The soldiers did not get medals, and their commander was suspended.

It would be hard to return from an Iranian mission.

As with other weapons, Israeli drone development suffers from small production scale. Much lower R&D costs so far have allowed Israel Air Industries to compete, but step by step the corporation is migrating abroad. Unless Israel breaks free from American export restrictions, drone production will go the way of Lavi jets, Merkava tanks, and Uzi guns.

UAVs, especially the large ones, are quickly becoming obsolete. They lack the active protection and maneuverability of manned aircraft, and are very easy to shoot down for an enemy who has even basic radar. Compared to mid-price-range Russian jets, they are not cheap, either.

Drones will not be employed in combat anytime in the near future. Drones are useful for reconnaissance, but they are not inherently preferable to ever-cheaper satellites. In the politically correct world, drones have become the weapon of choice for foreign missions: for some reason, affected governments find it easier to swallow if drones, rather than manned aircraft, violate their airspace.

Drones fit the videogame mentality of this generation: do not endanger pilots who, like any soldiers, are meant to be endangered. As fighter jets become prohibitively expensive for combat operations, and developed nations shrink from real combat anyway, we will see many more drones taking to the skies on quasi-military missions. With volumes soaring and competition increasing, Israel won’t be able to sustain her leading edge in drone development.

The parallels readily come to mind.

The Iron Dome was touted as the ultimate defense for Sderot, but we have pointed out all along that it cannot be used against Kassams for economic reasons: a $200,000 interceptor missile for a $100 projectile.

The Iron Dome will be deployed at IAF bases and other military installations to defend against Fajr rockets, which are still very rare. As for Sderot—who in the government cares about it?

The probe is strictly forbidden under religious guidelines. Its members commit the high crime of informing gentiles on Jewish transgressions—a crime which will certainly lead to more Israel-bashing. The haters will reason that Israel is guilty of many more cases of using white phosphorus than it has admitted to. In Jewish religious law, the crime is punishable by death.

Who needs the truth? Why could the commission not simply confirm that IDF used white phosphorus shells properly, for lighting purposes only?

IDF prosecution had opened a total of 36 criminal cases connected to the Gaza war. We’ve yet to hear about a single criminal case opened by Hamas against its fighters.

Their conditions contrast sharply with the resort-like conditionsJewish taxpayers provide for jailed Palestinian terrorists.

Now legal advisers will micromanage battles in the heat of operations.

It defies understanding why the government insists on conscripting haredim without providing them with proper military training.

Ronsky’s likely successors are even more conformist than him. Rabbi Rafi Peretz from Atzmona yeshiva instructed his students to participate in the Gush Katif eviction. The other two candidates are also rabbis on the government payroll. Ben-Artzi heads IDF’s Jewish Consciousness Department, whose job is to somehow reconcile halachic Judaism with the army’s defeatism. Another candidate is Shlomo Peretz, who heads the IDF’s kashrut department and is altogether removed from ideology.

The army has already created its own Jews by instituting a three-month conversion for non-Jews, and now it wants a pet chief rabbi.

Now IDF has issued an ultimatum to the soldiers of Har Bracha military yeshiva: within two months they must switch to a yeshiva with more amenable rabbis or have their studying privileges canceled.

Yeshiva students can dodge the draft, and most of them do, but once they join the army there is no way back. The army’s demarche will prompt many more yeshiva students to dodge the next draft.

Decades ago, that army used to fight Arabs.

No similar alert takes place when Arabs attack synagogues—a common occurrence even in Smaller Israel.

IDF opened dozens of criminal investigations against its soldiers, which will bear heavily on their morale in the next war.

While Israel is weakening her army, Hamas is strengthening its forces with new training courses, hundreds of miles of new tunnels, and mid-range rockets. In the next war, Hamas will have no qualms about bombarding civilians in Tel Aviv, but Israeli soldiers will fight under threat of prosecution for the pettiest offenses.

The army would be stupid to hold its fire while two border policemen were wounded.

Jail sentences and demotions did not stop the brave soldiers from standing by their values. In vain, IDF has tried to equate their actions with wartime insubordination. Soldiers are not automatons, and are duty bound to resist evidently immoral, criminal orders. Just as they must not obey their commanders in Kfar Qassem, so they must not in Homesh.

Their actions did not come up during any military activity, thus were strictly a political expression rather than an act of military disobedience. Still more curious is their eviction from the combat unit: does the refusal to evict Jews somehow make soldiers not reliable during combat with Arabs?

