A bloodbath
is taking place in Beit Hanun, the Israel Defense Forces runs
rampant and
kills at least 37 people in four days - and Israeli public
opinion
yawns with indifference. A brigade commander tells his soldiers, who
killed 12
people in one day: "You've won 12:0," and the soldiers grin
broadly.
This is the moral nadir we have reached, following a long slide
down a
slippery slope: Human life has become cheap.
Proof of
this came at the end of the week from the big mouth of Major
General
Elazar Stern, the head of the IDF Personnel Directorate, who
occasionally
says true things. "The IDF's excessive sensitivity to human
life led to
some of the failures in the Lebanon
war - and this should not
happen,"
Stern told Channel 7. Stern should be praised for these forthright
words:
Those who embark with unbearable lightness on a futile war of choice
cannot
allow themselves the luxury of showing sensitivity for the lives of
their
soldiers. In war, soldiers not only kill, but are also killed. This
should have
been stated in advance.
But the
general's remarks are also tainted with hypocrisy: Those who over a
few months
kill more than 1,000 Lebanese and 300 Palestinians for dubious
reasons do
not have the right to speak about sensitivity to human life. The
fact that
the public protest against the war did not take off demonstrates
that after
having lost all sensitivity for the lives of others, we are also
gradually
losing sensitivity for the lives of our children who are killed in
vain. The
contempt for human life starts with the lives of Arabs and ends
with the
lives of Jews.
What a long
way we have come since the talk, as hypocritical as it may have
been, about
"the purity of arms." This concept has been totally deleted from
the
lexicon. What a long way we have come since the time when we took pride
in the fact
that, unlike the Arabs, we tried not to kill innocent civilians.
And now we
have arrived at the shocking reality of the second Lebanon
war.
For
example, the number of people Israel
killed is not only almost 10 times
higher than
the number of people Hezbollah killed, but the number of
soldiers
Hezbollah killed is three times higher than the number of Israeli
civilians
they killed, while the number of Lebanese civilians killed by
Israel is about three times the number of
Hezbollah fighters. So whose arms
are purer? A
journalist from The Guardian who is currently in Israel
was
shocked to
hear that these figures have not been the subject of public
discussion
here.
The current
stage of the moral decline began with the targeted
assassinations
in the territories. When they began, there was still an
argument
over their legality and justness. Who remembers that the
assassinations
were once limited, declaratively at least, to "ticking
bombs"?
The High Court of Justice, in its cowardice, has evaded taking a
stance on
this issue for years, despite the petitions on its doorstep. And
the
assassination project grew and expanded until it reached monstrous
proportions.
In recent
months, almost no day has gone by without Palestinians being
killed in Gaza. Instead of asking
why, we get a prime minister who boasts to
the Knesset
Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee about "300 terrorists"
dead within
four months, as if killing in itself were an enormous
achievement.
This is the lesson from Ehud Olmert, and it is immeasurably
more
grievous than all his alleged corruption affairs.
No one
asked who these fatalities were, whether they all deserved to die,
and what
benefit Israel
derives from this wholesale killing. Beyond the
terrifying
number of civilians killed, including dozens of women and
children,
we should also ask whether every armed person in Gaza - and there
are tens of
thousands of them - deserves the death penalty, without a trial.
The day the
IDF began the targeted assassinations, our sensitivity to human
life was
doomed to be erased.
The IDF has
been operating in the town of Beit
Hanun for several days now.
Operation
Autumn Clouds is ostensibly intended to target Qassam launchers,
but
meanwhile it has only brought more Qassams on Sderot - besides the
killing,
destruction and terror it sows in the heart of the 30,000-resident
town. I was
at the Beit Hanun home of the Abu Ouda family twice recently.
The first
time was when a shell destroyed the family's home. The second time
was when
soldiers killed the father, his son and his daughter, who were
innocent of
any crime. And this was before Operation Autumn Clouds.
And how is
the Israeli press covering Autumn Clouds? In Maariv on Thursday,
you needed
a magnifying glass to find an offhand reference to the killing of
10
Palestinians in one day; it was the same for Yedioth Ahronoth. The two
newspapers
with the country's largest circulation demonstrate a disgusting
level of
dehumanization. The statement by Yedioth Ahronoth's military
commentator,
Alex Fishman, that one of the operation's goals is drilling the
troops for
the "big operation," does not stir any protest. That the IDF is
embarking
on a "training operation" in a dense population center, sowing
death and
destruction - does this not show a frightening contempt for human
life?
The daily
killing in Gaza
receives scant mention. Futile operations aimed at
restoring
the IDF's lost honor do not arouse any debate about their aim,
morality or
chances of succeeding. No one wonders about the extent of Qassam
damage
versus the extent of the killing and destruction - including the
bombing of
the power station - in Gaza,
where a million and a half people
are
encaged, impoverished and hungry.
These
futile operations will not stop the Qassams, which are aimed at giving
us and the
rest of the world a painful reminder of the imprisoned and
boycotted Gaza residents' distress,
which no one would notice if it were not
for the
Qassams. The way to fight the Qassams is to stop the boycott, sit
down at the
negotiating table and reach an accord. Otherwise, we will
continue to
slide and become immune to their loss of life, and soon to our
loss of
life as well. Listen to Major General Stern.