The Double Standard in The Hague Adv. Ehud Peleg


Opening:

I am sitting in front of the news on television, watching six bodies of Israeli hostages who were rescued from Gaza, after being shot by their captors from Hamas about 36 hours earlier: two women and four men, all underweight. Eden Yerushalmi, one of the women, weighed only 36 kilos (!). The following item shows a boy from one of the kibbutzim on the border with Gaza describing how, on October 7th ,  he lay for many hours hidden under his mother's dead body, after the Hamas' terrorists broke into their home and murdered both of his parents. And then the news are moving on to the next item, and I cannot believe my eyes: an indictment was filed against Israel at the International Court of Justice in The Hague.  Israel is accused of committing war crimes by attacking Gaza with the aim of returning its 251 abductees and collapsing the murderous organization that committed all those horrors and threatens to do it again and again?! Only a perverted and biased court of law could think of such an accusation! (And for those of you who have not yet understood – it is not the Hamas organization that is on trial in The Hague for war crimes, but the State of Israel that had been attacked by the same Hamas!)

This article does not pretend to be the statement of defense of the State of Israel against the charges at the International Court of Justice in The Hague; Nor did I receive any certification for this from any official body. Having said that, the document can fairly be described as a bill of indictment against the hypocrisy of the court and its double standard!

October 7, 2023:

On the seventh of October 2023, the Hamas army invaded Israel in the thousands from the Gaza Strip, raided the civilian settlements – villages and kibbutzim – along the border, massacred, raped and burned families and abducted 251 men, women and children to Gaza. One of the abductees was the "enemy" of the Palestinian people, nine-month-old baby Kefir Bibas. One can learn about a person by the identity of his enemies. Do you understand who the Gazan Hamas is?

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* Adv. Ehud Peleg heads the Center for Promotion of Fairness in Israel

The Gazan crowds cheered in the streets at the parade of the abductees and some of them even took to hiding (and still do to this day) the abductees in their homes. The invasion was accompanied by heavy barrages of hundreds of rockets fired from Gaza towards Israeli cities.

[A television screen with warnings of rockets being fired at Israeli cities – have you ever seen such a TV-screen in your country?]

Hamas – the extremist Islamic organization that controls Gaza – seeks the destruction of the State of Israel, as evidenced by its charter. A quote from the words of Hamas spokesman Razi Hamed: " October 7th  is only the first time; there will be many more October 7th until the total destruction of the State of Israel is achieved!"  Apparently, today's Hitler is in Gaza and if you don't destroy him he will destroy you.

Hamas Terrorist's Shocking Interview Threatens To Repeat October 7 Attack "Again & Again.."

Has your country ever encountered such a situation? Does the International Law cover such a situation at all?) By the way, one of those murdered in the kibbutzim on October 7 was a 92-year-old Jewish Holocaust survivor who was murdered along with his nursing aid. He managed to survive Hitler in World War II, but not the Hitler Model 2023 from Gaza( .

Hamas in Gaza numbers several tens of thousands of armed men who receive support and encouragement from the entire population. They not only hide within the population concentrations, while using it as a human shield, they hide their weapons, ammunition and missiles in schools, mosques and hospitals, and also launch the missiles from there into Israeli cities, and run to hide behind the civilians and in the tunnels under their houses. They trap with explosives the walls of houses where their families live in order to detonate them on IDF soldiers when they come looking for them. The Hamas terrorists aim their missiles at the peaceful civilian settlements along the border on the Israeli side, and at the Israeli cities deeper in the country. These murderers were educated in Gaza's schools, many of them run by UNRWA, were taught to hate everything related to Israel, with Gazan teachers cultivating this hatred in them and with textbooks full of poison and hatred towards Jews and towards Israel. They were trained in terror summer-camps in the use of weapons and how to murder Israelis. In light of all this, it is doubtful whether the civilian population in Gaza can be considered as "non-involved" according to the International Law. After all, it raised and nurtured Hamas and its satanic plans; It voted for it and allowed it to win the parliamentary elections (the last ones in the Strip); It cooperates with it and even hides the Israeli abductees for it. It even stood and cheered enthusiastically in the streets when the hostages were taken to Gaza, bruised and humiliated.

International law does not know how to deal with terrorist organizations that have taken over countries. In disputes between states, the parties try to reach settlements for the purpose of settling disputes without wars or after wars. With terrorist organizations like Hamas this is impossible, since they deny a-priori your right to exist as a state. Hamas has one goal and that is the destruction of the State of Israel.

Israel is under constant threat from the day it was founded and yet manages to lead a democratic way of life and to preserve its human character. In the Middle East this is probably a weakness; No western country is experiencing what we have been dealing with for decades? What would you do in the face of such existential danger? You would certainly not go to the library to look for solutions among the International Law books… even if you did you wouldn't find them there.

