- "THANK GOD for the American elections," our
ministers and generals sighed with relief.
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- They were not rejoicing at the kick that the American
people delivered to George W. Bush's ass this week. They love Bush, after
all.
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- But more important than the humbling of Bush is the fact
that the news from America pushed aside the terrible reports from Beit
Hanoun. Instead of making the headlines, they were relegated to the bottom
of the page.
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- THE FIRST revolutionary act is to call things by their
true names, Rosa Luxemburg said. So how to call what happened in Beit Hanoun?
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- "Accident" said a pretty anchorwoman on one
of the TV news programs. "Tragedy", said her lovely colleague
on another channel. A third one, no less attractive, wavered between "event",
"mistake" and "incident".
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- It was indeed an accident, a tragedy, an event and an
incident. But most of all it was a massacre. M-a-s-s-a-c-r-e.
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- The word "accident" suggests something for
which no one is to blame - like being struck by lightning. A tragedy is
a sad event or situation, like that of the New Orleans inhabitants after
the disaster. The event in Beit Hanoun was sad indeed, but not an act of
God - it was an act decided upon and carried out by human beings.
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- IMMEDIATELY AFTER the facts became known, the entire
choir of professional apologists, explainers-away, sorrow-expressers and
pretext-inventors, a choir that is in perpetual readiness for such cases,
sprang into feverish action.
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- "An unfortunate mistake It can happen in the best
families The mechanism of a cannon can misfunction, people can make mistakes
Errare humanum est We have launched tens of thousands of artillery shells,
and there have only been three such accidents. (No. 1 in the Olmert-Peretz-Halutz
era was in Qana, in the Second Lebanon War. No. 2 was on the Gaza sea shore,
where a whole family was wiped out.) But we apologized, didn't we? What
more can they demand from us?"
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- There were also arguments like "They can only blame
themselves." As usual, it was the fault of the victims. The most creative
solution came from the Deputy Minister of Defense, Ephraim Sneh: "The
practical responsibility is ours, but the moral responsibility is theirs."
If they launch Qassam rockets at us, what else can we do but answer with
shells?
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- Ephraim Sneh was raised to the position of Deputy Minister
just now. The appointment was a payment for agreeing to the inclusion of
Avigdor Liberman in the government (in biblical Hebrew, the payment would
have been called "the hire of a whore", Deut. 23,19). Now, after
only a few days in office, Sneh was given the opportunity to express his
thanks.
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- (In the Sneh family, there is a tradition of justifying
despicable acts. Ephraim's brilliant father, Moshe Sneh, was the leader
of the Israeli Communist Party, and defended all the massacres committed
by Stalin, not only the gulag system, but also the murder of the Jewish
Communists in the Soviet Union and its satellites and the Jewish "doctors
plot").
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- Any suggestion of equivalence between Qassams and artillery
shells, an idea which has been adopted even by some of the Peaceniks, is
completely false. And not only because there is no symmetry between occupier
and occupied. Hundreds of Qassams launched during more than a year have
killed one single Israeli. The shells, missiles and bombs have already
killed many hundreds of Palestinians.
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- DID THE shells hit the homes of people intentionally?
There are only two possible answers to that.
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- The extreme version says: Yes. The sequence of events
points in that direction. The Israeli army, one of the most modern in the
world, has no answer to the Qassam, one of the most primitive of weapons.
This short-range unguided rocket (named after Izz-ad-Din al-Qassam, the
first Palestinian fighter, who was killed in 1935 in a battle against the
British authorities of Palestine) is little more than a pipe filled with
home-made explosives.
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- In a futile attempt to prevent the launching of Qassams,
the Israeli forces invade the towns and villages of the Gaza Strip at regular
intervals and institute a reign of terror. A week ago, they invaded Beit-Hanoun
and killed more than 50 people, many of them women and children. The moment
they left, the Palestinians started to launch as many Qassams as possible
against Ashkelon, in order to prove that these incursions do not deter
them.
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- That increased the frustration of the generals even more.
