Israel Hayom..
11 December '12..
No soldier who goes through basic training learns how to use his rifle as a police baton. Not every soldier learns, in one course or another, how to extract himself from a violent mob. Soldiers' training is based on a legacy of victory in battle, helping their wounded comrades under fire, and using their weapons accurately to avoid hitting "uninvolved" parties. Each combat soldier learns how to hold a line while charging toward the enemy, so as not to mistakenly shoot a comrade in the back.
However, no soldier was ever taught to hold a line with lawyers, who represent those who claim to carry the badge of morality and peace but won't hesitate to stab him in the back.
In the not-so-distant past, all combat soldiers were willing and ready for the moment when they would need to use their weapons and put to use everything they had been prepared and trained for. In the not-so-distant past, each soldier knew that "returning home safely" was a goal achieved through the level of their soldiering skills, partly the result of the expertise acquired through training and partly due to the dependency on one's friends and commanders.
The reality has changed but no one bothered to give the soldiers the proper tools to deal with this impossible situation. Today, "coming home safely" means not falling victim to an embarrassing photograph taken by a terrorist with a camera for a weapon. This is what happens when you take skilled soldiers trained to win and ask them to be policemen and crowd dispersers.
Our short memory clouds our judgment and requires us to provide the correct guidance to our soldiers, our children, in the battle they are currently fighting. The lynch carried out by the crazed mob in Ramallah 12 years ago, in which two Israel Defense Forces reservists were horrifically murdered, has been all but forgotten. A little less than a year ago a father and son were killed when a rock thrown at their vehicle hit the father in the head while driving. They, too, have faded from our memories.
Instead of trying to appease the cameras and the "foreign" journalists, it is preferable to inform any person with a rock in his hand or behaving violently that the IDF doesn't intend to employ the same means. The IDF will hurt whoever threatens its soldiers, citizens or borders, and will do so with the use of live fire, precise and several times more painful. The soldiers who protect us and allow us to live normal lives need to know they were sent to carry out an achievable, legal mission, and will receive backup for any act that doesn't deviate from the purity of arms, without regard to the purity of the camera.
Two weeks ago was the end of Operation Pillar of Defense, in which Israel displayed its military, intelligence and moral might. The ink on the cease-fire deal has still not dried and Khaled Mashaal has already stoked the flames of hate to new levels in Gaza, clearly signaling what awaits Israel once Hamas also gains control in Ramallah. In the meantime, Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas continues to encourage the popular resistance, while we act as if the whole world is a stage and the soldiers are marionettes.
If our soldiers continue popping tear gas in the alleyways of Hebron and Kafr Qaddum, if we keep seeing soldiers flee enraged mobs because they aren't allowed to use their weapons — then please don't be alarmed if tomorrow morning we wake up to find tens of thousands of Palestinians marching toward Jerusalem, Jaffa and Beersheba.
The only way to face the future is to determine, now, that we won't allow the rock thrower of today to become tomorrow's suicide bomber, and for the stone hurled at us to be replaced with a rocket or roadside bomb.
Link: http://www.israelhayom.com/site/newsletter_opinion.php?id=3036
Zvika Fogel is an IDF brigadier-general (res.) and former chief of staff, Southern Command.
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