Col. Richard Kemp, the former commander of British forces in Afghanistan, called the recently released United Nations Human Rights Council report on last year’s Operation Protective Edge “dangerous” in an op-ed published today in The New York Times. One area of Kemp’s critique focused on the commission members’ ignorance of military matters.
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.
The commission could have listened to Gen. Martin E. Dempsey, chairman of the United States Joint Chiefs of Staff, who said last November that the I.D.F. had taken extraordinary measures to try to limit civilian casualties. Or to a group of 11 senior military officers from seven nations, including the United States, Germany, Spain and Australia, who also investigated the Gaza conflict recently. I was a member of that group, and our report, made available to Judge Davis, said: “None of us is aware of any army that takes such extensive measures as did the I.D.F. last summer to protect the lives of the civilian population.”
The report acknowledges that Israel took steps to warn of imminent attacks but suggests more should have been done to minimize civilian casualties. Yet it offers no opinion about what additional measures Israel could have taken. It even criticizes Israel for using harmless explosive devices — the “knock on the roof” — as a final warning to evacuate targeted buildings, suggesting that it created confusion. No other country uses roof-knocks, a munition developed by Israel as part of a series of I.D.F. warning procedures, including text messages, phone calls and leaflet drops, that are known to have saved many Palestinian lives.
Kemp added that placing the limitations suggested by the commission on the IDF, or any military, would endanger soldiers, undercut military effectiveness, and benefit the enemy. Kemp criticized the commission for providing excuses for Hamas and making impossible demands upon Israel. Following the report and its recommendations, Kemp argued, would “only provoke further violence and loss of life.”
A video of Dempsey’s remarks can be found here. The group of senior military officers presented their report earlier this month.
In his analysis published earlier this week in The Tower, Gerald Steinberg, president of NGO Monitor, also pointed to the lack of military expertise evident in the commission’s report:
Another major flaw that remained was the heavy reliance on highly political non-governmental organizations (NGOs) with façades of “expertise” without the substance. This NGO network is deeply entrenched in the UN structure, and visible on almost every page. Amnesty International’s versions of events are quoted 53 times; Human Rights Watch, 22; B’tselem, 69; Palestinian Center for Human Rights (PCHR), 50, and so on. In other words, as in the case of Goldstone, and, going back to the 2002 Jenin “investigations”, these political organizations, which clearly lack any systematic or professional fact-finding methodology, created the scaffolding around which the COI was constructed.
For example, Amnesty International, which has essentially no research expertise or professional methodology, is cited on a wide range of issues, from Hamas rocket production to compensation of Negev Bedouin struck by one of these rocket, to determining that the size of a crater in Gaza is ostensibly “consistent with the dropping of a large bomb”, whatever that may mean. None of these claims are in any way “evidence” that could be accepted in legal proceedings.
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