The next commission of inquiry By Robert Rosenberg July 25 2002 This week, the Israeli Air Force, relying on information provided by Israel's intelligence services, informed the political echelon that an opportunity had arisen to assassinate the founder and leader of the military wing of the Hamas, Salah Shehadeh by bombing his two-story cinder block home in a residential Gaza neighborhood. The government, which believes that its policy of "pinpoint prevention" - a euphemism for assassination - is an effective instrument of war against terrorism, had, by its own accounts, canceled at least 6 and possibly as many as 8 times, previous operations to do precisely the same thing, i.e., bomb Shehadeh's house, because of the presence of civilians in the area. This time, however, the government, in this case consisting of only the prime minister, the defense minister, and the foreign minister - who approved the operation in principle when Shehadeh's name was put on a list of assassination targets -- decided to go ahead with the operation. According to the government, Shehadeh was "worthy of death" because of his involvement in the planning of many terrorist attacks on Israelis over the years. The government says that intelligence gathered by the appropriate services, Military Intelligence and the Shin Bet, Shehadeh was in the building with one of his aides. The deaths of innocent civilians when the Air Force used a one-ton bomb to destroy the house, was a "regrettable accident." Some government officials, notably the head of operations for the army, said that if the army had known the results of the bombing beforehand, it would have canceled the operation once again, as it had in the past. By virtue of saying so, the government conceded that the operation was wrong because of the moral stain it left on the army. The army and the Shin Bet have promised internal inquiries, which are standard operating procedure after every military operation, even successful ones. This time, the two organizations promise that they will look into what went wrong, specifically, the failure on the part of the Shin Bet to know that there were civilians - Shehadeh's wife and baby - in the building, and the air force's choice of a very large, one-ton bomb, to drop onto a relatively small building in the heart of mostly one-story, flimsy buildings made of cinderblock and tin roofs. Since the attack, the government has been doing is best to downplay the significance of reports that the Tanzim was on the verge of announcing a unilateral, unconditional cessation of terrorist attacks on civilians, and that the Hamas had been drawn into talks about joining the declaration. It is saying that the Palestinians routinely issue announcements about putative ceasefires rendered impossible because of Israeli operations, and that such announcements are inherently mendacious. However, close observation of published reports of diplomatic activity in the past month, since the army reoccupied the West Bank as a counter-terror measure, shows that in fact there were significant international efforts being made in cooperation with key Palestinian figures, to indeed make reforms and changes that Israel - backed by the U.S. - had made conditional for any progress back to a political, rather than purely military, solution to the ongoing crisis in relations between Israel and the Palestinians. Therefore, an inquiry that reduces the error of the attack to the narrow military questions regarding how much intelligence the Shin Bet had about the presence of people inside and around Shehadeh's house, and the appropriateness of the munitions chosen for the attack, will not be sufficient to answer the questions raised by the raid. Among those many questions are:
The Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee's chairman, Labor MK Haim Ramon, has called a session of the highly secretive subcommittee on the intelligence services, to examine the operation "in all its aspects," as he wrote to Meretz MK Ran Cohen this week. Ramon's political antipathy toward Ben-Eleizer, whom he is challenging for the leadership of the Labor Party, may make that subcommittee's conclusions - if it does, indeed, ask these and other questions - appear partisan. Nonetheless, it is appropriate for parliament to be examining the issues. However, to eliminate suspicion that the government chose to approve dropping a one-ton bomb into a densely populated neighborhood in order to kill a single person, aware that it might harm innocent civilians, and that it would sabotage international efforts to end the cycle of violence, an independent commission, headed by a supreme court justice, must be established to question all those involved in the procedures and decision-making leading to the bombing, and to answer, once and for all, the questions that will remain over this affair until those answers are forthcoming. A black flag hung over the operation from the moment it was conceived. The laws of the state of Israel require those responsible to be held accountable. |  Jewish lovers ... JewishCafe.com  Peace  Pleasure  Bookstore Contact Letters to the Editor About Archive Donate Get the Ariga Update Get books about the Middle East Peace Process 
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