Brig. Gen. Gal Hirsch (Alon Ron)

Let it not be said that the IDF doesn’t learn from its mistakes and draw the proper conclusions.* The new deputy commander of Israel’s “depth command,” designed to take the battle to the enemy far from Israeli territory, is Brig. Gen. Gal Hirsch (Hebrew). In 2006, he commanded the unit which was attacked by Hezbollah resulting in the capture and death of two IDF soldiers. This embarrassing debacle in turn led to the Lebanon War, an even more embarrassing debacle for Israel and the IDF.

The Almog Report (chaired by Doron Almog, another IDF commander embroiled in controversy), which examined IDF performance during the war, slammed him for his unit’s sloppy preparation and performance that betrayed weaknesses which enabled the Hezbollah attack.  Most notoriously, Hirsch bragged to the Israeli media that the IDF controlled the village of Bint Jabel the day before nine Golani troops were killed there in a massive firefight.  In this he wasn’t alone.  The IDF bragged it’d killed Hassan Nasrallah using a U.S. bunker buster when it hadn’t.  Dan Halutz also predicted his forces would bomb Lebanon back to the Stone Age.  Though they tried awfully hard, they didn’t quite succeed at that either thanks in part to Iranian funds which helped rebuild the south.

Almog planned to recommend that Hirsch be deprived of any future IDF command, but he resigned just before the document was released. This enabled him to rear his ugly head again as he has today, like a cat of nine lives.

One wonders how someone who resigned in disgrace for something close to dereliction of duty could be allowed to return in a role with a supposedly prestigious new unit which shows that the IDF is adapting to new technology and the changing world.  All this goes to confirm that the IDF is very good at recycling the same tired old faces which have failed in the past and much less successful at looking at objectives and strategy in new and unorthodox ways.  It would rather remain with the tried, failed and true than experiment with the new and unconventional.

One also wonders how a commander who couldn’t prepare for or prevent his own troops from being attacked and killed by a relatively primitive fighting force like Hezbollah will succeed in combat against far more sophisticated enemies like Iran.

His Hebrew Wikipedia article reveals rather ironically that he chaired a group, Noam, which commemorated a fallen IDF soldier, Eytan Belhassan.  No word on his chairing any similar committees in memory of Ehud Goldwasser or Eldad Regev.  Imagine how the parents of these two men and all the other soldiers under his command feel about this atrocious rehabilitation of failed commander.

* the Hebrew (l’hasik maskanot) for “drawing the [proper] conclusion” means “resignation”

Yediot reports: 'Uzi Arad leaked to the U.S. government the controller's report on the second Lebanon war--so Wikileaks reveals'

Several months ago, Uzi Arad, former senior Mossad officer and then national security advisor to prime minister Netanyahu rather abruptly announced he was quitting his post.  At the time, rumors and speculation were rife about the reasons.  But no one dreamed they would be as provocative as this.  Turns out that Arad leaked the Controller’s secret report on the second Lebanon war to a U.S. diplomat in Israel.  After a long Shin Bet investigation, Arad was identified as the source and Bibi fired him.

Uzi Arad (Yanai Yehiel)

The Israeli media is claiming that the attorney general declined to prosecute Arad because he resigned immediately and because the leak was inadvertent.  But I don’t understand how leaking a report can be “inadvertent.”  Besides, skilled Mossad operatives don’t leak material by accident.  It just doesn’t happen.

Arad made lots of enemies inside even Bibi’s staff with his abrasive style.  Not to mention the role in played in “running” Larry Franklin and the Rosen Aipac spy scandal.  So as far as I’m concerned he got his just desserts.  In fact, he probably deserves to be prosecuted.

If anyone can tell me what’s the difference between Uzi Arad’s leak and Anat Kamm’s and why he deserves a get out of jail card and she deserves nine years in prison, I’ll buy you an ice cream cone at my favorite gelateria.  In fact, Arad’s crime is worse since he leaked a secret government report about a serious Israeli military misadventure to a foreign government, while Kamm leaked her materials to an Israeli reporter.  Oh, that’s right, Anat was just a girl file clerk in a general’s office while Arad is a former senior Mossad officer and fixture of the security establishment.  That’s the difference.  No hypocrisy here.  H/t to Jerry Haber for that notion and also to Dena Shunra for finding the headline pictured above.

I’d be grateful to any reader who can locate the original Wikileaks cable if it’s been published anywhere or online.

