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It appears that promotion in the Israeli army increasingly depends on how violently and with brutality you have dealt with Palestinians in the"Occupation." To read the article in Haaratz click here.
The primary example of this brutality given by this particular author in this article is that the Israeli army recently killed fifteen armed men in Gaza. As I recall from media reports at the time, the men were all members of Hamas, and thus part of a vicious, murderous terrorist conspiracy. If that's the best a critic can come up with, it ain't much.
That said, surely one can find examples of Israeli brutality in its occupation of Gaza. An occupation involves the exercise of a lot of arbitrary power, and no one could seriously claim that Israelis are somehow immune from normal human corruption. The underlying question is who is responsible for the occupation. The occupation itself is a result of first, Israel's victory in the Six Day War, which was launched to save itsellf from a combined attacked by Jordan, Syria, and Egypt, and second, the refusal of these countries to negotiate peace following that war (leading to the 1973 Yom Kippur War). More recently, in 2000, PM Ehud Barak of Israel offered to end the occupation of Gaza completely, and withdraw from almost the entire West Bank, save a few areas populated almost entirely by Jews. No more occupation. The Palestinians said no. Reports suggest that it was Yassir Arafat personally, rejecting the advice of his closest advisors, who scuttled the deal. He refused to give up the "right of return," which would require Israel to permit up to 4 million Palestinians to flood into Israel, destroying it. Arafat, in other words, had not reconciled himself to a two-state solution, or, some say, was too afraid of being assassinated to accept any peace deal. The lack of "historical" memory about something that happened only three and a half years ago is astonishing. So many articles and offhand comments about the occupation as if its an intrinsic part of Israeli policy, when Israel offered to end it so recently.