I would not worry about moral army which is a relic of shtetil haredi, torah and hashem. Nver mind moral, load your guns and never again into the gas chambers. if 6 millipoon jews in europe had guns, the nazi for certain would have not been able to kill 6 millioin. Perhaps a million would have been saved. And many nazis would have been killed. palestinians can teach jews something in this area and we should be smart enough to learn from them-defend your self and your family name. Tibi could be a good israeli patriot if he did not mind living in a jewish state.

One can only lean back in the chair, and grin at that kind of utterly pompous boast. Ridiculous to play that kind of silly game. What a posture!

No less moral than our own troops no doubt.

does mr. ben-yishai really believe that anything will stop the demonification of israel? if the israeli army went into gaza and gave every arab there a pedicure and a back rub, they will still say that we "murdered thousands of innocent people". you see, too many people have too much to gain by vilifying the jews. iran uses the jewish scapegoat to allow it to murder the opposition. the euopeans use it as a more acceptible form of antisemitism and anti-americanism. the moslem world uses israel in order to keep themselves from killing each otther and to keep the ruling class in power.

Considering Goldstone is after all a Zionist-Jew with an impressive judicial record and that Mr. Goldstone was highly, highly critical of Hamas and everyone else who contributed to the terrible situation in the Gaza - it is especially nasty and dishonest to describe as quote, "an enemy of the Jewish people" - a good and decent man who was trying his best to carrying out both ethically and factually, a task that was bound to infuriate a lot of people on all sides of the issue.

Israel treated the residents of Gaza in a way that most farmers would not stoop to treat an animal. Israel placed the entire Gaza Strip under a blockade which the UN, the Red Cross and others stated amounted to the collective punishment of 1.5 million people and resulted in the deaths of hundreds as food, fuel, medical supplies and even water were withheld from entering the Gaza Strip for long periods. Israel was also building settler "colonies" inside Gaza until 2007, while also slaughtering large number of civilians in their ongoing "security operations" - one of which killed eight people and broke the ceasefire in late 2008 resulting in the renewed rocket attacks against Israel, killing two people, which Israel then used as an excuse to kill fourteen hundred Palestinians - half of whom were women and children. The Goldstone report is only the tip of the iceberg.

If one does not prevent war and individual criminal acts such as murder when one knows and has proof of the intent, or even more so proof of continuous execution of such acts, one becomes complicit in the murder if one does NOT take measures. Israel has been far too lenient for far too long and this has allowed the cancer of terrorism to mestastasize all over the world. The operation Cast Lead was NOT a mistake; it was necessary to prove to ourselves that we can still kick ass, it was a feel good war. The building of the wall was not a mistake; it was necessary. Both are preventing continuous murder aimed at civilians. Hamas does not identify itself. It has no uniforms, it does not wear identifying armbands, it mingles with the population and so uses the population as both a shield and an excuse. Hamas is a Syrian operated government in Gaza. It has failed to protect the Palestinians in Gaza by not wearing, again, uniforms, or identification, by not building bomb shelters, and exposed the population because of its declarations of war and war operations.

do you realize that the usa and nato forces this past week sent a missile into a village thinking it is a terrorist stronghold in afghanistan. OPPSSSS! it was not a terrorist stronghold but a house consisring of 12 innocents that were blastged to amithereens and died as a result of this missile...from your country, no less. america offered an appology saying, OPPSS! SORRY WE MADE A MISTAKE. NO ONE SAW OR HEARD YOUR OUTCRY ABOUT THIS MISHAP!!!! two weeks ago, an errant usa missile hit a wedding party in afghanistant killing 5 innocent people. OPPPSS! AMERICA SAID. WE ARE SORRY IT WAS A MISTAKE, AN ERRANT MISSILE. AND SO GOES ON IN IRAQ, IN AFGHANISTAN FOR THE PAST 8 YEARS KILLING THOUSANDS OF INNOCENT CIVILIAZNS BECAUSE OF EITHER ERROR OR BAD INTELLIGENCE. not once, not a single time, had we had the pleasure of hearing your condemnation as you condemn israeli idf for mistakes or hits that went array because of the fog of war. why the double standard cameron? america killing civilians not even in self defense where the war on terror they are waging is 5,000 miles away from usa and european nato border and present no threat to the american and european civilians.... WHILE ISRAEL IS FIGHTING THIS TERROR 10 MILES AWAY FROM ITS SOUTHERN CITIES AND 20 MILES AWAY FROM ITS MAIN CENTRAL TOWNS. I BELIEVE ISRAEL HAS MUCH MORE OF A SOLID REASON FOR THIS FIGHT THAN ANY AMERICAN SOLDIER. if your american missiles can err and miss, why can't israeli ones??? if the usa just apologizes and continues to repeat bombardment against the taliban, why can't israel bomb hamas terror strongholds? why do you hold different standards of morality for your army and a different one for israeli idf? i wonder why? and i also wonder what is your feeling about the usa constantly appologising for its deadly mistakes. why is it that when the idf makes a mistake you label them immoral and war criminals and while the usa and nato countries make a mistake, they are all moral and ok? sounds like you have a logic problem here or it may be that you don't believe that jews have a right to defend themselves in the same way and manner that your army has a right to defend itself? i am particularly interested in your reply. enlighten me, please. hameed aboughaze, iranian

