Israeli Attack on Gaza: 2014 Version

[Peter Lemkin]

Preliminary estimate to repair the infrastructure damage in Gaza is 6-10 Billion US$!...and a few [4-5] years of work.

Not to forget the psychological 'repair' needed of all the children and most of the adults.

To those who lost loved ones or died, there is likely no repair possible...and those numbers are HUGE!

Palestinian children aged over 7 have witnessed/experienced 3! such attacks by the IDF...... Older persons know more of them. The very old, remember the original removal from their homes, the confiscation of their property and their being driven from their homeland into prison camps disguised as refugee camps.

[Lauren Johnson]

from The New Yorker in a display of the moral ambiguities that torture the most moral military in the world:

Buried deep inside a Times report last weekend about Hadar Goldin, the Israeli soldier who was reported captured by Hamas, in the southern Gaza Strip, and then declared dead, was the following paragraph:

The circumstances surrounding his death remained cloudy. A military spokeswoman declined to say whether Lieutenant Goldin had been killed along with two comrades by a suicide bomb one of the militants exploded, or later by Israel's assault on the area to hunt for him; she also refused to answer whether his remains had been recovered.

Just what those circumstances were began to filter out early this week, and they attest to deep contradictions in the Israeli militaryand in Israeli culture at large.

A temporary ceasefire went into effect last Friday morning at eight. At nine-fifteen, soldiers of the Israel Defense Forces headed toward a house, in the city of Rafah, that served as an entry point to a tunnel reportedly leading into Israel. As the I.D.F. troops advanced, a Hamas militant emerged from the tunnel and opened fire. Two soldiers were killed. A third, Goldin, was capturedwhether dead or alive is unclearand taken into the tunnel. What is clear is that after Goldin was reported missing, the I.D.F. enacted a highly controversial measure known as the Hannibal Directive, firing at the area where Goldin was last seen in order to stop Hamas from taking him captive. As a result, according to Palestinian sources, seventy Palestinians were killed. By Sunday, Goldin, too, had been declared dead.

Opinions differ over how this protocol, which remained a military secret until 2003, came to be known as Hannibal. There are indications that it was named for the Carthaginian general, who chose to poison himself rather than fall captive to the Romans, but I.D.F. officials insist that a computer generated the name at random. Whatever its provenance, the moniker seems chillingly apt. Developed by three senior I.D.F. commanders, in 1986, following the capture of two Israeli soldiers by Hezbollah, the directive established the steps the military must take in the event of a soldier's abduction. Its stated goal is to prevent Israeli troops from falling into enemy hands, "even at the cost of hurting or wounding our soldiers." While normal I.D.F. procedures forbid soldiers from firing in the general direction of their fellow-troops, including attacking a getaway vehicle, such procedures, according to the Hannibal Directive, are to be waived in the case of an abduction: "Everything must be done to stop the vehicle and prevent it from escaping."

Although the order specifies that only selective light-arms fire should be used in such cases, the message behind it is resounding. When a soldier has been abducted, not only are all targets legitimateincluding, as we saw over the weekend, ambulancesbut it's permissible, and even implicitly advisable, for soldiers to fire on their own. For more than a decade, military censors blocked journalists from reporting on the protocol, apparently because they feared it would demoralize the Israeli public. In 2003, an Israeli doctor who had heard of the directive while serving as a reservist, in Lebanon, began advocating for its annulment, leading to its declassification. That year, a Haaretz investigation of the directive concluded that "from the point of view of the army, a dead soldier is better than a captive soldier who himself suffers and forces the state to release thousands of captives in order to obtain his release."

For years, Israeli soldiers on the battlefield had hotly debated the directive and its use. At least one battalion commander, according to the Haaretz investigation, refused to brief his soldiers on it, arguing that it was "flagrantly illegal." And a rabbi, asked by a soldier about the order's religious aspect, advised him to disobey it. Major General Yossi Peled, one of the commanders who drafted the directive, told Haaretz that its purpose was to assert how far the military could go to prevent abductions. "I wouldn't drop a one-ton bomb on the vehicle, but I would hit it with a tank shell that could make a big hole in the vehicle, which would make it possible for anyone who was not hit directlyif the vehicle did not blow upto emerge in one piece," Peled said. It's understandable that soldiers would scratch their heads over formulations such as these.

