Archive for the 'IDF' Category

The IDF in Haiti

Support the relief effort here.  Support Israel’s soldiers here.

Ben Cohen adds: Since my post on Thursday asking for reader donations, the deal toll  in Haiti has climbed still higher, with current estimates hovering at around 100,000. The toll is likely to escalate as more corpses are pulled from the wreckage and as survivors deal with malnutrition, lack of clean drinking water, water-borne diseases and other horrors. So please, give as generously as you can. Football/futbol/soccer fans among you might also want to purchase one of these T-Shirts - all proceeds to earthquake relief.

A Serious Look at Proportionality and Self Defense in War

Just a couple of lines to recommend a lecture on the question of proportionality in war by Professor Jeff McMahan of Rutgers University. It’s worth the full hour and twenty four minutes of your time but in case you need a couple of teasers to tempt you I’ll throw you these; he thinks that certain classes of Israeli and Palestinian civilians are not entitled to complain if they are harmed by enemy action and that the idea of proportionality in unjust wars makes no sense. I found the lecture here.

Waging Lawfare Against the IDF

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:

Continue reading ‘Waging Lawfare Against the IDF’

Free Gilad Shalit

It’s three years to the day since Gilad Shalit was kidnapped and incarcerated by Hamas. The Red Cross has been denied access to him, his family has had no contact from him, no-one knows what his condition is or the circumstances he is being held in. Which is why the Israeli government will perhaps want to revisit all the options available to it, including the complete sealing of the border with Gaza (with the exception of, as Gilad’s father Noam has said, urgent medical and humanitarian requirements) until Gilad is released.

Kasher and Yadlin Redux

Readers interested in the Kasher and Yadlin vs. Walzer and Margalit debate - about which I posted here - may well be interested in their latest exchange here.

May Our Camp Be Pure

 

“It was as if the media were altogether so eager to find reason to criticize the IDF that they pounced on one discussion by nine soldiers who met after returning from the battlefield to share their experiences and subjective feelings with each other, using that one episode to draw conclusions that felt more like an indictment. Dogma replaced balance and led to a dangerous misunderstanding of the depth and complexity of Israeli reality. The individual accounts were never intended to serve as a basis for broad generalizations and summary conclusions by the media; they were published internally, intended for program graduates and their parents as a tool to be used in the process of educating and guiding the next generation.”

 

So writes Major Danny Zamir, laying to rest claims that the IDF engaged in planned, coordinated war crimes in Gaza. Emphasis added. In any case, read the rest.

 

Thanks to Petra for bringing this to our attention.

Jews Behaving Normally Redux:the IDF in Gaza

1.

There has been much talk in the press in recent days relating to “revelations” about the behavior of some members of the IDF in Gaza. I put the word revelations in brackets above because nobody who knows anything about warfare can have imagined that sending large numbers of well-equipped combat troops to fight against irregulars in built up areas was going to produce anything but a significant number of civilian deaths.

Continue reading ‘Jews Behaving Normally Redux:the IDF in Gaza’

Gaza: A British Soldier’s Take

In Basra in 2003 the USA and the UK chose to use extreme force against locations that had been fortified by the Ba’ath Party, in order to spare our troops and the people of Basra the horror of a drawn-out street battle. It appears that the IDF made the same choice in Gaza.

Read the rest.

Thanks to Petra Marquardt-Bigman for directing us to this piece.

Israel Announces Unilateral Ceasefire

Following a vote of the Israeli cabinet, Israel has announced a unilateral ceasefire in the Gaza Strip. IDF operations will end at 2AM local time. Details here, here, here and pretty much everywhere. Hamas, by the way, says it will continue its terrorist attacks.

Israel’s White Phosphorus Use: Not Unusual, Not Illegal

Last week, Human Rights Watch slammed Israel for what it alleged was the “unlawful” use of white phosphorus in its Gaza operation. HRW’s accusation has been now countered from an unlikely source.

Continue reading ‘Israel’s White Phosphorus Use: Not Unusual, Not Illegal’

Israel’s Gaza Operation Takes Shape on the Ground

From the Israeli website Gplanet comes this map displaying the IDF’s current ground operation in Gaza.

The arrows tracing the IDF incursion should be examined in the light of this report from the Washington Post:

Israeli military officials said forces were taking over strategic areas in order to decrease attacks on southern Israel, where more than 500 rockets have landed over the nine days of fighting. A senior Israeli military officer, speaking to foreign journalists in a conference call, said Israel was prepared to control those areas as long as needed to stop the rocket launches.

“We are not speaking about recapturing the Gaza Strip,” said the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity. “This is not our objective. If we have to hold those areas, to stop the rockets, we will do this.”

Ron Ben-Yishai says:

The IDF will focus on causing casualties among Izz al-Din al-Qassam’s fighting force. Many members of this force, which is organized within four regional combat divisions, went into hiding during the aerial assault. Yet an IDF ground maneuver will force them to come out and fight. Yet another objective is to deliver a serious blow to the rocket-launching infrastructure located in major launching sites threatening southern residents. Experience shows that an IDF presence at launch areas prevents rocket attacks from these sites or at least greatly minimizing them.

Adds the Jerusalem Post:

“We know there will be dangers, difficulties and victims… It must be said that the ground operation entails dangers to the lives of soldiers,” Defense Minister Ehud Barak said at the Defense Ministry in Tel Aviv Saturday night. “We must end the hostile actions against Israel… We will not abandon our citizens.”

“This will be a lengthy operation and there will likely be casualties on our side,” a senior defense official said. “But our mission is to defend the home front. The purpose is to destroy Hamas’s infrastructure and impair its ability to fire rockets into Israel.”

As well as expecting casualties, the IDF has experienced its first fatality: Staff Sergeant Dvir Emanuelof, who was 22 years old. He died of wounds sustained in a mortar shell attack near Jabaliya, in the north-eastern corner of the above map.

His funeral was scheduled for 11PM at the Mount Herzl military cemetery in Jerusalem.

Gaza, Israel and the Howling Chorus of Hypocrisy

It won’t be long before the first wave of whining, hypocritical and malevolent op-ed pieces condemning the Israeli operation that began in Gaza this morning rolls in. Israel will be accused of acting disproportionately, committing genocide, deliberately targeting babes in arms and much else besides.

Continue reading ‘Gaza, Israel and the Howling Chorus of Hypocrisy’

Of Pigs, Grunts and The Guardian

Josef Ratzinger is a Roman Catholic, bears do what they have to do in the woods and The Guardian is a newspaper with a particular dislike for Israel. None of this is news. However, I feel it would be remiss of me not to mention something in The Graun’s leader today about the current state of play between Israel and the Palestinians.

Continue reading ‘Of Pigs, Grunts and The Guardian’

The Enemy Within

Just occasionally, Juan Miguel Muñoz, El País’s rabidly anti-Israel correspondent in Jerusalem, gets something right. Writing here he reports on the ongoing toleration of the outrageous behavior of religiofascist settlers on the West Bank.

Continue reading ‘The Enemy Within’

Jews Behaving Normally

Writing in El Mundo’s Middle East blog, Sal Emergui works himself into something of a lather about the 21 days in prison recently dished out by the Israeli Air Force to one of its members who had allowed himself the luxury of an unsmothered yawn during a speech being delivered by the commanding officer of the Ramat David air force base, on the occasion of a ceremony to mark the anniversary of the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin.

Continue reading ‘Jews Behaving Normally’