When the New York Times used to say it as it is

alexa · May 28, 2016

I came upon this NYT article on the first Intifada. They are saying things as they are. What happened?

It would be a profound mistake for Israel to believe that it can restore order in occupied Gaza and the West Bank by resorting to brazen brutality and betraying its own values. How can that open a path to serious political talks with the Palestinians?

Israeli Defense Minister Yitzhak Rabin believes that he finally has the answer to six weeks of unrest. ''The first priority is to use force, might, beatings.'' He means it. The Israeli Army has been sent door to door to beat Palestinians into submission, even if that means breaking the bones of women, children and old men. That way, in Mr. Rabin's view, nobody gets killed and everybody gets the message.

It should not for a moment be thought, however, that the Israeli authorities lack sensitivity. They are sending in teams of psychologists to allay the effects of the beatings. On the soldiers.

Do these actions truly reflect the considered judgment of the coalition cabinet or the Israeli public? If the answer is yes, then the state that once promised deliverance to the oppressed has truly lost its way.

-snip

Beatings breed rage and despair. Israel was caught by surprise when demonstrations boiled up in Gaza and then spread even to the Temple Mount in East Jerusalem. Troops untrained in civil disorder were permitted to use live ammunition, a blunder. Faced with television and an uproar around the world, Mr. Rabin seized on his new policy of beatings.

The main target is the teen-age rioter who now can be detained for only 18 days. ''But if troops break his hand,'' explains the military correspondent of The Jerusalem Post, ''he won't be able to throw stones for a month and a half.'' Or in Mr. Rabin's words: ''I prefer a photo of a curfew over shooting, burning tires and petrol bombs.'' Thus does a truly humane country with a democratic government that is determined to deny parallels with South Africa invite parallels with South Africa.

Israel's effort to restore order in the occupied territories is surely tormenting. Washington, too, has a role to play in opening blocked channels, something to be explored when President Mubarak of Egypt sees President Reagan this week. But there can be no serious talk about policy until Israelis recognize something else. When a democratic government turns to thuggery as a policy, it risks losing far more than control.
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http://www.nytimes.com/1988/01/24/opinion/what-israel-is-losing.html

Totally amazing we would get none of this honesty now and of course the first Intifada was largely peaceful.

I know there is a video of IDF hammering a palestinian with rocks which is usually presented as the antisemite finding the rotten apple but it seems this was the policy, the one above which the IDF needed psychological counselling for. Perhaps this article illustrates where the change began as Israel became concerned about how she was reported abroad

The new Israeli policy of beating Palestinians to stop the protests in the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip has spurred relatively little official debate here, but brought mounting worries over Israel's image abroad.

Increasingly concerned about what is being widely seen as a public relations problem, some Government officials are saying that the orders to beat Palestinians have been changed, clarified to avoid ''irregularities,'' or even that they were never given.

''There is no beating,'' Police Minister Haim Bar-Lev told reporters after the Israeli Cabinet met today. ''This is an unfortunate term.''

Domestic opposition has come from leftist groups originally galvanized by Israel's 1982 invasion of Lebanon, such as the Peace Now movement, which gathered tens of thousands of demonstrators on the streets of Tel Aviv Sunday night to protest the Israeli policy. Israeli newspapers today estimated the crowds at between 30,000 and 50,000 demonstrators. 'Might, Power and Beatings'

Defense Minister Yitzhak Rabin publicly proclaimed the policy last week, saying the army would use ''might, power and beatings'' to intimidate Palestinians into halting their violent, rock-throwing demonstrations, during which at least 38 Palestinians have been killed by Israeli gunfire.

Since then, military commanders, ordinary soldiers, foreign relief workers and Palestinians who had been beaten have been extensively quoted talking about the policy in the local and foreign press. Hospital records showed that more than 200 Palestinians were treated for broken bones or other serious injuries from beatings in the first three days after Mr. Rabin announced the policy.

Many Palestinians had been taken out of their homes and beaten in house-to-house raids by the army through refugee districts and Palestinian villages where there had been protests. In some the injured and other witnesses said soldiers broke the hands of young men.

Many Israelis have been concerned more about the impact of the beatings on foreign public opinion, particularly in the United States, and, to a lesser extent, on possible harm to the mental health of the soldiers carrying out the orders. Official to Visit U.S. On the television news tonight, for example, the leading item was that the Government was sending the Cabinet secretary, Eliakim Rubinstein, to explain Israeli policy to American Jewish groups. The second item was about the adverse reaction to Israel in the United States.