I just discovered a Jerusalem Post story which makes the ridiculous claim that Arad’s sin was to discuss “electric and energy” issues with a reporter and inadvertently leak something he shouldn’t have.  But an Israeli friend had the clever idea of doing a Google search on the terms “Uzi Arad” and “atomic energy,” which reveals that the Jerusalem Post article was actually censored.  In it’s original form it said that he discussed “atomic energy” with the reporter.  It is possible that someone who discusses anything related to Israel’s nuclear program would be fired for such a leak, though I doubt this would happen if they were discussing purely civilian uses of nuclear power.

And a final note to the Rotterniks who may be apoplectic about yet another scoop they read here which offends them.  I don’t scare easily and death threats, even ones which indicate what caliber bullet you plan to put in my brain, don’t scare me.

Radioactive Israeli bunker-buster dropped on the Lebanese village of Khiam during the 2006 war

Aftenposten is reporting that a Wikileaks cable describes a November, 2009 meeting between a high-level delegation of Israeli and American political, military and intelligence operatives.  On the agenda was the U.S. delivery of 100 bunker-buster bombs to Israel meant to be used to assault Iran’s fortified nuclear facilities.  Those attending the meeting urged:

…That deliveries should take place in silence so that we could avoid allegations that the U.S. government was helping Israel to prepare for an attack on Iran, “the document noted…

From the discussion in the leaked document originating from the U.S. Embassy in Tel Aviv, it seems that the Israelis have obtained the bombs, by all accounts [approximately] 100, to break the Iranian nuclear program, the day they were to become necessary.

It has been widely reported that Israel would need such bombs to attack the Iranian facilities.  But I’d never heard any report that quantified what was in the Israeli arsenal to this level of specificity.

It is also known that the Bush Administration supplied the bombs to Israel to penetrate Hassan Nasrallah’s underground complex during the Lebanon war.  You’ll recall that Israeli generals were practically dancing on the rooftop of the Kirya believing they’d iced Nasrallah with one of the Big Boys.  Alas, they missed and Nasrallah merely amped up his image as a nine-lived Muslim hero who could withstand the best Israel and the U.S. could throw at him.  One wonders whether the same outcome could be in store if the U.S. and Israel were so foolish as to use those bombs against Iran.  Damage?  Yes.  A knocked out program or even one severely disabled?  Unlikely.  Damage to the U.S. and Israeli image in the world?  Beyond measure.

For more of what may be in store for Iran at the hands of the IAF, read this report of a radioactive bunker buster dropped on a Lebanese village during the 2006 war.  It can be assumed that Israel would love to drop such weaponry on any Iranian nuclear facility in order to render them toxic to human habitation and thus cause even greater damage to Iran’s nuclear program.

TV news video of armor moved to northern Israel during military manuevers

Israel has decided to rattle sabers after losing one of its senior officers in the tree-trimming incident on the Lebanese border. In a story that was removed from the IDF website, it published an article about the maneuvers, reporting that the army is engaged in a major exercise all the way from the central Beit Shean region to the far north, with troops and armor rolling down Highway 71.

Haaretz is also reporting a related escalation by Israel regarding armored vehicles sent to Shebaa Farms, one of the most highly disputed pieces of territory outside Jerusalem.  The Lebanese army was placed on high alert as a result.

A word of explanation before I cite Debka, a source I view as having no credibility whatsoever. Since I don’t have access yet to the original Maariv story and Debka seems to be recapitulating it, I’m going to quote Debka. It will likely be the only time I will ever do so here:

Monday night, the Israeli military unusually warned citizens and motorists they would have to put up with heavy military traffic on the northern highways leading from the center of the country to the shores of the Sea of Galilee, Upper Galilee and the Golan – in particular Route 71 linking Afulah and Bet Shean, and Routes 90 and 92 which circle the lake and reach the Galilee Panhandle. They were advised to avoid the roads leading up to the Israeli-Syrian and Israeli-Lebanese borders.

Nana has video of a TV news report showing the armor being ferried north.  The video makes clear that one of the tactical presumptions of the exercise is that Israel’s Arab population will rise up in opposition.  It is typical of the assumptions of Israeli Jews that their fellow Palestinian citizens will exhibit more hostility than they ever do.  And this plays nicely into the current level of paranoia within Israel toward the Arab minority as ginned up by the Shin Bet and other state organs.

