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Hizballah, Iran, and Syria - Not Israel - Are Flouting International Law

[Wall Street Journal] Orde F. Kittrie - At Qana, Israeli aircraft fired toward a building to stop Hizballah from shooting rockets at its cities. The aircraft did not deliberately target civilians; but Hizballah rockets are targeted at civilians, a clear war crime. If Hizballah used Lebanese civilians in Qana as "human shields," then Hizballah, not Israel, is legally responsible for their deaths. Hizballah and Iran - which provides this terrorist group with arms, direction, and over $100 million a year - are in continual violation of international law. Their calls for Israel's destruction violate the international genocide treaty's prohibition of "direct and public incitement to commit genocide." Iran's effort to develop a nuclear arsenal that could obliterate Israel, or deter its responses to future Hizballah attacks, violates the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty. Iranian (and Syrian) support for Hizballah violates UN Security Council Resolution 1373, requiring states to "refrain from providing any form of support, active or passive, to entities or persons involved in terrorist acts." Hizballah began the armed conflict with rocket attacks on Israeli towns and the abduction of Israeli soldiers: unprovoked acts of war violating an internationally recognized border. China killed hundreds of peaceful Tiananmen Square protestors in 1989, and has for five decades occupied Tibet, slaughtering tens of thousands. As many as 200,000 have been killed as Russia has leveled the capital city of Grozny. All of the leading EU countries actively participated in NATO's 78-day bombing campaign against Yugoslavia in 1999, killing hundreds of civilians, though Yugoslavia posed no threat to the existence of any of the EU countries that bombed it. Compared with how China, Russia, and the EU have dealt with non-existential threats, Israel's responses to the threats to its existence have been remarkably restrained rather than disproportionately violent. The writer, a professor of international law at Arizona State University, served in the Office of the Legal Adviser at the U.S. State Department from 1993 to 2003.
2006-08-08 01:00:00
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