‘Black day’ for the accuser

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu described UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon’s Thursday’s criticism of Israel’s military conduct in Gaza last summer as “a black day for the UN”.

All the UN head did to incur the wrath of the Israeli PM was to tell Israel, during an open UN Security Council meeting debating the report on the dangers faced by children in war zones, “to take concrete and immediate steps, including by reviewing existing policies and practices, to protect and prevent the killing and maiming of children and to respect the special protections afforded to schools and hospitals”.

That is “incendiary” talk, indeed!

Asking Israel to try to prevent killing and maiming children must be really asking the impossible from it, judging from the reaction of its politicians.

Last summer’s offensive on Gaza left 557 Palestinian children dead, hundreds more people killed and thousands injured, as well, and the infrastructure of Gaza in shambles.

What morality is that? How does this give Netanyahu the nerve to be critical of the UN?

Instead of seeing Ban’s words as an occasion to review his country’s policy in the occupied Palestinian territories, as an eye opener to the excessive use of force of his country’s military, Netanyahu hits back at the UN.

It is usual Israeli strategy, but not a position that, in any way, is conducive to peace. If anything, it is a position that proves Israel’s belligerence, belying its claim that it wants peace but has no partner to pursue it with.

Ban’s conclusion that the Israeli use of force was “unprecedented and unacceptable” is foregone.

How else could one describe the indiscriminate bombing of houses, schools, hospitals and infrastructure over 50 days?

A walk in the park?

This is no black day for the UN; it is rather an honourable stand on the part of the UN in defence of justice.

What is black, however, is the blot Israeli actions leave on the country’s record, a country that boasts of being democratic while having no compunction about killing children, women and old people for the mere fact that they exist on their own land that Israel gradually steals to make it its own.