The “Haaretz” newspaper has emerged from its protective bunker, in which it remained safely ensconced during the height of the recent war when the Israeli public was uniformly in favor of crushing genocidal Hamas. Now, “Haaretz” has resumed its insidious campaign to delegitimate the Jewish state. A case in point: Michael Sfard’s “A ‘Targeted Assassination’ of International Law,” which accuses the IDF of conspiring since at least 2006 to violate the foundational principles of the rules of war. The Israeli military’s biggest crime according to Sfard: interdicting Hamas’ use of residential areas as launching pads for both missiles and terror tunnels. Sfard admits that the IDF does everything it can to warn civilians to leave before targeting such terrorist hives, but he considers that such warnings are merely an attempt to divert the blame for war crimes that Israel richly deserves. The notion that any responsible army would stand idly by while a heavily-armed terrorist force used residential dwellings to target innocent civilians as well as combatants is absurd on its face. I doubt that even Michael Walzer would swallow it whole. Sfard is a “legal adviser” to Yesh Din, a legal defense group for “occupied Palestinians” founded on the premise that every Israeli who lives in the West Bank does so by virtue of theft. It’s advisory board contains retired political and intelligence “names” who have been in eclipse for a decade or more and who have no viable solutions to offer for the Israel people’s survival dilemmas. Yesh Din has been criticized by the NGO Monitor as essentially a paid arm of the Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Institute for Foreign Cultural Relations – IFA (Germany), the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (Ireland), Oxfam, and Belgian and other anti-Israel entities that fund it. Sfard’s article is available to premium readers of “Haaretz” at http://www.haaretz.com/opinion/.premium-1.608744. For the NGO Monitor’s criticism of Yesh Din for taking money from the Belgian government, see the “Jerusalem Post” for August 14, 2011 at http://www.jpost.com/International/NGO-Monitor-slams-Belgium-funds-for-anti-Israel-group.