The only positive thing about the United Nations Human Rights Council's report on Operation Protective Edge is the fact that it is slightly less hostile to Israel than the previous report written by the committee led by Richard Goldstone. Slightly less. The question that remains is whether Israel would have benefitted from cooperating with American jurist and committee head Mary McGowan-Davis, who advised Channel 2 news anchor Yonit Levi on Monday evening to avoid calling Hamas a "terrorist organization." According to her, Hamas is only an "armed group." What else is needed to demonstrate the distortion- Apparently, the report devotes some space to a small group of Israelis who testified before the committee. Their quotes in the report serve as an alibi for the committee -- to make it seem as though they didn't side with the Palestinians. Without the quotes, there would be no reason to think that far-reaching cooperation with Israel -- which would give the committee more legitimacy -- was carried out in full. Even the few facts presented to the committee should have resulted in a report that is more supportive of Israel. And that didn't happen -- not by chance, either. Would it have been worth it to try to cooperate with Davis and her friends? A tossup would have been the best possible result. The overwhelming proof that the committee worked against Israel can be found in the facts. The committee ignored those facts when it failed to draw conclusions from Israel's point of view. After three Israeli teenagers were kidnapped and murdered and rocket fire from Gaza was renewed, Israel agreed to a policy of seeking to simply return things to how they were before. It was a recipe for crisis with then-Economy and Trade Minister Naftali Bennett and then-Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman, and yet, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Moshe Ya'alon led the effort to prevent war in the summer of 2014. Israel agreed to hold fire on the eighth day of fighting and not to go into Gaza, and the government nearly fell apart, and yet Davis still told Levi that there is room for comparison between the IDF and the "armed group." There is no comparison. There was no investigation into the murderers of 21 civilians who were shot and killed without trial in a city square. How can that be compared to the IDF, which did not dispatch even one soldier into Gaza without prior consultation with a legal advisor? The conclusion is disheartening. The IDF tried for the first time in the history of humanity to fight according to the precise limitations of international law, and even that step did not earn it any points at the U.N. The only logical conclusion may be to leave the legal advisors behind, God forbid, in the next round.