Where was the world when Jews were shipped to the European death camps? What's moral is to kill your enemy and do it good and hold your enemy responsible for their own civilian casualties. We do everything to protect our children from harms way. If they use their own children as human shields that's on their conscience. Besides, acting like goody-two-shoes and morally superior only leads to more hate. The Jewish people have never been more loved and respected than today. That's not because of producing Holocaust movies ad nauseum to make the Gentiles feel guilty and pity us as victims, it's because we are no longer homeless and have one of the best armies the world has ever seen, and can bring death and destruction to those who screw with us. Strength and power earns respect, not pity and victimhood. Think about it, how many people hate Germans more than Jews, even though they started two world wars and are responsible for millions of deaths? We can end this conflict tomorrow if we like, but we are afraid of being hated for it. If we are destroyed we have ourselves to blame, no one else.

i asked myself this question. hamas terrorist holding gilat shallit captive is this moral? palestinian gun men firing rockets into israel every year is this moral? the world hating the jews and israel is this moral? hitler killing 6 million jews is this justifiable?palestinian terrorist hacking jewish children to bits is this justifiable? the london university group telling elton john to cancel his tour of israel is this ridiculous and obsurd.as a christain whose faith is close to the jewiish faith because christ was a jew, we wouldnt forget these atrocities committed against israel and we wouldnt allow it to happen again.

too much of this Ashkenazi need to seek approval from the Gentile (European) world. That's probably an outcome of the Diaspora and our lack of feeling complete in our own homeland and the need to to feel loved, liked and valued by the international community. While this is a consequence of the Diaspora, it is less of a fact in Israel than in the West.

referral to the "most moral army in the world" is an unneeded result of Jews feeling that they should be more "moral" than others and the world, in turn, expecting this from the "Chosen People". Freud, in his last book, "Moses and Monotheism", took this theme up and analyzed it from its socio-psychological and socio-historical roots. So the need to justify ourselves, as Jews, runs right alongside our Diaspora history. This conscious and arrogant inclination is, of course, a detriment to our well-being and to our effectiveness in functioning both in peace and war. As to morality in war, some American and British generals recognized that the bombing of Dresden crossed over the line of social morality and was a sinful act. The only wrong greater than that would have been to lose the war because we didn't act in our own self-interests. At any rate, we terrorized the city of Dresden with our bombing and this had the effect of demoralizing our opposition and, consequently, of shortening our war effort. When William Tecumseh Sherman was criticized for burning up Georgia during the American Civil War, he said that it was better to destroy the enemy in one fell swoop than to allow a war to continue on for years and years with all the suffering and misery which such a prolongation of war would cause. Harry S. Truman has been castigated for using a nuclear bomb on Nagasaki and Hiroshima but, had he not done that, and given what would have been the Herculean difficulties of cleaning out Japan itself on Japanese soil and, recognizing the valour and steadfastness of Japanese soldiers, the war would have lasted another two years at the cost of several hundred thousand American soldiers and at a huge financial cost. President Truman's decision was the right one and it was a courageous one as he was aware of the horrible consequences of his decision to use the atomic bomb. As to Israel, had we gotten rid of our illusions of moral superiority and fully recognized who the enemy was during our assault on Gaza (an obscene and evil force called "Hamas"), we would have wiped them out completely and then faced the world's condemnation, as we do now, after the act was completed. As it stands now, we will have to repeat our efforts in the future as there are no peaceful intentions from that quarter (which their charter makes quite clear). Yes, we may cross the "moral" divide but the only thing less moral is not to survive. Did we not learn that sixty years ago?

