A year after the Gaza War, the debate rages on about the conduct of forces on both sides during the three-week conflict. By now, major human rights organizations both in Israel and abroad have had their say in what crimes may have been committed during the war, and the UN released the results of their inquiry with the Goldstone Report. But all these reports called for more investigation. With a new year comes a renewed call for those investigations.
Starting with the Israeli response, Information Minister Yuli Edelstein stated earlier this week that Israel has no intention of setting up an independent investigation into possible crimes committed by the Israeli Defense Forces during Operation Cast Lead as requested by the UN General Assembly last year. Instead it will submit to the UN the results of their own internal government investigation on Thursday and call it good.
This response does not come as a surprise to anyone, but highlights the debate on whether any military is capable of adequately and impartially investigating itself. As a result, Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak and IDF Chief of Staff Lt. Gen. Gabi Ashkenazi are some of the figures pushing for the establishment of a judicial panel to investigate the IDF’s internal investigation.
The panel represents a compromise between those who believe that militaries often fail when it comes to internal investigations of their own conduct and those who want an independent investigation as called for by the UN General Assembly. Of course having a government investigate its own military probably isn’t much better than just having the military do it itself. However today is not the day for that debate, though I have no doubt that if such a panel is convened, the debate will come.
Of course, Palestinians aren’t to be left out of this internal battle for accountability. As a recent article in the Jerusalem Post pointed out, while there may be a debate about the quality of Israel’s investigations, there isn’t a debate about the quantity, something that neither Hamas nor the Palestinian Authority can say. That’s why it was big news last week when 11 Palestinian human rights groups called on Hamas and the Palestinian Authority to investigate their actions during the Gaza War. Unlike the ongoing debate about Israeli investigation, this call caught a lot of people by surprise. What isn’t surprising is that Hamas is staying mostly silent on the issue, though the Palestinian Authority announced a special commission headed by the Chief Justice of the Palestinian Supreme Court in the West Bank to fulfill the Goldstone Report’s recommendations. Since a large part of those recommendations concerned the need for inquiries into the conduct of Palestinian forces during the conflict, the move demonstrates that pressure continues on both sides.
In the meantime, there is a lot of speculation and allegations when it comes to the motive behind such calls for accountability. Edelstein, speaking ahead of his current stay in New York, called all outside reports alleging war crimes on the part of Israel, including the Goldstone Report, anti-Semitic. Some organizations, such as pro-Israel UN watchdog UN Watch, support this view. But I suspect that it has more to do with the rise in awareness about war crimes and the movement to prosecute them wherever they may occur. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict has gone on for more than 60 years but the world has changed significantly in that time. With the creation of international tribunals to prosecute war crimes in the former Yugoslavia, Rwanda, and Sierra Leone and now with the creation of the International Criminal Court, war as usual is becoming harder to justify. And more people are bound to pay attention when the horrors of war can be watched in realtime on cable news, something that happened with Gaza but has not happened for countless others conflicts around the world. In that regard, it is basic human nature that people care and pick sides.
For now, the Gaza debates continue into 2010. Once the February 5 deadline passes, there will be new analysis and new suggestions, all concerned with the same questions. That much is certain. What still remains unclear a year after the conflict ended is whether all this debate will result in anything other than just talk.
