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Israel Warns Officials of Travel as Sharon Feels Heat
JERUSALEM, July 27 (IslamOnline & News Agencies) - Israel's foreign ministry Thursday warned former army and security officials to avoid countries where they could find themselves in an "embarrassing" situation, Israeli public radio reported.
The warning comes amid reports Israel is studying criminal laws across Europe to see which nations are most likely to launch human rights trials against their nationals, as Belgium mulls whether to charge Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon with war crimes, the French news agency AFP reported.
Israel has launched a fierce counterattack against efforts in Belgium to try Sharon for war crimes, amid warnings that Israeli army officers and senior government figures face a growing threat of arrest and prosecution in Europe for their conduct during the Palestinian Intifada, The Independent, a British daily, said.
The Israeli daily Haaretz reported Thursday that foreign ministry experts were scrutinizing the legal code across the European continent to see where Israelis would potentially be most susceptible to prosecution, focusing - besides Belgium - on Spain and Britain.
Israeli Foreign Ministry legal adviser Alan Baker said the ministry is drawing up a list of countries with "universal jurisdiction" in order "to know where we stand", the Israeli Jerusalem Post said.
Baker stressed, however, that this is not a "blacklist" to be distributed as some kind of travel advisory to government or security officials, but rather an effort to know which countries have which laws pertaining to which crimes.
Israeli government officials are concerned that the Sharon lawsuit could spawn attempts to bring war crimes charges against the chief of staff of Israel's armed forces, Shaul Mofaz, the commander of its air force, Dan Hilutz, and other military officials, over the present conflict with the Palestinians, said The Independent.
A host of military measures by Israeli security forces has been condemned by human rights groups. They include at least 45 assassinations, the use of torture, the shooting deaths of hundreds of unarmed demonstrators, blasting police stations with F-16 bombers, and a military siege on the West Bank and Gaza Strip.
Israel has also been involved in a ferocious argument with Denmark over its new ambassador to Copenhagen, Carmi Gillon, the former chief of Israel's Shin Bet security agency, who has admitted authorizing the use of torture against Arab suspects.
Danish Justice Minister Frank Jensen hinted that Gillon could be arrested on his arrival for violating a U.N. convention against torture. However, he later acknowledged that the Israeli diplomat would have diplomatic immunity.
The case in Belgium is being brought by 23 survivors of the Sabra and Shatila massacres, where an Israeli-allied Christian Lebanese militia killed between 800 and 2000 Palestinians in two refugee camps in Lebanon during Israel's offensive and occupation of the country. Sharon was Israel's defense minister at the time, and guided Israeli military policy during the occupation of Lebanon.
In Israel, immediately after the massacre, a national commission of inquiry - the Kahan committee - found Sharon indirectly responsible for what happened in Sabra and Shatila.
The committee's report said it was impossible to justify Sharon's "disregard of the danger of a massacre".
Israel was one of the first nations to support the concept of "universal jurisdiction" for genocide and war crimes, now adopted by the Belgians. It used it to put Adolf Eichmann, a Nazi leader, on trial in Israel in 1961. He was later hanged.
Meanwhile, Sharon and his government's law enforcement agencies are facing fresh scandals over the part they played in sparking the Palestinian Intifada.
The new embarrassment comes after a decision by a judicial commission of inquiry to investigate the aftermath of Sharon's notorious visit to al-Haram al-Sharif (which Jews call the Temple Mount) in Jerusalem, the Independent said.
The Or Commission, which is investigating the death of 13 Israeli Arabs in the Galilee area after police opened fire on rioters there early on in the Intifada, has decided to take evidence concerning the unrest that erupted after Sharon's visit last September.
Since then, more than 600 people, mostly Palestinian, have been killed in the uprising.
The commission's decision to investigate one of the most fraught questions at the heart of the Intifada comes after weeks of intermittent hearings into events known among Israel's Arabs as Black October, when the Israeli Arabs were killed.
In recent months, Israeli Arabs have been subject to "administrative detention" Israel's euphemism for jailing people without trial.
Shin Bet, the internal security service, has interrogated Arab intellectuals deemed to have published extremist views. Yet, incitement and racist invective by hardline rabbis have gone unpunished, in addition to chronic civil rights abuses from apartheid housing practices, which prevent Arabs acquiring homes in Jewish areas, to unequal investment in their local authorities, and unequal access to employment, said the Independent.
Less than six percent of civil service jobs in Israel are held by Arabs and very few are key posts.
For months, the Israeli government insisted the police did not use any live ammunition during the October riots, until the commission forced the release of government post-mortem reports, which showed that at least two of the victims were shot with regular bullets.
Claims that police fired only when facing "life-threatening" situations have been exposed as false by testimony that police snipers were authorized to fire from rooftops at rioters, said the paper.
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