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Haaretz op-ed
piece, Thursday, March 7, 2002
Balata Has Fallen
by Ze'ev Sternhell
There was something surreal about the television
appearance, last Saturday night, by the commanders of the
two brigades that operated in the refugee camps of the
northern West Bank. The commander of the Paratroop Brigade
declared: Balata camp has surrendered. Indeed, the refugee
camp was "conquered" by elite forces, using state-of-the-art
weaponry, and backed up by tanks, armored personnel carriers
and helicopters. If the whole thing were not sad and
grotesque, it would be amusing.
But this is a story that is characteristic of the road
that has been followed by heroic little Israel, which was
admired by the whole Western world, until this terrible
period. There were times when the paratroopers were known as
the fighters of the Mitla Pass, Ammunition Hill and the
Chinese Farm. The Golani Brigade used to be famed for
breaching the fortifications of Rafah, as the fighters of
Tel el Faher and the Hermon outpost. Their sons and
grandsons have fallen to the level of breachers of walls in
shacks built of blocks and boards. And they are no longer
ashamed to speak of war when what they are really engaged in
is colonial policing, which recalls the takeover by the
white police of the poor neighborhoods of the blacks in
South Africa during the apartheid era.
There was a time - on the first day of the 1967 Six-Day
War - when the commander of a tank company in 7th Brigade,
Avigdor Kahalani, stopped his tank column in the midst of
advance to contact near Rafah so he wouldn't run over two
frightened Bedouin children. He waited until their mother
came to collect them. Later that day, Kahalani's tank was
hit and he suffered extensive burns. To the division
commander, Major General Israel Tal, the behavior of the
young officer, and not just his fighting, was exemplary.
Today, again in Rafah, army men of a different generation
watch as children play next to a booby-trapped bomb that was
placed there by the IDF and don't lift a finger. It must
have been clear to all of them that if the children touched
the bomb it would explode, with loss of life. When the
military advocate general finally decided to launch an
investigation into the incident - in which five children
were killed - the division commander did everything in his
power to prevent the probe from taking place.
In colonial Israel, and more especially the Israel in
which advocates of "transfer" sit in the government, human
life is cheap - and therein lies the most serious danger to
our future. A society in which dozens of children are killed
as a result of army operations can easily lose its last
remaining moral inhibitions. The fact that the Palestinians
are also killing indiscriminately cannot absolve us of
responsibility for what is going on in the territories. The
killing of innocent people is gradually becoming a norm, and
that norm is being implemented in the service of a goal that
seeks to deprive another people of its freedom and its human
rights: The Sharon government is turning the territories
into one huge jailhouse, and is turning its citizens in
warders who are called upon to suppress a prisoner uprising.
That was not quite the purpose of Zionism.
If the army is dominated by shamelessness, and if purely
military actions by the Palestinians, such as successful
attacks on army outposts and checkpoints, are included under
the rubric of terrorism, the settlers' camp is doing all it
can to label our inability to cope with the Palestinians'
war of independence as the "Rosh Hashanah War." This
half-baked attempt to create symmetry between a just war and
a campaign of colonialist suppression is not merely a
curiosity: It is the desecration of the memory of those who
fell in the 1973 Yom Kippur War. It won't be long before we
are told that the battle in which tank crews risked their
lives on the banks of the Suez Canal and the effort in which
an Israeli tank destroys a Palestinian car containing a
mother and her three children is the same war.
We should take note here of an interesting phenomenon.
The number of Israeli civilian casualties in the past year
is far greater than the number of soldiers who have been
killed or wounded. When all is said and done, the army is
waging a deluxe war: It is bombing and shelling defenseless
cities and villages, and that situation is convenient for
both the army and the settlers. They are well aware that if
the army were to sustain casualties on the same scale as
occurred in Lebanon, we would now be on our way out of the
territories.
We perceive the death of civilians in shooting attacks or
at the hands of crazed suicide bombers in the heart of our
cities, including the extinction of whole families, as a
decree of fate or as a kind of act of nature. However, the
death of soldiers immediately poses the critical question:
What are the goals of the war? For what end are the soldiers
being killed? Who sent them to their death? As long as the
conscript troops do not pay too heavily, as long as the
reservists are not called up in massive numbers to protect
and defend the occupation, the question of "why" does not
dictate the national agenda.
However, the atmosphere in the country is rapidly
approaching the boiling point. More and more people are
beginning to understand that the Israeli reprisal operations
only engender despair, and despair gives rise to suicide
bombers. Today, when the whole political system is
paralyzed, it looks as though it will be possible to bring
an end to the madness that is raging here, only if people
take to the streets en masse and demand an immediate start
to negotiations.
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