Today’s Top Stories
1. Could Israel hack Hezbollah’s rockets?
2. The US Senate passed legislation against efforts to boycott Israel. The language was piggybacked onto the Trade Promotion Authority legislation, which the White House is expected to sign into law. See Times of Israel coverage, plus the Jerusalem Post‘s background.
3. Just before this roundup was published, an aerial drone from Gaza crashed in Israel near the border; IDF engineers retrieved the UAV for further analysis.
4. BDS Has Only One Weapon: The more people see Israel as a force for good in the world, the less susceptible they’ll be to the boycott movement’s effort to turn the world against it.
Israel and the Palestinians
• It’s refreshing to see a reporter ask a straight question to a politician, who gives a frank answer. Here’s the key question posed by Washington Post reporter Ruth Eglash to Israeli-Arab Knesset member Basel Ghattas about his participation in the Gaza flotilla.
Q: There has been criticism that this is a political action, not a humanitarian one. Can you explain what the goals of this flotilla are?
A: This is a nonviolent political action aimed at bringing attention to the blockade.
• Police manhunt for two illegal Palestinian workers who beat an Israeli farmer to death. David Bar, of Moshav Pedaya near Rehovot, was 70.
• Worth reading: Reporter Dan Ephron really did his homework with an in-depth and frank look at the IDF’s controversial Hannibal directive. Published in Politico, Ephron certainly sheds more light on army tactics than that UN report everyone’s talking about.
To the military in the United States and around the world, Israel serves as a kind of laboratory for battle tactics, especially those involving counterinsurgency. Its wars with guerrilla groups like Hamas and Lebanon’s Hezbollah—four in the past nine years—are pored over for the lessons they hold and the questions they raise. The story of Hadar Goldin raises one question in particular: How far should a modern military go to prevent one of its own from being captured? . . .
Now, nearly a year later, Israeli military lawyers are trying to determine if the Hannibal procedure led soldiers to commit a war crime. The lawyers have a particularly delicate task. Ordering a criminal investigation would put them at odds with the institution they serve. Not ordering one might open the door to a probe by the International Criminal Court.
• UN development official to AP: At it’s current pace, Gaza reconstruction will take 30 years because Hamas can’t be trusted not to pilfer cement for terror tunnels because of the nasty Israeli blockade.
• Israel to Jordanian media: ‘Stop praising attacks on Israelis’
• Here’s a fleeting ray of sanity at Turtle Bay: UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon said the Gaza flotilla isn’t helpful.
• Nice to see the New York Times conceding that Tel Aviv is not the capital of Israel. This Dia Hadid dispatch was corrected by the time I saw it (see the second paragraph), but there’s a footprint of the lousy Tel Aviv synecdoche on the paper’s Mideast page.
• Foreign investment in Israel dropped 50 percent in 2014. Experts sharing their conjecture with YNet attributed this primarily to the Gaza war, weak international economic growth which led to other countries seeing similar declines, and, possibly too, the boycott movement against Israel.
Around the World
• Papers picked up on an open letter signed by a number of ex Obama administration officials and diplomats against the unfolding Iranian nuclear deal. More at Reuters.
• Brazilian crooners won’t bend to BDS
• Holocaust memorial in Kiev defaced with swastikas
Commentary/Analysis
• Col. Richard Kemp, the former commander of British forces in Afghanistan, slammed the UN’s Gaza report in a New York Times op-ed:
The report is characterized by a lack of understanding of warfare. That is hardly surprising. Judge Davis admitted, when I testified before her in February, that the commission, though investigating a war, had no military expertise. Perhaps that is why no attempt has been made to judge Israeli military operations against the practices of other armies. Without such international benchmarks, the report’s findings are meaningless.
• Here’s what else I’m reading today . . .
– Stephen Huntley: The latest bit of nonsense from the UN on Israel
– Irit Kohn: Faced with criminal tactics, Israel abided by laws of armed conflict
– Jonathan Tobin: It’s ot France, but an Obama diktat that Israel fears
– Zvi Barel: While world finalizes Iran deal, Israel bogged down by UN report
– Bernard-Henri Levy: A yellow star for the Jewish state?
– Washington Post: US shouldn’t be swayed by Khamenei’s nuclear threats
– Wall St. Journal: The UN’s Israel inquisition (staff-ed, click via Google News)
Featured image: CC BY flickr/Kathleen Conklin with additions by HonestReporting; soldiers CC BY-NC flickr/Israel Defense Forces;
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