The Moral Standards of the Warring Sides

In response to the massacre of its citizens on October 7th and the abduction of 251 people, women and children, Israel mobilized its reserve army and invaded the Gaza Strip to achieve two main goals: rescuing the abductees and destroying Hamas' ability to pose a future threat on Israel. Israel has a right granted by International Law to maintain its existence and defend itself – the right of self-defense.

The main difficulty Israel faced was twofold:

  1. Our abductees were kept in hiding places in the homes of Gaza residents and in the tens of kilometers of tunnels under the city, and even if their location was discovered there was a fear of harming them.
  2. Tens of thousands of Hamas terrorists also hid within the civilian population and in facilities protected by International Law, such as schools, hospitals and mosques, where they also hid their weapons, a huge supply of ammunition and thousands of missiles which they launched at Israeli cities.

According to International Law, any target that has a military use, even if it has a mixed military and civilian use, is a legitimate target. Because of this, for example, it is permissible to attack buildings of civilian use that the Hamas organization has turned into weapons depots and hiding places, and this is certainly the case if it launches missiles towards Israel from there.

Israel, for its part, took several precautions to ensure minimal harm to the civilian population, despite being a hostile population that supports and assists Hamas and its actions:

  1. It designated humanitarian areas in parts of the Gaza Strip, and called on the population to evacuate themselves there before attacking a certain area.
  2. It dropped leaflets on the neighborhoods it intended to attack and warned the population to evacuate.
  3. It took a step called "tap on the roof" and dropped bombs without explosives on the roofs of civilian buildings where headquarters and terrorist shelters were located and which it intended to attack, so that their residents could evacuate before the bombing.

I am not aware of other countries, even democratic ones, that have behaved this way in any of their wars.

In all its fighting, the IDF (the Israeli Army) does not aim its weapons at civilians and does not intend to harm them, despite the difficulty of spotting terrorists trying to hide among them. Civilians who have not evacuated expose themselves to the inevitable risk of injury as a result of the fighting. Just for comparison, Hamas, for its part, purposely aims the missiles to civilian targets in Israel in order to harm the population; Hamas attacked civilian settlements in Israel and massacred their residents; it was Hamas that based itself and fought from mosques and schools, thus violating their immunity and causing it to be revoked;

But it is Israel that stands trial in The Hague…

Again, I don't recall other countries in the world behaving like that in similar struggles, using the moral measures and the utmost caution that Israel undertook upon itself;

But Israel is the one standing trial in The Hague…

To this day, Hamas has not allowed the International Red Cross to visit the abductees to check on their well-being, has not given them medications, some of which life-saving, in light of the serious medical conditions of some of the wounded, sick and elderly abductees (ranging from a one-year-old baby to the elderlies over 80 ), and did not even agree to publish the lists of the abductees held in his hands;

But Israel is the one standing trial in The Hague…

What would you call this if not a double standard?

The Definitions of International Law

Israel is accused of committing genocide and war crimes.

Just to better understand the meaning of the terms, let us recall some historical examples of those who committed genocide:

  1. Nazi Germany against the Jewish people (the Holocaust)
  2. Nazi Germany against the Gypsies.
  3. Turkey against the Armenian people.
  4. The Hutu tribe against the Tutsi tribe in Rwanda.

The definition of genocide according to UN General Assembly Resolution 260 is: "Genocide means any of the following acts, committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group as such"…

To be charged with the crime of committing genocide, one must prove ideology, intent and systematic and indiscriminate extermination in relation to the people that are intended to be exterminated. These elements do not exist in the way Israel conducts itself in the war in Gaza! If Israel's goal had been genocide, then Gaza would have been destroyed from the air without any need to enter the strip by ground, and without endangering our soldiers. But Israel behaves differently, and its soldiers pay a high price in blood when they maintain the humanitarian restrictions it adopts. (By the way, following October 7th the Israeli government was presented with a proposal to carry out an air-strike that would claim the lives of thousands of Gazan citizens as a means of pressure on Hamas to free the abductees, but the proposal was rejected by the government which adhered to the high moral standards that we have taken upon ourselves).

Is this how the Allies also behaved in the war against Nazi Germany? If Israel's goal had been to commit genocide, Israel would not have directed the non-combatant population to evacuate themselves to the humanitarian areas it allocated before attacking neighborhoods and areas where Hamas terrorists were hiding. Why try to save the residents if you want to destroy them, as the false accusation tries to attribute to us? If the goal had been to commit genocide, Israel would not have circulated warning notices to keep the population away and would not have resorted to the "tap on the roof" method before attacking buildings inside the cities even if the result of the warning was giving the terrorists an opportunity to escape.

On the other hand, the above definition actually describes precisely the atrocities committed by Hamas against the Israeli citizens in the settlements on October 7th.

