Is Israel losing its army?
http://ww1.sundayherald.com/print37774With pilots refusing to attack Palestine, the top brass briefing against hard-line policies and outrage at conscription, the Israeli army is at crisis point. By Robert Tait in Jerusalem
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FOR more than half a century it has been a symbol of invincibility and the bedrock of the Jewish state. But now Israel’s much-vaunted army has been riven by a row with the political establishment over how to deal with the Palestinians.
So deep run the divisions, seasoned observers believe, that they provide a worrying harbinger for the disintegration of the army, an institution long regarded as the guardian of Israel’s existence, and even of Israeli society itself.
Tensions between the army and the right-wing coalition of Ariel Sharon, Israel’s Prime Minister, burst into the open after the army chief of staff, Lieutenant-General Moshe Ya’alon, gave what was intended to be an off-the-record briefing to three senior Israeli journalists last week. The resulting reports in Israel’s three main daily newspapers amounted to a devastating critique of policy in the occupied territories of Gaza and the West Bank.
Attributed to “senior military sources”, the articles cited deep unhappiness among the military’s top brass over the Israeli cabinet’s refusal to lift restrictions that would ease the lives of ordinary Palestinians. The present policy, characterised by closures and curfews and exacerbated by seizures of Palestinian land to build a so-called “security fence” through the West Bank, risked provoking an unprecedented explosion in the territories, the warnings said. In a particularly damning comment, the political leadership was accused of taking “tactical decisions” that run “contrary to our strategic interest”.
The criticism even extended to partly blaming the government for the downfall of the reform- minded Palestinian Prime Minister Mahmoud Abbas two months ago because of a “stingy” refusal to make more concessions. It also condemned September’s decision to “remove” Yasser Arafat from his leadership position in the Palestinian Authority – which only served to restore Arafat’s standing among his own people, in the military’s view.
As well as targeting Sharon, the remarks added up to a withering assault on defence minister Shaul Mofaz, who has staunchly opposed lifting restrictions on the territories on the grounds that they would increase the risk of suicide attacks.
As it became clear that the author of the criticisms was the chief of staff himself, Sharon and Mofaz moved into overdrive. Sharon’s office reported that he was “furious” and wanted Ya’alon fired, while Mofaz summoned his military underling to explain himself.
Yet, with the row assuming cacophonic proportions even by Israeli standards, it has become clear that Ya’alon’s observations have exposed a degree of alienation on the part of the army that neither the deployment of political spin nor the pulling of rank can conceal.
They go to the core of a growing belief in Israel that the hardline policy against the Palestinians has failed and that, with the government’s failure to stop “terrorism” and tackle a persistent economic crisis, the nation is dangerously adrift.
More:
http://ww1.sundayherald.com/print37774Israel is doing more than "losing its army."
Israel is committing national suicide, thanks to Sharon, for two reasons:
1. the Palestinians, like every other national liberation movement against colonialism in modern history, will defeat the occupying racist power; and,
2. Israel is sacrificing and destroying its own moral legitimacy as a nation, as evidenced by the corruption, the misery, and the total reliance on military solutions, which is, in fact, a sign of weakness, not strength.
Israel under Sharon cannot last.
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