By Norman Finkelstein.<\/p>\n
It takes considerable talent to describe Hamas\u2019s firing of primitive \u201crockets\u201d that to date have indirectly killed one person (she died of a heart attack) as a \u201cwar crime,\u201d while describing Israel\u2019s killing to date of 120 Palestinians, overwhelmingly civilians and innocent children, and its systematic targeting of civilian infrastructure, as mere \u201ccollective punishment.\u201d <\/p>\n
But it\u2019s what one has come to expect from Human Rights Watch. In 2008 HRW issued a report entitled Flooding South Lebanon: Israel\u2019s use of cluster munitions in Lebanon in July and August 2006<\/em>. The report found that Israel dropped as many as 4.6 million cluster submunitions on south Lebanon during the 2006 war. It was \u2013 in HRW\u2019s words \u2013 \u201cthe most extensive use of cluster munitions anywhere in the world since the 1991 Gulf war,\u201d while relative to the size of the targeted area the density of the attack was historically unprecedented. Some 90 percent of these cluster munitions were dropped during the final three days \u201cwhen Israel knew a settlement was imminent\u201d (HRW), the U.N. ceasefire resolution having already been passed but not yet gone into effect. But, although finding that Israel committed \u201cextensive violations\u201d of the laws of war, HRW did not go beyond stating that Israel\u2019s massive resort to cluster munitions was \u201cin some locations possibly a war crime,\u201d even as the evidence HRW itself assembled conclusively showed that Israel was targeting civilian population centers. <\/p>\n HRW now says that targeting the civilian homes of Hamas militants constitutes mere collective punishment. So, let\u2019s see. Israel prides itself on having a citizen army. Virtually every civilian dwelling in Israel contains a family member who is either in the army or the reserves. If Hamas had precision missiles, issued an official warning that henceforth it would be targeting every civilian dwelling in Israel, and then proceeded to do just that, would HRW call it mere \u201ccollective punishment\u201d? <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" By Norman Finkelstein. It takes considerable talent to describe Hamas\u2019s firing of primitive \u201crockets\u201d that to date have indirectly killed one person (she died of a heart attack) as a \u201cwar crime,\u201d while describing Israel\u2019s killing to date of 120 Palestinians, overwhelmingly civilians and innocent children, and its systematic targeting of civilian infrastructure, as mere … Continue reading “HRW, apologists for murder”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2961,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[492],"tags":[286,9477,178,1561],"class_list":["post-14734","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-opinion","tag-gaza","tag-hrw","tag-israel","tag-war-crimes"],"cc_featured_image_caption":{"caption_text":false,"source_text":false,"source_url":false},"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/praag.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14734","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/praag.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/praag.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/praag.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2961"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/praag.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=14734"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/praag.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14734\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":14735,"href":"https:\/\/praag.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14734\/revisions\/14735"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/praag.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=14734"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/praag.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=14734"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/praag.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=14734"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}