Hitler's Birrthday in Ukraine

On April 20, 2015, the birthday of Adolf Hitler, the United States government is sending American troops to train units of the Ukrainian National Guard. How appropriate.

The U.S. mass media has lionized the new Ukrainian government as defenders of democracy and freedom. That always rang false to an old Jew like me. After all, my grandparents, left Odessa at the beginning of the Twentieth Century to avoid yet another pogrom in the freedom loving Ukraine.  

And then, during World War II, many Ukrainians joined the German Waffen SS in the extermination of Jews.  Baba Yar is the most famous of these. In this case, over 30,000 Jewish men, women and children were killed in a two day period by the Nazis and their Ukrainian nationalist supporters. The Ukrainians were responsible for seeing that the Jews were kept in line on the way to the pits where they were forced to lie down and then machine gunned. Anybody who resisted or hesitated was kicked or clubbed by the Ukrainian collaborators. 

Baba Yar was one of many Ukrainian sites where Jews were brought and killed as part of the “final solution.” In Odessa, Romanian nationalists led in the murder of over thirty thousand Jews. 

Seems like the Ukrainian nationalists were the most zealous in carrying out the Nazi policies of extermination. In Stepan,  Lviv,  and Zhytomyr, Ukrainian nationalists led in the killing of Jews. A Ukrainian division of the SS assisted the Waffen SS in its extermination policies.

But collaboration with the Nazis was the province of the ultra-nationalist Ukrainians. More than 4.5 million Ukrainians joined the Red Army to fight Nazi Germany, and more than 250,000 served in Soviet partisan paramilitary units.

Fast forward to the demonstrations that overthrew the government of Viktor Yanukovich. Not to the tar the movement with the brush of anti-Semitic atrocities, there were members of the demonstrations who were, in fact, interested in having a democratic government. Some of them, by the way, were hooted, harassed and beaten by the ultra-right nationalist demonstrators there.

So what does this all have to do with Hitler’s birthday and the government of Ukraine? The government of Ukraine is riddled with the heirs of Nazi collaborators. I know that sounds very Putinesque, but the facts do speak. 

A few points: During the demonstrations in Maidan Square that led to the doppling of Yankukovich,  Ukrainian nationalists draped Confederate flags (that’s right, American confederate flags), inside the occupied Kiev’s city hall. They hoisted white power symbols and Nazi SS symbols over a toppled statue of V.I.Lenin. They destroyed a memorial to Ukrainians who died fighting the Nazis in World War II.  Sieg Heil salutes and the Nazi Wolfsangel symbol were common in the demonstrations and in the far right autonomous zones established during the protests. Hardly auspicious.

            The new Ukrainian “freedom loving” government includes the ultra-nationalist Svoboda party led by Oleh Tyahnbok. This fellow has called for the liberation of Ukraine from the “Muscovite-Jewish mafia.”  This fellow is clear about his sympathies. After the conviction in 2010 of the Ukrainian  Nazi death camp guard John Demjanjuk, known by the inmates as “Ivan the Terrible,” Tyahbok rushed to Germany to declare that this man, responsible for the death of thirty thousand people, was a “hero”.  Tyahnbok’s party holds thirty-seven seats in the Ukrainian parliament. (His deputy, Yury Mykhalchyshny, has founded a think tank called the “Joseph Goebbels Political Research Center,” in honor of the Nazi Minister of Propaganda).

            The Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland has enjoyed “friendly” meetings with the Svoboda leadership. “The Euro-Maidan movement has come to embody the principles and values that are the cornerstones for all free democracies,” Nuland proclaimed.

Two weeks later, as reported by Max Blumenthal, in the online blog, Alternet, 15,000 Svoboda members held a torchlight ceremony in the city of Lviv in honor of Stepan Bandera, a World War II-era Nazi collaborator who led the pro-fascist Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN-B). Lviv, the city renowned for its vigorous involvement in the World War II extermination of Jews,  has become the epicenter of neo-fascist activity in Ukraine.  Elected Svoboda officials have waged  a campaign to rename its airport after Bandera and successfully changing the name of Peace Street to the name of the Nachtigall Battalion, an OUN-B wing that participated directly in the Holocaust. “’Peace’ is a holdover from Soviet stereotypes,” a Svoboda deputy explained.

