Everywhere one turns these days, the apartheid/South African analogy is growing in strength:
A senior Israeli military official during last year’s war in Gaza has said that an independent commission of inquiry should investigate allegations that Israeli troops committed war crimes.
Colonel Pnina Sharvit-Baruch, who was in charge of the Israel Defence Forces’ international law division and is now a law lecturer at Tel Aviv University, said the United Nations report on the war by Justice Richard Goldstone had severely damaged Israel’s international standing. The offensive left 1400 Palestinians dead.
”We are now in a situation in which we need to give [Israel’s] friends, who don’t want to see lawsuits filed against us in their own courts, the tools to do away with such claims, along with other charges against us,” Colonel Sharvit-Baruch said.
She said she was concerned the fallout from the Goldstone report could turn Israel into ”a kind of South Africa or Serbia”, or a criminal or racist state in the eyes of the world.