To be clear, there is no evidence that Goldin was killed by friendly fire. But military officials did confirm that commanders on the ground had activated the Hannibal Directive and ordered "massive fire"not for the first time since Operation Protective Edge began, on July 8th. (One week into the ground offensive, in the central Gaza Strip, forces reportedlyenacted the protocol when another soldier, Guy Levy, was believed missing.) Since the directive's inception, the I.D.F. is known to have used it only a handful of times, including in the case of Gilad Shalit. The order came too late for Shalit and did not prevent his abductionor his eventual release, in 2011, in exchange for a thousand and twenty-seven Palestinian prisoners. That year, as part of the military's inquiry into the circumstances leading to Shalit's capture, the I.D.F.'s Chief of Staff, Benny Gantz, modified the directive. It now allows field commanders to act without awaiting confirmation from their superiors; at the same time, the directive's language was tempered to make clear that it does not call for the willful killing of captured soldiers. In changing the wording of the protocol, Gantz introduced an ethical principle known as the "double-effect doctrine," which states that a bad result (the killing of a captive soldier) is morally permissible only as a side effect of promoting a good action (stopping his captors).

Whether soldiers have heeded this change in language, and how they now choose to interpret the directive, is difficult to assess. If past experience is any indication, the military hierarchy's interpretation remains unequivocal. During Israel's last operation in Gaza, in 2011, one Golani commander was caught on tape telling his unit: "No soldier in the 51st Battalion will be kidnapped, at any price or under any condition. Even if it means that he has to detonate his own grenade along with those who try to capture him. Even if it means that his unit will now have to fire at the getaway car."
On Sunday, a decade after its initial investigation of the Hannibal Directive, Haaretz revisited the subject with a piece by Anshel Pfeffer that tried to explain why, despite the procedure's morally questionable nature, there hasn't been significant opposition to it. Pfeffer wrote:

Perhaps the most deeply engrained reason that Israelis innately understand the needs for the Hannibal Directive is the military ethos of never leaving wounded men on the battlefield, which became the spirit following the War of Independence, when hideously mutilated bodies of Israeli soldiers were recovered. So Hannibal has stayed a fact of military life and the directive activated more than once during this current campaign.

Ronen Bergman, author of the book "By Any Means Necessary," which examines Israel's history of dealing with captive soldiers, further explained this rationale in a recent radio interview: "There is a disproportionate sensitivity among Israelis [on the issue of captive soldiers] that is hard to describe to foreigners." Bergman traced this sensitivity back to Maimonides, the medieval Torah scholar, who wrote: "There is no greater Mitzvah than redeeming captives."
This line of argument, while historically true, is worth pausing overif only to unpack the moral paradox within it. In essence, what this "military ethos" means is that Israel sanctifies the lives of its soldiers so much, and would be willing to pay such an exorbitant price for their release, that it will do everything in its power to prevent such a scenarioincluding putting those same soldiers' lives at risk (not to mention wreaking havoc on the surrounding population). This is the dubious situation that Israel finds itself in: signalling to the military that a dead soldier is preferable to a captive one, while at the same time signalling to the Israeli public that no cost will be spared to secure a captured soldier's release. (It's worth recalling that, three years after Shalit was traded for more than a thousand Palestinian prisoners, the captive U.S. Army Sergeant Bowe Bergdahl was traded for five Taliban prisoners. This isn't to suggest that Israel cares more about its troops than the United States does, but rather that no crime is greater, in the eyes of Israelis, than the kidnapping of "our boys.")

Daniel Nisman, who runs a geopolitical-security consultancy, told the Times that the Hannibal Directive "sounds terrible, but you have to consider it within the framework of the Shalit deal. That was five years of torment for this country, where every newscast would end with how many days Shalit had been in captivity. It's like a wound that just never heals."

