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The long and imbecilic arm of Israel

by haaretz

Dropping a one-ton bomb in a densely-populated area of Gaza is either an intelligence failure, a case of bad judgment, or the work of an evil mind, and God only knows which is worse.
The long and imbecilic arm of Israel

By Yoel Marcus

The robbery of the safe deposit boxes at the Israel Discount Bank arouses professional awe. The was brilliant planning, flawless inside information, skillful execution, a right choice of timing, and scrupulous attention to detail to the point of using a vacuum cleaner to remove all traces of evidence.

What has the State of Israel come to, if the only thing that goes right is a bank robbery?

Where are the days before the IDF word-laundry turned "assassination" into "preventive strike"? The days when missions of this type were carried out in secret, most of them successfully? When an operative dressed as a woman and bumped off a wanted Palestinian in Beirut without harming his family? When today's chief of staff oversaw the liquidation of Abu Jihad at his home in Tunis and departed without a hair falling from the head of his wife and children?

Where are the days when the perpetrators of the massacre of our athletes in Munich were struck down with surgical precision, one by one, and no one would have been the wiser if not for a little identification mix-up in Lillehammer? Where are the tweezer operations, like the capture of Eichmann, who was brought to Israel to stand trial? Some liquidations have never been reported or spoken about, but at least they were all the product of an orderly decision making process, and not the whim of one man.

Israel's long arm had become a trademark. But not everything that could be done in the past can still be done today, because of our diplomatic relations and because the rules have changed. And not everything that was effective and served as a deterrent in the past does those things equally well today. Expulsions, house demolition, andcollective punishments, do more harm than good. Times and circumstances have changed. Our long, legendary arm has gone from smart to imbecilic.

"We used to catch elephants with tweezers," says Avi Gil. "Today, we catch tweezers with elephants." Yossi Sarid, who once sat on secret committees that decided matters of life and death, says that there are times when you don't have to be a military expert - you just have to be an expert in the brains department. When 180 people, including women and children, are killed or wounded in a "surgical strike," it's clear they weren't in bed with Salah Shehadeh. They are among the hundreds of people who live in tin shanties nearby.

It is hard to believe that no one knew they existed. Dropping a bomb that weighs a ton in such a teeming place is either an intelligence failure, a case of bad judgment, or the work of an evil mind, and God only knows which is worse.

I shed no tears for Shehadeh, but for the timing of this operation and the outcome. What kind of clever idea is it to do the right thing but have the whole world, including the United States, denounce you for it? Hamas needs no excuses to carry out suicide bombings.

But when babies and just plain innocent people are killed, Hamas will get free propaganda and public sympathy it doesn't deserve when it takes revenge with a mega-bombing. Just the sort of bombing that will drag us, sooner or later, into the last thing we need: an invasion of Gaza.

Which takes us back to the government decision making process. These days, when there is zero tolerance for assassinations, and cease-fire talks are on the horizon, it is intolerable that a decision to knock someone off is made before you can blink, with no consideration for what's happening around us.

In view of Shehadeh's murderous past, no one would have had any complaints if Israel had got rid of him in a pinpointed strike at a different time. But Sharon can't get up and decide such a thing on his own, while Ben-Eliezer is informed long distance and doesn't ask too many questions. Peres (the same who is foreign minister, we assume) is not told at all, or even consulted, about an assassination that is strategic in character, has the whole world down our throats, and in hindsight, could have been done some other time. The operation was a triple-loser, a combination of intelligence failure, military clumsiness and political obtuseness.

Sharon says this is one of the most successful operations Israel has ever pulled off. He used a similar expression to describe the Lebanon War. Here is a baker who priases his spoiled dough. He has brought us to the point where the number of Israelis who have died in the Intifada is fast approaching the number of fallen in Israel's most glorious military triumph, the Six-Day War. Without peace, without security, Sharon is dragging us into an existential and moral abyss, just so he can achieve his goals of staying in the territories and staying in power.

http://www.haaretzdaily.com/hasen/pages/ShArt.jhtml?itemNo=190990&contrassID=2&subContrassID=4&sbSubContrassID=0&listSrc=Y
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by Akiva Eldar
By Akiva Eldar

On Monday night at 10 P.M., the West Bank Fatah Secretary General Hussein a-Sheikh approved the final draft of a Tanzim declaration of an unconditional, unilateral cease-fire, with no demands on Israel. This time, the cease-fire would include no further attacks on settlers. All that would remain of the intifada would be the military campaign against Israeli soldiers in the occupied territories and the diplomatic campaign against Israeli citizens wherever they may be.

