The moral-operational conflict
By Ze'ev Schiff
Haaretz, December 8, 2004
The incident at the village of Bara near Jenin - where an Islamic Jihad man, involved in the past in terror activities, was shot to death by Shayetet troops even though he was not armed - exposes an operational-moral argument between troops and junior officers who want to reach home safely from operations and the senior echelons worried that the troops are getting vague orders that come across with double meanings about how to behave in battle against their enemies.
Chief of Staff Moshe Ya'alon, Maj. Gen. Moshe Kaplinksi of the Central Command and Admiral David Besht were quick to conclude that the Shayetet troops behaved improperly and against IDF rules and the spirit of those rules.
The minute they decided to suspend the elite unit's activities in Judea and Samaria, at least for several days, they sent a message to all combatant soldiers that the troops behaved wrongly and should have conducted the battle differently.
The senior command, headed by Ya'alon, is worried, and justifiably so. But the junior commanders have tough questions that expose the depth of the internal debate. Two commanders who are directly involved in ongoing field operations explain that the case of the Islamic Jihad man is a good example of that debate. He was so involved in terrorism that the Palestinians had arrested him, but he escaped from jail and was back to his old ways, and the intent was to arrest him. When he tried to escape, the soldiers' gunfire wounded him. "I am not ready, under any circumstances," said one commander, "to endanger any of my soldiers and order them to approach his body when there might be an explosives belt and the wounded man might blow them up. My duty to protect my soldiers comes before anything else."
The problem is that the real argument need not be between the operational command level and the senior command. The occupation is expressed less in operations than in other contact with the population, such as the checkpoints. The greatest erosion is first of all in the contact between soldiers and Palestinians who have nothing to do with terror. The elderly, women and children who use the checkpoints; the theft of olive harvests without the thieves being put on trial; and stories like the one reported on Channel Two about the five Palestinian children who need a pair of IDF jeeps to accompany them to school because some settlers at an (illegal) outpost harass them on their way to school by setting dogs on them - and no legal action has been taken against the perpetrators.
Either way, the investigators of the incident near Jenin will not write the obvious conclusion: that the occupation corrupts, even when the orders are not vague.
