hazing incident. ineptitude of the IDF. tear gas issued to a combat unit. AND, SOMEHOW, IN THE PITIFUL REFLECTION OF THE WRITER, IT'S ALL BECAUSE OF THE SETTLERS AND THE SETTLEMENTS!!! WHEN DID ASHKELON BECOME A SETTLEMENT? OR SDEROT?

To Gilad-london Your conversation is sick. If their was no settlements, there would be no Israel. With Love Of Zion I.M. Paladin Have Thought Will Travel N. USA

who cares if the s.golani uses tear gas, fart gas or any other means to train/ kill our enemies? with all that is gonig on , is this really the best you van write about? get a life!

In the post oslo world Israel actually defending itself by killing or anjuring anybody but the most senior terrorist comanders has become a crime we must appologise for. Winning wars in Israel today is not somethng we do with pride we do the fighting then we applogise to the arabs. If the world condemed Israel for fighting then after day 1 we would be calling for a ceacefire because we didnt want the rest of the world to hate us. Assuming we actually won the war then day 7 would not be the day of rest it would be the down at the UN trying to draw up a plan whereby Israel will give back all the territory it captured along with financial compensation to the relatives of the dead arab soilders. Who knows in another 40 years assuming the crooked politicians and blind left wingers dont sell the country first but if we last that long the Golanis of the future might find themselves being issued with water pistols insitead of guns that fire live amunition. There was a time when the IDF was told they could have just about any weapon they wanted no price was to high and we looked up to them like heros. Today the IDF has to fight battles for every shekel in Lebanon soilders were having to buy their own bullet proof vests because we saw budget cuts as more important than soilders lives. When it came to having a ceremony for the 1 year memorial for the dead soilders PM Olmert, chief of staff Dan Halutz and president ellect Peres all snubbed the ceremonry and minister of defense Peretz only agreed to attand at the last minute because of politcal preasure. Our politicians are not even interested today in attentending memorial services for the dead men who died fighting a war they sent them to fight. Today the IDF has become a glorified police force, they dont get suitable training to fight real wars ( training for reservists is allmost non existant for some ), live fire exercises are a special occasion that doesnt happen very often. Its debatable that the IDF of today would have sufficiant training to fight the 6 day war. We have neglected the IDF for years now beleiving in the mythical peace process to be our savior and money that would have been allocated to the millitary has been spent on politicly popular projects and the millitary told basicly you want weapons go tell the Americans they will give you a couple of billion in millitary aid and leave it at that. The only posative thing thats come out of the Lebanon war is that the government have finnaly agreed to increase the millitary budget after years of cuts. The politicians no longer have any respect for the IDF our ex minister of defense Peretz never served in the army, Olmerts sons are safley out the country so they dont have to fight wars so they dont care the soilders are pawns in their games of politics and in the IDF itself there are very few experienced officers just men collecting their paycheck while at the same time arabs have been spending billions on modern weaponry and learning about millitary tactics and how to fight to win our officers though were debating weather the days of armoured warfare were over and did we need to spend alot of money on tanks anymore. We need to start asking ourselves what we want our soilders to be .. badly trained poloicemen or well trained eltite soilders and if its policemen we want then lets change the uniform to blue rather than green and give them tear gas instead of the kind of explosive grenades that actualy kill people.