The IDF exercise is certainly related to the border incident, and the follow-up threat by the U.S. Congress that it would cut federal funding of the Lebanese military. Today, Iran followed up on the U.S. threat by committing to fill any financial gap caused by our pull-out.

In my post about the tree-trimming incident, I warned that this could impact Israel-Iran relations, which themselves are a tinder-box. If you add Syria to the mix and the possibility of regional war, this is a place to which neither Israel nor the U.S. can want to go. The fact that the Israel lobby sycophants in Congress decided they had to rattle their sabers indicates that they are near-sighted eedjuts who can’t see beyond a millimeter in front of their faces as far as the policy implications of their braggadocio.

If this were the Knesset or the Israeli government, I would say such provocation might be deliberate since many in Israel WANT a war with Iran. But I don’t believe most of Congress (with the exception of the Ledeenites & other neocons there) want to provoke such a war. So they are merely ignorant fools, but not deliberate war provocateurs. But if there is an attack none of this will matter. Wars can just as easily be started inadvertently as deliberately.

According to an Israeli source who claims to have inside information about this operation (and which I could not independently verify), we should watch to see whether all this equipment returns to its home base or is maintained in border staging areas.  If it remains on the border, then we should begin to wonder to what possible use such equipment could be put in the event of an Israeli attack on a neighboring country.

To Obama and everyone else who has half a brain in their head (including a few in Israel I hope), I say: “Stand down.” Get the troops back in the barracks. Send the tanks home. Stop rattling sabers. If not, I will point out that most specialists in the subject believe that Nasser never intended to provoke the 1967 War. Yet his bellicose rhetoric played a role in bringing on hostilities (though of course the Israelis attacked first). There must not be military hostilities now under these circumstances.

Chances are Israel wishes to threaten the Lebanese. Haaretz reports that the IDF has already threatened to assassinate the Lebanese commander who ordered the sniper fire which killed the Israeli officer on the border. These manuevers are a follow-up to that. They also serve to remind the Syrians that Israel can do plenty of damage to them. And there can never be a downside in Israeli domestic politics from issuing menacing threats aimed at Iran. So the Highway 71 military exercise is a sort of Israeli Trifecta. Mass the troops and hopefully throw the fear of God into your three most potent neighbor/enemies.

Assaf Oron is a research statistician at the University of Washington.  He is also an Israeli peace and human rights activist who blogs at Daily Kos, the Villages Group, and was an IDF sarban, refusing to serve in the Occupied Territories.  Before he was named to his current academic post, he applied for a tenure track position as a statistician in Ben Gurion University’s department of industrial engineering.  He was told a year ago he was the department’s top candidate.  What he did not reckon was that his candidacy would generate a firestorm of controversy due to the machinations of a far-right member of the department nominations committee.

Prof. Israel David publicized internal departmental deliberations to smear BGU job candidate

Prof. Israel David is an industrial engineer who teaches operations research at BGU.  He was a major in the IDF before he retired after 11 years of service, and lives in an Orthodox suburb of Tel Aviv.  He has worked for the Israeli defense industry and a significant portion of his research is funded by either the IDF or military contractors.  Prof. David’s political screeds are published regularly by  Daniel Pipes-Campus Watch-type groups in Israel called Israel Academia Monitor and Isracampus.  They take upon themselves the weighty responsibility of ridding Israeli campuses of Arab-loving, Israel-hating faculty like Dr. Oron.  David’s views are also congenial to another far-right Israeli gang which targets Israeli academics with progressive political views, Im Tirzu.

Once David caught wind of Oron’s candidacy he went into high gear.  Sitting on the department appointments committee, he lobbied his colleagues hard to deny the former the position.  In meetings, he noted Oron’s political engagements and cited them as grounds for not hiring him.  It rapidly became clear to the department chair, Dr. Gadi Rabinowitz that David was biased against the candidate and would not restrict his consideration to academic-professional criteria alone.

So Rabinowitz disbanded the appointment committee, created a new one and left David out of it.  This infuriated the latter.  He went to the media.  He placed a story in Globes, the Israeli Wall Street Journal, in September 2009 for which he was an anonymous source.  The article called Oron “a second Neve Gordon.”

This was shortly after Prof. Gordon wrote a controversial op-ed in the Los Angeles Times supporting the global BDS movement.  After the latter published his article, the University’s president publicly invited Gordon to quit his position, which he uncooperatively refused to do.   Prof. Rivka Carmi explicitly stated that academic freedom did not give a professor the right to support such an enterprise which posed a danger to the State of Israel.

