Israel's Right To Self-Defense

The Dubai hit exposes the failure of international law to fight jihadi
terror, forcing the Jewish state to act independently.

By GERALD M. STEINBERG Jerusalem
FEBRUARY 23, 2010, 4:24 P.M. ET

The headlines and video images allegedly showing Israeli spies in Dubai are
titillating, but they mask the serious issues involved in the death of Hamas
terrorist Mahmoud al-Mabhouh. Along with predictable European hand-wringing
over forged passports, this case is the latest example of the failure of the
international legal system and the United Nations to provide a remedy to
mass terror.

Al-Mabhouh was a cold-blooded murderer-in an interview just last year on Al
Jazeera he boasted about kidnapping and then killing two Israeli soldiers.
He was also a major figure in arranging arms shipments from Iran to Gaza.

Al-Mabhouh shared responsibility for the thousands of rocket attacks fired
at civilians in Sderot and other Israeli towns, which resulted in last
year's war in Gaza. In his travels, the Hamas terrorist was probably making
arrangements for the next round of attacks.

But international law provides no means for stopping terrorists like
Al-Mabhouh, or for his Hezbollah counterpart, Imad Moughniyeh, whose life
ended with an explosion in Damascus in 2008. (In addition to numerous
attacks against Israelis, Moughniyeh has been blamed for the 1983 Beirut
bombings that killed hundreds of American and French peacekeepers and the
murder of Lebanese President Rafik Hariri.) Cases involving Muslim
terrorists, supported by Iran, would never be pursued by the prosecutor of
the International Criminal Court, or raised in the framework of the United
Nations. Al-Mabhouh violated the human rights of untold Israeli civilians,
but the U.N.'s Human Rights Council-which is dominated by such moral
stalwarts as Libya, Algeria, and Iran-has no interest in Israeli complaints.

It is equally hard to imagine Interpol issuing arrest warrants in response
to Israeli requests. And if warrants were issued, history shows that German,
French, Belgian, and other European governments would not risk the
consequences of acting on them. Little effort was ever made to apprehend the
perpetrators of the Munich Olympic massacre, or of the deadly bombing
attacks against synagogues in Istanbul and Athens. It's a widely known
secret that European governments had ungentlemanly agreements with the PLO
that allowed the Palestinians to operate from their territories, provided
the terror attacks occurred elsewhere. Not until 2003 did the EU even put
Hamas on its terror list. Hezbollah is currently free to operate in Europe.

The bitter reality is that for Israel, international legal frameworks
provide no protection and no hope of justice. Instead, these frameworks are
used to exploit the rhetoric of human rights and morality to attack Israel.
In European courts, universal jurisdiction statutes, initially created to
apprehend and try dictators and genocidal leaders, are now exploited as
weapons in the service of the Palestinian cause. In this way, Israeli
defense officials are branded as "war criminals."

Similarly, Richard Goldstone's predetermined "fact finding inquiry" into the
Gaza war makes no mention of Al-Mabhouh or Iran, which supplied Hamas with
over 10,000 rockets for attacks against Israelis. Mr. Goldstone and his team
have remained silent about what would be the "legal" way to bring jihadi
murderers to justice. In their efforts to demonize Israel, Palestinian
terror actually doesn't really exist. The Goldstone team simply refused to
accept conclusive Israeli video evidence of Hamas war crimes.

The same legal distortions are found among the organizations that claim to
be the world's moral guardians, such as Human Rights Watch. HRW's systematic
bias is reflected in a Middle East division that sees no problem in holding
fund-raising dinners in Saudi Arabia-one of the world's worst human rights
violators and a country officially still at war with Israel-to help finance
their campaigns against the Jewish state.

In the absence of any legal remedies or Western solidarity, Israel's only
option to protect its citizens from terror has always been to act
independently and with force. When in 1976 a group of Palestinian and German
terrorists hijacked an Israel-bound Air France plane to Uganda and separated
the Jewish passengers, Israel decided to act. In a daring mission, it
rescued all but three passengers while killing all terrorists and several
Ugandan soldiers who had been protecting the terrorists. Back then, Israel's
detractors also fretted about the "violation of Ugandan sovereignty" even
though dictator Idi Amin was in cahoots with the terrorists. Entebbe,
though, quickly became the gold standard for successful counter-terror
operations. Only a year later, Israeli-trained German special forces freed
in Mogadishu, Somalia a Lufthansa plane hijacked by Palestinian terrorists.

Similarly, when after years of horrific suicide bombings Israel pioneered
the targeted killings of Hamas terrorists-often with the help of unmanned
drones-Israel's Western adversaries complained about "extrajudicial
assassinations." Today, though, U.S. forces have copied Israel's technique
with their own drone killings of jihadi terrorists in the Afghan-Pakistan
border region.

Unlike those Predator strikes, though, which hardly raise an eyebrow in the
West these days, there was no "collateral damage" in the mysterious Dubai
hit. No innocent civilians were hurt, no buildings were damaged. Justice was
done, and al-Mabhouh's preparations for the next war ended quietly.

All this is lost on those diplomats, "legal experts," and pundits who blame
Israel for Dubai, and angrily denounce the passport infractions. In the
absence of viable alternatives, and a refusal to share any of the risks,
they are in no position to condemn actions aimed at preventing more terror.

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Mr. Steinberg teaches political science at Bar Ilan University and heads NGO
Monitor