Israel Denounces Belgian Ruling

The language was as harsh as any that Israel uses when speaking of implacable enemies such as Hamas, Hezbollah or Islamic Jihad. The terminology ran to highly charged phrases: blood libel, anti-Semitism, terrorist sympathies, callous indifference to the Holocaust.

Israel was talking about Belgium, whose Supreme Court ruled Wednesday that Prime Minister Ariel Sharon could face war crimes charges over 2-decade-old events in Lebanon once he leaves office. Under the ruling, other high-ranking Israeli officials could be exposed to charges as well. Although considered by legal experts to be unlikely to culminate in actual prosecution of the Israeli leader, the ruling caused an outburst of anger here Thursday, bringing half-buried, half-century-old animosities flaring into the open.

Typical of the heated commentary was that of Yisrael Meir Lau, the chief rabbi to Israel’s European-descended Jews. Like other prominent Israeli figures, the rabbi invoked the Holocaust’s horrors in denouncing the ruling.

“The thought that a nation which stood by and watched while Jewish blood was spilled like water, and blocked its ears to victims’ screams, now elevating itself to the position of world policeman is outrageous in the extreme,” Lau said in a statement. He called Belgian authorities “pretentious and hypocritical.”

Israel ordered its ambassador to Brussels, Yehuda Kenar, home for consultations, and hinted that an extended recall could be in the offing. The Belgian ambassador to Israel, Wilfred Geens, was summoned Thursday by Foreign Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who told journalists afterward that he had made a strong protest.

Under a Belgian law that allows the country’s courts to hold trials for war crimes committed anywhere in the world, the high court had been asked to weigh charges filed by survivors of the 1982 massacre of hundreds of Palestinians at two refugee camps outside Beirut. Sharon was defense minister at the time of the massacre by Lebanese Christian militia members allied with Israel.

Several Israeli diplomats, speaking on condition of anonymity, described the contretemps as among the most serious they could recall in recent years between Israel and a European nation. Belgium is a NATO ally of Israel’s closest friend, the United States -- although at the moment, that relationship is fraught with tension as well.

The United States is trying to persuade Western European allies, including Belgium, to support a military strike against Iraq. It has met with sharp resistance from France and Germany, which the Bush administration has begun, pointedly, to refer to as “Old Europe.”

The Israel-Belgium quarrel could also prove a poisonous element in any future talks on a Mideast peace plan engineered by the so-called quartet -- the United States, Russia, the United Nations and the European Union. Sharon has already made clear that he doesn’t trust Europe to be a fair mediator in the nearly 2 1/2-year-old conflict with the Palestinians.

The Belgian ruling dominated headlines and newscasts in Israel on Thursday, displacing, if only temporarily, the incessant talk of preparations for a U.S.-led war with Iraq. Under the headline “Twisted and Outrageous,” the mass-circulation daily newspaper Maariv carried well-known attorney Yehiel Gutman’s legal analysis of the decision. He called it “reckless, a legal and political scandal, and not free of anti-Semitic considerations.”

“It exposes each and every one of us, citizens of the state of Israel who have served in the army, to the risk of investigation, arrest and trial in Belgium, for acts or omissions we are supposed to have made in the course of our army service,” he wrote.

That comment explains, in part, why the controversy touched such a raw nerve here. For most Israelis, the Belgian ruling had far less to do with Lebanon than with the Palestinian uprising, and Israel’s response to it.

Many people here believe that outsiders, Europeans in particular, cannot comprehend the reality of living under the daily threat of suicide bombings -- just as many in Europe believe that Israel systematically violates the human rights of Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

“What [Europeans] see on television is entirely damning as far as Israel is concerned,” said David Kimche, head of the Israel Council on Foreign Relations. “There is a real lack of understanding for what we are going through.”

Nearly two decades ago, Israel passed its own judgment on the massacres at the Sabra and Shatila camps. Following the finding of an independent commission in 1983 that he was indirectly responsible, Sharon was forced to resign his post as defense minister. It was years before he again held a top government position.

In the Belgian case, a lower court had ruled that Sharon, as head of the Israeli government, had diplomatic immunity, which the Supreme Court upheld.

But Wednesday’s ruling left open the possibility that upon leaving office, the 74-year-old Israeli leader could be investigated and prosecuted. Israel said it would do everything it could to stave off such an eventuality.

Netanyahu called the ruling a “blood libel” and added, “We will take action against it diplomatically, politically and in other ways.”

Israeli commentators made scathing reference to Belgium’s colonial past in Congo and Rwanda, and sarcastic mention of Brussels as a “capital of world diplomacy.” Although any action against Sharon would have to wait some time, the Belgian court said an investigation could move ahead immediately against former Israeli commander Amos Yaron, who was also named in the complaint. Yaron, now the director-general of Israel’s Defense Ministry, said he wasn’t worried.

“Who told the Belgians to go and judge people from other countries?” he asked on Israel’s Army Radio. “Over things that happened in other foreign countries?”