" It Is Time to Indict Israel": Norman Finkelstein on Growing Push for ICC to File War Crimes Charges
Transcript
This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
AMY GOODMAN: I want to go to the acting Israeli foreign minister, Yisrael Katz, responding to the U.N. Human Rights Council’s report.
YISRAEL KATZ: [translated] This report is another chapter in the theater of the absurd produced occasionally by the United Nations Human Rights Council, another hostile, mendacious and slanted report against the state of Israel. It’s a report based on distorted information, in which the facts were not at all checked, whose only purpose is to slander the only democracy in the Middle East and harm our right to self-defense in the face of the terrorism of a murderous organization. The state of Israel outright rejects this report.
AMY GOODMAN: Norm Finkelstein, the significance of Israel saying it rejects the report?
NORMAN FINKELSTEIN: Well, Israel has always rejected the reports, whether they come from the United Nations or, more often than not, they come from reputable human rights organizations, like Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch or the Israeli human rights organization B’Tselem. So it’s not as if—to use the words of the person you just had on, it’s not as if it’s a typically mendacious U.N. report. It’s a report that falls in line with the findings of every reputable human rights organization.
AMY GOODMAN: What most struck you about this report?
NORMAN FINKELSTEIN: What most struck me about the report was it was remarkably honest. It was very forthright in its conclusions. And it didn’t fake this kind of balance, which most human rights organizations, even reputable ones, attempt between Israel and the United States. So, just to take a couple of examples, it forthrightly stated that Israel targets intentionally children during these demonstrations. It targets reporters. It targets medical personnel. And that’s unusual. Allow me just two examples, which you would be familiar with. So, when there was the killings during Operation Protective Edge of the four children who were playing hide-and-seek—
AMY GOODMAN: This was back in 2014.
NORMAN FINKELSTEIN: 2014. Recently, The Intercept had an article on those four—killings of the four kids, and had this story that they weren’t really intentionally killed, it was an accident, it was a mistake. And same thing with The New York Timeswhen it had the big story on Razan al-Najjar, which was quoted everywhere. The essence of the story was, there was an Israeli sniper’s bullet, it hit the ground, ricocheted and then accidentally hit three Israeli medical personnel. It was a magic bullet, because there was a huge crowd of people, but this magic bullet only hit three medical personnel.
But this human rights report by the Human Rights Council, it’s very straightforward. It says intentionally targets children, intentionally targets even disabled persons. And that, to me, was a credit to them that there was no fake balance. If you look at the proportions, when it looks at the damages done to the people of Gaza, they devote 10 full pages. And then there’s a section called “Impact on Israel.” It’s three paragraphs. And that’s exactly what the reality shows, that overwhelmingly—in fact, virtually entirely—all the infliction of death and destruction is on the Palestinian side. For the period they covered, during the demonstrations, there were no fatalities during the demonstrations, and four Israeli soldiers were lightly injured. These are massacres. They’re not conflicts. They’re not engagements. They’re just outright massacres of overwhelmingly unarmed, nonviolent demonstrators."
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