Colonial police force.

• Author: Avnery, Uri

A story has it that Oscar Wilde once attended the premiere of a colleague's play and every few minutes raised his hat. When asked about this odd behavior, he replied:

"I am a courteous person. I raise my hat when I meet an old acquaintance." If I wore a hat, I would have to raise it every few minutes these days when I view TV talk shows, listen to the radio, or read the papers. I keep meeting things I wrote years ago, and especially things I have written since the beginning of this war.

For example: For decades, I have warned again and again that the occupation is corrupting our army. Now the papers are full of learned articles by respected commentators, who have discovered--surprise, surprise!--that the occupation has corrupted our army.

In such cases we say in Hebrew: "Good morning, Elijahu!" You have woken up at long last. If there is a touch of irony in my remark, I do apologize. After all, I wrote in the hope that my words would convince readers--and especially members of the Israeli establishment--and that they would pass the message on. Now that this is happening, I am quite happy about the plagiarism.

But it is important to spell out how the occupation has "corrupted our army." Otherwise, it is just an empty slogan, and we shall learn nothing from it.

A personal flashback: In the middle of the 1948 war, I had an unpleasant experience. After a day of heavy fighting, I was sleeping soundly in a field near the Arab village Suafir (now Sapir). All around me were sleeping the other soldiers of my company, Samson's Foxes. Suddenly I was woken up by a tremendous explosion. An Egyptian plane had dropped a bomb on us. Killed: none. Wounded: one.

Why were we almost unscathed? Very simple: We were all lying in our personal foxholes, which we had dug, in spite of our fatigue, before going to sleep. It was self-evident to us that when we arrived anywhere, the first thing to do was dig in. Sometimes we changed locations three times a day, and every time we dug foxholes. We knew that our lives depended on it.

Not anymore. In one of the most deadly incidents in the Second Lebanon War, twelve members of a company were killed by a rocket near Kfar Giladi, while sitting around in an open field. The soldiers later complained that they had not been led to a shelter. Have today's soldiers not heard about a foxhole? Have they not been issued personal shovels? Inside Lebanon, why did the soldiers congregate in the rooms of houses, where they were hit by...