Ashkelon is not a remote poverty-stricken little town like Sderot, most
of whose inhabitants are of Moroccan origin. In Ashkelon there lives also
an elitist population of European descent. The army chiefs, having lost
their honor in Lebanon, were eager - according to this version - to teach
the Palestinians a lesson, once and for all. According to the Israeli saying:
If force doesn't work, use more force.
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- The other version holds that it was a real mistake, an
unfortunate technical hitch. But the commander of an army knows very well
that a certain incidence of "hitches" is unavoidable. So-and-so
many percent are killed in training, so-and-so many percent die from "friendly
fire", so-and-so many percent of shells fall some distance from the
target. The ammunition used by the gunners against Beit-Hanoun - the very
same 155mm ammunition that was used in Kana - is known for its inaccuracy.
Several factors can cause the shells to stray from their course by hundreds
of meters.
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- He who decided to use this ammunition against a target
right next to civilians knowingly exposed them to mortal danger. Therefore,
there is no essential difference between the two versions.
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- Who is to blame? First of all, the spirit that has gained
ground in the army. Recently, Gideon Levy disclosed that a battalion commander
praised his soldiers for killing 12 Palestinians with the words: "We
have won by 12:0!"
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- Guilty are, of course, the gunners and their commanders,
including the battery chief. And the General in charge of the Southern
Command, Yoav Gallant (sic), who radiates indifference spiked with sanctimonious
platitudes. And the Deputy Chief-of-Staff. And the Chief-of-Staff, Dan
Halutz, the Air-Force general who said after another such incident that
he sleeps well at night after dropping a one-ton super-bomb on a residential
area. And, of course, the Minister of Defense, Amir Peretz, who approved
the use of artillery after forbidding it in the past - which means that
he was aware of the foreseeable consequences.
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- The guiltiest one is the Great Apologizer: Ehud Olmert,
the Prime Minister.
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- Olmert boasted recently that because of the clever behavior
of his government "we were able to kill hundreds of terrorists, and
the world has not reacted." According to Olmert, a "terrorist"
is any armed Palestinian, including the tens of thousands of Palestinian
policemen who carry arms by agreement with Israel. They may now be shot
freely. "Terrorists" are also the women and children, who are
killed in the street and in their homes. (Some say so openly: the children
grow up to be terrorists, the women give birth to children who grow up
to be terrorists.)
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- Olmert can go on with this, as he says, because the world
keeps silent. Today the US even vetoed a very mild Security Council resolution
against the event. Does this mean that the governments throughout the world
- America, Europe, the Arab world - are accessories to the crime at Beit
Hanoun? That can best be answered by the citizens of those countries.
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- THE WORLD did not pay much attention to the massacre,
because it happened on US election day. The results of the election may
sadden our leaders more than the blood and tears of mothers and children
in the Gaza strip, but they were glad that the election diverted attention.
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- A cynic might say: Democracy is wonderful, it enables
the voter to kick out the moron they elected last time and replace them
with a new moron.
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- But let's not be too cynical. The fact is that the American
people has accepted, after a delay of three years and tens of thousands
of dead, what the advocates of peace around the word - including us here
in Israel - were saying already on the first day: that the war will cause
a disaster. That it will not solve any problem, but have the opposite effect.
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- The change will not be quick and dramatic. The US is
a huge ship. When it turns around, it makes a very big circle and needs
a lot of time - unlike Israel, a small speed-boat that can turn almost
on the spot. But the direction is clear.
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- Of course, in both new houses of Congress, the pro-Israeli
lobby (meaning: the supporters of the Israeli Right) has a huge influence,
perhaps even more than in the last ones. But the American army will have
to start leaving Iraq. The danger of another military adventure in Iran
and/or Syria is much diminished. The crazy neo-conservatives, most of them
Jews who support the extreme Right in Israel, are gradually losing power,
together with their allies, the crazy Christian fundamentalists.
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- As former Prime Minister Levy Eshkol once said: when
America sneezes, Israel catches cold. When America starts to recover, perhaps
there is hope for us, too.
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