On Tuesday, as a seventy-two-hour ceasefire went into effect and the I.D.F. pulled its ground forces out of Gaza, I spoke to Assaf Sharon, the academic director of Molad, a progressive Israeli think tank that focusses on social policy. While he accepted Nisman's logic, he questioned the Hannibal Directive's social ramifications. "I don't know that you can draft clear-cut rules that would apply to any situation, but I do think that a certain risk of a captured soldier's life should be allowed. I think the real problem starts with the hysterical discourse, of the kind that says, This must be stopped at any cost.' From there, the path to the horrors we've seen over the last few days, in Rafah, is a short one. What we've seen wasn't only putting a soldier's life at risk but intentionally targeting anything that movedwhether relevant or irrelevant."

Sharon added that the mixed consequences of the directive are typical of the behavior that now characterizes the Israeli public at large. "On the one hand, we are willing to risk soldiers' lives recklessly and without need, but on the other hand we have zero tolerance for the price that this might entail."

With sixty-seven Israelis and more than eighteen hundred Palestinians killed, ground forces have completed their withdrawal from the Gaza Strip. The Hannibal Directive will soon be tucked away, along with the worn bulletproof vests, until the next time the military wades into hostile territory. But its moral implications will linger. It's time for the painful reconstruction, both in Gaza and in Israeli society, to slowly start.

[Magda Hassan]

Daniel Nisman, who runs a geopolitical-security consultancy, told the Times that the Hannibal Directive "sounds terrible, but you have to consider it within the framework of the Shalit deal. That was five years of torment for this country, where every newscast would end with how many days Shalit had been in captivity. It's like a wound that just never heals."

What a creepy apologist for wanton murder. Given that Shalit was released unharmed and according to Shalit and his (IDF) doctors who said he was not abused or tortured (unlike many Palestinian prisoners) he is really saying that it is all too uncomfortable for Israeli society to not know if their soldier is alive or dead and rather than wait wondering until they know they would rather have them dead so they can indulge in and justify their prejudices and murderous intent towards Palestinians. At worst he was not fed fully but neither are many Palestinians living under siege. It seems he just shared in the privations of the Palestinian captors.

[Peter Lemkin]

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: We turn now to Gaza, where fighting has resumed after the expiration of a 72-hour truce expired. Israel said it launched airstrikes after Palestinians fired at least 18 rockets into southern Israel after the ceasefire ended. Palestinian officials say a 10-year-old boy was killed earlier today when an Israeli airstrike hit near a mosque in Gaza City. Six other people were wounded in the attack.
AMY GOODMAN: Hamas rejected an extension of the 72-hour ceasefire, saying Israel had failed to meet a key Palestinian demand to ease the crippling blockade on Gaza. A Hamas military wing spokesperson earlier called on Palestinian negotiators holding indirect talks with Israel negotiators in Cairo to refuse any ceasefire extension unless its long-term demands were met. This is Abu Ubaida.

