What changed Israel's initial decision to accept a
United Nations "fact-finding committee" on the Jenin
refugee camp into a furious rejection?
From the beginning, Israel's acceptance of the
committee was tinged with grave misgivings. The United
Nations has long since lost any claim to impartiality
with respect to Israel. The antisemitic conference on
racism it sponsored in Durban last summer is but one
example of ingrained bias against Israel. Nevertheless,
Israelis were so confident that an honest fact-finding
would exonerate Israel of the wild charges being made
by Palestinians and humanitarian organizations that
they initially acquiesced to the proposal.
However, when the committee mandate and composition
were finally revealed, they convinced Israelis across
the political spectrum that Secretary General Kofi
Annan had set a trap for Israel.
In order to render a fair and unbiased judgment on the
conduct of any military operation, two basic conditions
must be met. First, the operation must be placed in the
context of the causes that gave rise to it. Without
that context, no judgment on the proportionality of the
response is possible. Second, the operation must be
assessed in comparison to other such military actions.
Yet the United Nations committee was asked to examine
the Israeli Defense Force's actions in Jenin and the
suffering of Jenin's inhabitants without reference to
the earlier terrorism coming out of the Jenin camp that
had triggered the Israeli action. In short, the
committee would evaluate Israel's war on terrorism
without any reference to terrorism.
Imagine a team sent to investigate American military
action in Afghanistan without reference to the attacks
of Sept. 11 or Osama bin Laden's boasts that he would
destroy America. And imagine asking that investigation
to ignore the sanctuary the Taliban gave Mr. bin Laden
and his al-Qaeda operatives despite previous American
warnings.
Stripped of that context, the United States would
inevitably be found guilty of having assaulted one of
the poorest and most backward countries on the face of
the earth and of inflicting unnecessary harm on the
civilian population. A similar inquiry into the massive
allied bombing of Germany in World War II would have
resulted in charges of war crimes against Franklin D.
Roosevelt and Winston Churchill.
But this kind of distorted result is exactly what the
United Nations' noncontextual fact-hiding strategy
would have arrived at. To examine the Israeli
operations in Jenin and at similar sites with no
reference to the nonstop Palestinian suicide bombings
and other terrorist attacks dispatched from those sites
-- these attacks killed more than 100 Israeli civilians
in March alone, a number that translates for tiny
Israel to the equivalent of twice the number of
Americans killed on Sept. 11 -- suggests an intent to
find Israel guilty in advance.
The second major flaw was hidden in the committee
composition: most of its members possessed no military
background. Moreover, there was no indication that the
military operation would be assessed in comparison to
other military operations with similar missions; for
example, by comparing civilian casualties in Jenin to
civilian casualties inflicted by the Russian ground
forces in Chechnya or by the American air forces in
Afghanistan.
Israelis are confident that any fair comparative
examination of the Israeli Defense Force actions in
Jenin would show that the soldiers made extraordinary
efforts to minimize civilian casualties in the nine-day
battle there. Twenty-three Israeli infantrymen would be
alive today had the army made a decision to use its
airplanes and artillery to wipe out the armed
opposition more quickly.
Israel has nothing to hide. Israel rejected the United
Nations fact-finding committee not because of what the
committee sought to explore, but because of what it was
determined to ignore.
Yuval Steinitz is chairman of the Subcommittee for
Defense Planning and Policy of the Israeli Knesset.
This essay first appeared in the New York Times.
