The UN Schabas commission investigating the Gaza operation has “nothing to look for” in Israel, Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu said Wednesday, in his first public comments regarding Israel's policy toward the commission established by the UN Human Rights Council
The commission's findings have already been written, and its head – Canadian professor William Schabas – has already decided that Hamas is not a terrorist organization, “so they have nothing to look for here,” Netanyahu said after meeting New York's Governor Andrew Cuomo in his office.
“First let them to visit Damascus, Baghdad, Tripoli,” he said. “Let them go see Islamic State, the Syrian army, Hamas – there, not here, they will find war crimes.”
Netanyahu said that the UNHRC is giving legitimization to murderous organizations like Hamas and the Islamic State.
“Instead of investigating Hamas' attacks on Israeli citizens and its use of Gaza residents as human shields, instead of investigating the slaughter that [Syrian President Bashar] Assad is carrying out on Syrian citizens, or the Islamic State massacre of Kurds, the UN decided to come and investigate Israel – the only democracy in the Middle East, and which is acting legitimately to defend its citizens from murderous terrorism,” he said.
Foreign Minister Avigdor Liberman went even further than Netanyahu, saying that Schabas should not be allowed to step inside Israel. During a meeting with local council heads in the south, Liberman pointed out that Schabas has said that both Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu and Nobel peace prize laureate and former president Shimon Peres should be indicted for war crimes and brought to the International Criminal Court.
Liberman said that Israel would have to “deal” with the UN commission, but would not cooperate with it.
“Israel should not cooperate with the committee,” he said. “We must deal with them, but not cooperate or give legitimization to haters of Israel.”
On Tuesday, during an interview with the Jerusalem Post, Liberman would not say whether Israel would cooperate with the probe, saying then only that “we don’t have to say what we are going to do.”
The Foreign Ministry's professional level has recommended to Liberman that Israel not cooperate directly with the committee, but instead adopt a model that was used in dealing with the the UN's Palmer commission that investigated the Mavi Marmara. Israel, in parallel to that committee, set up its own committee, the Turkel commission, which then passed on its findings to the UN commission.
Intelligence Minister Yuval Steinitz, meanwhile, said that because of Schabas’ previous statements regarding Israel's leaders, he should resign.
“Paradoxically, the only way he can qualify himself for the job is to disqualify himself from the the job,” said Steinitz. “Any honest and fair minded judge in Israel, Europe or the US who would have made such allegations against one side in a case, would disqualify himself” from serving as a judge.
Furthermore, he said, it was telling that an investigation into a military operation did not include as one of its members any military experts, generals or former military men.
In addition to the composition of the committee being fundamentally flawed, so too was its mandate, which does not even mention Hamas, Steinitz said. The mandate calls for the commission to “investigate all violations of international humanitarian law and international human rights law in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem, particularly in the occupied Gaza Strip, in the context of the military operations conducted since 13 June 2014.”
Steinitz said that any fair judgement of the proportionality of Israel's response needed to take into account not only Hamas' continued rocket attacks on Israel's civilian population, but also its past behavior – including the killing of 1,000 Israelis in suicide bombings during the second intifada – and its ultimate goals, which is the destruction of Israel.
Steinitz also expressed astonishment that Schabas, in a Channel 2 interview Tuesday night, would not say that Hamas was a terrorist organization, something acknowledged not only by Israel, Egypt, the US, and Britain, by also by Schabas' home country: Canada.

By HERB KEINON