Richard Silverstein (Tikun Olam), after reviewing the geriatric makeup of the commission Israel assigned to investigate the Gaza Flotilla massacre, could only conclude that: “the fix is in.” The average age of the panel is 85 years, at least some of participants being recruited from nursing homes. But that is not as damning as the well-known biases they carried through in their more lucid times.
The laughing begins when we hear about who will chair the commission: the youthful, 75 year-old Justice Yaakov Tirkel. About Tirkel, the Yediot Achronot wrote:
The judge heading up the Gaza flotilla investigation is known in his rulings as someone who says “Yes” to the security services. He also protects freedom of speech-as long as its not connected to state security.
Tirkel is known to derive his legal rulings, not from legal precedence or law, but from “a set of nationalist and humanist values,” which gives favor to Israeli security needs and the IDF. Quoting Tirkel,
With great sorrow, I view the honor and freedom of our fighters as more dear than those of the enemy’s fighters.
Need one say more.
Ninty-three year old Shabbtai Rozen, chosen for the commission, was once an eminent Israeli diplomat and scholar of international law, is being recruited from a nursing home. A picture shows him before the cameras in his summer pajamas along with his Filipino caretaker. According to Silverstein, an published interview with him ‘makes him appear equally out to lunch.’
Then there’s 86 year-old Amos Horev, a distinguished Israeli general with impeccable intelligence credentials, but a former booster boy for the Israeli defense industry. Whether Horev is or is not in a nursing home himself, having an Israeli general sit in judgment of the IDF has obvious bias implications.
As to the rest of the octogenarians plus or minus on the commission, not much information is available.
If internal Israeli biases and waning cognitive faculties were the only problems, what about the two international observers brought in to give the commission an air of objectivity? But even here, we see a commission loaded up to fix the final conclusions about the Mavi Marmara massacre.
FireDogLake headlined it this way: John Bolton Pal Appointed to Israeli Whitewash Panel. The pal referred to is none other than David Trimble of the Ulster Unionist party. Trible was most recently a founding member of the Friends of Israel, a little select group of Israel government friends which includes AIPAC favorite John Bolton and Dore Gold. It was formed on the day of the Flotilla murders. Trimble is also a member of the Henry Jackson Society, closely allied with Richard Perle, James Woolsey and William Kristol, notorious American Neocons, who led the Bush administration by the nose (think Iraq).
The Friends of Israel initiative was reportedly formed with concern about the “unprecedented delegitimation campaign against Israel, driven by the enemies of the Jewish state and perversely assumed by numerous international authorities” and concern “about the onslaught of radical Islamism as well as the specter of a nuclear Iran since these are threats affecting not only Israel, but the entire world.” Need one say more? More can be read about Trimble at the link.
The other outside observer is a Canadian, former military judge advocate general Ken Watkin, whose only fame was his involvement in an apparent stonewalling of a House of Commons inquiry into whether Canadian troops turned over Afghan detainees to be tortured. Uri Avnery, the Israeli peace activist, wrote that Watkin’s behavior in this incident “does not bode well for (his) willingness or ability to participate in exposing facts which might prove embarrassing to the Government of Israel.”
According to news reports, Israeli PM Netanyahu stated that the inquiry being set up by Israel into the Gaza-bound aid flotilla raid will “make it clear to the world that Israel is acting legally, responsibly and with complete transparency”.He said that exposing the facts “will prove that (Israel’s) aim was to conduct a defensive operation according to the highest standards”.
To repeat Richard Silverstein, “the fix is in.”