ABU UBAIDA: [translated] We urge the Palestinian delegation who is negotiating not to extend the ceasefire deal unless there is an initial agreement to the demands set by our people, and foremost is the seaport.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Israel's 29-day offensive in Gaza killed nearly 1,900 people, including at least 1,354 civilians, 415 of them children. More than 10,000 people have been injured. Half-a-million Palestinians have been displaced, with at least 187,000 still living in U.N. emergency shelters. Ten thousand homes have been completely destroyed, 30,000 partially wrecked. Meanwhile, 64 Israeli soldiers were killed in Gaza; three civilians died in Israel.
AMY GOODMAN: To talk more about the situation in Israel and Palestine, we go to Tel Aviv, where we're joined by Uri Avnery, longtime Israeli peace activist and writer. He's a former member of the Israeli Knesset, the Parliament, and the founder of the Gush Shalom peace movement. He writes a weekly column published in several countries and is the author of many books, including 1948: A Soldier's TaleThe Bloody Road to Jerusalem, Israel's Vicious Circle and My Friend, the Enemy.
Uri Avnery, welcome to Democracy Now! Can you talk about the end of the ceasefire and what this means?
URI AVNERY: Well, I think everybody's very sad about it, because we all have hoped that the war has ended. But the war is going on, and if there's no new ceasefire, the stakes will get worse on both sides.
AMY GOODMAN: Israel says that it was Hamas that broke the ceasefire by shooting rockets into Israel. Can you respond?
URI AVNERY: That's very easy to answer. The ceasefire was in force until 8:00 this morning. No one broke it. It was just not renewed.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Now, you have been a longtime founder and leader of the peace movement in Israel. What is the state of the peace movement in your country right now?
URI AVNERY: Well, in any war, it is very difficult to talk about peace, see. Every war creates a war hysteria. People become superpatriotic. People don't want to hear any criticism of their government or their country. So, it's a bad situation. But there are demonstrations against the war going on every day. Tomorrow evening, on Saturday evening, there will be a very big demonstration in the center of Tel Aviv. So the peace movement is not silent.
AMY GOODMAN: You have a long history, Uri Avnery, that goes, to say the least., back to before the establishment of the state of Israel. You were born in Germany. You fled Nazi Germany with your family. You were part of the Irgun when you were, what, 15 years old. Can you talk about the Irgun and the Stern Gang in pre-state Israel, what you were doing there, and what these organizations did?
URI AVNERY: Well, we are dealing with day-to-day occurrences, but we do not deal with the root of the matter. The root is that Israel is occupying the Palestinian territoriesthe territory of the West Bank and the territory of the Gaza Strip. As long as the occupation lasts, there will be no peace. In order to put an end to the occupation, you must make peace, peace between Israel and the Palestinian people. In order to achieve peace with the Palestinian people, Israel must end the occupation, withdraw from the Occupied Territories and enable the Palestinians to set up their own independent nation and state, the state of Palestine. That's what it's all about. Everything else flows from this basic problem.
AMY GOODMAN: You haveIsrael calls Hamas terrorist. So does the United States. Your group, Irgun, was a paramilitary organization. You have said you ultimately left the groupShamir was a part of it, as well. You have said you left the group because of its terrorist tactics inwhat year was it? In 1942.
URI AVNERY: Well, I was a member of a terrorist organization when I was 15 years old. I believe I understand the psychology of young people who join organizations which are called terrorists by their enemies, but which themselves think of themselves as freedom fighters. Hamas thinks it's fighting for the freedom of Palestine. They are deeply convinced of this, and therefore they are fighting. And everybody must admit that they are fighting very well, because what you have here during the last month is a guerrilla organization of, I would say, at leastat most 10,000 fighters, fighting against one of four biggest and strongest armies in the world. So it's not an even fight, yet they are standing therethey are still standing there after more than a month. I think even the Israeli Army recognizes and somehow respects the fighting force of this organization.
One of the basic problems at this moment is that Israelis and Hamas do not talk to each other. The ceasefire was negotiated by Egypt. Egypt, at this moment, is against Hamas more than Israel. At this moment, Egypt and Israel are very close partners. So Egypt appearing as a negotiator, as a mediator, of an honest broker, is ridiculous, the same way that the American mediation was ridiculous. America is a very, very, very close ally of Israel. President Obama repeats like a parrot the most basic Israeli propaganda, and so does John Kerry. So we don't have somebody who can mediate and who's being trusted by both sides. I think Hamas went to Cairo to these ceasefire negotiations full of apprehension, full of distrust towards Egypt. I, myself, would say that there's a very simple solution to this. I think Israel and Hamas must talk to each other. When people are firing on each other and trying to kill each otherindeed, killing each otherthe best solution is that they start to talk with each other. I think if the Israelis and the Palestinians would sit together opposite each other at one table and thresh out their real problems, trying to understand, be able to understand each other, the whole thing would look very differently.
