Not Me, Said the General
Ma’ariv reports:
Several dozen soldiers, many discharged from the Paratroopers Brigade last week, protested in front of the Defense Ministry office in Tel Aviv Wednesday afternoon and demanded that their comrade and commander be released. The detained soldier, a staff sergeant, is accused of beating and abusing a Palestinian at the Hawara roadblock.
The protesters accused the advocate general’s office of placing the blame at the bottom of the ladder and not the top, “We were sent to the roadblock without training. It is the nation that should be charged”. They displayed signs reading, “Terrorism and the advocate general against IDF fighters” and “We’re at the roadblocks, you stay clean”.
The soldiers actually have a good point. They are blaiming the “nation” for putting them at the checkpoint without any clear cut orders of how to handle the situation, and without proper training. Such “vagueness” policy is definitely intentional – higher rank officers dont need to take responsibility for crimes they havent ordered. Thus the only people screwed are the soldiers at the checkpoint, not the generals at the Kyria.
Valid points all around.
The army prepares you to fight the enemy, not really to stand around a checkpoint and check papers for hours on end. But the Israeli army and police are a bit short of manpower, so it’s a real constraint.
I don’t blame the generals (Asaf, cute how you ‘assume’ that the paratroopers are blaming the army, very naive of you too), I too blame the short-sighted government who fails to accept that most of these large checkpoints (like the Schem/bh’d 3 one) are permanent fixtures since the Arabs have shown little sign of sincerity and the govm’nt doesn’t reorganize suitably like hiring ‘professional’ security guard companies and thereby freeing the soldiers up to continue hunting Palestinian Arab murders and their organizers.
josh – good point. what i meant by “assuming” is what they SHOULD assume. so i removed that remark.