The ultra-nationalists are in power in the contemporary Ukrainian government. Unlike Germany there has been no official  apology for the extermination of Jews and Gypsies by Ukrainian collaborators. Unlike Germany schoolchildren do not visit the sites, there is no memory. No memory of the victims.  Instead, significant and powerful elements of the Ukrainian government support the memory of those who committed the atrocities rather than those who perished.

 All of this is quite personal. After all, if my grandparents had not left the Ukraine in 1906,   I might have been one of those Jewish children shot dead by the “freedom loving” Ukrainian nationalists.

Hitler’s birthday! What an auspicious time for the United States to send military aid to the “national guard” of Ukraine.

In Memoriam: Lieutenant-Colonel Nathan B. Bluestone, M.D.

On August 26, 1948, Nathan B. Bluestone, M.D. ended his suffering that began four years earlier on the fields of France. My father was a country doctor. His love was medicine and he tended to the ill and wounded. It was his calling. In the small upstate town where he practiced he delivered babies in the office house where we lived. He drove out to remote farms to give the five daughters of a farmer their vaccinations. He healed broken bones and cut foreheads. But nothing prepared him for the slaughter that he encountered after he landed with the fourth wave at Normandy in June 1944.

My experience of the war was my father's absence. He would send my mother and I funny little letters that would have sections blacked out. This was V-mail. I always thought it was strange that other people would read my father's letters to me. But the censors did read them and blocked out areas that they felt were sensitive to national security or something.

He wrote me a continuing story about a friendly amoeba. There even were illustrations. In later years when I visited India I found it strange that people feared amoebas as much as they did.

To my mother and aunts and grandparents he sent letters and watercolors. He was an artist as well as a physician and would, in those rare moments when he had a minute or two, paint a watercolor of where he was. We cherished those postcard size pictures painted with love, for they were not only beautiful but they represented a part of the artist that could not be expressed in words.

Then, for three months, we heard nothing. No letters came. No pictures came. Nothing came. And with each day my mother became more and more distraught.

This was the time when the Germans made a desperate attempt to counterattack the American forces.

This was the time when the Germans made a desperate attempt to counterattack the American forces. The German forces under the command of Field Marshall Gerd von Runstedt had encircled the American forces centered at Ardennes, France. This was the Battle of the Bulge. And for over a month, during the bitter winter, American and German soldiers slaughtered each other. Nineteen thousand American soldiers died. Six armies locked in battle in the coldest winter on record. Over a million men fought in what was to be recorded as the worst battle of World War II.

Torn, ripped, cut and blown apart, young men passed through the field hospital that my father headed. It was X-ray after X-ray after X-ray. It was an assembly line of death and dying. There was no time for the physicians to protect themselves from the deadly radiation. And it was this radiation that caused the skin cancer that later was to take my father's life.

When he returned from that war I was six years old. My father rarely spoke to me about that war, only once, that I remember, to joke that he had a rifle in the back of his jeep and that's where it stayed. He was a healer, not a killer. He even received a Bronze Star for bravery and never told me what he did. It was half a century later, when my brother and I were cleaning out my mother’s house that I found the citation from the Major General to my father and the reasons. My father received the Bronze Star for his service tending to the wounded from France through Belgium and Germany, often on the front lines under enemy fire. He was a lieutenant-colonel. He was chief of surgery. And he went to the front lines, not as a hero, but as a healer. He knew that, for a wounded soldier, the journey from the front lines to the field hospital could mean the difference between life and death. He was just doing his job.

My memories of Dr. Nathan Bluestone are fragmentary and impressionistic. Mostly I remember how we would sing together in the car, my father and I. "I've Got Sixpence", "Someone's in the Kitchen with Dinah" and rounds and rounds.