Undoubtedly, Prof. David was emboldened by Carmi’s attacks on Gordon and saw an opportunity to continue the controversy by opening a second front against Oron.

But that first Globes story did not drum up the brouhaha that the engineering professor expected so he wrote his own story under his own name at the News1 site.  In it, he quoted from confidential internal committee deliberations about Dr. Oron’s record, including his political views.  Here is just a nugget:

The department chair summarized the proceedings by saying that Dr. Oron matched the position’s professional requirements but that he suffers from other “personality problems” [so reads the transcript of the meeting].  The committee asked one of the senior members of the department to take advantage of his summer sabbatical in the U.S. by speaking with Oron and asking whether he’d be willing to restrain his political activism in order to better assimilate into the department.

In most universities (though apparently not BGU), this is among the most sensitive functions that faculty members and a department can perform.  Such transcripts are treated with sensitivity and guarded jealously.  In most universities where I have studied or worked, publishing such material publicly would be grounds for disciplinary action.  Not so Ben Gurion.  Apparently there, faculty can skewer job candidates, smear their reputation, dredge up personal matters and political involvement, and use them as ground for denying someone a job.

In his article David levels a full frontal assault on the notion of confidentiality and claims that the concept violates court rulings.  I have never heard of any such ruling either here in the U.S. or Israel and I’m reasonably certain that no court has ever ruled that enforcing confidentiality in such circumstances is a violation of law.  Further, he argues that non-academic and even political considerations are rightfully within the purview of such committee discussions.   In fact, I believe that David is here daring the University to either discipline him or take legal action against him.  Which of course it would never do.  A University dean confirmed to me that no disciplinary action is contemplated against David.

I also find it astonishing that an academic department would ask a job candidate to restrain his private political statements.  What business is that of anyone either in academia or outside?  Does this department and Ben Gurion as a whole not cringe in embarrassment at the thought that such a discussion occurred during deliberations concerning the hiring of a faculty member?

The University’s response to David’s onslaught against Dr. Oron was to claim that it “does not compromise the privacy of candidates.”  Which of course ignores the fact that a duly appointed member of a University committee did just that.  At no time during any of this madness did the University or department make any attempt to reach out to Oron, explain to him what was happening, or seek to mollify his concerns about the attack on his reputation.  It never defended him personally or encouraged him in any way.

In addition, David accused the University of Washington lecturer of “disseminating hate against Israel” and comparing the IDF and its officers with Nazis.  In truth, it was IDF officers themselves who made the comparison in a 2002 Haaretz article in anticipation of Operation Defensive Shield.  They admonished the army to learn from all previous military sieges in history including, specifically the Nazi assault on the Warsaw ghetto.  Oron merely called attention to this fact in his essay.  Here is the salient passage from the Haaretz article:

…One of the Israeli officers in the territories said… it’s justified and in fact essential to learn from every possible source. If the mission will be to seize a densely populated refugee camp, or take over the casbah in Nablus, and if the commander’s obligation is to try to execute the mission without casualties on either side, then he must first analyze and internalize the lessons of earlier battles – even, however shocking it may sound, even how the German army fought in the Warsaw ghetto.The officer indeed succeeded in shocking others, not least because he is not alone in taking this approach. Many of his comrades agree that in order to save Israelis now, it is right to make use of knowledge that originated in that terrible war, whose victims were their kin.

Frankly, I’ve been writing on this subject for a very long time and this article was new to me until I read the essay in which Oron quoted the article.  The idea that the army of the State of Israel should learn lessons from one of the most desperate and vicious assaults against Polish Jewry during the Holocaust era is not simply tin-earned or offensive, it is really a hillul ha-Shem, a desecration of God’s name.  Does the IDF really want to be compared to Hitler’s killing machine at the height of its vicious assault against the brave Jews of the Warsaw ghetto?

Returning to David’s accusations in his column, much like abortion and other socially conservative ideas have been exploited as wedge issues against Democrats, Israeli rightists manipulate the Holocaust as a wedge issue in an Israeli political context.  Like abortion for American conservatives, the Holocaust elicits a visceral response from Israelis.  Whenever you can tar your opponent with terms like those David exploits, you’re almost guaranteed to put him on the defensive.

Finally in his article, David excoriates Oron for supporting the military refuser movement and notes longingly that there are countries in the world (North Korea and Iran undoubtedly) where refusal to serve is punishable by death.

