Israeli says: Our Defense Forces, our war crimes, our terrorism

An Israeli journalist and IDF veteran writes: Our Defense Forces, our war crimes, our terrorism - Haaretz - Israel News.

I want to apologize for the unforgivable.

It is time for us to stop "understanding" why we kill so many Palestinian civilians. It is time for us to stop explaining away the deaths we excuse as the unfortunate and incidental by-product of a terrible war.

If it had been only an isolated incident, a tragic aberration, I would have kept my peace, said nothing, just moved on.

But the same crime, the same - let's call it by its real name - atrocity, has been committed time and again, under the same circumstances, for the same reasons, with the same indefensible result.

Someone in an IDF uniform, in a position of responsibility, gave an order. We will probably never know who. Nor will we know who loaded the shell into the tank gun, if that was, indeed what happened, or who armed the air-to-surface missile, if that was what happened, who sighted the target, who gave the order to fire, who carried it out.

What we do know is that a mother in Beit Hanoun, a devastated area of northern Gaza from which Qassams and mortars are fired at Israel, was seeing to the breakfast of her four small children Monday morning when their world exploded.

We know that they are all dead. -- Bradley Burston in Ha'aretz

Israel has been making excuses for such murders since I was a child 35 years ago. But no American government has ever held her to account. Only her citizens and her supporters in the West can force Israel to change.

Cease the murder. This will lead to peace. Violence has not curtailed violence in this war. Only negotiation will. Hamas has offered a ceasefire. talk it out. Now.

Hat tip to Philip Weiss for the above.