Discussing Israel's Actions - 2

The people who know Israel is wrong, no matter what the facts might be, will be unmoved by this New York Times item, which tells that the IDF military police has shut down the investigation into the allegations of the Oranim soldiers for lack of facts. And note: not for lack of evidence, which could imply the events happened but can't be documented well enough to indict anyone. Lack of facts mean it didn't happen.

The item does however raise a number of perplexing questions:

The academy’s director, Dany Zamir, told Army Radio on Monday that he accepted the advocate general’s report. Still, he added, “If soldiers will now feel that they cannot talk because of the outcome of this specific story, then this is very bad for us as a society and army.”

Anyone have any idea what he's talking about? Or this:

On the other hand, he stated, it was not his intention to attract news media attention by making the contents of the soldiers’ discussion public. He added that the news media’s focus on the story “truly complicated everything.”

First he leaked the discussion to the press, then he didn't mean it to be public. And of course, inevitably:

A group of nine Israeli human rights organizations issued a statement saying that the army’s speedy closing of its internal investigation underlined the need for an independent investigation into possible Israeli war crimes in Gaza.

Translation: since the investigation didn't give us the results we were praying for, we need to try again with an independent team who won't be swayed by such things as empirical evidence or lack there-of. You easily see the dynamic here: These folks are Israelis, so they must be reliable where the other Israelis, the ones with the training and access, are obviously not. That's the line our enemies will take, at which point these particular Israelis will cite the international opinion as proof of Israel's need to do it better, by handing its sovereign obligation to investigate to entities who have no obligations to anyone except their agendas. By the end of the day the discussion will have been transferred from crimes that didn't happen to Israel's intransigence in not allowing outsiders to say they did.