THE ISRAELI government voted yesterday to provide “full moral and legal support” to any soldiers who faced lawsuits over actions committed during the recent fighting in Gaza.
The decision came in response to moves by Palestinian and international human rights groups to draw up charges against senior officers for allegedly using disproportionate force and committing “war crimes”.
Prime minister Ehud Olmert told ministers that Hamas and its supporters were trying to turn the aggressor into the victim. “Israel did everything in order to avoid hitting civilians,” Mr Olmert said.
“I do not know of any military that is more moral, fair and sensitive to civilians’ lives, than the Israel Defence Forces.”
Israel’s military censor has already issued orders forbidding the media from publishing the names or photographs of senior officers who participated in the Gaza war.
With the general election just over two weeks away, the unity that characterised Israel during the conflict has been replaced by the usual political mud-slinging.
Foreign minister Tzipi Livni, the leader of the centrist Kadima, which trails in the polls to the right-wing Likud, warned that if Likud leader Benjamin Netanyahu is elected prime minister, Israeli relations with the US will deteriorate, as they did during Mr Netanyahu’s first term as premier between 1996-99.
Kadima officials quoted passages from a book written by President Bill Clinton’s Middle East envoy at the time, Dennis Ross, highly critical of Mr Netanyahu.
“Translating an idea into action seemed beyond his grasp”, Mr Ross wrote. “Often he would come up with ideas simply to get himself out of a jam.”
But Likud sources dismissed the Kadima campaign as panic, prompted by the fact that Ms Livni has failed to reduce the Likud lead in the polls.
They responded with separate quotes from Dennis Ross in more recent newspaper interviews, regretting that the US had not insisted on reciprocity with the Palestinians, and had not focused on measures to improve the Palestinian economy, both central elements of Mr Netanyahu’s approach.
On Wednesday, President Barack Obama’s new Middle East envoy, George Mitchell, arrives in the region and will hold talks with Israeli and Palestinian Authority leaders. Mr Mitchell, who played a key role in the Good Friday peace agreement in Northern Ireland, is no stranger to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
During the Clinton presidency he led a six-month fact-finding mission on the reasons behind the second intifada (Palestinian uprising).