The Palestinians, Hamas cannot and will not agree to a real ceasefire, long-lasting ceasefire, if there is a blockade on the Gaza Strip. This is a basic, local problem. You have 1.8 [million] of Palestinians in the Gaza Strip. It's a tiny, tiny, little territory. You can translate it to American geographical facts. The whole thing is about 50 kilometers wide and about 10 kilometers long. So, translate this to New York City, I think it's smaller than Brooklyn. So, this is this huge population in this small territory. It's suffering from a blockade for at least eight years. A blockade means that all the borders are closed, including the sea border, and you cannot get in anything except by the permission of Israel, and you cannot get anything out at all. There is no export from the Gaza area.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Well, Uri
URI AVNERY: So, no one will agreeyes?
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: I wanted to ask you
URI AVNERY: After such a cruel war, with so manyyes, please?
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: You've mentioned the need for the Israeli government and Hamas to talk as a first step, but you've also written in the past that Israel was complicit in the rise of Hamas and actually, to some extent, supported its rise. Could you talk about that and the significance of the early period of Hamas?
URI AVNERY: Well, at the time, before '93, not Hamas was considered the main enemy of Israel, but the PLO, the Palestinian Liberation Organization, which was led at the time by Yasser Arafat, and which is being led now by Mahmoud Abbas. Because they considered the PLO their main enemy, they believed that any enemy of the PLO would be a friend of Israel. Under occupation, you cannot have any real political activity. Any political activity in the Occupied Territories was completely forbidden. You went to prison for any kind of political activity, except that you could not close the mosques. So Islamist people who go to the mosque to pray were the only people in the Occupied Territories who could come together and plan action. And this is howIsrael did not create Hamas, but Hamas was tolerated by Israel in order to fight against Yasser Arafat and the PLO.
When the First Intifada started, the first Palestinian uprising started in 1967 [ 1987 ], the Israeli authorities very quickly realized that Hamas is more dangerous than PLO. So they made peace with the PLO, the Oslo Agreement in 1993. And the PLO today is a kind of partner of Israel, and Hamas has become the main enemy. They are much more dangerous because they are much more fanatical. They are very strongly religiously motivated. And at this moment, we have the strange situation that Israel today would like Abu Mazen, Mahmoud Abbas, the leader of the PLO and the Palestinian Authoritythey want Mahmoud Abbas to help Israel against Hamas. This delegation, which is now conducting negotiations in Cairo for the Palestinian people, is led by Mahmoud Abbas. So, it's a full swing. It's a full reversal of Israeli policy. Now
AMY GOODMAN: We have to break, but we're going to come back to the discussion with you. And we want to also ask you about that moment in 1982 when you crossed lines and you were the first Israeli Yasser Arafat ever met, when you met with Yasser Arafat. Uri Avnery is a longtime Israeli peace activist. He started in the Irgun, the Zionist paramilitary organization, when he was a teenager. He left there, concerned about terrorist activity, ultimately founded one of the first peace groups in Israel. He was a member of the Knesset and met with Yasser Arafat. We'll talk all about that when we come back.
[break]
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: We continue our conversation with Uri Avnery, longtime Israeli peace activist and writer. He was born in Germany in 1923. His family fled the Nazis and moved to what was then Palestine. As a youth, he joined the Irgun Zionist paramilitary group, which he later quit to become a leading peace activist in Israel.
AMY GOODMAN: In 1950, he founded the news magazine HaOlam HaZeh, This World. Fifteen years later, he was elected to the Knesset on a peace platform. In 1982, Uri Avnery made headlines when he crossed the lines during the Siege of Beirut to meet with Yasser Arafat. In 1993, he started the Gush Shalom peace movement. He turns 91 next month. He still writes a weekly column. Can you go back to 1982, Uri Avnery, to talk about that moment when you met with Yasser Arafat? How significant was that?