Then Prof. David upped the ante, suing Rabinowitz for libel for 100,000 shekels and claiming that in removing him from the appointment committee the chair had slandered his good name.  The rightist professor retained as counsel a leading far-right attorney who is also representing Im Tirzu in its libel lawsuit against an Israeli activist who created a Facebook group calling the group “fascist.”  David’s brief, all the while claiming his own reputation was damaged, slanders Oron savagely.

As part of his legal campaign, yesterday Haaretz published an op-ed by David which called BGU “Bir Gurion University,” as if the campus’ left-wing faculty wished to turn it into an Arab university.  The article was briefly available on the website’s main page, but now it’s been relegated to an inaccessible back page.  A slightly different version has also been published by Yediot Achronot.  Among the other smears David offers in Haaretz is to call a campus protest against the Gaza flotilla attack a “Nazi march.”  Finally, he accused, again without proof, the campus peace activists of calling a faculty member’s son who died a “hero’s death” in Operation Cast Lead, a “Nazi criminal.”  Even more shockingly, he calls the entire affair of Oron’s job candidacy and his own elimination from the appointment committee a “Nazi circus.”

In the year since he heard that he was the department’s top candidate, no one from the University had any contact with Oron, and certainly no one breathed a word of apology to him.  In April, no doubt goaded by Prof. David, the student body president quoted the school’s president as saying that his candidacy was dead.  Last week, on an Israeli Social Sciences listeserv, David waved this as evidence of the president’s support for his campaign.

After a year of absorbing these body blows to his reputation and not responding, Oron finally confronted his BGU nemesis on the listserv last week.  He simultaneously wrote Pres. Rivka Carmi expressing concern with the smearing of his reputation and her supposed connivance with David to undermine him.  Prof Rivka Carmi replied that she couldn’t possibly interfere with any candidate’s consideration by a department even if she wanted to do so.  She also added the rather mysterious statement that Oron’s candidacy was “no longer relevant.”

Curiously Dr. Rabinowitz, the department chair, wrote to Oron yesterday claiming that when Pres. Carmi inquired about the status of Oron’s candidacy Rabinowitz told her that he was still very much an active candidate.  The chair blames Oron’s supposed lack of communication with the department for his not getting the job, without realizing that after a candidate has been smeared it might be the responsibility of the department to contact him rather than the other way around.  I’d say the truth is that after David went on the warpath neither the University nor the department wanted to hire him and they can find many reasons in retrospect to blame the victim for not getting the job.

What is also troubling is that after all of this madness, the chair expresses disappointment that Dr. Oron addressed David’s charges against him in the Social Sciences listserv where the latter had attacked him.  It appears he would’ve preferred Oron to have remained silent and waited patiently for the school’s rejection letter.

A few days ago, Prof. David wrote triumphantly to Oron that the department had hired someone else for the job.  Which means that David has won, that academic bullying has won; that anyone at Ben Gurion who has a political vendetta against a young aspiring academic can vent their rage and frustration in the most public of settings.  They can sling mud at them, potentially harm their careers and no price will be paid.

In fact, after the University of Washington statistician defended himself on the Israeli listserv, an Israeli graduate student wrote to him that he had been denied a graduate fellowship by a Diaspora academic fund because his name appeared on the Israel Academia Monitor site.  Though I do not know for certain which group participated in the witch hunt, one of the best funded such academic programs is the American-Israeli Cooperative Exchange, whose director is former Aipac flack, Mitchell Bard.  Given Bard’s pro-Israel advocacy and ideological partisanship it wouldn’t surprise me in the least if he used Isracampus, Israel Academia Monitor or NGO Monitor as arbiters of who should be denied funding for academic research.

Returning to Dr. Oron, luckily he has a good position at the University of Washington.  Despite Prof. Israel David’s best efforts, one hopes he will fail in harming Oron’s career.  But imagine the next young scholar applying for a job at BGU who has ‘questionable’ affiliations in his or her background.  If such a person has several job interviews with Israeli academic institutions, why would they want to include BGU given the treatment afforded Oron?

Ben Gurion’s president honors academic freedom in the breach when it doesn’t cost her anything.  When the chips are down, she folds like a house of cards.  For example, when BGU Prof. David Newman was attacked by a British trustee of the University, who suggested he’d be happy if Newman died because the faculty member had aired views critical of Israeli policy in a TV documentary, Carmi remained mum.  140 of Newman’s colleagues demanded that she make a statement in support of Newman.  In the face of alienating a wealthy donor, she shut up.  Perhaps as a direct result of her pusillanimousness, Newman was recently named dean of the faculty of humanities and social sciences in a vote by his peers.