Much later a psychic told me that my father had been deeply wounded by his inability to heal in the face of such overwhelming carnage. His soul, as much as his body, had been gravely affected. That rings true.

We moved back into the office house and my father continued the practice that he had left four years earlier. But the cancer, first on his finger, spread and slowly, he began to die. Bit by bit the doctors cut away my father. First they took his finger. Then they took his right breast. And then he died.

It has been almost sixty-five years since my father died. I have grown far from that nine year old boy who couldn't understand why such a thing was possible. And yet, after all this time, I still cry at the loss.

On this day each year we are called upon to remember those who have died in the service of their country. Politicians give speeches, flags are unfurled and hot dogs are consumed.

What we tend to forget is what General William Tecumseh Sherman once reminded a group of young men. "War is hell." And the hell is for the living, for those who survive the deaths of their beloveds as much as it is for those who die on the fields of battle or in the hospitals.

What we tend to forget is that war leaves lots of fatherless sons and daughters. Today, for example, thousands of American and Iraqi  and Afghani sons and daughters will grow up without their fathers and mothers. And for what?

What we tend to forget are the children who are left behind. We forget that fifty years from now there will be adults who still grieve for the loss of a father or a mother--who still cry at the remembrance. Let us truly remember

In Defense of Torture

Sometimes I wonder if I have stepped into a perverse variation of “Alice Through the Looking Glass.” Can it actually be happening? Can it be that in this year 2009 there are people defending torture? Can it?

The former Vice President of the United States defends pushing people’s heads under water until they almost drown. He defends stripping people naked and forcing them to undergo sleep and sensory deprivation. He defends using dogs, suffocation and other forms of “enhanced interrogation.” He supports torture of other human beings..

Now we know that this man, this former vice president of the United States is crude. One merely needs to look at him to see that his ugliness is more than skin deep. The architects of torture must be crude. There is no room for sensitivity. This former vice president of the United States was, after all, the man who told a Senator he disagreed with to “Go fuck yourself.” And that on the floor of the United States Senate while this vice president was still serving as the presiding officer. What a disgusting little man he is. That the media was not up in arms about this is just another example of how ineffective the media have become.

So let’s start with a basic. Torture of another human being is unacceptable. It is unacceptable morally. It is unacceptable according to the relatively civilized “rules of war” that have been supported by countries around the world, including our own.

The lawyers of the last administration who have found the legal parsing to support torture are of the same category as the lawyers who helped build the legal system of the Third Reich. The Deputy Attorney General of the United States famously declared that it would be justified to crush the testicles of a child to get information from his parent. To split hairs on torture is in the same genre as arguing the validity of race law and extermination.

Marx once called this period in human history the pre history of human beings. When one listens to the little man who was once the vice president of the United States we can see what he meant. This little man and all he represents is barbaric. That he still has an audience is both remarkable and tragic.

It’s too bad that so much of the discussion has centered on the effectiveness of torture. That misses the point. The point is that if we begin to act like Nazi’s, just what is it that we are defending?

On this Memorial Day weekend let us remember that in World War II, American and Allied forces died to destroy the very mentality that justified torture. Between fifty to seventy million people died in that struggle. There were almost a million American casualties in that war.

Our men and women died in a struggle to defeat fascism and the barbarism of Hitler and his group of Nazis. People like the former vice president spit on the legacy of that war.

Let us remember what this country is about. Let us remember those who have given their lives so that ugly little men cannot spread their barbarism.

Speaks for Itself

Haaretz, founded in 1918, is Israel's oldest newspaper. This appeared on March 20,2009. Once again the criticism of the Israeli army's attack on Gaza is greater in Israel than in the United States. That, in itself, is disgraceful.

