CBC’s Neil MacDonald, who earlier this year suggested Israeli complicity in the Abu Ghraib tortures, now weighs in on the UN’s long-awaited recognition that ‘there is nothing in the fact of occupation that justifies the targeting and killing of [Israeli] civilians’:
But the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is not as easy to characterize as the UN report might wish. The Israeli soldiers who enforce the occupation kill a great many Palestinian civilians. If Palestinians have committed terror, the Israelis have certainly committed war crimes.
There is also the question of whether the Jewish settlers in the West Bank and Gaza, thousands of whom are well armed and overtly bellicose, constitute civilians or combatants.