Instead of leadership and conviction, Pres. Carmi tests the political winds to see which way they are blowing and follows suit.  Currently in Israel there is a savage campaign against human rights and peace NGOs.  The legal political activism of activists is under assault as never before.  Astute individuals like David and Carmi understand this.  The first exploits it and the second acquiesces to it.  Neither response does either Israeli academia or Ben Gurion proud.

On a related note, yesterday the founder of Im Tirzu published a Haaretz column, The Fight for Academic Freedom, in which he contended, much like David Horowitz and Daniel Pipes in the U.S. context, that anti-Zionists have taken over Israeli campuses and that soon political correctness will prevent anyone not sharing such views from speaking their minds.  Assaf Oron’s case proves the absolute falseness of this claim.  If anything, it is the Im Tirzus and Israel Davids who are in the ascendancy on Israeli campuses, not the other way around.

Finally, what is one of the most obvious and elementary violations of both the candidate’s privacy rights  and academic due process is that the job he was applying for had absolutely no political component.  He was applying to be a statistician, not a political science or sociology professor.  As such, his personal political involvement had nothing to do with the job and should’ve been ruled treif as grounds for review or consideration.

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• Threatened prof wins out (thejc.com)

I recently did an interview with Bill Alford of Seattle’s Moral Politics community-access TV program. We spoke about the issues surrounding the Naveed Haq trial and his recent conviction for first degree murder in the 2006 attack on the Seattle Jewish federation, which left one employee dead and five seriously injured.

We grappled with whether Haq’s sentence was just in a moral and religious sense and the overall theme of Muslim-Jewish tension rooted in the intractable Israeli-Arab conflict.

I wanted to warn that I made an error during the interview in suggesting that in Haq’s first trial, which ended in a hung jury, he was charged with second degree murder. A local journalist reports to me that he was charged with first degree murder in both cases.

It’s a 30 minute interview. I hope you’ll watch it and suggest to others interested in Muslim-Jewish relations that they watch it too.

Dan Halutz's Facebook page

Psst, are you ready for some fun?  I’ll let you in on it on one condition: don’t blow the secret.  This is too good and funny to be true and I don’t want to spoil it by having anyone squeal.

I was looking through my Facebook profile and noticed one of my Friends had linked to a new page seemingly created by Dan Halutz.  He’s the former chief of staff of the IDF who commanded the ignominious Lebanon war while he wheeled and dealed with his stock broker over his investment portfolio.  Perhaps his distraction contributed to the IDF’s lackluster performance in the war.  I say lackluster not because the Israelis didn’t kill enough Lebanese.  They did that–somewhere around 1,200 died during the month of that war.  But the performance was lackluster in that over 100 Israelis were killed, all of northern Israel was a barren wasteland for a month, and Hezbollah was neither dislodged nor vanquished–all of which was promised by Halutz before and during the war.

Some Israeli jokester has created a spoof website that is deliciously ironic.  Not to mention that fabulous real photo of Halutz looking like George Clooney in a tank and yukking it up.  Here are some of the more hilarious Wall segments:

Personal Information

Activities:

Fighter jet pilot, soldier and general.
love extreme sports. modern weapons.
I also love jogging in the early morning, and play the African game of Homboh.

Interests:

exploding bodies
long range bombing, financial portfolio

Favorite Music:

the sound of napalm in the morning

Favorite Quotations:

What do you feel when you drop a 1-ton bomb on a residential building? “A slight bump to the (airplane’s) wing” – D. Halutz

About Me:

I have a Wikipage:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dan_Halutz

Some of the comments by Dan’s Friends are pretty funny:

Dan Halutz Going off-line untill monday. happy new year!

December 30, 2009 at 9:08pm ·

Mary Woodward

What? You putting extrajudicial murders on hold till then, Generalissimo??
PS Happy New Year to you, also, Sir.

December 30, 2009 at 11:12pm

Tom Vee

Happy New Year! Maybe your New Year’s resolution should be not to kill as many children, yes?

Dan Halutz I am Mr. Halutz and Dr. King

December 29, 2009 at 7:13am ·

Mary Woodward

And I am…confused, Generalissimo?