Shooting and crying'

By Amos Harel

Tags: IDF, Israel News, Gaza

Less than a month after the end of Operation Cast Lead in the Gaza Strip, dozens of graduates of the Yitzhak Rabin pre-military preparatory program convened at Oranim Academic College in Kiryat Tivon. Since 1998 the program has prepared participants for what is considered meaningful military service. Many assume command positions in combat and other elite units of the Israel Defense Forces. The program's founder, Danny Zamir, still heads it today and also serves as deputy battalion commander in a reserve unit. The previous Friday, February 13, Zamir had invited combat soldiers and officers who graduated the program for a lengthy discussion of their experiences in Gaza. They spoke openly, but also with considerable frustration. Following are extensive excerpts from the transcript of the meeting, as it appears in the program's bulletin, Briza, which was published on Wednesday. The names of the soldiers have been changed to preserve their anonymity. The editors have also left out some of the details concerning the identity of the units that operated in a problematic way in Gaza.

Danny Zamir: "I don't intend for us to evaluate the achievements and the diplomatic-political significance of Operation Cast Lead this evening, nor need we deal with the systemic military aspect [of it]. However, discussion is necessary because this was, all told, an exceptional war action in terms of the history of the IDF, which has set new limits for the army's ethical code and that of the State of Israel as a whole.

