But For Palestinian Terror, Operation Cast Lead Would Not Have Occurred

Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas is considering taking the severely flawed and biased Goldstone Report to various international bodies in a bid to bring Israeli officials before their jurisdiction in charges of war crimes or crimes against humanity. As YnetNews reports:

The move appeared to mark a change in position, as the Palestinian delegation on Friday backed a move at the UN Human Rights Council to defer a vote on whether the report should be passed on.

Erakat said Abbas' decision came "in light of the controversy that has arisen" around the report, which accused Israel of committing war crimes during its three-week Gaza war that erupted December 27.

"We want to discuss the report in international bodies so they will take decisions on what emerged in the report, in order to insure that the crimes committed by Israel against our people are never repeated," he said.

That's a serious situation, particularly because if they're going to claim that Israel violated Palestinian human rights, they better bring Ismail Haniyeh and other Hamas leaders before the same bodies to convict them of war crimes as well - for precipitating the Operation Cast Lead in the first place.

But for kassam and mortar attacks, Israel would not have engaged in Operation Cast Lead.

But for kassam and mortar attacks, Israel would not have engaged in restricting humanitarian aid that was repeatedly hijacked by Hamas to further their war goals (reequiping Hamas at the expense of the civilian population).

But for Palestinian terror attacks, Israel would not need to maintain security checkpoints to thwart suicide bombers.

Without the thousands of rockets and mortars fired at Israel, each with the deadly intent to murder and maim Israelis with range of those mortars and rockets, Israel would not have engaged in an operation that was meant to stop the terrorists from firing on Israel in the first place. That civilians were inadvertently killed in the process is lamentable, but Hamas purposefully put civilians in harm's way by commingling with civilians, wearing civilian clothes, and firing rockets and mortars from civilian areas, including in close proximity to UN facilities.

The Palestinians are hoping to use the Goldstone Report to further undermine Israel's ability to defend itself from future attacks along the same lines.

As others have noted, the overwhelming number of those killed in Gaza were not civilians as the Palestinians propagandize, but were Hamas and Islamic Jihad members. They were counted as civilians primarily because they were wearing civilian garb, even if their longstanding ties to the terror groups were well known. In fact, Israel went above and beyond established international law and the Geneva Conventions to minimize civilian casualties by attempting to contact those individuals personally and directly to get them out of harm's way even as Hamas was engaging in all manner of war crimes to purposefully put civilians in harm's way.