Were war crimes committed at Jenin? Robert N. Hochman of the New Republic says "yes," and he's got a point:
All civilized people agree on the premise of the Palestinian leadership's argument about Jenin. There is a vast moral difference between targeting civilians and combatants. It is wrong, even during a war, to target civilians intentionally.Posted by Dr. Frank at April 25, 2002 05:11 PM | TrackBackBut this is an odd principle for terrorists, and those who harbor them, to preach. After all, terrorists seek to obliterate the distinction between civilian and combatant. And, remember, it is the Palestinian terrorist groups that send human sacrifices as bombers into Israeli restaurants and shopping malls, where the murder of innocent civilians is not just a consequence but the very explicit goal. And it is the official Palestinian leadership--with the apparent support of the vast majority of Palestinians--who hail these bombers as heroes. If targeting civilians is a crime, as the Palestinian leadership now suggests, then the Palestinian terrorists and their supporters have been guilty of it for years.
And they were guilty of it at Jenin, too--only in an even more twisted sense. The large loss of life in Jenin is a tragedy, no doubt. But against whom should we direct our moral outrage? In Jenin, terrorists sprinkled bomb-making factories, storehouses of weapons, and combatants throughout the civilian population. And when the Israelis came in to find the terrorists, the Palestinians didn't hesitate to use civilians as human shields. One Israeli general described a structure with bombs on the first floor, civilians on the second, and snipers on the third. Elsewhere, terrorists placed bombs in ambulances carrying away the wounded. They hid rocket launchers in mosques, employing the sacred structure itself as a shield. In Bethlehem, the terrorists have taken this immoral tactic to a new level, occupying one of Christianity's holiest sites, using both the sacred structure and the civilian occupants as shields from the Israelis. In Jenin, as in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv and Netanya and Haifa, the terrorists employed civilian death intentionally as a weapon in their jihad.