"This is an action that sowed massive destruction among civilians. It is not certain that it was possible do have done it differently, but ultimately we have emerged from this operation and are not facing real paralysis from the Qassams. It is very possible that we will repeat such an operation on a larger scale in the years to come, because the problem in the Gaza Strip is not simple and it is not at all certain that it has been solved. What we want this evening is to hear from the fighters." Aviv: "I am squad commander of a company that is still in training, from the Givati Brigade. We went into a neighborhood in the southern part of Gaza City. Altogether, this is a special experience. In the course of the training, you wait for the day you will go into Gaza, and in the end it isn't really like they say it is. It's more like, you come, you take over a house, you kick the tenants out and you move in. We stayed in a house for something like a week. "Toward the end of the operation there was a plan to go into a very densely populated area inside Gaza City itself. In the briefings they started to talk to us about orders for opening fire inside the city, because as you know they used a huge amount of firepower and killed a huge number of people along the way, so that we wouldn't get hurt and they wouldn't fire on us. "At first the specified action was to go into a house. We were supposed to go in with an armored personnel carrier called an Achzarit [literally, Cruel] to burst through the lower door, to start shooting inside and then ... I call this murder ... in effect, we were supposed to go up floor by floor, and any person we identified - we were supposed to shoot. I initially asked myself: Where is the logic in this? "From above they said it was permissible, because anyone who remained in the sector and inside Gaza City was in effect condemned, a terrorist, because they hadn't fled. I didn't really understand: On the one hand they don't really have anywhere to flee to, but on the other hand they're telling us they hadn't fled so it's their fault ... This also scared me a bit. I tried to exert some influence, insofar as is possible from within my subordinate position, to change this. In the end the specification involved going into a house, operating megaphones and telling [the tenants]: 'Come on, everyone get out, you have five minutes, leave the house, anyone who doesn't get out gets killed.' "I went to our soldiers and said, 'The order has changed. We go into the house, they have five minutes to escape, we check each person who goes out individually to see that he has no weapons, and then we start going into the house floor by floor to clean it out ... This means going into the house, opening fire at everything that moves , throwing a grenade, all those things. And then there was a very annoying moment. One of my soldiers came to me and asked, 'Why?' I said, 'What isn't clear? We don't want to kill innocent civilians.' He goes, 'Yeah? Anyone who's in there is a terrorist, that's a known fact.' I said, 'Do you think the people there will really run away? No one will run away.' He says, 'That's clear,' and then his buddies join in: 'We need to murder any person who's in there. Yeah, any person who's in Gaza is a terrorist,' and all the other things that they stuff our heads with, in the media. "And then I try to explain to the guy that not everyone who is in there is a terrorist, and that after he kills, say, three children and four mothers, we'll go upstairs and kill another 20 or so people. And in the end it turns out that [there are] eight floors times five apartments on a floor - something like a minimum of 40 or 50 families that you murder. I tried to explain why we had to let them leave, and only then go into the houses. It didn't really help. This is really frustrating, to see that they understand that inside Gaza you are allowed to do anything you want, to break down doors of houses for no reason other than it's cool. "You do not get the impression from the officers that there is any logic to it, but they won't say anything. To write 'death to the Arabs' on the walls, to take family pictures and spit on them, just because you can. I think this is the main thing in understanding how much the IDF has fallen in the realm of ethics, really. It's what I'll remember the most." "One of our officers, a company commander, saw someone coming on some road, a woman, an old woman. She was walking along pretty far away, but close enough so you could take out someone you saw there. If she were suspicious, not suspicious - I don't know. In the end, he sent people up to the roof, to take her out with their weapons. From the description of this story, I simply felt it was murder in cold blood." Zamir: "I don't understand. Why did he shoot her?" Aviv: "That's what is so nice, supposedly, about Gaza: You see a person on a road, walking along a path. He doesn't have to be with a weapon, you don't have to identify him with anything and you can just shoot him. With us it was an old woman, on whom I didn't see any weapon. The order was to take the person out, that woman, the moment you see her." Zvi: "Aviv's descriptions are accurate, but it's possible to understand where this is coming from. And that woman, you don't know whether she's ... She wasn't supposed to be there, because there were announcements and there were bombings. Logic says she shouldn't be there. The way you describe it, as murder in cold blood, that isn't right. It's known that they have lookouts and that sort of thing." Gilad: "Even before we went in, the battalion commander made it clear to everyone that a very important lesson from the Second Lebanon War was the way the IDF goes in - with a lot of fire. The intention was to protect soldiers' lives by means of firepower. In the operation the IDF's losses really were light and the price was that a lot of Palestinians got killed." Ram: "I serve in an operations company in the Givati Brigade. After we'd gone into the first houses, there was a house with a family inside. Entry was relatively calm. We didn't open fire, we just yelled at everyone to come down. We put them in a room and then left the house and entered it from a different lot. A few days after we went in, there was an order to release the