Urgent appeal for Israeli peace group Gush Shalom

The following is the editorial of today's Ha'aretz - and our answer which we prepared. It is disappointing to see that a liberal paper has no word of criticism of governmental incitement against peace activists - several ministers calling us names, and Justice Minister Shetreet using the word "traitors" on the radio.

The blindness of political purity
Activists from Gush Shalom, the leftist peace group, have sent letters to 15 Israel Defense Forces officers, warning that the movement is collecting evidence about actions that took place under their command in the territories for submission to the International Criminal Court in The Hague, on suspicion that the officers committed war
crimes.
This week, the prime minister asked the attorney general to investigate the Gush Shalom leaders. Attorney General Elyakim Rubinstein said that the state prosector had yet to form an opinion on whether legal steps could be taken against the Gush Shalom activists. But irrespective of the legal questions, it is difficult not to regard Gush Shalom's action as injudicious and wrong, and its damage is certainly going to overshadow the pure intentions of the activists.
Gush Shalom is a political movement that promotes the campaign against the occupation in various ways. These include organizing rallies and demonstrations, as well as monitoring IDF activity in the territories and publishing the results of this monitoring through various media channels.

This is all acceptable in any democracy. Collecting seemingly incriminating material against officers in an army that operates under the law in a sovereign state, according to the instructions of an elected government, can also be considered worthy civic action, on one condition - that the gathered information is published or presented to the law enforcement agencies in the country.

A Gush Shalom spokesman told Ha'aretz that the movement was considering passing on the information it collected to The Hague "only if our appeals to the courts in Israel are to no avail." But even with this reservation, the decision to warn IDF officers is problematic. The inherent working assumption of the activists and the implicit threat in the letters to the officers is that those state institutions meant to implement the principles of democracy and protect the rule of law - including the courts, the parliament and the press - are insufficient, in Gush Shalom's eyes, as legal institutions. The movement is in effect stating that if it is not satisfied (presumably with convictions), it will seek out international forums to get what it believes would be true justice.

With this political purity, Gush Shalom is causing great damage to public life in Israel - and harm to its own cause. Of all people, leftist peace activists are the ones who are needed to strengthen the press and to find ways to convince the public and encourage the state prosecutor and the legal system to investigate every problematic incident in the army. Putting the International Criminal Court - with all the problematics of its structure - above the state's legal system is a blunt vote of no confidence in the institutions and public opinion in Israel.
The decision to send evidence to the international court in The Hague shows contempt for those who have not given up the continuing campaign for an end the occupation and
for peace - people who also work under difficult conditions in the bitter conflict that has given birth to profound disappointment and a crisis in the left, but are interested in doing so in an open and legitimate political debate.
Handing over evidence to the international court will not inspire Israeli public opinion to turn against blatantly illegal orders given or executed in the territories. On the contrary, it could even achieve the opposite result.

[If you want to react, you can do it by writing a letter to the editor: letters@haaretz.co.il - or by addressing the editors at: editor@haaretz.co.il What follows is our own reaction - which was sent to the Hebrew and the English edition:]

Dear Sir

The editorial of Ha'aretz, Tuesday Aug. 6, was devoted to an attack upon Gush Shalom, which in fact joins the campaign launched against our movement by Prime Minister Sharon.

It is rather disappointing that the editorial uses factually untrue arguments. In it you take the position that "collecting seemingly incriminating material against officers in an army that operates under the law in a sovereign state, according to the instructions of an elected government, can also be considered worthy civic action, on one condition - that the gathered information is published or presented to the law enforcement agencies in the country."

The editorial writer(s) seem unaware that Gush Shalom did precisely that. Each one of the letters sent to various military officers was simultaneously sent to all the papers, including Ha'aretz, and as a matter of fact we made considerable efforts at the time to get your reporters interested - to no avail. Also, from each of these letters there were copies sent to the military prosecution, to the army chief-of-staff and to the Minister of Defence, so that the competent authorities had a full chance to take judicial action had they wanted to. We were not surprised that they didn't, since the actions about which we wrote to various officers mostly constituted part of the official policies of the state of Israel and its armed forces. Such acts as the demolition of houses, collective punishments and the arrests of family members of suspected terrorists for the sole reason of their being family members are
common and approved parts of official policies - and neverthless, they constitute serious violations of international law and specifically of the Fourth Geneva Convention. We had no difficulty in finding evidence connecting a particular officer to such acts. In most cases, the evidence was provided in press interviews in which the officers addmitted - often boasted of - the particular act. In such cases, we felt duty bound to write such an officer and warn him that his acts, or those which he had ordered his subordinates to do, constitute violations of international law.
It is difficulat for us to believe that the existing Israeli judicial system, military or civilian, could deal with offences of this kind - though we will be extremely happy to be proven wrong. Possilbly, at some time there will be created in Israel an institute similar to the "Truth Commission" of post Apartheid South Africa, which could take up this burden. Otherwise, the issue is likely to arrive, sooner or later, at a internationa judicial forum of one kind or another.
It is surprising that Ha'aretz did not see fit to refer to the aritcle published yesterday (August 5) by your correspondent Amir Oren, in which he refered to plans being prepared at the Israeli Army's general staff for "a new operation, more harsh than 'Defensive Shield' and 'Detemined Path', whose implementation may result in "The death of thousands of Palestinians"(!). Without knowing the details, which your correspondent did not enumerate, this horrifying news item arouses a terrible suspicion of mass war crimes being prepared. If these crimes ever come to perpetrated, the International tribunal
in the Hague is likely to initiate action on its own, without waiting for "Gush Shalom".

Adam Keller, spokesperson of Gush Shalom, Tel-Aviv

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