Report, repine, repeat

The common murmur from Jerusalem over the past year saying that the UN Human Rights Council inquiry into the Gaza conflict was pre-written could have, it seems, just as easily been aimed at Israeli press coverage of the long-awaited release of the report, featuring as it does predictably righteous indignation from the two populist tabloids and a more nuanced and accepting view of the commission’s findings from the lefty Haaretz daily.

Exasperation over the report, which accused both Israel and Hamas of possible war crimes, practically drips off of Yedioth Ahronoth and Israel Hayom, which sprinkle their coverage with words like “absurd,” “hypocritical” and “exaggeration.”

“Report of hypocrisy” reads the main headline of Yedioth Ahronoth, which reserves its first couple of pages of coverage not for the substantive findings of the report but rather for the bits it found the most donkey-brained.

Among the findings it points out is the report’s conclusion that tunnels dug by Hamas into Israel were not meant to target civilians and were legitimate military tools, that threatening messages sent by Hamas as part of psychological warfare were bona fide warnings to help civilians get out of harm’s way, and that the conflict wasn’t connected to the kidnapping of three Israeli teens earlier in the summer, which by most accounts kicked off the summer of blood.

The paper’s Ben Dror Yemini calls the report just another notch in the belt for the Boycott Sanctions Divestment Campaign, possibly marking the moment that the letters BDS lost all meaning and came to stand for anything that criticizes Israel.

“No criticism, not an attempt to get at the real truth, this was just another victory for the BDS campaign. The headlines may have been that ‘both sides carried out war crimes,’ but Hamas doesn’t interest anybody,” he writes, missing the fact that the report didn’t accuse anyone of carrying out war crimes, but mentioned only probable war crimes. “The report also has some truth to it. Not every word there in regards to specific incidents is false. There were extraordinary cases. Attacks on innocents. Every serious allegation must be checked and even probed. But despite that, we are talking here about a mega fraud. When the head of the commission says ‘the scale of destruction and human suffering in Gaza was unprecedented,’ she’s not raising a factual claim. She making a propaganda claim, and one that is mostly lies.”

Israel Hayom, which runs headlines calling the study a “terror rights report” and a “report born in sin,” is no less generous with scorn to heap upon the UNHRC paper.

The tabloid leads off with Israel’s angry response to the report, writing that it’s finally something that has managed to unite the country.

“Most of the responses, from right and left, had one common characteristic: They attacked the UNHRC, which authored its report with a degree of hypocrisy and propaganda disregarding the moral role of the IDF in the fighting,” the paper writes.

Not to be outdone, commentator Boaz Bismuth jumps into the fray, terming the UNHRC a terror-encouraging body and working himself into hysterics.

“The harshest thing in the report is that the world will no longer allow Israel to win wars decisively (as witnessed by the latest rounds in Gaza), and its members will prevent Israel from fighting or from defending itself at all,” he writes.

The tabloid also notes that though Jerusalem refused to cooperate with the report when it was being written, seeing it as a fool’s errand, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has now decided to compose an official response to the UNHRC in a bid to head off a Palestinian effort to use the report to prosecute Israel in the International Criminal Court in the Hague.

It’s a smart move, according to Haaretz’s Barak Ravid, who writes that the UN report is in fact aimed at The Hague, but an Israeli investigation could pre-empt the ICC, since the war crimes tribunal will only investigate in cases where the suspected party didn’t investigate itself.

Ravid calls the report relatively balanced, and it’s a thread that runs through the broadsheet’s coverage, which trades in the histrionics of its cousin for matter-of-fact reporting, and saves its criticism for Jerusalem’s decision to boycott the committee and automatically attack its findings.

“If Israel keeps with tradition and launches a self-righteous frenzy labeling the UN as anti-Semitic, this too, would be a mistake. In recent years … Israel has gone to great lengths to improve its own policy and the investigative capabilities of both the Military Police and the Military Advocate General, in attempts to preempt international accusations of war crimes or atrocities. This latest UN report highlights the efforts of Military Advocate General Maj. Gen. Danny Efroni on this front, though it also points out that the relatively small number of courts martial and criminal investigations attests to Israel’s failure to follow international law to the letter,” he writes. “But when the prime minister explains beforehand that the UN report is biased and therefore superfluous, when the defense minister publicly criticizes Efroni’s decisions to investigate operational events that took place during the fighting, when IDF senior officers blast the Military Advocate General in interviews with the media, and when the IDF is called without question ‘the most moral army in the world,’ and social media are full of fiery discussions, it’s hard to expect Efroni to take additional action.”

In Yedioth, though, military correspondent Alex Fishman writes that the report shows an utter lack of familiarity with the realities of fighting an urban battle against an irregular army, and thus will be pretty useless should the army want to use it as a guide for what not to do next time around.

“The Davis Commission report has only one practical application: to be used as ammunition in the hearts-minds-propaganda battle being waged against Israel, and will be added on to the story of the flotilla coming to Gaza which is waiting in the wings.”

Druze clues

While the army tries to figure out what to do with the Gaza war report, it will also be dealing with a new reality in the north of the country, where ambulances carrying wounded Syrians for treatment are suddenly the target of an angry Druze community.

All three papers term the attack on the ambulance and killing of a Syrian fighter in the Golan town of Majdal Shams Monday night a “lynch.”

Yedioth reports that the ambulance was not properly protected and the army should have seen the attack coming, as anger has risen in the Druze community over rebel advances on Druze towns in Syria, and especially after a similar attack in the town of Hurfeish just 24 hours earlier.

“Based on the initial reports this seems to have been a mess-up by the IDF: They did not learn from the relatively light attack from two days ago,” the paper accuses.

In Yedioth, Yoav Limor warns that the violence, which may only get worse, could end up with Israel bogged down in a fight it wants no part of.

“The biggest fear of course is that events of this kind will drag Israel, unwillingly, into the Syrian civil war,” he writes. “There’s no shortage of people who are liable to ask for revenge over last night’s incident — whether against the Druze in Israel or their coreligionists in Syria — and drag Israel into the mess that it’s successfully avoided for the last four and a half years.”