"When blood boils and eyes are blinded", By Yossi Sarid
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/738530.html-snip-
I was no different. My blood boiled, too. How much can we take? Wild thoughts rushed through my mind, but at least I knew that I had to be cautious with respect to myself and my thoughts. Most of the people there were experts on force; I was an expert on its limits. It is so easy, in meetings like these, to be tempted into undertaking such promising operations, which will prove counterproductive. Nearly every operation looks promising on the map.
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One rainy day Yitzhak Rabin explained to me, as a prime minister and as a friend, why he had to look for every possible crack that would allow a settlement with Israel's neighbors. "It is impossible to stretch the muscles and the nerves of a nation for so many years. Sooner or later they become lax," he said, and added: "The Israel Defense Forces is a good army, all in all, but even the best army's strength is limited and its staying power is liable to decline, and it must not be subjected to too many tests, certainly not unnecessary ones."
One can always make excuses and say that it is our enemies who are testing us, but experience shows that we have sacrificed our sons on too many occasions.
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Deterrent capability consists not only of military might, but also of moral might. After all, Bush himself, and not the defeatist bleeding hearts, often talks in the name of the Moral Majority and world morality and cites it as the culmination of his vision. The trouble is that you cannot set rules of behavior and serve as an example to others when your own soldiers are daily attacking people who have done no wrong, torturing prisoners, sending suspects to "black holes" that are as far as East from West, and holding detainees indefinitely without judicial review. The president himself is violating human and civil rights by ordering mass wiretapping, by the wholesale penetration of private bank accounts and by unrestrained assaults on journalists who are faithfully doing their job. Most of these phenomena are of course not foreign to Israel, which encountered difficulties when, in the biblical metaphor, it did the deed of Zimri and demanded the reward of Pinhas. This is not deterrence; this is joining the evildoers and strengthening them and their arguments.
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Maybe the time has come to put the pistol into safety mode for a moment, back into the holster, and at high noon declare a worldwide Marshall Plan, so that the eternal losers will finally have something to lose. Only then will it be possible to isolate the viruses of violence and terrorism, for which quiet is quagmire and which in our eyes are themselves quagmire. And once isolated, it will be possible to eradicate them one day. "
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