URI AVNERY: Well, to my mind, it was very significant. The situation was, in a way, similar to the present one. The PLO, the Palestine Liberation Organization, was considered the main enemy of Israel. It was located in South Lebanon, and the Israeli army started an invasion of Lebanon in order to destroy the PLO. It was a very cruel war, like the present one. Civilian towns and villages were shelled and bombarded. And West Beirut was surrounded by Israeli troops, like Gaza is now. And there was a debate in our political and military leadership whether to invade and conquer West Beirut. I was very much afraid of this. I thought that it would lead to a widespread slaughter, to a lot of casualties on all sides, and many, many civilians being killed. And I thought, as I think today, that in order to put an end to a war, you must talk with your enemy, look him in the eye, try to understand him, and come up with a solution.
So, during the battle of Beirut, I crossed the lines into the Palestinian territory. I met with Yasser Arafat, who was the leader of the PLO, and we had a long conversation about how to make peace. And then I went back to Israel. And we remained friends for the rest of his life. We met very often, abroad in Tunis and later when he came to Palestine, here in Palestine. I think the result of this meeting was that it helped to de-demonize the PLO. Yasser Arafat was demonized for years. He was considered a monster. When pictures of him and me appeared on Israeli television talking to each other, sitting on the same sofa, I think itto some extent, it helped to change the picture of Arafat the monster into Arafat the enemy with whom we can make peace. And 12 years later, Israel indeed made peace with the PLO. It was a peace that was made between the Israeli prime minister, Yitzhak Rabin, and the chief of the PLO, Yasser Arafat. Unfortunately, they did not do a complete job. Many things were left open, and very soon, after Yitzhak Rabin was assassinated, assassinated by a Jewish assassin, we sank back into a war.
My friends and I have demanded that our government start talks with Hamas, eight years ago. We, ourselves, met with the Hamas leaders. I met with several Hamas leaders several times. I found them people with whom I don't necessarily agree, but people with whom I can talk. I believe, even today, that we can come to an agreement with the Palestinian people, including Hamas. You cannot ignore Hamas. People have maybepeople abroad and in Israel, too, have completely distorted people what Hamas is. Hamas is not a militia. Hamas is not a military organization. Hamas is a Palestinian political party, which in the last Palestinian elections, supervised by ex-President Carter, Hamas had a majority. Majority of the Palestinian people, including the Gaza Strip, voted for Hamas. When a Palestinian government was set up by Hamas, it was destroyed by Israel and the United States and Europe. It was brought down. It was then that Hamas took over power in the Gaza Strip by force, but it took power after it won a big majority in free elections in the Gaza Strip. So it's much more complicated than just a fight between Israel and a military or terrorist or whatever-you-want-to-call-it organization. You cannot wish Hamas away. You can do to Hamas whatever you want. You can kill all the 10,000 fighters of Hamas. But Hamas will remain, because Hamas is an ideology, and Hamas is a political party accepted by the Palestinian people. So, in the end, whatever we do, in the end, after all the killing and after all this terrible destruction, in the end, we'll have to talk with Hamas.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Well, Uri Avnery, do you feel that in the leadership of the Israeli government there are those who are determined never to allow a Palestinian state? Or do you think that there is enough of a leadership cadre willing to reach a fair and just peace with the Palestinians?
URI AVNERY: This government of Israel, which represents the extreme right in Israel, with some openly fascist elements in it, but supported by a majority of the Israeli people, does not want to give up the occupied territories of the West Bank and the indirectly occupied territories of Gaza. That's the whole point. If we are ready to give up this territory and allow the Palestinians to set up their own nation and state of Palestine, then the problem is solved. There will be some discussions about details, about this part or that part, but basically the problem will be solved, and we shall have peace. But this government does not agree to give up the West Bank. It has put up there dozens of Israeli Jewish settlements. It is supporting these settlements. It's going to put up more settlements. And if you put up settlements in the West Bank, you cannot have a Palestinian state.
The West Bankone must realize, the West Bank and Gaza together, the Occupied Territories, altogether constitute 22 percent of the historic land of Palestine. I was a citizen of Palestine before 1948. And Palestineof this country of Palestine, 22 percent are the Occupied Territories in which the Palestinians desire and are ready to set up their own nation and state of Palestine. The question is: Do we agree to live side by side with an independent, sovereign state of Palestine? Yes or no? If not, then every further discussion is superfluous. We shall have war, and again and again and again and again, until the end of time.
AMY GOODMAN: Uri Avnery, I want to thank you very much for being with usI'm sorry we've come to the end of our showlongtime Israeli peace activist, writer, former member of the Israeli Knesset and founder of the Gush Shalom peace movement, crossed lines in 1982 in the Siege of Beirut to meet with Yasser Arafat.

