Dan Halutz, shooting himself in the wing
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17/01/07
On the day when Dan Halutz entered upon his career as Army Chief of Staff, activists of Gush Shalom and Yesh Gvul stood protesting outside. We flew across the Defence Ministry walls little paper airplanes bearing quotations from Halutz’s infamous interview, where he stated that he was sleeping well at night after his pilots had killed fifteen civilians, nine of them children, in a single minute of dropping a bomb on Gaza, and that he felt nothing but “a slight tremor in the wing, as the bomb departs”. Two years have passed, in which Dan Halutz was directly responsible for shedding the blood of thousands – Israelis, Palestinians and Lebanese. The arrogant man who had no feeling at the death of Palestinian civilians also led his own soldiers into an unnecessary, cruel war, hastily and without preparation, and ended with a shameful fiasco for which he is today paying the price. Dan Halutz has today been thrown out of the job which he should never have gotten, and we do not feel even a slight tremor in the wing. Halutz’s successor would do well to remember that even the commander of the most powerful army in the Middle East is far from being almighty.
By coincidence or not, the day of Halutz’s resignation is also the day that the military authorities withdrew their intention to add yet another to the innumerable iniquities of the occupation, and rescinded the intention of imposing an Apartheid ordinance forbidding Israelis and Palestinian from travelling together on the West Bank roads. May that be a sign of things to come.
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Contact: Adam Keller - Gush Shalom spokesperson adam@gush-shalom.org
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