Blogs > VALUES - THE COUNTRY WE WANT TO LIVE IN

Nov 28, 2004

VALUES - THE COUNTRY WE WANT TO LIVE IN



Much has been written about the current debate over values. I wrote about our game of Othello and here are the editors of the The Jerusalem Post chiming in ever so correctly:

If war is hell, then war against terrorists is an even deeper form of damnation. It is easy to minimize but difficult to imagine the demands on young soldiers who must fight an enemy that deliberately camouflages itself as civilians, and even uses civilians as human shields. Israeli soldiers have learned to trust no one. At one checkpoint, soldiers died because they rushed to assist a woman who seemed to be pregnant and fainting, but who turned out to be a suicide bomber. Children have been caught planting bombs and wearing suicide bomb belts. Even ambulances have been used to ferry weapons and terrorists. The tremendous difficulties, however, do not excuse any failure to do what can be done to avoid killing non-combatants, particularly children. A company commander has been indicted in connection with suspicions that he" confirmed the kill" of a young girl... Our objective, however, should not be to meet international standards that seem to only exist for us, but to meet our own standards for the country we want to be. We want to be a country in which every soldier, and certainly our company commanders and generals, regard ethical standards as an integral part of how they measure themselves and their military effectiveness... A soldier or commander who improvises his own open-fire regulations or gratuitously humiliates Palestinians at a roadblock should be seen as failing himself, his unit, his country and the cause he is fighting for.


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