I've always considered you one of the sharper tools in the shed here. But I don't know what happened to you today, as your latest comment is deplorable and stems of great ignorance. All cynicism aside, the Israeli Defense Force IS the world's most moral army. The IDF warns citizens ahead of time to evacuate their homes, by spreading leaflets and making phonecalls. Show me another army that does this. The IDF aborts missions of eliminating terrorists, with 100% success probability, just because too many civilians might get hurt in the process. Show me another army that does this. In the 2002 Defensive Shield operation, the IDF preferred clearing the terrorist nest of Jenin by walking door-to-door in a super-dangerous sniper-infested urban area, rather than flattening the whole thing from the air. This cost the lives of 13 combatants. Show me another army that does this. Compare that to the tens (or even hundreds?) of thousands of Iraqis and Afghans your American troops killed, maimed, violated, or left homeless. Compare it to NATO who killed hundreds of innocent Serbs, in a completely unnecessary war recently. Compare that to Russia flattening Grozni to the ground, and bombing Georgian civilians indiscriminately. And I won't even ask you to compare that to how Muslims soldiers treat their own fellow Muslims, I'll stick only to supposedly-moral and enlightened Western armies. None of them come close to the efforts the IDF makes to avert civilian deaths. You don't need to take my word for it, you can learn it from the testimony of colonel Richard Kemp (of the British army) on the Cast Lead operation - look it up in youtube. As he said there - no army is exempt from making tragic mistakes. War is after all an ugly business. But mistakes are NOT war crimes. And all the more impressive, is the fact that unlike NATO, or the American, Russian and British armies - whose countries do not face existential danger - Israel is under constant threat, yet its army is the most moral of all, in the treatment of its enemies. I want to see how America reacts if rockets would fall on San Diego's kindergartens. Within an hour, there would be no more Tijuana. BTW, Hameed in #8 is even more instrumental in his answer.

is the u.s. army (or the army of another country) the world" s most moral army. it is a subjective reaction. every country says that it has the most moral army in the world. what are the real facts and what country is telling the objective truth?

Israel often says it's a light to the nations and that it has the most moral army. Maybe so. I hope so. But when it TELLS people that it's the most moral, it invites rebuttal. I think Israel would be better served to claim that it's "at least as good" as other armies. It should try to be the best, but it shouldn't claim to be the best.

killed by accident 12 family members in afganistan. in war there always civilian catualties. especially when it held in hurban place.

It was impossible not to smile and bow before the shining radiance & purity of "the world's most moral army". Now mark you....I always give Israeli forces full credit for knowing their business, but statements like that I find egotistical to the point of passing strange, so you will have to pardon me for rolling my eyes and grinning a bit on that one. Let's just keep the matter more grounded in a healthy, realistic, perspective, shall we?

no one should ever have to compare armies. what they need to compare and pay attention to when judging an army's action is the imminent danger, the proximity of the danger and the intention of the danger. all these three points point to hamas. hamas is the imminent danger on israeli borders. hamas is in very close proximity to israeli civic centers and innocent civilians. hamas is intent and resolute in bombarding israel, terrorising its innocent civilians and had never any intention to bomb army bases, but population centers that had no military value or significance. hence, the role of any army in the above terror situation and bombardment attacks perpetrated by the terrirists is entitled, morally and justifiably, to stop the terror and missiles by any means possible at their convenience. this is why the argument of proportionality doesn't wash here. if one argues proportionality, then one says that israel, like hamas, is entitled to respond with 13,000 missiles that are not high tech precise and directed and bombared gaza anywhere they please. this would have resulted not only in the death of 400 civilians and 700 terrorist, but the death of hundreds of thousands of palestinians needlessly. israel intended to minimize the casualties by phoning palestinians, dropping leaflets, etc.. while hamas' missiles did everything possible with the intent to kill as many civilians as possible on the israeli side. i do not see america choosing to use exactly the same munition and military hardware that the taliban possess just because the un is screaming proportionality. i do not see nato forces in the sky that obliterated kosovo and chechnya, serbia and yemen villages and innocents paying attention to proportionality. what is see is that no army in the world sends warning phone calls, distributes warning leaflets, stops the attack to let food in to the enemies. but israel did this. now, that is a big case for proportionality and morality of war. all countries fight with the best equipment they have and spare nothing in their attack, sir. israel, therefore and idf in particular, is an army just like all other nato armies that has the ultimate responsibility to protect its civilians, its home front and to win against terror by any means at its disposal. morality doesn't play a factor because most if not all armies subject innocent civilians to collective punishment in the fog of war, unfortunatelly. the hamas however, never wera uniforms and blends into its civilian population, making distinguishing fighters from innocent civilians next to impossible for any army, even the most moral one. the amount of killed civilians in no way points to an israeli agenda to punish the palestinians as a group. the numbers that were killed were killed as a result of hamas not wearing uniforms, blending into and using innocent populations, their homes and mosques to do battle from thereby rendering their civilians unprotected and abused by hamas for propaganda. one like you needs not ask who is more moral than the other, but what started this war in the first place and who acted like a terrorist to bring this war about and then cried victim! hameed aboughaze, iranian

