By Jonathan Cook - Nazareth
The fatal shooting by Israeli soldiers of an Israeli man earlier this week as he tried to scale a fence into the Gaza Strip was reportedly part of a drastic procedure the army was supposed to have phased out several years ago.
The Israeli media reported that Yakir Ben-Melech, 34, had bled to death after he was shot under the "Hannibal procedure", designed to prevent Israelis from being taken captive alive by enemy forces.
One critic, Uri Avnery, a former Israeli legislator and leader of Gush Shalom, a small radical peace group, defined the procedure as meaning: “Liberate the soldier by killing him”.
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<span style="font-family: Arial; ">The Hannibal Procedure</span>
ReplyDelete<span style="font-family: Arial; ">by Uri Avnery</span>
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Hannibal crossed the Alps with his division of combat elephants and terrorized mighty Rome for years. He commanded the army of Carthage, originally a Canaanite Phoenician colony, spoke a kind of Hebrew and bore a Hebrew name ("God has been gracious"). In my youth, when we were searching for Hebrew and Semite heroes as role models, he figured high on our list.
It appears that the Israeli army, too, considers him a model. This week the legendary general was at the center of a controversial public disclosure.
The subject of the sensation was the "Hannibal Procedure" – an Israeli army practice instituted in the mid 80s, first in oral instructions and later as an official order bearing this name. Some time ago this order was officially amended, but many soldiers attest that the original version it is still in force. It has now been published by Haaretz.
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ReplyDelete"This logic had terrible consequences in Munich, when the German police (with the encouragement of the Israeli government) opened fire on the captors of the Israeli athletes resulting in the deaths of both. Most of the hostages were presumably killed by the police, since the post mortem results were never published.
A similar tragedy occurred in Ma’aloth, in northern Israel, when Palestinians took a large group of schoolchildren hostage. Many children were killed when Moshe Dayan ordered the use of force to liberate them, in the middle of negotiations with their captors."
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ReplyDelete"The Israeli army has changed a lot since its first days – and not for the better. Forgotten are the days when it was led by commanders like Yig’al Alon and Shimon Avidan, who valued the life of the individual soldier. They did not need to consult the Army Advocate General in order to know what is forbidden and where the black flag is flying.
Decades of service in support of the occupation have changed the Israeli army beyond recognition. This is another army, an army that produces robot soldiers and whose officers are no different from the generals of the Russian Czar or the King of Prussia. Not one of them would dream of eulogizing the fallen soldiers of the enemy, as did Chief-of-Staff Yitzhaq Rabin after the June 1967 war. The disdain for the lives of Palestinians has gradually led to disdain for the lives of Israelis."
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