The crisis isn’t over – it’s just being kicked down the road

Haredi conscription has been an impossible political puzzle, and the coalition didn’t quite solve it last night

During the last few weeks’ political turmoil, a lot of sports metaphors were thrown around. The ball was in this one’s or that one’s court to end the coalition crisis. And now that an election wasn’t called this week, the headlines would have you believe that the proverbial ball disappeared.

Actually, the ball has just rolled a little farther away.

Haredi conscription has been an intractable political issue for so long that it’s hard to believe that it was really resolved last night. And it wasn’t. The crisis ended with an agreement among the coalition parties by which the Ministerial Committee for Legislation would allow each of them to decide how they would vote on the haredi conscription bill proposed by Shas MK Yoav Ben-Tzur in a preliminary reading held Tuesday night. Then, as expected, every coalition party except Yisrael Beytenu decided to vote in favor of the bill. This workaround allowed Aliya and Integration Minister Sofa Landver to vote against the bill, without Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu firing her, as is the custom when a minister votes against the government.

The next part of the deal to avoid an early election is that the Defense Ministry committee charged with working on a draft bill for haredi conscription would present its proposal to the ministers by the end of May. After the two draft bills pass a first reading, they will be merged, and the result must be agreed upon by the heads of haredi parties and Defense Minister Avigdor Liberman, before it goes to a final vote.

Other pieces of the deal are that the coalition parties will avoid proposing new religion and state bills, and will try to keep the coalition stable “over time,” the amount of time not being specified, though the government’s term ends in November 2019.

This is all very well, and the coalition partners are quietly celebrating that they were able to back Netanyahu into a corner so he wouldn’t call an early election, but actually all this is doing is postponing

4,564 rockets and mortar shells at Israel. Seventy-three Israelis and a Thai farm worker died, thousands were wounded, and Israel carried out thousands of air strikes on the Gaza Strip.

Underlying much of the comptroller’s determinations that international law’s minimal requirements had been followed was the idea that fighting in Gaza against Hamas, which regularly used its civilian population as human shields, created a tremendous challenge.

Some areas in which the comptroller criticized the IDF related to resources devoted to humanitarian issues.

For example, in the report, the Office of the Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories relayed that, “Another area in which the Coordinator [COGAT] identifies a gap is with regard to the study of civilians and intelligence gathering, which requires the investment of many additional resources. It is estimated that today, our capabilities in this area in regard to Judea and Samaria and Gaza stand at about 50% as compared to the actual needs, due to gaps in terms of resources.”

Surprisingly, the IDF spokesman explicitly told the comptroller that due to scarce resources, the IDF might not be able to overcome the gap in its intelligence that helps avoid targeting civilian targets.

However, The Jerusalem Post has learned that the intelligence in question did not affect the IDF’s ability to evacuate civilians, and in one reading, may be more connected to general planning than to what happened operationally during the war.

Further, COGAT questioned whether civilian affairs officers in the field, whose job it is to liaison with Palestinians to better ensure their safety, could properly do their jobs when only 34% knew Arabic.

Again, the IDF said the lack of already available Arabic-speaking officers, the desire for the officers to be trained for combat and the lack of resources for training them in Arabic was a hurdle, though it said the number of Arabic speakers was rising.

Next, the comptroller credited the IDF for providing courses in the law of armed conflict to its soldiers and commanders, fulfilling that international law requirement.

But the comptroller quoted IDF legal officials themselves admitting that the number of course hours was insufficient.

Furthermore, they said that in the absence of any kind of exam or requirement that blocks advancement absent a show that a given officer has absorbed the rules, many officers did not take the courses seriously enough. ANOTHER MAJOR POINT was criticism of the IDF’s compliance with the quasi-government 2013 Turkel Commission recommendations.

The comptroller found that the IDF complied with many recommendations and is working seriously on others, but that there were also important recommendations that it did not, or did not fully comply with.

The commission, named for its leader, former Supreme Court justice Jacob Turkel, reviewed Israel’s apparatus for self-investigating war crimes allegations and made 18 recommendations for improvement.

One of the key recommendations was that legal proceedings should proceed without being affected by the IDF’s operational debriefings. Operational debriefings are designed to evaluate a mission’s successes and failures from a military perspective.

The commission found that any connection between the operational briefing process and legal investigations could lead to interference with the legal process. For example, operational briefings could lead soldiers to coordinate their stories prior to being criminally questioned by the Military Police.

Eventually, the IDF chose a compromise position, inventing a format called Fact Finding Mechanisms, which would operate in parallel to operational briefings.

While the comptroller said the Fact Finding Mechanisms system fulfilled international law’s minimal requirements, it also found that this compromise position did not sufficiently isolate the legal process from the operational briefing process, and retained the same problems warned about by the Turkel Commission.

Moreover, Shapira said that the Fact Finding Mechanisms staff were often underqualified and did not give all necessary data to the IDF legal division for making informed decisions.

To the IDF legal division’s credit, the comptroller did say that whenever such issues came up, the division made sure to acquire additional necessary evidence on its own and that its final decisions were based on judgment and evidence complying with international law’s minimal requirements.

Further, Israel’s Fact Finding Mechanisms system is being studied by other countries as more advanced than what other countries often have for the same purpose.

The Turkel Commission had also recommended a series of time limits for how long the IDF prosecution can take to decide whether to open a criminal investigation and for whether to file an indictment.

The report found that maximum time limits have been seconded by the Ciechanover Commission, but that they are still not being used in practice and that 80% of Fact Finding Mechanisms processes took longer than the time they were given to complete their probes.

The Post has learned that the IDF view is that most of these time limits were set for peacetime probes and that they do not apply or apply very differently to probes relating to a war like in Gaza in 2014.

Although the report did not discuss specific cases by name, even three-anda-half years after the war ended, the IDF legal division still has not decided whether to criminally investigate the three incidents with the most Palestinian civilian casualties: Black Friday, the Shejaia incident and the Khuza’a incident.

On a related issue, the IDF Planning Directorate had warned that based on a 2013 military exercise, thousands of Palestinians could theoretically have gotten hurt by the IDF’s conduct. The report does not indicate that the shortcomings highlighted by the IDF Planning Directorate were corrected.

On the more unambiguously positive side, the comptroller gave high marks to the security cabinet for taking into account international law and reducing danger to Palestinian civilians when it made targeting policy for the war.

Shapira cited the cabinet as discussing ensuring civilian safety in 18 cabinet meetings during the war.

He wrote that the cabinet minutes and statements of ministers made it “clear that both the political echelon and the senior military echelon explicitly considered the limitations and rules set forth in international law with regard to the conduct of the fighting in Gaza, and the prime minister gave explicit instruction to refrain from harming uninvolved civilians.

The report also gives explicit examples where top commanders told the cabinet that the IDF had refrained, due to danger to civilians, from striking targets that legally could have been hit. •