Soccer Dad

American/jewish organizataions and israel

The Forward ran an article on American Jewish support and criticism of Israel during its recent war with Hezbollah.

On the positive side

Following a solidarity mission to Israel last week, leaders of the Rabbinical Council of America issued a statement prodding the Israeli military to review its policy of taking pains to spare the lives of innocent civilians, in light of Hezbollah’s tactic of hiding its fighters and weaponry among Lebanese civilians. Because Hezbollah “puts Israeli men and women at extraordinary risk of life and limb through unconscionably using their own civilians, hospitals, ambulances, mosques… as human shields, cannon fodder, and weapons of asymmetric warfare,” the rabbinical council said in a statement, “we believe that Judaism would neither require nor permit a Jewish soldier to sacrifice himself in order to save deliberately endangered enemy civilians.”

Too few people are aware of the rules of war. The media does an excellent job of using casualty figures to assign blame rather than explaining concepts such as irregular warfare. And of course the media also relies on anti-Israel NGO's like Human Rights Watch to define what is right and wrong.

Fortunately the rabbis of the RCA mission understand the truth and their statement reflects that.

Marc Stern of the American Jewish Congress also provided some context.

Condemnation of Israel by international groups for inadvertently killing civilians when targeting terrorists “has happened in all of the Israeli-Palestinian conflicts, but this has brought it front and center in very clear ways that everybody now sees,” said Marc Stern, general counsel of the American Jewish Congress.

“You can’t conduct a war in Lebanon without killing civilians,” he said. Stern added that Hezbollah is part of a cadre of groups, including Hamas and the Sri Lankan rebel group Tamil Tigers, which live within the general population, making it impossible to wage war on them without attacking civilians.

Unfortunately too many are still unsure or just anti-Israel like the UN.

Some Jewish organizations have criticized the U.N., saying that the 192-nation group and the cohort of charities that carry out humanitarian work on a global scale place too much emphasis on laws protecting civilians. Among the aid groups criticized has been the International Committee of the Red Cross, which is charged with promoting adherence to international law.

The problem though is not that the UN and the NGO's put too much emphasis on protecting civilians. Protecting Israeli civilians isn't something that concerns them much. The UN and its like minded organizations don't want Israel to defend itself. In the case of the UN, it even actively protected Hezbollah from Israel - a member state - in 2000. This paragraph doesn't convey the perfidies these organizations have committed against Israel.

Also missing in a discussion of criticisms of Human Rights Watch and the defense by its director Kenneth Roth is any mention of an incident in June when a Palestinian family was killed by an explosion and an HRW "expert" declared that Israel was responsible. Within a week, Israel had defended itself and demonstrated that the explosion could not have been caused by Israeli fire. Citing that incident would have given readers a proper appreciation of the unapologetic bias that infests HRW.

Israel's existence is a just cause. Its defense of its citizens, too, is justified. Unfortunately for most of the world these are not givens. Too many suppposedly noble organizations subvert their lofty goals and use their unscrutinized positions to condemn Israel falsely.

UPDATE: The (noble!) Ignoble Experiment has a couple of items about these ignoble "humanitarian" organizations.

Technorati tags: Israel, Rabbinical Council of America.