Mostly-Israel link roundup, June 13, 2024

(a) apropos the cease-fire negotiations, US Secretary of State [for non-American readers: foreign minister] Anthony Blinken is shocked! shocked! that HamaSS would keep changing terms in bad faith. Either he’s incredibly naive or he’s feigning surprise, and hoping that pressure from Arab countries will bring HamaSS around.

(b) the long-time chair of Human Rights Watch, Kenneth Roth [ moiser ve-malshin ] has wondered, incredibly, whether Israel’s hostage rescue may have been an act of “perfidy” under international law, because the rescue force disguised itself as civilians. He is referring here to Article 37 of the Protocol Additional to the 1949 Geneva Convention:

1. It is prohibited to kill, injure or capture an adversary by resort to perfidy. Acts inviting the confidence of an adversary to lead him to believe that he is entitled to, or is obliged to accord, protection under the rules of international law applicable in armed conflict, with intent to betray that confidence, shall constitute perfidy. The following acts are examples of perfidy:

(a) The feigning of an intent to negotiate under a flag of truce or of a surrender;

(b) The feigning of an incapacitation by wounds or sickness;

(c) The feigning of civilian, non-combatant status; and

(d) The feigning of protected status by the use of signs, emblems or uniforms of the United Nations or of neutral or other States not Parties to the conflict.

2. Ruses of war are not prohibited. Such ruses are acts which are intended to mislead an adversary or to induce him to act recklessly but which infringe no rule of international law applicable in armed conflict and which are not perfidious because they do not invite the confidence of an adversary with respect to protection under that law. The following are examples of such ruses: the use of camouflage, decoys, mock operations and misinformation.

Needless to say, HamaSS has been engaging in perfidy (in that legal sense) day in and day out, so to me (but I am not an international law expert) would seem to have forfeited any claim to this argument. US troops in the past appear to have operated under this principle: against Japanese troops in the Pacific theater who treacherously used Red Cross emblems, or feigned surrender and then attacked, they fought with the gloves off entirely. But a Times of Israel explainer, interviewing a number of actual experts, addresses the question in more depth.

(c) According to the Free Beacon, University of Minnesota found nobody better to hire for their center of genocide studies than what looks like a failed academic from a tier 2 college,[*] who has accused Israel of genocide in the wake of the October 7 pogroms.

Some have referred to this character — a far-left activist using his expat Israeli JINO [Jew In Name Only] background as a shield — as a “failed academic”. I’m unfamiliar with his specific tenure or promotion file, but I’ve seen more of those than you can shake a stick at, and for a faculty member in their fifties at a US university not to have been promoted to full professor generally means major flaws (or hostile relations with the campus administration). Tenure (typically tied to promotion to associate professor) is the major hurdle in the US, with onward promotion to full professor pretty much assured after a number of years if the associate professor continues to perform at the level that got him/her tenure.

(d) From my old home turf, Belgian honorary senator and erstwhile Secretary-General of Doctors Without Borders/Artsen Zonder Grenzen/Médécins sans Frontières , Alain Destexhe, excoriates the level of judeophobia in Belgium and particularly that of its intellectual and political class. The outgoing Prime Minister, Alexander de Croo [whose father Herman was one of the “useful idiots” in the West of Romanian dictator Ceaucescu], is singled out for special attention — I note with some schadenfreude that his party got thrashed like a piñata in the elections last weekend and that de Croo was forced to resign. I am not saying this was because of his sanctimoniousness about Israel not kissing the rear end of its enemies, rather that the latter is one symptom of the general out-of-touchness that cost the transnationalist “watermelon left” the election.

(e) [h/t Mrs. Arbel] UN Watch executive director Hillel Neuer testifies before US Congress on UNRWA

(f) Incredible: Harvard student facing criminal charges for accosting Israeli classmate lands job in DC public defender’s office. (In a just world,he’d be lucky to get a job at McDonald’s.) See also more in NYC and Cornholio, er, Columbia University.

(g) and now for something different, again from my old home turf:

Gee, whodathunkit? But better that they wake up late than never.

ADDENDUM: Con Coughlin in the Telegraph: HamaSS “terrorists are playing the West for fools” (paywalled; cached copy). Related from the WSJ: internal communications reveal how HamaSS leadership are cynically sacrificing their own civilian casualties for Western PR points. If Western pro-“Palestinians” cared one whit about the actual people they claim to care about (rather than as an anti-Western and anti-Israel pawn), all HamaSSholes they could lay hands on would be dangling from lampposts.