyrdom; not of themselves but of those whom Hamas is prepared to martyr.

The Amnesty International report on the 2014 Gaza/Israel conflict : "Strangling Necks: Abduction, torture and summary killings of Palestinians by Hamas forces during the 2014 Gaza/Israel conflict" Photo: Anmesty International