Israel and its automatic defenders, from Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on down, have come out all guns blazing against the United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC) report on last summer’s Gaza campaign. The report is hypocritical, biased, one sided, distorted, a capitulation to terrorist groups and a “rape of the truth”, as Netanyahu noted.
Very few people will be reading the report, anyway - including those who will be voicing very strong opinions about its contents. Israel bashers will maintain that it proves once and for all that the Israeli army is guilty of war crimes. Israel advocates will respond that it proves once and for all that the United Nations is morally bankrupt. Most people will make do with a few headlines and tweets.
That is a shame. As my colleague Amos Harel points out, the report issued by a commission of inquiry headed by former federal prosecutor and New York judge Mary McGowan Davis is no reprise of Cast Lead’s Goldstone Report. Whatever its flaws and shortcomings, it is far more disciplined and balanced. For that reason alone, its negative ramifications for Israel might be far greater.
For the few who will wade through its 183 pages, the report makes for harrowing reading. It devotes ample space and deference to Israelis suffering from rocket attacks, but its eyewitness accounts of the scenes of carnage in Gaza in the wake of Israel air force bombings in which entire families were wiped out will disturb even the most ardent justifier of Israeli actions. They are, in a word, atrocious.
“The ordinary response to atrocities is to banish them from consciousness,” Judith Herman writes in the book Trauma and Recovery, but that observation relates to people who had been exposed to the calamities in the first place. Last summer, the overwhelming majority of Israelis were spared the sights and sounds of the carnage in Gaza: Israeli media refrained from covering the suffering of Gazans while politicians and pundits maintained that it was unpatriotic to even discuss. The hardships and ordeals of Israelis cowering from rocket attacks, undeniable in and of themselves, were magnified tenfold while the misery of Gaza was not only downplayed but also depicted as well deserved.
Credit to Haaretz.com
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