Army's ethics chief: Israel fair in Gaza

BY KARIN LAUB / ASSOCIATED PRESS WRITER

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NETANYA, Israel (AP) — In some ways, Brig. Gen. Eli Shermeister's job is one of the toughest in the Israeli army. Shermeister serves as the Israeli army's ethics watchdog, at a time when the military is under international scrutiny for its behavior during its Gaza invasion.

That puts him in the front line of a war of words that extend into the white-hot realm of "war crimes," "anti-Semitism," "atrocities" and "blood libel." But his job is made easier by the fact that most Israelis support his contention that they have nothing to be ashamed of.

"I didn't see in the Gaza operation anything that can teach us or show us that something in the moral attitude of the IDF (military) was ... changed or spoiled," Shermeister said in an interview with The Associated Press at an officers' school in Netanya, north of Tel Aviv. The 3-week Gaza war has widened the gap between Israel's self-image and how it is perceived abroad.

The wave of international criticism, and an imminent U.N. investigation, have deepened a sense here that Israel is being treated unfairly and held to impossible standards. Critics in Israel as well However, the war that took more than 1,000 lives by both sides' count and left entire neighborhoods in rubble has a few Israeli critics, too.

They say their countrymen are too quick to brush aside tough questions arising from the military's overwhelming use of force in Gaza, including mounting hundreds of bombing raids and firing imprecise artillery shells in one of the most crowded places on Earth.

They say Israeli leaders haven't posed the right question to the public — how much force and loss of civilian life is it willing to sanction to stop the rockets that Gaza militants had been firing at Israeli communities for eight years. The offensive, launched Dec. 27, had been intended as a punishing blow to Hamas, similar to what Israel unleashed in the 2006 war in Lebanon.

The campaigns sent a message, both to Gaza's Hamas rulers and Lebanon's Hezbollah guerrillas, that rocket attacks would draw a harsh response.

Deterrence, say Israeli military experts, is the key weapon in Israel's arsenal; the military is developing a shield against short-range rockets and missiles, but it would only be deployed next year at the earliest, and will likely be expensive and only partially effective. One army officer, Maj. Gen.

Gadi Eizenkot, has spoken of the "Dahiya doctrine," named after the Beirut suburbs considered a Hezbollah stronghold where Israel destroyed dozens of buildings in 2006. "We will wield disproportionate power against every village from which shots are fired on Israel, and cause immense damage and destruction.

From our perspective, these are military bases," Eizenkot told the daily Yedioth Ahronoth in October. "This isn't a suggestion. This is a plan that has already been authorized."

How this transcription was made

Date confirmed on the page (folio). Filed under the archive’s spelling; the page prints “The Sun (Arkansas)”. folio reads THE JONESBORO SUN, SUNDAY, APRIL 12, 2009, page B11

Context added by this archive

Crosshead in the story reads "Critics in Israel as well". The structure of the page is worth recording in itself: a wire story headlined on the army's own ethics chief saying Israel was fair in Gaza, which then, five paragraphs later and in the same narrow column, prints the Dahiya doctrine in the general's own words with the word "disproportionate" in it.

The AP does not editorialise on the contradiction; it simply sets the two next to each other. Also quoted in the story: Yedioth Ahronoth.

Cite this clipping

"Army's ethics chief: Israel fair in Gaza," The Jonesboro Sun, 12 April 2009, p. B11. Covering Palestine archive, CP-2009-040. https://coveringpalestine.org/archive/cp-2009-040