The massacre of some 800 Palestinians during the Lebanon War was planned and carried out by Lebanese Christian Phalangists. Israel's guilt lay in allowing the Phalangists, its allies, into the Sabra and Shatilla refugee camps: The Kahan Commission, which investigated the affair, said Israel should have foreseen the possibility of a massacre and therefore used Israeli rather than Lebanese troops to put down the armed resistance in the camps. 

By any normal legal standard, failing to foresee and therefore prevent a massacre constitutes a much lower level of guilt than actually committing one. Yet Belgium has shown no interest whatsoever in prosecuting the Phalangists who were directly responsible: It is only targeting Israelis. 

Numerous suits have so far been filed under Belgium's 1993 "universal competence"law, which authorizes Brussels to try crimes against humanity committed anywhere in the world. The current and former world leaders named in these suits include Yasser Arafat, Saddam Hussein, Fidel Castro and Augusto Pinochet all of whom are directly responsible for hundreds or thousands of deaths, and most of whom stand accused of crimes of far greater magnitude than Sabra and Shatilla such as Saddam's slaughter of more than 50,000 Kurds. 

Yet all these suits are languishing in the Belgian prosecutor's office. The only suit the prosecution has seen fit to bring to court is the one against the Israeli defendants, whose responsibility for the crime at issue is at most indirect. 

In normal prosecutorial practice, it is the worst offenders who are given top priority. 

Sabra and Shatilla is also the only one of the above mentioned cases that has already been subject to legal proceedings. The massacre was investigated by a blue-ribbon judicial commission of inquiry headed by Yitzhak Kahan, then president of Israel's Supreme Court; another of its three members, Aharon Barak, is the current Supreme Court president. 

This panel found that Sharon, who was defense minister at the time, bore ministerial but not criminal responsibility; it reached similar conclusions about the officers involved.
Since the ostensible purpose of the Belgian law is to prosecute cases that are being ignored by their own countries' legal systems, there is no legal rationale for giving priority to the one case that already has undergone a thorough judicial examination. 

Furthermore, this decision is an unprecedented insult to Israel's legal system. All democratic countries traditionally give full faith and credit to each other's judicial systems: Belgium would never dream of trying a case that France's judiciary had already investigated and dismissed.
For Belgium to decide that Israel alone of all democratic nations is undeserving of this full faith and credit is completely unjustifiable on legal grounds. 

When the lower court threw out the case against Sharon on the grounds that Belgium can only try crimes to which it has some connection (the one previous case heard under the 1993 law, which involved the Rwanda massacres, included 10 Belgian peacekeepers among the victims), four senators from different parties promptly introduced an amendment to the "universal competence"law stating that no such connection is necessary. 

The amendment also explicitly stated that it would apply retroactively, meaning to the one case already in court. It was backed by Prime Minister Guy Verhofstadt and passed by a large majority of parliament's upper house; the lower house is expected to approve it shortly. 

The legislative and executive branches thus sent a clear message to their Supreme Court: If you uphold the lower court's ruling now, we will force you to reverse your own ruling later. 

Belgium's parliament is certainly entitled to clarify legislation by amendment but under such circumstances, it requires enormous disingenuousness to claim, as Michel did, that this was a purely judicial decision in which the political system played no part. 

Indeed, had Belgium not provided such strong grounds for the conclusion that Israel is its main target, the worldwide indifference to the dangerous precedent its high court set last week would be incomprehensible because if Brussels did use its 1993 law to try the entire world, it would wreak havoc on the international legal system. 

Belgium, after all, is no different from any other country; if it can claim universal jurisdiction, so can anyone else. The result would be an international legal nightmare in which any country could claim jurisdiction over any serious crime, with no way to decide which jurisdictional claim takes precedence. 

And that, perhaps, is the saddest commentary of all on Belgium's behavior: that its blatantly politicized use of the 1993 law is actually less frightening than the alternative.