Now two soldiers of Nachshon Brigade are protesting their unit’s role in destroying an outpost.

Both Samson and Nachshon Brigades are prestigious units, and it takes significant courage for these young people to protest, which will result in their being demoted from combat to mundane tasks.

Many soldiers refuse to evict Jews, but normally such matters are settled quietly with their commanders.

Israel’s good health-care has played a statistical trick: Israel wars have left a relatively small number of dead. That is because the killed-to-wounded ratio in IDF is 1:16, much better than in Arab armies. But the high rate of survival translates into a huge number of disabled veterans, currently about 50,000. On average, an Israeli family pays $400 a year in taxes to support disabled veterans.

The investigation includes allegations of… property damage. If IDF decides to punish its soldiers for breaking Palestinian TVs and fridges, that would certainly position us as the most moral army in the world. Or the most stupid.

According to Barak, “The IDF must not be involved in political controversy, including the evacuation of settlements.” What he meant is that the IDF must be involved in the evacuation of settlements, and must not protest it.

It takes Jewish madness for a general to lambaste soldiers who refuse to repress the best local nationalists.

The detachment will likely be disbanded, and its soldiers demoted to munda,ne non-combat positions.

The truth is probably just that Israel needs to use commandos to neutralize Iranian SAM batteries and clear the way for an IAF strike.

Despite leftist propaganda about allegedly strained relations between soldiers and settlers, they are actually quite friendly.

Bar fears that the settlers would indoctrinate soldiers with real Jewish values. For its part, the army conducts massive brainwashing of conscripts in the peacenik agenda.

This is no big deal, though, as IDF has been persecuting Jews in Judea and Samaria for many years.

In Olmert’s government, Barak was the only minister who opposed an Israeli strike on Syria and the operation in Gaza. When he was overruled, Barak executed both operations with tactical brilliance.

Even if true, the allegations lack significance because there is a clear commandment to kill entire towns whose population violently oppose Jews in the Promised Land.

Admission of guilt in such cases would allow the Arabs and their supporters a point to rally around. They use the very fact of the investigation to show that IDF admits to having committed major atrocities. In the Arab mentality, you only investigate an atrocity when you cannot hide it, and it is a tip of an iceberg.

The IDF is investigating Palestinian allegations to preclude international criminal investigations that might be undertaken were we to refuse to investigate the incidents.

Imagine the outcry if the government had mandated public fasting on Yom Kippur.

Faced with a Muslim insurrection in the Philippines, General Pershing buried the executed terrorists in swine skins.

Active defense is only useful against rare projectiles such as rockets or grenades. It cannot counter Hezbollah’s trademark massive mines or heavy armor-piercing machine-guns, and is of dubious efficacy against a concerted assault from many RPGs. Any active defense system also has black zones, missing RPGs fired at close range just above the ground. Pointedly, Trophy was not tested against RPGs with splitting warheads.

In the contest between offense and defense, tanks are doomed just like cavalry.

The report details common wartime violations of mores. IDF soldiers indeed sometimes damaged Palestinian property for no military reason, endangered Arab civilians, and shot at everything that moved. Such things weren’t widespread, but they did happen, as they always happen in any war. Soldiers hate their enemies and cannot fight in white gloves.

Instead of admitting these simple truths and disregarding the report, the Israeli media damages its own credibility in order to preserve the silly image they have created for the IDF as a suicidally moral army.

Army Radio brainwashes the troops into supporting a peacenik agenda.

Along with all other Israeli media, Army Radio boycotted Meir Kahane and continues to ignore the Israeli right-wing camp.

The provocation shows that the Palestinians are certain that Israeli soldiers under crazy peacenik orders won’t shoot an Arab woman.

The incident took place near Jericho, the place where our biblical hero Joshua bin Nun killed all the enemy residents.

The problem is, the Russians have long been using optical heads for their anti-aircraft missiles.

In the competition between defense and offense, offense always wins. In the long term, missiles doom aircraft in the same way artillery doomed fortresses.

The leftist establishment refuses to recognize that once a man takes a weapon, he lives according to different rules, and it is no big deal for a teen to drive an ATV.

Such “achievements” are probably routine in every country, certainly in Russia. The trick is that professional intelligence operatives play their parts well and arouse no suspicions. It is practically impossible to guard huge bases against all possible intruders, and infiltrators are normally spotted by their irregular, nervous behavior.

