Dilemma

The Jerusalem Post's David Horovitz discusses Israel's ethical dilemma in the phase that the conflict has now reached. Faced with the need either to intensify the air campaign or to launch an expanded ground offensive, the country's leaders hesitate, for they know that either step will involve a much heavier loss of civilian life, and an even more hysterical response from the Arab world and beyond. Horovitz thinks that the State of Israel must now decide to break with its traditional stance in this regard: threatened by an enemy that has no morality and no humanitarian principles, Israel must adjust its thinking and strategy, for the motto of the struggle is now kill or be killed:

Our own sense of why the Jews must have a nation of their own is born in part of our appreciation of the Jewish values that underpin it. Our Jewish values are what sustained our nation in exile over the centuries.

But in this hostile Middle East, in this ruthless and hypocritical era, Israel increasingly faces the question of whether it can cling to those values and still survive - or perhaps more accurately, whether it needs to reinterpret what those Jewish standards require it to do in order to survive.

Sooner or later, Israel will have to decide how far it is prepared to use the devastating force it has at its disposal in order to maintain its right to national life in this vicious part of the world.