Honest Reporting has a useful summary of media coverage of the news that Luis Moreno-Ocampo, the Chief Prosecutor at the International Criminal Court in the Hague, is already considering a war crimes investigation of one IDF reserve officer, Lt. Col. David Benjamin. It’s called “lawfare:” harassing Israeli politicians and military figures with dubious, politically-loaded charges of war crimes.

Meanwhile, Ocampo, Richard Goldstone and others jumping onto the “Israeli war crimes” bandwagon would do well to read Richard Cohen’s take on the context of the Gaza operation in the Washington Post:

In Gaza, Israel, as opposed to the United States and Britain in World War II, went out of its way to minimize civilian fatalities. That does not mean, as the UN Human Rights Council has alleged, that Israel (as well as Hamas) did not commit war crimes in Gaza, only that had it followed Harry Truman’s logic in authorizing the atomic bombing of Japan, it would have relied almost exclusively on air power to pound Gaza into submission. That would have ended the rocket attacks into southern Israel and would not have cost Israel the life of a single soldier. As it was, Israel reported 10 soldiers killed (4 by friendly fire) and 336 wounded.

Clearly, standards of what constitutes a war crime have changed — and a good thing, too. But what has not changed is anger and provocation. In World War II, Germany and Japan’s bombing of population centers and their record of atrocities fueled a desire for payback. (The Russians excelled at this.) Truman had scant sympathy for Japanese civilians, but his first priority was to end the war and save American lives. He was, after all, the commander in chief. Still, you can imagine what various human rights groups would today say about the “disproportionate” use of force.

Israelis, too, were angry. After withdrawing from Gaza, they did not get peace but eight years of incessant rocket and mortar fire into Southern Israel. On the single day I spent in the Southern Israeli city of Sderot, three rockets landed. I wondered at the time how long Israel would put up with the situation, and I wondered, too, how long the world would do nothing. In the end, the world did nothing, so Israel did something. Doing nothing is the UN’s version of passive aggressive behavior. It’s not a war crime. It just produces them.

Cohen’s piece in full, here.