i am still waiting for your intelligent response, sir. can you please oblige me with your response? if you do not respond, i will conclude that i am perfectly right in my answer to you. if you decide to respond, then please.....answer all my concerns. hameed aboughaze, iranian

I am saddened that so many of us seem to have such a minuscule grasp of logic. The question of human shields has been found to be wrong when our defense forces used the practice in the past. And without a full investigation into current allegations, it would be completely illogical as well as immoral to wage war over something that our defense forces have been known to do on a regular basis. I am horrified to read that someone who claims to be from our Israel, Yaniv, who wrote that our Israel should eliminate the Palestinians but that we do not do so because "we are afraid of being hated for it". I weep that there would even be one Jew in our Israel who would advocate for something that we have said never again to. I cry that there is even one Jew in our Israel would bring up the Shoah to use as a play for sympathy from the Gentiles and then imply we should ourselves engage in killing an entire people and create a new one. I am unable to comprehend that there would even be one Jew who could even think such a thing.

The Goldstone Report is only the tip of the iceberg.

Do you hear me? I am sorry! I saw what we did on channel 10 and I'm sorry for what we did in Gaza. G-d I'm sorry. So sorry...

to repair the judgment aparartuse . the teaching aparatuse the commanders aparatuse . evry one conducte himselfe if it is not by education or commands it will be by the force of law but it needs a clean judgment .. it must be before the war so it would not after it

i just have to laugh when i see a palestinian with a good knowledge of english, or a pro palestinian engage in assuming an identity not only of a jew israeli, but of A RABBI, of all things. and then, blablabing the arab palestinian propagandas and lies for us to read. get off it "rabbi" you are no rabbi and not a jew at that as well. we know an impostor when we smell one. sameer

join the "rabbi" in impersonating the real william from israel. you both deserve the impersonation award of the century. quit your scam while you are at it. you are so obvious. sameer

to the gazans but their pride or Hamas stoped them for atending it, when they really needed it, that is the truth a real fact. go check it.

since someone pay him to do reaport with no avidences. :) in real cases it wouldn't even go to court, lack of evidences and probable cause whch is very missing in here.

Logical fallacies and justifying atrocities is an expected result of missing the works of 150,000 years of evolution. One of the stories our brain tells us is the story of human evolution. From the neck up, its structered in the order in which it evolved. The brain stem, the bulb where the brain meets the spine, is the oldest part of the brain, the midbrain and higher brain evolved on top of it. As with our brain's structer so developed the behavior each part of our brain controls. They too go from primitive to most sophisticated. The lower brain is responsible for aggression, territoriality and rituals (the part which the vast majority of people on both sides rely on). The midbrain holds the limbic system, the seat of powerful emotions, sexual instincts and the sense of smell. Over the top arches the cerebral cortex which is the part of the brain that regulates higher levels of cognitive and emotional functioning (including morals). This is the site of reasoning, planning, creating, and problem solving, and its the part that makes us humans. When you have a good look at this stupid conflict and how atrocities and war crimes have been justifies/rationalized by both sides, you can be sure that evolution has missed this part of the world. Personally, i would not even identify them as humans. Finally, the IDF is far from being the world's most moral army, its merely the second last (the last being Hamas and Arab armies). So congratulations!! You can compare yourself with your neighbours and feel great yourselves!

you both are 100% correct. ashkenazi jews must decide once and for all if they are europeans or jews. they must stop looking for love from the gentiles because there is almost non. and the UN will not protect us in the time of need.