NGOs Confident They Can Still Call Undetermined Bibi Successor ‘War Criminal’

“My first thought was it shouldn’t matter who it is, since Zionism is inherently a war crime,” acknowledged Omar Shakir of Human Rights Watch.

Jerusalem, May 5 – The deadline for incumbent Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu to form a coalition government passed at midnight last night, raising the specter of a different leader at the helm of the Jewish State for the first time since 2009, thus presenting activist groups with the prospect of an Israeli premier with no previous documented contribution of consequence to Israeli self-defense and therefore a paucity of valence to one of the reflexive epithets the activists traditionally aim at Israeli leaders when a whiff of Palestinian suffering makes the news.

Israel’s fourth election cycle in the last two years resulted in a familiar stalemate this past March, with neither major faction able to muster the requisite 61-seat bloc to control a majority of the Knesset. President Reuven Rivlin found himself forced to choose among a field of unconvincing parties upon whom to confer the dubious honor of cobbling together such a coalition, including Netanyahu. Previous cycles have resulted in the tantalizing possibility of a non-Netanyahu-led government, but even such arrangements as a rotation agreement with the leader of another party have collapsed before that could become a reality. If the current stalemate continues, another round of elections must take place several months hence – but the possibility of someone other than Netanyahu taking the helm of the government has pro-Palestinian activists wondering whether the “war criminal” accusation will suit whoever emerges in his stead as well as it has suited Netanyahu in their eyes.

“My first thought was it shouldn’t matter who it is, since Zionism is inherently a war crime,” acknowledged Omar Shakir of Human Rights Watch. “But the whole fiasco of redefining ‘Apartheid’ to suit an anti-Israel agenda in our report last week has made some of us reconsider, like maybe we should substantiate the accusations we level instead of relying on a once-dependable media to spread our propaganda without question. That would mean finding something specific that an Israeli prime minister has done that constitutes a war crime, even if only by the tendentious definition that we ‘human rights’ activists use regarding only Israel – but if the incoming premier has no such record, that makes things a challenge.”

“Not much a challenge,” assured Avner Gvaryahu of Breaking the Silence. “Since when do our accusations have to be factual? Just today I tweeted about Jewish settlers setting fire to Palestinian fields, but it was really Palestinians committing the arson – but our cooperative media allies ran with it, and even my tweet later on ‘correcting’ the report barely reached anyone. We have nothing to worry about.”

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