family. They had set up positions upstairs. There was a sharpshooters' position on the roof. The platoon commander let the family go and told them to go to the right. One mother and her two children didn't understand and went to the left, but they forgot to tell the sharpshooter on the roof they had let them go, and it was was okay and he should hold his fire and he ... he did what he was supposed to, like he was following his orders." Question from the audience: "At what range was this?" Ram: "Between 100 and 200 meters, something like that. They had also came out of the house that he was on the roof of, they had advanced a bit and suddenly he saw then, people moving around in an area where they were forbidden to move around. I don't think he felt too bad about it, because after all, as far as he was concerned, he did his job according to the orders he was given. And the atmosphere in general, from what I understood from most of my men who I talked to ... I don't know how to describe it .... The lives of Palestinians, let's say, is something very, very less important than the lives of our soldiers. So as far as they are concerned they can justify it that way." Yuval Friedman (chief instructor at the Rabin program): "Wasn't there a standing order to request permission to open fire?" Ram: "No. It exists, beyond a certain line. The idea is that you are afraid that they are going to escape from you. If a terrorist is approaching and he is too close, he could blow up the house or something like that." Zamir: "After a killing like that, by mistake, do they do some sort of investigation in the IDF? Do they look into how they could have corrected it?" Ram: "They haven't come from the Military Police's investigative unit yet. There hasn't been any ... For all incidents, there are individual investigations and general examinations, of all of the conduct of the war. But they haven't focused on this specifically." Moshe: "The attitude is very simple: It isn't pleasant to say so, but no one cares at all. We aren't investigating this. This is what happens during fighting and this is what happens during routine security." Ram: "What I do remember in particular at the beginning is the feeling of almost a religious mission. My sergeant is a student at a hesder yeshiva [a program that combines religious study and military service]. Before we went in, he assembled the whole platoon and led the prayer for those going into battle. A brigade rabbi was there, who afterward came into Gaza and went around patting us on the shoulder and encouraging us, and praying with people. And also when we were inside they sent in those booklets, full of Psalms, a ton of Psalms. I think that at least in the house I was in for a week, we could have filled a room with the Psalms they sent us, and other booklets like that. "There was a huge gap between what the Education Corps sent out and what the IDF rabbinate sent out. The Education Corps published a pamphlet for commanders - something about the history of Israel's fighting in Gaza from 1948 to the present. The rabbinate brought in a lot of booklets and articles, and ... their message was very clear: We are the Jewish people, we came to this land by a miracle, God brought us back to this land and now we need to fight to expel the gentiles who are interfering with our conquest of this holy land. This was the main message, and the whole sense many soldiers had in this operation was of a religious war. From my position as a commander and 'explainer,' I attempted to talk about the politics - the streams in Palestinian society, about how not everyone who is in Gaza is Hamas, and not every inhabitant wants to vanquish us. I wanted to explain to the soldiers that this war is not a war for the sanctification of the holy name, but rather one to stop the Qassams." Zamir: "I would like to ask the pilots who are here, Gideon and Yonatan, to tell us a little about their perspective. As an infantryman, this has always interested me. How does it feel when you bomb a city like that?" Gideon: "First of all, about what you have said concerning the crazy amounts of firepower: Right in the first foray in the fighting, the quantities were very impressive, very large, and this is mainly what sent all the Hamasniks into hiding in the deepest shelters and kept them from showing their faces until some two weeks after the fighting. "In general the way that it works for us, just so you will understand the differences a bit, is that at night I would come to the squadron, do one foray in Gaza and go home to sleep. I go home to sleep in Tel Aviv, in my warm bed. I'm not stuck in a bed in the home of a Palestinian family, so life is a little better. "When I'm with the squadron, I don't see a terrorist who is launching a Qassam and then decide to fly out to get him. There is a whole system that supports us, that serves as eyes, ears and intelligence for every plane that takes off, and creates more and more targets in real-time, of one level of legitimacy or another. In any case, I try to believe that these are targets [determined according to] the highest possible level of legitimacy. "They dropped leaflets over Gaza and would sometimes fire a missile from a helicopter into the corner of some house, just to shake up the house a bit so everyone inside would flee. These things worked. The families came out, and really people [i.e., soldiers] did enter houses that were pretty empty, at least of innocent civilians. From this perspective it works. "In any case, I arrive at the squadron, I get a target with a description and coordinates, and basically just make sure it isn't within the line of our forces. I look at the picture of the house I am suppose to attack, I see that it matches reality, I take off, I push the button and the bomb takes itself exactly to within one meter of the target itself." Zamir: "Among the pilots, is there also talk or thoughts of remorse? For example, I was terribly surprised by the enthusiasm surrounding the killing of the Gaza traffic police on the first day of the operation: They took out 180 traffic cops. As a pilot, I would have questioned that." Gideon: "There are two parts to this. Tactically speaking, you call them 'police.' In any case, they are armed and belong to Hamas ... During better times, they take