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Fighting Terrorists While Preserving Morality

(Scripps Howard/Anchorage Daily News) Jay Ambrose - Israelis are doing their best to cope with Palestinian terrorists while preserving their own decency, their own sense of humanity. It's not easy, considering the nature of an enemy that focuses on the deliberate killing of civilians. The Israeli military ordinarily bends over backwards to avoid civilian casualties, even in some situations where it is put at life-threatening disadvantages by its reticence. Since September 2000, Israel has been subject to 24,000 attacks by terrorists who often use civilians as cover and observe no rules of warfare. Yet legal advisers must authorize virtually every Israeli attack before it takes place, the nation's supreme court supervises everything the military does, and soldiers are required to disobey orders that are manifestly illegal. It is difficult to spend much time among the citizens of this land without seeing that they are aiming to survive not just physically, but morally, as caring, civilized human beings, while under constant assault by a murderous enemy that wishes as many of them dead as possible.
2006-06-16 00:00:00
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