Listen to Maj. Gen. Stern
By Gideon Levy

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.

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A brutal taste of the future
The assault on Beit Hanoun is a terrifying example of what lies in store for Palestinians

The initiation of Avigdor Lieberman - widely regarded as an outright racist - into Ehud Olmert's Israeli government seems to have already brought a taste of things to come. For the past week, the Gaza Strip city of Beit Hanoun has been made a ground zero by the Israeli army. By yesterday, more than 260 Palestinians lay dead and injured, with 53 fatalities - women, children and ambulance drivers among them. The Israeli army had vowed to end the firing of home-made rockets towards southern Israel. Many Palestinians disagree with the use of these makeshift rockets, but regard Israeli offensives as flagrantly disproportionate. Beit Hanoun was left with no men between the ages of 16 and 45 in the wake of a massive forced round-up by the Israeli army last Thursday night amid helicopter gunfire, tanks and artillery shelling. Women and children in the city sent urgent calls for help through Gaza's radio stations. To these jobless women, losing their men meant breakdown in their households. On Friday morning, scores of women marched through Beit Hanoun in a spontaneous rush to aid friends and loved ones after hearing their pleas. Unarmed, they were shot at by Israeli soldiers from their tanks; two women were left dead and others severely injured. These women were said to have been heading to a mosque to free armed men who took refuge there. Television footage and interviews with witnesses show these women posed no military threat, but they were treated as such by the Israeli army without warning.

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The Women of Beit Hanoun
Who Was Perpetrating the Terror?

For many of the women who left their homes at sunrise and walked for an hour or more to the scene of terror their only hope was that their actions might save some lives and the world might be woken up to the reality of their tragedy. Instead, their actions have been used to further vilify their loved ones who had spent a night holed up inside a house of worship that was being systematically bulldozed from outside. Walls were crushed and the ceiling caved in. The women outside were looking for one glimpse of their husbands and sons. The Israeli forces opened fire and women were among the dead.

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How Gaza Offends Us All
Nightmare in Beit Hanoun

An opened jaw with yellowed teeth gaped out of its bloodied shroud. The rest of the head parts were wrapped in a plastic bag placed atop the jaw and nostrils, as if to be close to the place to which it once belonged. The bag was red from the pieces that were stuffed inside it. Below the jaw was a human neck slit open midway down: a fleshy, wet wound smiling pink and oozing out from the browned skin around it, the neck that was still linked to the body below it. Above him, in the upper freezer of the morgue lay a dead woman, her red hennaed hair visible for the first time to strange men around her. More red plastic wrapped around an otherwise absent chin. She was dead for demonstrating outside a mosque in Beit Hanoun, northern Gaza where more than 60 men sheltered during the artillery onslaught by Israeli tanks and cannons.

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The Accident At Beit Hanun And The Logic Of Unilateralism

Israel's policy is to imprison the Palestinian people in a series of encircled "homelands", while annexing the Palestinian land and water resources to Israel. As Soffer implies, this is not a "solution" to the problem that any Palestinian can willingly accept but, grossly outgunned as they are, what exactly are the Palestinians going to do about it, except send their crappy homemade rockets over the wall? And when they do that, Israel has an answer: it will use its overwhelming firepower to simply bomb the confined Palestinians into submission. Apparently, when enough of their women and children are dead, the Palestinians are supposed to accept whatever unilateral solution Israel imposes on them. That is the logic of Israeli unilateralism; that is the logic of the wall. You have to be utterly insane and delusional to think that this will ever bring Israel security, but apparently those qualities are no longer disqualifiers for holding office in Israel. And that is why this morning's killings in Beit Hanun are not an accident, but an "accident". Of course the individual tank gunners who fired the fatal barrage didn't mean to kill those particular Palestinians, and in that sense it is an accident. But inasmuch as it is Israeli policy to cage the Palestinians and bomb them into submission, this is not an accident, it is policy. It is the natural outcome of an Israeli government mentality that still thinks military might will allow it to impose unilaterally a solution on the Palestinians, and save it from having to negotiate with them as equals. And, most damningly of all, it is the natural outcome of an Israeli government mentality that finds it less distasteful to blow up innocent people in Gaza than to finally get out of the Occupied Territories and allow Palestinians their independence.

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