Has Israel’s army morality become immoral?
Has Israel’s army morality become immoral?

In 2013 it was Lt. Colonel Shalom Eisner, who was suspended from duty after striking a Danish anarchist holding a knife and blocking a highway near Jericho, as if the IDF was expecting its soldiers to submit to being beaten by “pacifists” who hinder the army’s activities and facilitate terrorism. Eisner was left on his own.

In 2015, it was Col. Israel Shomer, the commander of the Judea and Samaria Division’s Binyamin Brigade who shot and killed a Palestinian terrorist after his vehicle was ambushed. 

In 2016, it is the soldier who shot a Palestinian terrorist in Hevron. The soldier was arrested and the whole world, supported by Israeli media and political-military echelon, called it a “summary execution”, despite the fact that the soldier feared the terrorist was ready to detonate himself. Again, a proud Israeli soldier was left on his own.

I have been in Tel Rumeida, the tiny enclave where the attack took place, and only those who want deport its brave Israelis and surrender the Jewish Hevron can call for prosecuting this soldier.

Has Israel’s “purity of arms” become a joke of political correctness for a kind of self-righteous defeatism?
Israel’s morality cannot become the immorality of prolonging conflicts endlessly by preventing victory. But this is what Israel sometimes does.

The Jewish State is waging a just war against terrorism by fair means, proportionately, even too carefully, compared with global law enshrining the right to self-defense.

In Gaza, for example, the Israeli government never seeks victory, but yet another “ceasefire”. And in Judea and Samaria, IDF soldiers often answer with delay and weakness to terror threats against Israeli civilians, escaping from Palestinian Arab villagers, all this under surreal “rules of engagement”.

It is a kind of melancholic spiral epitomized by Israeli journalist Nahum Barnea’s column: “Come home”.

Has Israel’s “purity of arms” become a joke of political correctness for a kind of self-righteous defeatism? This military parody also doesn’t advance Israel’s cause in the international public arena: Israeli soldiers are already vilified as “child killers” and Muslim terrorists are justified as “resistors”.

The Israeli soldiers shouldn’t be “merciful” or busy showing “restraint”, but should destroy the enemies who come to kill Jews.

In the ghettos during the Holocaust, Jews discussed the morality of using weapons against the Nazi Germans. And it didn’t end well.