Halutz est bien le LeMay de Tsahal

Nous avons aujourd’hui quelques précisions sur le chef d’état-major de Tsahal, dans un texte d’Alexander Cockburn mis en ligne sur le site CounterPunch. Il s’agit bien du LeMay israélien.

Cockburn nous rapporte quelques détails sur l’homme et ses conceptions. Aucune surprise, juste une confirmation…

« “Israel is doomed,” said a friend of mine some months ago, returning to the U.S. after a trip to Israel. I asked him why, and my friend, who spent twenty years working at a high level in the Pentagon, answered, “They've put in an Air Force man as chief of the General Staff.” He was talking about Dan Halutz, appointed chief of the General Staff of the IDF in February of this year.

(…)

» Dan Halutz is in the LeMay tradition, a brutish lout. He raised a storm when he was asked what feelings, what moral tremors he might have had about the dropping of a one-ton bomb in a house in Gaza. Halutz's jaunty reply was to the effect that all he felt was “a slight tremor in the wing of the airplane.

» Writing about Halutz, and that particular remark, the Israeli columnist Gideon Levy wrote in Ha'aretz on February 28, “Halutz faithfully represents the policy in recent years of the air force and the Israel Defense Forces, which no longer has a place for moral statements in our war on terror. According to this policy, dropping heavy bombs on a house is a legitimate and just means, and killing innocent civilians, including children, does not at all resemble Palestinian terror.”

» That one-ton bomb killed many civilians. Levy continued, “Anyone who saw the ruined apartment houses also knew that the IDF and the air force lied brazenly when they initially tried to publicize the claim that there were only ‘huts’ on the site of the bombing; that it was impossible to know that people were living in them. The real moral image of the air force is reflected from among the ruins in the Daraj neighborhood more than all the statements of its commander.”

» So the brazen thug Halutz got the big job, just at the moment the Israeli high command was firming up plans for its long planned onslaught on Lebanon. It was Halutz who sold Olmert and Peretz on the fantasy of swift and devastating air force raids finishing off Hezbollah. »

Mis en ligne le 3 août 2006 à 19H32