[Drew Phipps]

This has been bothering me for a couple weeks now. If the Palestinians had all these tunnels into Israel to smuggle people and/or weapons, why didn't they use them when attacked?

[Magda Hassan]

Yes some thing to ponder there. Maybe some of them were used but their primary and vital purpose was to bring in food and goods to get around the blockade. Hamas doesn't need to use tunnels to bomb Israel.

[Magda Hassan]

For Israeli arms makers, Gaza war is a cash cow

Factories worked around the clock turning out munitions as the army tested their newest systems against a real enemy. Now, they are expecting their battle-tested products will win them new customers.

By Shuki Sadeh | Aug. 11, 2014 | 3:41 AM

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Israeli soldiers from the armoured corps gestures atop tanks after returning to Israel from Gaza August 5, 2014. Photo by Reuters





Far from the fighting in the Gaza Strip and the rocket attacks that have pummeled Israel from south to the Sharon, some 300 employees of Israel Military Industries in Nazareth haven't left their assembly lines for a minute in the past four weeks. They have been working in shifts, 24 hours a day, to ensure a regular supply of 5.56 mm bullets to Israel Defense Forces soldiers. Others have been hard at work turning out highly sophisticated Kalanit and Hatzav tank shells for the Artillery Corps. The shells, which are fired above the heads of militants armed with anti-tank weapons, exploding in midair above them and releasing shrapnel, were both used on a massive scale for the first time in Operation Protective Edge.
For some years now the state-owned IMI has had an image problem, in part due to it enormous debts and management's cozy ties with the union locals and the political establishment. Next to the two other big government-owned defense companies, Rafael Advanced Defense Systems and Israel Aerospace Industries, until recently IMI looked decided dowdy, low-tech and crony-ridden. Three months ago the state signed a recovery accord with IMI, which offered a generous severance package of 1.3 million shekels ($370,000) to any employee who took voluntary early retirement. Early next year the government plans to hold a tender to privatize the company, and by early 2016 IMI should be in private hands.
Image aside, for several years IMI has very quietly been developing more sophisticated products than bullets, rifles or hand grenades. For example, its new, super-smart MPR-500 multipurpose rigid bomb, which is designed to penetrate reinforced concrete structures and other difficult targets, was first used operationally in Protective Edge. Today, back orders for the bomb total 5.6 billion shekels.
IMI has built the foundations for a more successful business, and in a market where violence erupts every few years a new round of violence erupts, a dependable customer with the IDF and a classroom to test its equipment.
"IMI cooperates with the IDF and the defense establishment in adapting quick solutions for changing needs," says UMI chairman Maj. Gen. (res.) Udi Adam. "The defense industry is in a perpetual learning mode together with the IDF and the Defense Ministry to examine the weapons systems that were introduced for initial operational use in Operation Protective Edge, as well as weapons systems that have been in operational use for a long time."
One unit of IMI has already been privatized. Israel Weapon Industries, which makes the Tavor assault rifle that is used today by most of the infantry, is owned by Samy Katsav and is considered one of the world's six leading light-weapons manufactures. The SK Group comprises several companies that supply the IDF.
Israel Shipyards, for example, makes missile boats and the Shaldag patrol boat for the Israeli military, while Meprolight manufactures sights for sniper rifles and night-vision equipment. As is the case for all companies in the group, Meprolight's most important customer is the IDF, even if 90% of the company's sales are to foreign countries,.
"After every campaign of the kind that is now taking place in Gaza, we see an increase in the number of customers from abroad," says Meprolight CEO Eli Gold, adding, "Of course, we marketing abroad aggressively, but IDF operations definitely affect marketing activity."
Protective Edge's marketing edge
"Battle-tested" is the best marketing slogan for defense industries the world over, so for Israeli military manufactures Operation Protective Edge has yielded a major competitive edge.
"For the defense industries this campaign is like drinking a very strong energy drink it simply gives them tremendous forward momentum," says Barbara Opall-Rome, Israel bureau chief for the U.S. magazine Defense News. "Combat is like the highest seal of approval when it comes to the international markets. What has proven itself in battle is much easier to sell. Immediately after the operation, and perhaps even during, all kinds of delegations arrive here from countries that appreciate Israel's technological capabilities and are interested in testing the new products."
That was also the opinion of veteran military correspondent Amir Rapaport, editor of Israel Defense, which covers the local defense industry. "From a business point of view, the operation was an outstanding thing for the defense industries," he says. "There are two main reasons for that. First, the cloud of budget cuts and project cancellations has been lifted. I believe that after the operation, Israel's defense budget will be increased and projects that were frozen will be revived. Second, during the weeks of the war, new products were introduced for the army's use. The war is an opportunity to cut red tape. Weapons systems that have long been under development suddenly became operational during the course of the fighting.
Operation Protective Edge saw many weapons systems and other technology that had been under development since the time of the Second Lebanon War in 2006 enter the field of battle, for instance a unique communications system designed to link air, sea and ground forces to the same infrastructure. "It's very difficult to defeat an enemy like Hamas, which is a guerrilla organization, but in terms of technology the victory is quite clear," says Rapaport.
"The operation has a potential to promote defense exports, mainly systems that have proven themselves," says Maj. Gen. (res.) Danny Yatom, who now deals in defense equipment and other business. "The industry will also benefits as the [Israeli] defense establishment rebuilds inventories. Also, in this war we saw that the army has new needs, especially in regards to tunnels. In my opinion, there will now be an accelerated process of development for that. There's a financial incentive both for the developers and the manufacturers."
Yatom contends that the course of Operation Protective Edge shows that future weapons systems must be designed to combat guerrilla organizations rather than conventional armies. One example of the likely change is increased demand for thermal-imaging night-vision equipment, rather than the Starlight technology, based on available light, that is currently more common in the IDF. "Thermal-imaging night-vision equipment is not affected by glow of bombs and by urban lighting, so it makes identification easier," he explains.
Gold confirms that the army is already thinking about this issue. "During the war the IDF took an interest in this subject," he says. "But still it's hard to estimate how things will turn out, because the IDF has yet to formulate a view on the matter. The product itself is not new, and we've already sold it to various armies worldwide."
On the other hand, not everyone thinks that a successful campaign means an increase in defense exports. Maj. Gen. (res.) Isaac Ben Yisrael, a former director of the Defense Ministry's Research and Development Directorate, cautions that the success in Israel of a certain military system does not necessarily carry over to foreign sales.
"Iron Dome, for example, is one of the main developments in this war," he says, "but there's no demand for it in the world, because other countries don't face a similar threat. Besides, after the war most of the money channeled into the defense budget will be used for restocking inventories, so that the money that would normally be directed toward developing combat systems will decrease."
He says that despite the criticism being heard about the size of the defense budget, Israel has no choice but to increase the army's R&D spending. That should be done by channeling profits from the government defense industries into the IDF's R&D units, he says, rather than handing them over to the Finance Ministry, which funnels this money into the general state budget.

