Love of the Land: A short lesson in defamation: UK newspaper links Gaza operation to Sabra and Shatila massacre

A short lesson in defamation: UK newspaper links Gaza operation to Sabra and Shatila massacre

Robin Shepherd
Robin Shepherd Online
03 February '10

In the latest non-story about Israel’s Operation Cast Lead in Gaza last year, Britain’s Independent newspaper splashes an “exclusive” revelation across its front page today from an unnamed “high-ranking” Israeli commander saying that Israel “rewrote the rules of war for Gaza” by putting Palestinian civilians at risk to minimise the risk to Israeli soldiers.

The article is a garbled, evidence-free piece of anti-Israeli opportunism which appears designed to keep the UN’s Goldstone Report on Gaza high in the public consciousness. But the purpose behind the apparent absurdity of making a front page article out of such a flimsy pseudo-exclusive is revealed in an editorial accompanying the report which rehashes one of the most enduring calumnies in the arsenal of Israel’s detractors.

In urging Israel to conduct a full inquiry into Gaza, the paper says it should draw from the example of a previous Israeli investigation in the 1980s:

“The Kahan Commission, which examined the massacre of Palestinian refugees after the 1982 invasion of Lebanon, provides a respectable model. A new Kahan Commission is needed to look into every action of the Israeli military’s behaviour in Gaza, from the testimony of soldiers on the killing of civilians, to the revelations that troops were cheered into battle by extremist rabbis.”

The Sabra and Shatila massacre, it will be recalled, involved the deliberate slaughter of hundreds of Palestinian civilians in Lebanese refugee camps in September 1982 by an Arab-Christian Phalangist militia group. The Kahan Commission found that Israel bore a degree of indirect responsibility for failing to stop the militia group — which was allied to Israel — from perpetrating the massacre. Direct responsibility for the massacre, of course, belonged to the Arab group that actually conducted it.

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Love of the Land: A short lesson in defamation: UK newspaper links Gaza operation to Sabra and Shatila massacre