Can Photos From Gaza Help Blaze The Path To Peace?

Some more diligent interviewers, like MSNBC's Andrea Mitchell and CNN's Piers Morgan, questioned the surrogates about the wisdom of jeopardizing civilians by bombing highly concentrated residential areas. Well-schooled in their responses, the surrogates answered with Israel's customary refrain that it wasn't Israel jeopardizing the civilians, but Hamas, who purposely hid in residential neighborhoods to use civilians as human shields - a claim refuted by the 2009  United Nations Fact Finding Mission on the Gaza Conflict , also known as the Goldstone Report, which stated:

The Mission, however, found no evidence of Palestinian armed groups placing civilians in areas where attacks were being launched; of engaging in combat in civilian dress; or of using a mosque for military purposes or to shield military activities.

Perhaps the most shrill and offensive of Israel's surrogates is American lawyer and Harvard Law Professor Alan Dershowitz, who in a November 19th appearance with CNN's Piers Morgan, repeated a claim he has made in the past. It's a claim Dershowitz has not categorically proved. It's a claim Dershowitz has no way of knowing from seeing first hand. And it appears to be a claim Dershowitz may have invented for the purpose of dehumanizing the Palestinian people. It's hideous in its label and its tone.

Here is part of Dershowitz'  conversation with Piers Morgan  regarding Operation Pillar of Defense and what he refers to as the  Dead Baby Stategy :

Morgan: But they [Israelis] killed a whole family.

Dershowitz: Hamas was firing rockets in order to induce them to kill the family. You know what it's called in Gaza? It's called the Dead Baby Strategy. It's a strategy. They want - this sounds terribly brutal - but it's absolutely true. They want their children to be martyred so they can carry them out, show them to the international media and thereby gain an advantage over Israel. It's a double war crime and the media encourages it.

Dershowitz' seems to allege that in Gaza, Hamas, with the complicity of the families of Gazan babies, knowingly station the babies where the Israeli military will kill them. Dershowitz contends in his comment that some unnamed [ it's called ] entity in Gaza calls this plan the  Dead Baby Strategy . Dershowitz presents  Dead Baby Strategy  as a known label, but he never identifies exactly who in Gaza uses this label.

Interesting that two years ago, on November 5, 2010,  Dershowitz appeared as a panelist  in Israel at the annual John Gandel Symposium. There he also talked about the  Dead Baby Strategy , but he described the genesis of its label somewhat differently. He said at 15:46 minutes into the panel:

And then you have military deligitimation. It is such a clever - if it weren't such a horrible technique - such a clever technique. Again, I have a name for it. I call it Hamas' and Hesbollah's  Dead Baby Strategy .

In this case, Dershowitz proclaims that  he named the  Dead Baby Strategy . Are we then to believe Hamas liked Dershowitz' label and strategy so much that they somehow appropriated it and began using it in Gaza? Or that the IDF said, 'Hey, let's use Alan's label and say Hamas uses the  Dead Baby Strategy  so we can kill their kids.' Likely not.

What it does appear we should believe is that the term  Dead Baby Strategy  is an invention of Mr. Dershowitz, used to promote a heinous accusation against Palestinians. Here's the rest of Mr. Dershowitz' description of his so-called  Strategy. Do note his mention of the Goldstone Report, which (as shown above) refutes Dershowitz' contention that Hamas purposely endangers civilians through the placement of its rockets.