Israeli Press
Ethicist Asa Kasher urges Israelis to disown the settlements and Gaza's ruin
Graphic: Times of Palestine
Original Reporting
The philosopher who wrote the Israeli army's code of ethics called on his fellow citizens Thursday to sever themselves from the West Bank and Gaza — which he names Sodom and Gomorrah — in an essay the Israeli daily Haaretz published as the election season opens.
Asa Kasher's argument proceeds from a personal reckoning he says every Israeli owes. A state acting for its citizens does not flood the occupied West Bank with hundreds of outposts through what he calls the Defense Ministry's expansionist arm, he wrote, and does not let what he plainly names Jewish terrorist groups torment Palestinian villagers without restraint.
On Gaza, Kasher defended the war's opening as self-defense but condemned its conduct. He cited a division commander recorded ordering troops that there are no innocents in Gaza — a directive he called criminal and contrary to the army's own code — and the bulldozer culture of total demolition he described as unbearable.
None of this is done for me or in my interest; it is done against me, Kasher wrote of both territories, declaring the minister who permits it "not my defense minister."
His practical counsel is refusal: keep your children off settlement tours, oppose joint training with settler units, demand parliament choke the money.
Accepting Sodom and Gomorrah's habits, the essay concluded, ends any prospect of the democratic state Israelis claim — a warning carried by the establishment paper of record eleven weeks before the vote.
