Israel’s government approved on Sunday a proposal by Communications Minister Shlomo Karhi that mandates any government-funded body refrain from communicating with Haaretz or placing advertisements in the paper. The proposal was approved by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
The decision, according to the government’s explanation, is a reaction to “many articles that have hurt the legitimacy of the state of Israel and its right to self defense, and particularly the remarks made in London by Haaretz publisher, Amos Schocken, that support terrorism and call for imposing sanctions on the government.”
The proposal did not appear on the government’s agenda published ahead of the weekly cabinet meeting. The Attorney General’s office, unaware of the intention to bring the proposal to a vote, did not review it at all and did not present its opinion, as customary. The resolution was presented to ministers during the discussion without any legal opinion.
In a speech at the Haaretz conference in London last month, Schocken said “the Netanyahu government doesn’t care about imposing a cruel apartheid regime on the Palestinian population. It dismisses the costs of both sides for defending the settlements while fighting the Palestinian freedom fighters, that Israel calls terrorists.”
I don’t think it’s hard to imagine how tanks, artillery, and apache helicopters would do more damage than rifles and a handful of RPGs.
You just have to look at the incinerated cars and bodies from the festival to see how much damage the helicopters did there.
There’s no way anyone can know that without a full and transparent investigation being done, which Israel did not allow to happen.
That said, there are many indicators that they did a significant amount of damage.
One example:
All the burned bodies and cars from the festival that were somehow burned by Hamas (with molotovs?), and definitely not by Apache helicopters equipped with hellfire missiles. Oh… except for the handful of bodies that turned out to be Hamas fighters. THOSE ones were killed and burned by hellfire missiles, but the Israeli bodies were burned by Hamas. And so were their cars of course. Let’s not worry about why the cars were trucked off far away, shredded, and compacted before being buried. Definitely has nothing to do with making it harder to investigate what actually happened to them.
Much of this info has been available for over a year now.
Sure I know there were a lot of friendly fire incidents.
But you said that the IDF “did the vast (capitalized) majority of damage”.
Now you seem to have dialed that down quite a bit to “a significant amount of damage” and with the disclaimer “there’s no way to know that”. So that makes you wonder why you’re making these changes when asked to support your previous argument?
