Some say that good exists only because of evil

Al-Jazeera reported on Tuesday that

Israeli state-run radio on Monday reported that five Israeli occupation soldiers had confessed to committing "degrading acts" against two Palestinian youths. ...

According to press reports, the soldiers forced the boys into an abandoned house near the roadblock. There they urinated into a small plastic bucket, dipped the boys' identity cards in and, at gunpoint, forced them to retrieve the IDs with their mouths.

The soldiers also extinguished cigarettes on the boys' skin and forced them to jump from the roof of the house.

The soldiers, who belonged to the notoriously violent border police, were arrested on Sunday night, after the story was published in the Hebrew-language press.

One of them reportedly told police that he did what he did because he hated Arabs and wanted to exact revenge on them.

An official at the Israeli Ministry of Justice said in an interview on Monday that "such behaviour by the border police is unfortunately rampant".

He pointed out that Israel needed to find a "deep and radical treatment for this phenomenon".

The good news is that Israeli officials are aware of this and say they want to do something about it. The bad news is a) that it happens at all, b) something was done about the incident only after it was publicized by others, and c) what's exceptional about this case is that something was in fact done.

None of this is actually news. Back on December 21, I posted an article from Haaretz (Israel) which included descriptions of the "insult and humiliation" that are routine experiences for Palestinians at checkpoints.

In the previous post, I said that to minimize terrorism you must first understand what drives it. My own conviction is that the factors that are common to at least most terrorists (non-government terrorists, that is; institutions have their own logic) are desperation and the conviction that you and others like you are victims of an extreme injustice. That conviction, of course, need not be correct - it just needs to be there. In that light, is Israeli policy toward the Palestinians (just like US policy in Iraq) preventing terrorism or creating more terrorists?

I just remembered a talk an old friend named Alan Solomonow, then of the Jewish Peace Fellowship, now with the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC), used to give. It was called "Can Israel Survive Itself?" - a deliberately-provocative title to explore his conviction that Israeli policy was actually creating a long-term danger to Israel's security rather than preserving it. It seems equally apt now.