Fatah people and throw them off the roofs and see what happens. "With regard to the thoughts, you sit with the squadron and there are lots of discussions about the value-related significance of the fighting, about what we are doing; there is a lot to talk about. From the moment you start the plane's engine until the moment you turn it off, all of your thoughts, all of your concentration and all of your attention are on the mission you have to carry out. If you have an unjustified doubt, you're liable to cause a far greater screw-up and knock down a school with 40 children. If the building I hit isn't the one I am supposed to hit, but rather a house with our guys inside - the price of the mistake is very, very high." Question from the audience: "Was there anyone in the squadron who didn't push the button, who thought twice?" Gideon: "That question should be addressed to those involved in the helicopter operation, or to the guys who see what they do. With the weapons I used, my ability to make a decision that contradicts what they told me up to that point is zero. I dispatch the bomb from a range within which I can see the entire Gaza Strip. I also see Haifa, I also see Sinai, but it's more or less the same. It's from really far away." Yossi: "I am a platoon sergeant in an operations company of the Paratroops Brigade. We were in a house and discovered a family inside that wasn't supposed to be there. We assembled them all in the basement, posted two guards at all times and made sure they didn't make any trouble. Gradually, the emotional distance between us broke down - we had cigarettes with them, we drank coffee with them, we talked about the meaning of life and the fighting in Gaza. After very many conversations the owner of the house, a man of 70-plus, was saying it's good we are in Gaza and it's good that the IDF is doing what it is doing. "The next day we sent the owner of the house and his son, a man of 40 or 50, for questioning. The day after that, we received an answer: We found out that both are political activists in Hamas. That was a little annoying - that they tell you how fine it is that you're here and good for you and blah-blah-blah, and then you find out that they were lying to your face the whole time. "What annoyed me was that in the end, after we understood that the members of this family weren't exactly our good friends and they pretty much deserved to be forcibly ejected from there, my platoon commander suggested that when we left the house, we should clean up all the stuff, pick up and collect all the garbage in bags, sweep and wash the floor, fold up the blankets we used, make a pile of the mattresses and put them back on the beds." Zamir: "What do you mean? Didn't every IDF unit that left a house do that?" Yossi: "No. Not at all. On the contrary: In most of the houses graffiti was left behind and things like that." Zamir: "That's simply behaving like animals." Yossi: "You aren't supposed to be concentrating on folding blankets when you're being shot at." Zamir: "I haven't heard all that much about you being shot at. It's not that I'm complaining, but if you've spent a week in a home, clean up your filth." Aviv: "We got an order one day: All of the equipment, all of the furniture - just clean out the whole house. We threw everything, everything, out of the windows to make room. The entire contents of the house went flying out the windows." Yossi: "There was one day when a Katyusha, a Grad, landed in Be'er Sheva and a mother and her baby were moderately to seriously injured. They were neighbors of one of my soldiers. We heard the whole story on the radio, and he didn't take it lightly - that his neighbors were seriously hurt. So the guy was a bit antsy, and you can understand him. To tell a person like that, 'Come on, let's wash the floor of the house of a political activist in Hamas, who has just fired a Katyusha at your neighbors that has amputated one of their legs' - this isn't easy to do, especially if you don't agree with it at all. When my platoon commander said, 'Okay, tell everyone to fold up blankets and pile up mattresses,' it wasn't easy for me to take. There was lot of shouting. In the end I was convinced and realized it really was the right thing to do. Today I appreciate and even admire him, the platoon commander, for what happened there. In the end I don't think that any army, the Syrian army, the Afghani army, would wash the floor of its enemy's houses, and it certainly wouldn't fold blankets and put them back in the closets." Zamir: "I think it would be important for parents to sit here and hear this discussion. I think it would be an instructive discussion, and also very dismaying and depressing. You are describing an army with very low value norms, that's the truth ... I am not judging you and I am not complaining about you. I'm just reflecting what I'm feeling after hearing your stories. I wasn't in Gaza, and I assume that among reserve soldiers the level of restraint and control is higher, but I think that all in all, you are reflecting and describing the kind of situation we were in. "After the Six-Day War, when people came back from the fighting, they sat in circles and described what they had been through. For many years the people who did this were said to be 'shooting and crying.' In 1983, when we came back from the Lebanon War, the same things were said about us. We need to think about the events we have been through. We need to grapple with them also, in terms of establishing a standard or different norms. "It is quite possible that Hamas and the Syrian army would behave differently from me. The point is that we aren't Hamas and we aren't the Syrian army or the Egyptian army, and if clerics are anointing us with oil and sticking holy books in our hands, and if the soldiers in these units aren't representative of the whole spectrum in the Jewish people, but rather of certain segments of the population - what are we expecting? To whom are we complaining? "As reservists we don't take relate seriously to the orders of the regional brigades. We let the old people go through and we let families go through. Why kill people when it's clear to you that they are civilians? Which aspect of Israel's security will be harmed, who will be harmed? Exercise judgment, be human."