The secretary hoped that in the morning, Hamas in Gaza would add its signature to the declaration. Marwan Barghouti sent his approval from jail. That day - Tuesday - an article was supposed to reach the New York Times bureau in Jerusalem presenting Fatah's new policy.

On Tuesday morning, in a Jerusalem restaurant, the final drafts in English of the Tanzim statement and the New York Times article were presented to a Western diplomat and an American peace activist. Another, four-page Arabic-language document titled "A statement regarding suicide bombings," explaining why the attacks were forbidden, for moral reasons, served as an appendix.

The two Westerners' faces showed they had spent a night without sleep, worried and sorrowful about the Palestinian children killed in Gaza and the Israeli children now likely to die in revenge attacks. They sadly folded up the documents and put them in their briefcases. The Palestinians said that a unilateral cease-fire is the last remaining ammunition in their hands and they are afraid of it being turned into a blank when they fire it. The disaster in Gaza reopened the cycle of bloodshed and the Hamas won't be quiet until it has wreaked its revenge. They decided, therefore, to shelve the official declaration for two to three weeks, and pray things calm down by then.

The Western diplomat has been involved in quite a few initiatives for a cease-fire and has been burned by both sides. He says that this time it isn't merely a matter of a cease-fire, but a profound political change in the young Palestinian leadership. "They're sick and tired of being forced to rebuild Palestinian credibility over and over. They want full transparency in everything, including political contacts, and they want to put everything on the table.

"The Tanzim has reached the conclusion that if they don't make the change, the Hamas will raise the flag. They have also understood the political and moral damage the suicide bombings have created around them. They regard reducing the violence as a means for achieving strategic goals. The cease-fire was meant to allow them to present their public with a new leadership and a clear direction." The diplomat said that a-Sheikh told him that he was taking into account that the initiative would not please the Israeli side and might cost him his life. He ordered his membership to stick to the initiative. He didn't take into consideration an incident that would take 15 civilian lives, mostly children, and more than 100 wounded.

Defined and deleted

Dr. Menachem Klein took into consideration that his article in the prestigious British journal The World Today would echo far beyond the Oxford university campus, where he is at the end of a sabbatical year. The editor says in an introduction to the brief piece that the Israeli expert on Palestinian affairs from Bar-Ilan University was formerly an advisor to former prime minister Ehud Barak (Klein was a member of the Jerusalem experts team in the negotiations).

The article was sent in to the Royal Institute for International Affairs a few weeks before the deadly bombing in Gaza, which turned the article into a prophecy. Klein notes that during the intifada, the senior Israeli command has "authorized the firing of missiles or the planting of explosives in residential dwellings or in vehicles carrying civilians." He says that "generally, such operations follow aerial reconnaissance of the target, from which the presence of civilians is obvious.

"However, the value of those lives is as dust under the wheels of Israeli methods of combat and the fury aimed at the Palestinian terrorism. The existence of civilians and their right to life have been deleted from the screen of Israeli consciousness."

Prime Minister Ariel Sharon announced the day after the bombing that Israeli citizens should prepare for new terrorist attacks. Klein wrote "Prime Minister Ariel Sharon ... together with the establishment that serves him, is abetting terrorism against Israel ... What is terrorism if not a deliberate attack on a noncombatant population in order to achieve a political goal? And what, by the same token, is a rage-directed reaction - blind or calculated, but in either case systematic and repeated, against a civilian population - if not terrorism."

He goes on to recite a litany of Israeli assaults on the "hostile but noncombatant population," listing checkpoints, soldiers' vandalism, using civilians as human shields, and the breaching of interior walls to enter houses while searching for terrorists in heavily populated areas. He writes the Israeli establishment made no effort to restrain even the "war crimes" that accompanied the IDF incursions and invasions of the Palestinian villages and cities.

"Every decent person must condemn Palestinian terrorism. Every decent person must also acknowledge that even though Israel is a victim of terrorist attacks this does not give it the right to react in the same way. For the melancholy result of Israel's response is that its war machine also frequently operates as an agent of terror. Not in the Palestinian form of uncontrollable gangs or individuals driven by religious fanaticism; not by means of suicide operations or by the terrorism of the weak. This is terrorism of the strong, the mechanism of the state."