Sgt.Richter Levi, among other troops, was suppressing a routine Arab riot in Bir Zeit village. Instead of allowing the Arabs to kill each other out and break each other’s shops, the Jewish army intervened.

At that point, Arab civilians attacked the soldiers. Under strict orders not to shoot the unarmed Arabs, the soldiers could not counter them on approach and engaged in hand-to-hand fighting. Sgt. Richter Levi’s rifle went off when he was thus fist-fighting with an Arab.

Instead of shooting him.

Both actions are useful tactically but not strategically. By now, Iran has removed most of its weapons-grade uranium from Natanz into caves, which can only be attacked with nuclear weapons—especially now that Washington has refused to sell Israel the bunker-buster bombs. As for the ABM, the cowardly mullahs won’t counterattack Israel: their missiles are not advanced enough to pass through Israeli defenses, and an Israeli retaliatory strike, unlikely as it is, would be debilitating for Iranian economy.

If true, this is the first instance of the Israeli Navy taking what is traditionally IAF’s job as Israel’s long arm.

The reports confirm the IDF practice of phoning the residents in advance of bombing their houses (which stored Hamas weapons). Why would the Gazans be afraid to provide their houses to Hamas for weapons-storage if Israel spares their lives? Each house was struck first with a $200,000 stun rocket to warn the residents and bombed only afterwards.

The army announced proudly that it did not even shell terrorist squads in open fields with white phosphorus. A normal Jew among us wonders, why not fry the terrorists?

Barak praised IDF as “one of the most moral armies in the world.” Why “one of”? IDF is the only army with top brass stupid enough to risk its soldiers to save enemy populations.

Israeli Arab MK Tibi reacted to the report by calling IDF “the army of murderers.” It is not clear what he meant, since Arabs do not serve in the IDF.

In the effort to counter the anti-IDF propaganda by the ultra-left, the army set up various initiatives, including SoldiersSpeakOut.com where IDF medics proudly relate some of their stupid actions—they risked Jewish lives and expended significant resources to provide help to Hamas’ voters in Gaza. The Palestinians were evacuated by helicopters to Israel for expensive treatment.

The most appalling example comes from a well-meaning Jew named Amir. His unit broke into a wanted terrorist’s home and saw his wife in labor. The Jew-hating female refused Amir’s help in delivering the terrorist’s baby. At that point, the IDF unit retreated to make the room for the Palestinian ambulance.

Jews will be using $200,000 interceptor missiles for $100 Kassam rockets. The Iron Dome is useless against shells, which are used with increasing frequency by Palestinian terrorists, and its efficiency against Grad and newer Kassam-4 rockets is questionable.

The Iron Dome was chosen over the American laser system due to the pressure from Histadrut trade union and the Israeli military-industrial complex.

A much cheaper and more efficient solution would be to annex Gaza and expel its inhabitants into Egypt.

There is a considerable religious controversy about donor cards because Jewish law only allows organ donation (corpse mutilation) for a specific and immediate transplantation to another Jew; no organ banks.

Barak and Bibi together are worse than either one of them alone. Their experience in Sayeret Matkal, Israel’s top commando unit, predisposed them to tunnel vision. Barak is a great tactician but a failed strategist, and Netanyahu is neither of those things.

Barak was the major voice in Olmert’s government against attacking Iran, Syria, and Gaza—though he planned and executed the last two operations with incredible success. Bibi is much less likely than Olmert to break Barak’s opposition on military matters.

Netanyahu desperately needs the left-wing Barak in order to make his right-wing government acceptable to our European and American puppeteers. Due to Labor’s internal deliberations, Barak might join the government after it is formed, and replace the interim Defense Minister.

Some of the report’s absurdities include the soldiers deliberately herding Palestinian civilians into IAF’s open-fire zones, snipers shooting Palestinian children with their mothers, and troops throwing out furniture and fridges from the occupied houses (just imagine tired soldiers working out at night by throwing fridges through windows).

Instead of discharging the involved academy’s personnel for treason, Barak promised to thoroughly investigate the allegations.

Israeli leftists are increasingly pushing for Arab participation in Shirut Leumi to alleviate public concerns over the gross preference given to Arab citizens: they vote and receive benefits from the state but don’t spend three years in IDF. Shirut Leumi service for Arabs would also allow the left to ban a popular discrimination measure: Jewish businesses often advertise the hiring of IDF veterans to avoid hiring Arab enemies.

Shirut Leumi is mostly a scam to begin with, as very few of its jobs actually benefit society.