Yoni Goodman, director of animation of the Academy Award-nominated “Waltz with Bashir,” has a far more meaningful short video on the Gaza attack: a beautiful protest of Israel’s violence against a confined civilian population. Read more »
The film is applauded for its courage in confronting a complicity that has long been part of the historical record. This confrontation ends up leading to redemption much more than to condemnation. And hardly anyone suggests that Israel’s current military operations should also be bravely examined. I suppose that we will have to wait for another award-winning film, a quarter-century from now, to do that. Read more »
A price? Even if you multiply this so-called price by a thousand, this is still no price to pay. The thousand prisoners requested by Hamas are less than a tenth of the many prisoners rotting in Israeli jails. Most of them served lengthy sentences, and experience shows they are unlikely to return to terrorism if released. Some are political prisoners who should never have been arrested and jailed under any rule of law. They deserve to be released with or without connection to Shalit. Read more »
Palestinian support for the Islamist Hamas movement has soared in the wake of Israel’s three-week offensive against the Gaza Strip, according to a poll released yesterday. Read more »
The film “Waltz with Bashir” belongs to the kvetch genre: “Oy, how traumatic that massacre in Sabra and Chatila was for us.” The Jewish Agency is afraid that the tender soul of American Jewry might be hurt by the film and therefore it is offering them psychological relief on the Internet (jewishculture.org). Read more »
Israeli Army, the World is Watching
Anti-Occupation activists protecting Palestinian farmers in the West Bank. Photographer unknown.
If you know who the photographer is, or any further information about this photograph (location, date, etc.), please contact us so that we can include it and recognize the photographer. Please include any relevant links to the [...] Read more »
Tel Aviv University confirmed on Sunday that Israel Defense Forces Colonel Pnina Sharvit-Baruch would teach a course on international law during the spring semester as planned, despite attempts by critics of her policies to prevent her from lecturing there. Read more »
Whoever honestly followed the events of the war knows that the question is no longer whether crimes were committed, but who bears responsibility for them. Legal minds the world over are now diligently preparing legal cases detailing crimes allegedly committed, and only here the reactions range from silence to legal propaganda. Read more »
If Israel plans to keep control over any future Palestinian entity, it will never find a Palestinian partner, and even if it succeeds in dismantling Hamas, the movement will in time be replaced by a far more radical Palestinian opposition. Read more »
On the first day of Operation Cast Lead, the air force bombed the graduation ceremony of a police course, killing dozens of policemen. Months earlier, an operational and legal controversy was already swirling around the planned attack. According to a military source who was involved in the planning, bombing the site of the ceremony was authorized with no difficulty, but questions were raised about the intent to strike at the graduates of the course. Military Intelligence, convinced the attack was justified, pressed for its implementation. Representatives of the international law division (ILD) in the Military Advocate General’s Office at first objected, fearing a possible violation of international law.
Over the course of several months, the operational echelons, particularly Military Intelligence, kept up the pressure on the army’s legal staff. In the end, ILD authorized the air strike as it was carried out. The “incrimination” of the policemen (that is, justifying an attack on them) was based on their categorization as a resistance force in the event of an Israeli incursion into the Gaza Strip; not on information about any of them as individuals. Read more »