Klein accuses Israeli society of "political and moral blindness." He argues it is unable to see the difference between the war in Afghanistan and Israel's war against Israeli independence. "Osama bin Laden did not confront the U.S. with a peace offer, whereas the Palestinian national movement put forward a peace proposal more than a decade ago, at the end of the 1980s. Today, this has become a pan-Arab initiative. At a historic summit meeting in March, all the Arab heads of state approved the principles of a peace settlement proposed by Saudi Crown Prince Abdullah. The Israeli government did everything in its power to rebuff the Arab initiative."

The Israeli researcher goes on to say: "In contrast to what President George Bush and the citizens of the U.S. did for the people of Afghanistan, the Israeli people did not send food, medicines, or other humanitarian aid to the Palestinians, apart from a few marginal left-wing groups, whose efforts were usually blocked by the army."

Klein sums up: "Israel's surrender to terrorism rules out the possibility it will be able to sustain its charge that the Palestinian national movement resorted to such tactics. What will be the future basis for the Israeli claim against Palestinian actions? Self-righteousness is not the same as right and justice."

Sorry we murdered you

It was the first time that Gideon Maeir of the Foreign Ministry, Israel's official public relations spokesman, did not even try to explain away his bosses' behavior. He told CNN and the BBC that the dozens of innocent casualties, including babies, cannot be defended. "Undefendable," he said.

Maeir understood that to maintain any credibility for his reaction to the next suicide bombing, he better not use the excuses that the political and military leaders proposed the day after the disaster. Reactions like "if we knew this would be the result, we would have forgone the operation," sound pathetic against the background of the horrifying pictures from Gaza.

Official Palestinian expressions of sorrow, and condemnations, of murders of Israeli citizens have never prevented "appropriate Israeli responses." Prime Minster Sharon persuaded President Bush that to stop the bombings the Palestinians have to undertake a thorough reform of their security apparatus and severely punish the guilty.

But what is Israel going to do to prevent more "regrettable mistakes" that harm people who happen to live in a neighborhood where the latest wanted man on an Israeli list is hiding? Will anyone in the security forces be required to explain to a legal authority the decision to drop a ton of explosives into a crowded neighborhood of flimsy buildings?

Will Sharon and Defense Minister Benjamin Ben-Eliezer be asked to answer the question whether they knew, when they approved the attack, that the Tanzim, and possibly the Hamas, were about to publish an declaration of cessations of attacks on civilians?

If they did not know, then it's Israel's intelligence services that need reformation. If they did know, they will have to explain why the killing of one more wanted man wasn't offset by the chance to save Israeli lives.

And at that same opportunity, there's a need to find out if there is a connection between some of the other "pinpoint preventions" (Jamal Mansour and Ra'ad Carmi) and the fact their assassinations came after periods of calm and mounting international pressure to begin negotiations.

These questions, and others, are in a letter that Ran Cohen, MK (Meretz), the new chairman of the Knesset Comptroller's Committee, wrote this week to Haim Ramon, MK (Labor), the new chairman of the Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee. Cohen asked Ramon's committee to look into all these issues. Ramon wrote back saying that the subcommittee on secret services has already been slated to discuss "all aspects of the operation" next week. Presumably the committee room will be very crowded the day Ramon calls Ben-Eliezer in to answer the questions.

http://www.haaretzdaily.com/hasen/pages/ShArt.jhtml?itemNo=190579&contrassID=2&subContrassID=5&sbSubContrassID=0&listSrc=Y
by concerned
So you think that these Islamic terrorist groups in the Middle East (Sorry, Islamic Freedom Fighters.-Isn't that what Al Qaeda call themselves?) will just shut down their operations once they are finished with Israel? You don't think they will join their brothers in arms and turn on us next? All indications point to this global Islamic movement as not a resistance to Israel or Jews but a resistance to all Infidels.

I am simply going by what I see on the Palestinian Authority broadcasts of religious clerics repeatedly calling for 'Jews and Americans to be killed everywhere they are found.' Followed by loud cheers and anit-Western slogansfrom the crowds. Keep in mind that these are not Al Qaeda but are Palestinians. What's that all about? Are they using us and then going to turn on us? Am I being paranoid or should I belive what Iam seeing?
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