True, we’ve been here before. War in Israel has always been pocked by accusations of Israeli excesses, even atrocities. I well remember that during Israel’s invasion of Lebanon in 1982, there were lurid reports from the battlefront claiming that Israel was deliberately targeting civilians. Jacobo Timerman, whose memoir of his own imprisonment by the junta in Argentina had made him a human rights hero, filed from Lebanon during the war and accused Israel of outrageous, criminal behavior. Yet until the slaughter at Sabra and Shatila, in which Israel was at least complicit (according the report of the Israeli government’s investigative commission), Israel was nowhere near as villainous as Timerman and the media in general had reported. (Concerned by those reports, I somehow made contact with Aharon “Areleh” Yariv, Chief of Military Intelligence, in Lebanon. He was stunned by what I told him. He’d been unaware of such reports, and vigorously denied them. I knew him and trusted him; post-war accounts confirmed his trustworthiness.) And again, during the Israeli attack on Jenin during the second intifada, the early media reports were horrific. Israel was alleged to have gratuitously massacred people and recklessly destroyed property. In the event, as the media and human rights organizations later acknowledged, Israel had generally behaved with restraint.
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