UN Report Accuses Israel of Intentionally Striking UN-Run School in Gaza

A UN board conducted a non-binding inquiry, concluding that Israel had intentionally struck a UN-run elementary school, killing three young men seeking shelter from the fighting.

The incident was one of eight in which the Israel Defense Forces fired on U.N. personnel or facilities that drew scrutiny from a three-member U.N. board of inquiry. The board found that Israel had repeatedly breached the inviolability of U.N. premises and that, in attacking another elementary school, it exhibited "reckless disregard for the lives and safety" of civilians. Two children were killed and 13 others injured in that attack.

U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon said he planned to press for compensation for the damage to U.N. property, which amounted to more than $11 million. But he rejected the board's recommendation to expand the investigation into Palestinian and Israeli excesses during the conflict and to hold perpetrators accountable for their crimes.

"I would emphasize that a board of inquiry is not a judicial body or court of law," said Ban, who released a 27-page summary of the 184-page report. "It does not make legal findings and does not consider questions of legal liability."

An Israeli spokeswoman, Mirit Cohen, welcomed Ban's assurances that the matter was largely closed. But she accused the U.N. board of producing a "tendentious, patently biased" report, pointing to a recent Israeli military inquiry into the incidents as demonstrating that Israel had not targeted the United Nations. "The findings of these inquiries were published two weeks ago and proved beyond doubt that the IDF did not intentionally fire at the U.N. installations," she said.

Documentary About Rachel Corrie

Salon has an interview with Simone Bitton, a Moroccan-born Jewish filmmaker who made a documentary "Rachel," about American activist Rachel Corrie. Corrie was killed by a bulldozer in the Israeli-occupied Gaza Strip in 2003.

Bitton approaches Corrie's death from an Israeli point of view, which means she sees it quite differently from the way Americans do. For her, it's partly a forensic puzzle -- an episode of "CSI: Gaza" without a clear resolution -- and as a philosophical challenge to the military and political status quo. It's important to understand that within Israel, Corrie's encounter with a military bulldozer (an enormous armored machine called the Caterpillar D9, built in the United States to Israeli specifications) and the subsequent investigation were a relatively minor news blip, not the full-on media frenzy we enjoyed.

Until she visited the U.S. late in production to meet Corrie's family, friends and classmates in Olympia, Wash., Bitton was unaware that Corrie embodied an ideological divide in American discourse about the Middle East. When I asked her about the flag-burning photo, she didn't seem to understand that many Americans view that act as tantamount to treason. (Other nations do not tend to view their flags with the same quasi-religious fervor.)

Some quotes from the interview:

I think they [Corrie and her group, the International Solidarity Movement] had a pro-Palestinian agenda, and I don't think that having a pro-Palestinian agenda means having an anti-Israeli agenda. Actually, as an Israeli, I have a pro-Palestinian agenda, and I think that when life will be normal and reasonable for Palestinians, it will be much better for Israelis too.

I don't think it's an insult to say that somebody has a pro-Palestinian agenda. If it means that somebody is committed to more justice for the Palestinians, who have been oppressed, bombed, caged, occupied, it's very good to have a pro-Palestinian agenda. It's not only good, it's absolutely needed if you don't want the Middle East to explode in the face of the world, more than it has exploded already.

I was a peace activist when I was their age, you know. I was demonstrating against occupation when I was 25 years old, and our generation failed completely, because the situation is much more horrible now than it was. More settlements, more killings. So we failed. And now it's on their shoulders, all this mess that we couldn't solve.

I have the feeling that they are more lucid than we were, because we believed that we would solve it, you know. We were naive enough to think that it would be enough for a few thousand Israelis to stand up and say, "Hey, we don't want this occupation, we want peace, we want the Palestinians to have their own state." They are not so naive. They know that even if half the Israeli population is against the occupation, the occupation goes on and gets tougher and tougher. And the Israeli governments are more and more extremist and more and more right-wing. It's really a catastrophe. So this young generation knows all this. They are more lucid, and still they are struggling without much hope, which I find really remarkable.

Freedom House 2009 Report

Freedom House released its 2009 Freedom of Press Report, which shows a global decline in freedom of press. Apparently Israel, Italy and Hong Kong have all slipped from "Free" to "Partly Free." The post on the Foreign Policy blog gives a partial explanation:

The worst offenders are all usual suspects, but I suspect the most attention will be garnered by the three countries that slipped from "free" to "partly free": Israel, Italy, and Hong Kong. Here's the explanation on Israel from the report's overview essay:

Israel, the only country in the [Middle East] to be consistently rated Free, moved into the Partly Free range due to the heightened conflict in Gaza, which triggered increased travel restrictions on both Israeli and foreign reporters; official attempts to influence media coverage of the conflict within Israel; and greater self- censorship and biased reporting, particularly during the outbreak of open war in late December.

Also, Sunday, May 3 is World Freedom of Press Day!

Update:

The report says Israel fell due to restrictions on journalists and official attempts to influence coverage during the conflict with Hamas in the Gaza Strip.

The study says Italy slipped because the country is limiting free speech with libel laws and the intimidation of journalists by organized crime.

Freedom House says it downgraded Hong Kong because Beijing is exerting growing influence over the media there.

The executive director of Freedom House, Jennifer Windsor, says the journalism profession is fighting to stay alive, which she warns has enormous implications for democracy. "Declines have been registered in established democracies, as well as partly free countries, and the most repressive regimes have continued to tighten their grip in order to control the information flows that have become increasingly globalized and out of their control," she said.