But Israel is the one standing trial in The Hague…

Another illustration of Israel's moral standards in the way it fights terrorism can be seen in the "Anemone Picking" operation on September 6, 2003: at a time when Hamas was carrying out severe terrorist attacks against Israel, Israeli intelligence received precious information about a secret meeting of all Hamas commanders in a three floors building in El Rimal in the city of Gaza. The IDF planned to attack the building with a one-ton bomb and destroy it. From an analysis of an aerial photograph, it became clear that 40 families of civilians live in the adjacent building, which was only five meters away from the building where the Hamas commanders were about to meet. In light of this, it was decided to cancel the operation so as not to cause peripheral damage that would harm those families. Shortly before the meeting, new information arrived, indicating that the Hamas commanders' meeting would take place on the third and top floor of the building. In light of this, it was decided to carry out the attack using a much smaller bomb, which would not destroy the house next door. The operation was carried out and the attack was accurate, but it turned out that the meeting of the Hamas commanders was finally held on the ground floor and thus all the leaders of the organization escaped unharmed. Later on those same commanders took part in planning additional terrorist attacks against Israel, and some of them even planned the October 7th attack. Is this how a country that commits genocide and war crimes behaves? Would another army act according to the same moral norms?

But Israel is the one standing trial in The Hague…

A war crime is a serious violation of the laws of war in International Law. War crimes include the intentional killing of civilians or the intentional killing of prisoners, torture, hostage-taking, unnecessary destruction of civilian property, wartime sexual violence, and looting.

Here, too, we can see that there is a requirement for intentional harm, the need to deliberately plan causing harm to an uninvolved population or to ignore possible danger that may occur, in a manner disproportionate to the need or degree of harm required to defeat the enemy.

The circumstances of our fighting in Gaza and its goals, the involvement of the civilian population, their homes and facilities, and especially the efforts that characterize the way the Israeli army is fighting to minimize harm to those non-involved, lead to the unequivocal conclusion that Israel's actions are not violating the requirement of proportionality in the light of the threat and danger against which we are fighting. They certainly do not correspond to the definition of a war crime.

(By the way, what exactly would qualify as a proportional response to the massacre and burning of hundreds of families, to the abuse and rape of dozens of young women and the deliberate launching of missiles at hundreds of thousands of citizens in Israeli cities?)

Is it possible to say what is a proportional response to the fact that after almost 360 days since October 7th, the Hamas army is still holding and abusing the 101 abductees? Israel has claimed more than once, that the war could have ended a long time ago, if the Hamas army had released the hostages, laid down its weapons and surrendered.

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict

Blaming Israel for the war in Gaza is not separated from the tendency in the world to refer to Israel as the "bad guy" in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. This tendency stems from the extreme ignorance of the accusers regarding the history of the conflict.

To begin with, a common error is to start the reference to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict from the Six Day War in 1967, when Israel conquered the Sinai Peninsula, the Golan Heights and Judea and Samaria (the West Bank), and the "occupation" as it is often called began. Checking what had happened in the region just one month earlier, one could have seen the Arab countries surrounding Israel and threatening with announcements and military parades to invade and destroy it, in order to "throw the Jews into the sea" as they declared. (By the way, that is the meaning of the demonstrators' shouting "from the river to the sea Palestine will be free!"). On June 5th, 1967, Israel spoiled their plans. The world does not remember today the tense waiting period and the existential threat and anxiety experienced by the population in Israel, prior to this date. Survival, in the Israeli reality, has a very concrete meaning…

The world also ignores other "uncomfortable" questions, such as why did the Palestinians not establish their state between 1948 and 1967, when Israel did not yet control Judea and Samaria and the Gaza Strip? Why did the UN observers, who were specially placed between Egypt and Israel in the Sinai Peninsula to ensure that Israel would not be attacked, leave immediately upon the demand of the Egyptian President Nasser, abandoning Israel to its fate? Where was the righteous and moral world then? We are fortunate that, as a lesson from the Holocaust, the State of Israel did not trust the world in anything related to its security.

We could continue to ask who accepted the UN resolution in 1947 on the division of the Land of Israel into two states, a Jewish state and an Arab state (the Jews did), and who refused to accept it (the Arabs)?  Who tried to destroy the young state of Israel with the help of Arab states in May 1948 but ended losing the war' thus creating the refugees problem because of their own fault? Should Israel justify itself because it won the war and did not allow the Arabs to cause its destruction?

We will also skip over the Arab murder campaigns in British-governed Palestine  in 1921, 1929 and 1936, in which Arab Palestinians massacred Jewish residents, both Jews who had been living there from ancient times and Jews who returned to their homeland after 2000 years of forced exile, Jews who reached out to their neighbors for peace in the hope of maintaining good neighborly relations with them. In their naivete, Israelis reached out to them once again in Israel's Declaration of Independence in 1948, but were turned down with a sharp ax by the entire Arab world.

