IDF chief Ashkenazi tries to justify Israel's Gaza war crimes as its isolation grows

Israel is whingeing again about UN 'bias' but no one is listening anymore.

The Israel Defense Forces chief of staff, Lt. Gen. Gabi Ashkenazi, said on Monday that a damning United Nations report on Israel's winter offense against Hamas in Gaza was "biased," and that the IDF was a moral army.

"I read the report, it is biased and unbalanced," Ashkenazi told Army Radio, in his first public response to the report.

Referring to Richard Goldston, the South African prosecutor who wrote the report, the IDF chief said: "From his mandate, he was already unbalanced. He ignored Hamas [rocket] fire. As the one who planned the operation, I say that we have a moral army; we did everything we could to lessen the harm to noncombatants."

Though the 547-page document, which was released on Thursday, accuses both Israel and Hamas of carrying out war crimes during the three-week campaign in Gaza, it focuses primarily on Israel's actions during the hostilities.

more at the supposedly 'left-wing' Haaretz

Writing in the Financial Times Roula Khalaf points out that it is the sheer impunity that Israel's crimes are received with by the so-called 'international community' that will encourage Israel to carry out yet more crimes against the Palestinians.

The bias argument might have worked in the past and helped dismiss a whole slew of other reports - most of them reaching very much the same conclusions as the UN council. But it will prove a little harder to discredit a panel headed by Richard Goldstone, a friend of Israel, who is a former South African judge. "One report is biased, two reports are biased, but not everyone can be biased," says a human rights activist who investigated Gaza violations.

The most threatening recommendations of the report - that the UN Security Council should refer the findings to the International Criminal Court at the Hague if Israel and Hamas fail to carry out credible investigations - will probably never be implemented.

Washington has pledged a more even-handed treatment of the Middle East conflict and shown a desire to be better understood in the Muslim world. But, at the end of last week, the concerns the US expressed about the report suggested that it would probably block it from reaching the ICC.

This rescue, however, does not make the report any less devastating, morally and politically.

Israelis are usually dismissive of the outside world, seeing it as generally unfriendly and incapable of understanding the trauma of living next to an enemy like Hamas. But it would be wrong to assume they care little about their country's steadily deteriorating international image.

Israel's foreign ministry has mounted a diplomatic offensive against the UN report and it appears concerned about the legal implications in European countries that pursue complaints by individuals or judges against people suspected of war crimes. Officers who were involved in the Gaza war might think twice before travelling to some capitals.

Most important, at a time when Israel and the Palestinians are supposed to be working on reviving peace talks, a failure thoroughly and genuinely to investigate the tragedy in Gaza perpetuates a culture of impunity and promises more bloodshed.