The television news reported that the Israeli Ambassador in Washington, Moshe Arad, said the damage was most heavy, and had ''hurt Israel's image of being an enlightened country.''

The leading Hebrew newspaper Haaretz carried a dispatch from Washington this morning on the American reaction, with a headline printed in English saying ''The Week of the Sticks.''

......

Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir, who represents the hard-line Likud faction, has already publicly endorsed the policy of Mr. Rabin, the Defense Minister, who belongs to the nominally more dovish Labor Party, saying ''it was decided upon and instituted by the Government as a whole.''

The Jerusalem Post, in an analysis today, said that Labor Party members were upset not so much at Mr. Rabin's policy of what he called ''a massive show of force and bashing the rioters'' as his bluntness in publicly announcing it. The Importance of Image
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http://www.nytimes.com/1988/01/25/world/israelis-worry-about-their-image.html

See this was near the time '82 Lebanon war when the West started getting a view of Israel which was not expected. What happened to make it so that such papers now find something like 2014 acceptable?

"We entered Gaza…with an insane amount of firepower."

TABLE 5 How Israel Fought OPE: A Selection of IDF Testimonies

18* When we left after the operation, it was just a barren stretch of desert…. We spoke about it a lot amongst ourselves, the guys from the company, how crazy the amount of damage we did there was. I quote: “Listen man, it’s crazy what went on in there,” “Listen man, we really messed them up,” “(*)(*)(*)(*), check it out, there’s nothing at all left…, it’s nothing but desert now, that’s crazy.”

21 I remember that the level of destruction looked insane to me.

22 We entered Gaza…with an insane amount of firepower.

25 It all looked like a science fiction movie…serious levels of destruction everywhere…. [E]verything was really in ruins. And non-stop fire all the time.

30 Before the entrance on foot [to the Gaza Strip], a crazy amount of artillery was fired at the entire area…. Before a tank makes any movement it fires, every time. Those guys were trigger happy, totally crazy.[1]

31 The explosions’ effects cause major amounts of damage, but that doesn’t interest anyone. “Use it, use it, explosives can’t be taken back,” the platoon commander says, “I don’t want to leave explosives with me.”

35 [Y]ou saw crazy wreckage, it was a real trip.

36 Our view was of the center of the Strip. Let’s say it was a real fireworks display. From a distance it looked pretty cool.

37 [Y]ou’re shooting at anything that moves—and also at what isn’t moving, crazy amounts…. t also becomes a bit like a computer game, totally cool and real.

49 It was total destruction in there—the photos on line are child’s play compared to what we saw there in reality…. I never saw anything like it.

70 [T]he unfathomable number of dead on one of the sides, the unimaginable level of destruction, the way militant cells and people were regarded as targets and not as living beings—that’s something that troubles me.

74 t’s destruction on a whole other level.

94 The air force carries out an insane amount of strikes in the Gaza Strip during an operation like “Protective Edge.”

96 The air force carries out an insane amount of strikes in the Gaza Strip during an operation like “Protective Edge.”

* Testimonies are numbered in the collection.
** Bracketed, italicized interpolations by Breaking the Silence.

Although Israel recoils at comparisons between its own conduct and the Nazi holocaust, one of the testimonies (#83) breaks this taboo: “There’s that famous photo that they always show on trips to Poland (organized trips in which Israeli youths visit Holocaust memorial sites) that shows Warsaw before the war and Warsaw after the Second World War. The photo shows the heart of Warsaw and it’s this classy European city, and then they show it at the end of the war. They show the exact same neighborhood, only it has just one house left standing, and the rest is just ruins. That’s what it looked like.” To avoid mind-numbing redundancy, Table 5 omits quoting the succession of combatants who testified that the IDF’s modus operandi during OPE was shoot to kill anything that moves, often on explicit orders, but also because it was “cool.”[2] The last testimony (#111) in the Breaking the Silence collection provides insight into the society that nurtured this Vandal-like army. “You leave the [Gaza Strip] and the most obvious question is, ‘Did you kill anybody?’,” an IDF infantry sergeant rued. “Even if you meet the most leftwing girl in the world, eventually she’ll start thinking, ‘Did you ever kill somebody, or not?’ And what can you do about it? Most people in our society consider that to be a badge of honor. So everyone wants to come out of there with that feeling of satisfaction.”[3]

Read more at:https://www.byline.com/project/13/article/227
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When the New York Times used to say it as it is

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When the New York Times used to say it as it is

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