December 29, 2009 at 8:01am

Dan Halutz

On one hand, I am a war-machine, nothing but a bump in the wing. On the other hand, lately I started felling this pain, or a twitch, somewhere in my chest every time I blow a kid to smithereens.
Dr. Jakyl & Mr Hyde…

December 29, 2009 at 8:10am

Mary Woodward

Don’t break my heart, Generalissimo!

December 29, 2009 at 8:14am

What makes all of this even more delicious is the fact that real live right wing Israeli politicians have been hoodwinked by the satirical page and have “friended” Dan, including Likud MK Danny Dannon and settler extremist Moshe Feiglin. It’s all too funny for words: enjoy. But let’s keep this our little secret.

There are only three scenarios that will end the senseless carnage in Gaza:

1. the world community must coalesce around a demand for an immediate ceasefire.

2. the IDF blunders in an operation which ends in major loss of Israeli life.

3. the IDF blunders and kills a large number of Gaza civilians in a single catastrophic event.

Unfortunately, we do not yet have #1, though Barack Obama has ended his Sphinx like silence with the following almost Delphic oracle:

The loss of civilian life in Gaza and in Israel is a source of deep concern for me.

Regarding #2: yesterday, the IDF shelled a Gazan home full of its own troops killing three, wounding 20.  That unfortunately qualifies as the type of disaster which may make Israelis begin to take pause at the sacrifices their boys must make in this godforsaken enterprise.  Though I fear that this alone will not end the fighting.

Rushing survivor of UN school massacre to hospital (Ismail Zaydah/Reuters)

Regarding #3: sadly, today brings news of a Qana-like utter disaster.  The IDF fired mortar rounds directly at a UN school killing 42 and injuring 50 more several severely.  The death toll is expected to rise.  Since the UN had provided coordinates for all its Gaza facilities, the army knew it was targeting a UN building housing civilians.  This, like Qana is the disaster that will begin to turn the hearts of world opinion against Operation Solid Lead.

Israel claims mortars were fired at its forces from the school.  Even if this were true, the idea that you fire a mortar at a school crammed with 350 civilians is grotesque.  IF you want to take out 2 militants, you don’t do it by firing a mortar.  The officer who ordered the mortar round fired deserves the IDF medal for duncehood.  The only thing such weaponry guarantees is the result that we have now.

Reuters tells the story of the disaster differently:

…Two tank shells exploded outside the school, spraying shrapnel inside and outside the building where hundreds of Palestinians had sought refuge from the fighting.

I have given up hope that the Israeli government gives one solid crap about Palestinian life.  The only thing that moves them is world opinion.  That is why Obama’s statement, pathetic as it is, is a start.  It may loosen the tongues of some world leaders who’ve been sitting on the sidelines waiting to see which way the wind would blow.  For the fence-sitters, this would be the time to get off their duffs and tell their UN ambassadors to get into intensive diplomatic mode.  The time for stalling is long gone.  The UN needs to get down to business and end this thing.  Whatever Bush or Rice think is happening or that they wanted to happen, they have to end this before there is an even greater catastrophic failure.

Given Gaza is a densely populated urban enclave, you know that either the IDF is going to blunder into killing its own, Hamas is going to ambush a platoon and kill a significant number of troops, or Israel will kill massive numbers of civilians once again.  The Times even notes the IDF’s tendency toward such disasters:

Israel has been criticized in the past for the inaccuracy of its shelling…

In November 2006, Israel all but stopped firing tank and artillery shells into Gaza after 18 Palestinian civilians, most from one family, were killed by Israeli shells that missed their target and hit a row of houses in Beit Hanoun.

In another strike, during its conflict with Hezbollah in July 2006, Israel suspended air attacks in southern Lebanon for 48 hours after one of its air strikes on the southern town of Qana left dozens of civilians, many of them children, dead.

This had to happen.  The only question was how long it would take before it did.  I predicted it would from the very first day of the war.  It doesn’t take rocket science to know this.

What does take a bit of finesse is butting Hamas and Israeli heads together to engineer a ceasefire.  And I’ll repeat for the umpteenth time: the ceasefire needs to satisfy not only Israeli demands for an end to rocket fire.  It also needs to address Gaza’s need for a total end to the Israeli siege.  The blockade as a policy designed to topple Hamas has failed.  It has long been time to abandon it and take a different tack.

Latest death toll: 640 Gazans, five Israelis and five soldiers.