Uprising Called Threat to Israeli Soldiers’ Standards

A retiring senior general said Israel’s efforts to quell the 13-month-old Palestinian uprising could damage the moral standards of its soldiers.

In Wednesday’s editions of the daily newspaper Maariv, Maj. Gen. Menachem Einan, who is leaving his job as the army’s logistics chief, said he was “very worried about the level of morality of Israel’s soldiers in the territories.”

“We are making them face provocations that inspire maliciousness all too quickly,” he said.

An army spokesman said Einan had been scheduled to step down Friday for a civilian job and that his resignation was not related to the criticism.

In the interview, Einan traced his misgivings about the territories to the Israeli government’s handling of the 1982 Lebanon invasion, which escalated into a three-year conflict instead of a limited campaign as initially planned.

“Perhaps there are times,” he said, “when the fighting military echelons cannot accept to the last letter the instructions given by the political echelons.”

Meanwhile, the army chief of staff, Lt. Gen. Dan Shomron, was quoted in the Jerusalem Post as saying that troops are unable to halt the rebellion in the occupied territories and that a political solution is needed.

Shomron was quoted by the Jerusalem Post as telling a closed-door session of the Parliament’s Defense and Foreign Affairs Committee on Tuesday that the army is limited in its ability to subdue the revolt.

“There is no such thing as eradicating the uprising because in essence it expresses the struggle of nationalism,” the Jerusalem Post quoted him as saying.