Top Israeli Officer Says Tactics Are Backfiring

Israel's senior military commander told columnists for three leading newspapers this week that Israel's military tactics against the Palestinian population were too repressive and were fomenting explosive levels of "hatred and terrorism" that might become impossible to control.

In remarks that suggest a dramatic split with the approach of the current government, Lt. Gen. Moshe Yaalon, chief of staff of the Israeli armed forces, said that crackdowns, curfews and roadblocks in the West Bank and Gaza Strip were crippling the lives of innocent Palestinians and that the military's tactics were now threatening Israel's own interests.

The military chief directed most of his complaints at restrictions imposed on the West Bank four weeks ago, after a suicide bomber from the West Bank city of Jenin killed 21 people in a restaurant in the Israeli port of Haifa. Yaalon said the current curfews and travel restrictions, some of the tightest since the outbreak of the Palestinian uprising in September 2000, were preventing Palestinians from carrying out critical olive and other agricultural harvests, hampering thousands of children from attending school, increasing hatred for Israel and strengthening terrorist organizations.
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Billmon has interesting comments on the above...

A Higher Law

There's a dramatic struggle being waged in Israel right now between the uniformed military and the Sharon government, one with some very unsettling implications -- not just for Israeli democracy, but for what still passes as a democracy here in the United States:
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The IDF's chorus of incitement
By Gideon Levy

Who told the director of Military Intelligence, Major General Aharon Ze'evi (Farkash) to declare, "Better Palestinian mothers should cry and not Jewish mothers"? Is the head of army intelligence now also to be in charge of setting Israel's moral priorities? And what prompted the commander of the Ground Forces, Major General Yiftah Ron-Tal, to decide that Palestinian Authority Chairman Yasser Arafat has to be liquidated? It's not hard to guess what would happen if Mohammed Dahlan, the former security chief of the Palestinian Authority, were to call for the assassination of Prime Minister Ariel Sharon - or, for that matter, what the consequences would be if Major General Ron-Tal were to urge Israel to launch negotiations with Arafat: His days on the General Staff would be numbered.
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Expulsion, little by little
By Amira Hass

The fears and suspicions, as usual, came true - and very quickly. Hiding behind security rationales and the seemingly neutral bureaucratic language of military orders is the gateway for expulsion. Not massive expulsion, heaven forbid, not on trucks, and not far. Drop by drop, unseen, not so many that it would be noticed internationally and shock public opinion; with the proper measure so the Israelis can continue saying it's justified for security reasons, with the appropriate modesty in the media so the information doesn't reach the consciousness of even those who are dealing with the details of a permanent agreement, with their love of peace, while a wave of anti-Semitism sweeps the world.
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Lesser-Known Stories from the Only Democracy in the Middle East
by Ran HaCohen

So if your mother happened to be Jewish, and you live in Montreal, in Mexico City or in Johannesburg, you need no permit at all to go to the small West Bank village of Salim. But if you are a Palestinian, even if you and your family have been living in Salim for centuries, you cannot stay there without a written permit from Major General Moshe Kaplinski "or someone acting on his behalf", as the order goes.

Major General Moshe Kaplinski has not been summoned to the International Criminal Court in the Hague yet for this racist order. I doubt whether he ever will be.

But if you ever wondered what the world would have looked like if Hitler had won the War, I think this could give you a pretty good idea.
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It Is Forbidden to Say Such Things
Criticizing Zionism

It's okay to call Muslims worshippers of Satan.

That's essentially what far right Armageddon happy Lt. Gen. Boykin -- newly appointed deputy undersecretary of defense for intelligence -- did recently. It seems to be okay with Rumsfeld, Boykin's boss. It's more than okay for the likes of Pat Robertson, Jerry Falwell, and other Islam-hating Christian-Zionists. For them, denigrating Muslims is an industry.

"That's the way we live," Rummy told reporters Thursday during a Pentagon news briefing. "We're a free people. And that's the wonderful thing about our country. And I think that for anyone to run around and think that that can be managed and controlled is probably wrong... Saddam Hussein could do it pretty well, because he'd go around killing people if they said things he didn't like."

Of course, it depends who you criticize.

Remarks of Malaysian prime minister Mahathir Mohamad aside, there is a campaign to portray criticism of Zionist state violence against essentially defenseless Palestinians as creeping anti-Semitism. "Liberals and leftists, traditional champions of the underdog, engage en masse in a form of fashionable, politically correct anti-Semitism by condemning Israel's 'racist,' 'apartheid,' 'Nazi' regime, portraying the tiny Jewish state (with 0.1 percent of the Mideast land mass) as the brutal aggressor Goliath, while casting the Arab world (with 99.9 percent of the land, and all of the oil) as David," writes Whistleblower Magazine.

Never mind that it's true -- Israel is a racist state.

Can you imagine the outcry if Americans passed a law denying citizenship to people of African descent who marry US citizens? The Israeli Knesset passed just such a law July 31, forcing Palestinians who marry Israelis to live "separate and unequal" lives from their spouses. "This law comes to address a security issue," Gideon Ezra, an Israeli cabinet minister, declared.
"Since September 2000 we have seen a significant connection, in terror attacks, between Arabs from the West Bank and Gaza and Israeli Arabs."
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And how is it that Israel can attack a US Navy vessel and our government covers it up?

Cover - Up Alleged in Probe of USS Liberty

A former Navy attorney who helped lead the military investigation of the 1967 Israeli attack on the USS Liberty that killed 34 American servicemen says former President Lyndon Johnson and his defense secretary, Robert McNamara, ordered that the inquiry conclude the incident was an accident.

In a signed affidavit released at a Capitol Hill news conference, retired Capt. Ward Boston said Johnson and McNamara told those heading the Navy's inquiry to ``conclude that the attack was a case of 'mistaken identity' despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary.''
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Israel's Attack on the Liberty, Revisited
Rockets, Napalm, Torpedoes & Lies

In early June of 1967, at the onset of the Six Day War, the Pentagon sent the USS Liberty from Spain into international waters off the coast of Gaza to monitor the progress of Israel's attack on the Arab states. The Liberty was a lightly armed surveillance ship.

Only hours after the Liberty arrived it was spotted by the Israeli military. The IDF sent out reconnaissance planes to identify the ship. They made eight trips over a period of three hours. The Liberty was flying a large US flag and was easily recognizable as an American vessel.

A few hours later more planes came. These were Israeli Mirage III fighters, armed with rockets and machine guns. As off-duty officers sunbathed on the deck, the fighters opened fire on the defenseless ship with rockets and machine guns.

A few minutes later a second wave of planes streaked overhead, French-built Mystere jets, which not only pelted the ship with gunfire but also with napalm bomblets, coating the deck with the flaming jelly. By now, the Liberty was on fire and dozens were wounded and killed, excluding several of the ship's top officers.
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Here is a page on articles about the Liberty, with pictures, including the following:

Israeli Pilot Admits USS Liberty Was Intentional

Fifteen years after the attack, an Israeli pilot approached Liberty survivors and then held extensive interviews with former Congressman Paul N. (Pete) McCloskey about his role. According to this senior Israeli lead pilot, he recognized the Liberty as American immediately, so informed his headquarters, and was told to ignore the American flag and continue his attack. He refused to do so and returned to base, where he was arrested.
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