Scandal-shocked Israelis ask if the army has lost its way

Senior officers indifferent to suffering of Palestinians

By Agence France Presse (AFP)

Monday, November 29, 2004

JERUSALEM: Israel's once-unshakable faith in the morality of the army has been put to the test by a series of recent scandals, one of which saw a soldier empty his weapon into the body of a young Palestinian girl, who had been killed moments earlier on her way to school.

It has not been a particularly good couple of weeks for an army which proclaims itself to be "the most ethical army in the world."

Last week, a military court indicted an officer accused by his own soldiers of carrying out a "confirmed kill" - pumping bullets into the body of a dead 13-year-old Palestinian school girl.

In the same week, the Israeli press published disturbing images of soldiers abusing the corpses of Palestinians, alongside another photo of soldiers forcing a Palestinian violinist to play for them at a checkpoint near the West Bank town of Nablus.

Following the shooting incident, the leading Israeli rights group B'Tselem demanded that General Moshe Yaalon, the army's chief of staff, stand down for what it denounced as a "a culture of impunity" over Palestinian civilian deaths.

Although Israeli troops had killed at least 1,369 unarmed Palestinian civilians since the start of the intifada over four years ago, only one soldier had been charged, B'Tselem said. "The army has lost its way" read a headline in the right-wing Israeli daily, the Jerusalem Post.

"Can it be that Yaalon and his commanders' attitudes can be summed up as 'a little girl dead, another day at the office'?" questioned the editorial.

Mordechai Bar-On, an Israeli historian and former chief education officer in the army, has little doubt that the continuing Israeli occupation of Palestinian territory is corrupting the moral fiber of the army.

"All the security problems today are not vis-a-vis an army but vis-a-vis a civilian population, and when you're dealing with civilians, you are bound by the very situation, to witness a prolonged process of corruption in terms of behavioral values," Bar-On said.

"The very fact that you occupy another nation will undoubtedly lead to such corruption. We see that now, not only in the behavior of the soldiers toward Arabs, but also toward themselves, toward their officers and toward the army," he said. "Senior officers should have absolutely no tolerance for clear abuses of values and be very stringent about punishing them in the most severe way."

But even among the top military, senior officers have been known to show indifference to the suffering of those under occupation. Two weeks ago, Dan Halts, Yaalon's deputy and the former head of the airforce, was hauled over the coals by the Israeli supreme court for his blasŽ attitude in the wake of the assassination of a top Hamas leader in Gaza City two years ago.

Seventeen Palestinians were killed and scores more wounded after Halutz authorized the use of a one ton bomb in a densely populated area.

The celebrated Israeli author Yoram Kaniuk said that the "humiliation" of the violin-playing Palestinian threw the justification of the state's very existence into doubt. "Our entire existence in this Arab region was justified, and is still justified, by our suffering," he wrote in Sunday's Yediot Aharonot daily.

"If we allow Jewish soldiers to put an Arab violinist at a roadblock and laugh at him, we have succeeded in arriving at the lowest moral point possible."

By Hazel Ward, Agence France Presse