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Sunday, September 1, 2002
12:14 a.m.
'Palestinians a cancer' - Israeli military chief
The Jonathan Sacks interview got bigger play in the UK, naturally. But that given by IDF Chief of Staff Moshe Ya'alon to Ha'aretz is not without interest.
The tone is rather different than that of the usual Israeli boilerplate dished up on British (and, no doubt, other Western) news broadcasts by the attack-dogs of the Israeli Foreign Ministry and the like (the Palestinian equivalents. by comparison, are generally toothless, mangy curs!). The general is altogether less slick - but none the less forceful for that.
He characterises the Palestinian threat as a 'cancer': up till now, the IDF have been treating the threat with chemo - but
"There are all kinds of solutions to cancerous manifestations. Some will say it is necessary to amputate organs."
The threat of a step-change in the intensity of IDF operations - to whatever level - is not exactly veiled.
And he says that Israel is fighting a war of national survival. To the question
".....the goal of Arafat and of Fatah is to liquidate Israel by stages?"
he replies "Of course."
The implication is clear: the methods used in war (in practice, if not in international law) are proportionate to the threat. In a war of national survival (as, for example, the UK in World War 2), no holds are barred. (Whereas, facing an IRA-type insurgency, methods of striking back are limited - carpet-bombing of Dublin was never on, even in 1969-70 period when the Irish government were aiding the IRA, whatever the immediate satisfaction to those on the mainland.).
Ya'alon also opposes the ideas of unilateral withdrawal from all or part of the Occupied Territories; and of building a fence to protect Israel proper - on the grounds that both are essentially defeatist, and will only encourage Palestinian resistance.
And he's afraid of impatience amongst Israelis:
"Nowism is the mother of all sins."
And more generally with the Israeli public:
"There is a deep psychological problem here: Because it is difficult for people to apprehend a reality that they do not control, it is more convenient to blame the Israeli side. Or the army. Or the chief of staff. Or whoever is reporting to them that the reality is not exactly the way they would like it to be."
[I'm not quite clear what precise 'problem' he's talking about. Something more than just impatience with the lack of any available means to solve the conflict, presumably: he's clear elsewhere in the interview that this is a war of attrition in which the Palestinians are counting on a high enough Israeli body count killing their will to fight (a sort of Vietnam syndrome).
"There is no reason for gloom," he says about Israel's resources to defeat the Palestinian, and more general Arab, threat: but evidently he does not think his sanguine view on this is necessarily widely shared.]
And, at the end, there he talks about the Shehadah 'assassination by one-ton bomb': the man is by turns a sentimentalist,
"The dead children are hard for me."
and a nice calculator of collateral damage: the target's wife was deemed expendable; and if the neighbours ended up
"wounded but not killed,"
that was fine and dandy too.
He says "I work constantly with the resolution of a surgeon's scalpel so as not to hurt innocent people."
And I thought we were still at the chemo stage.......
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