When Arab countries extended its hand in peace to the State of Israel, peace agreements were signed and last to this day first with Egypt, later with Jordan and more recently with several others through the Abraham Accords.

In 1993, the State of Israel opened itself again to the chance of examining the Palestinian peace intentions, in the Oslo Accords, following which the Palestinian Authority was established. Israel transferred control over Judea, Samaria and the Gaza Strip to the Palestinian Authority as part of the agreement. Very quickly came the infernal attacks and bus bombings committed inside Israel, carried out by none other than the Palestinian terrorists who returned from Tunis, where they had been deported after the Lebanon War. At that time Israel no longer controlled the territories of Judea, Samaria and Gaza, while the Palestinian Authority that ruled there did not succeed, and it is doubtful that it even tried, to prevent those attacks.

In 2005, in another attempt to prevent points of friction, Israel evacuated all Israeli settlements in the Gaza Strip, so that there would be no reason to carry out hostile actions against Israeli citizens from there. Did the long-awaited peace come as a result? What happened was exactly the opposite: within a few years, Hamas and Islamic Jihad took control of the Gaza Strip and literally threw the Palestinian Authority people from the rooftops to their deaths, events that were documented in unforgettable photos. They established the state of Hamastan, and declared in its charter their intention and plan to destroy the state of Israel.

If there was any doubt that these were mere statements, October 7th, 2023 arrived and taught us a painful lesson and at a terrible cost.

What does the West have trouble understanding?

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict could have come to an end with an agreement to establish a Palestinian state alongside Israel that would recognize the State of Israel and not strive every few years to destroy it. The one player who prevents any attempt to progress in this direction is radical Islam. Extremist Islam, in the form of Hamas and Islamic Jihad or the Muslim Brotherhood (as well as Hezbollah in Lebanon), led by Iran which trains, finances and equips them, negates any possibility of the existence of the State of Israel, before they move on to deal with the West with all its "infidels". Extremist Islam imposes mafia style fear and terror and thwarts any possibility of rapprochement between the parties. Its ambition is to dominate through Sharia law – the extreme Muslim religious law – over the entire world starting with the destruction of the Jewish state. Even naïve peace seekers in Israel are not immune to its malicious intentions. Among those killed on October 7th, there were residents of kibbutzim who opened their homes to Palestinians from Gaza and provided them with work, as well as transported members of families from Gaza who needed medical treatment to the hospitals in Israel that opened their gates to them. In some cases, it was the very same Gazans who led the Hamas killers and guided them to the kibbutzim and then participated in the looting of vehicles and objects they found in the homes of murdered residents.

Innocence in the Middle East is a crime bordering on suicide. In a well-known proverb it is said that "it will not help the sheep to sign a treaty in favor of vegetarianism as long as the wolves have not attached their signature to it". Israel cannot afford to be innocent and must beware of the plots of radical Islam that threaten to destroy it. Western democracies and Israel have gotten used to enjoying the benefits of a peaceful and democratic life and are reluctant to go to war. It's hard to blame them, after all, this is the normal and desirable situation; But does it also fit the reality in the neighbourhood which we live? Its major shortcomings are in trying to turn a blind eye to the plots that evil is secretly hatching and in its reluctance to respond harshly and firmly to terrorist acts directed against it. Just for example, you can see how the Houthis from Yemen have been harassing maritime traffic in the Red Sea for many months while the West has been allowing them to continue.

It is difficult for the democratic West to understand that Israel is a state like them that, however, is trying to survive in a hostile undemocratic region such as the Middle East, and it must, if it seeks survival, to engage in repeated survival conflicts. Western countries can only thank their good fortune that they do not have to experience this themselves and thank the State of Israel for leading this fight against radical Islam for them as well. The West enjoys and rightly appreciates the comfortable life it maintains in light of enlightened human values ​​(which Israel certainly shares), values ​​that sanctify life and enable the most basic pleasures they offer, such as happiness, love and family; But if he wants to preserve this lifestyle, it must remind itself that there are cruel enemies whose hearts are full of hatred for this Western way of life and wish to destroy it. Enemies whose values ​​sanctify jihad and death.

There is no escape from decisively dealing with this evil wherever it is.

Closing one’s eyes and trying to ignore this is very dangerous and can spell disaster. This is especially true if turning a blind eye turns into total blindness and the exercise of double standards towards those who are fighting this evil for the West as well.

Conclusion

"The West is Next!" was yesterday's truth ; but after the nine-eleven attack in New-York, The Bataclan Theater in Paris, the bombs in the London Underground, the terrorists' attacks in Brussels and Berlin,
“Next” means Now!

Therefore, the Western countries should focus on the uncompromising fight against this evil, and not on the prosecution of those who fight it for them as well.