http://www.haaretz.com/news/diplomacy-defense/1.609919

[Peter Lemkin]

One really MUST watch the Al Jazeera documentary on the total destruction of the Gaza town of Khuzaa! It is totally destroyed and the Israelis were opening fire on women, children, elderly, crippled fleeing with white flags!.....it is UNBELIEVABLE and must be seen to be believed. The city is dust......and the people dead or without homes - not even a pot left intact.

[Lauren Johnson]

One really MUST watch the Al Jazeera documentary on the total destruction of the Gaza town of Khuzaa! It is totally destroyed and the Israelis were opening fire on women, children, elderly, crippled fleeing with white flags!.....it is UNBELIEVABLE and must be seen to be believed. The city is dust......and the people dead or without homes - not even a pot left intact.

Peter, mind putting up a link?

[Peter Lemkin]

One really MUST watch the Al Jazeera documentary on the total destruction of the Gaza town of Khuzaa! It is totally destroyed and the Israelis were opening fire on women, children, elderly, crippled fleeing with white flags!.....it is UNBELIEVABLE and must be seen to be believed. The city is dust......and the people dead or without homes - not even a pot left intact.

Peter, mind putting up a link?

You'll find it here. www.aljazeera.com/programmes/aljazeeraworld/2014/08/khuzaa-attack-aftermath-201481165544556845.html

This 45 minutes alone puts the Big Lies of the IDF and Israel to bed....precision bombing etc. only if their intent is to kill anything that moved and lots that didn't move, as well. That city is no more! It is like the center of Hiroshima.