JERUSALEM... - The hunt for suspected militants sent Sgt. Lirom Hakkak bashing his way through a wall into a Palestinian family's threadbare living room, his slender frame sweating under nearly 35 pounds of body armor and combat gear, his M-16 rifle ready. 
He noticed the grandmother first, her creased face so blanched with terror that she appeared on the verge of collapse. A middle-aged couple huddled close by, trembling.
"They could be my parents," Hakkak, the 22-year-old son of an Israeli poet, recalled thinking. In that split second of recognition, he said, "you really feel disgusting. You see these people and you know the majority of them are innocent and you're taking away their rights. You also know you must do it."
With the Israel Defense Forces in the fourth year of battle with the Palestinians, the most dominant institution in Israeli society is also embroiled in a struggle over its own character, according to dozens of interviews with soldiers, officers, reservists and some of the nation's preeminent military analysts.
Officers and soldiers have begun publicly criticizing specific tactics that they consider dehumanizing to both their own troops and Palestinians. And while they do not question the need to prevent terrorist acts against Israelis, military officials and soldiers are speaking out with increasing frequency against a strategy that they say has forsaken negotiation and relied almost exclusively on military force to address the conflict.
Nearly 600 members of the armed forces have signed statements refusing to serve in the Palestinian territories. Active-duty and reserve personnel are criticizing the military in public. Parents of soldiers are speaking out as well, complaining that the protection of Jewish settlements in the West Bank and Gaza Strip is not worth the loss of their sons and daughters.
Such issues are being debated at the highest levels of Israel's political and military leadership. At the end of last month, the military chief of staff, Lt. Gen. Moshe Yaalon, told columnists from Israel's three leading newspapers that the road closures, curfews and roadblocks imposed on the Palestinian civilians were creating explosive levels of "hatred and terrorism" among the populace. Last week four former heads of the Shin Bet domestic security service said the government's actions and policies during the Palestinian uprising had gravely damaged Israel and its people.
While such public comments have infuriated Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, a former general who favors stringent measures against the Palestinians, they reflect the anxieties of many active-duty soldiers and reservists over whether the military is provoking more terrorist attacks than it is preventing. In addition, members of the armed forces said they feared that some of the harsher tactics -- especially assassinations of suspected Palestinian militants, which often also cause civilian deaths -- are corrupting Israeli soldiers, and by extension, Israeli society.
"What's happening is terrible," said retired Brig. Gen. Nehemia Dagan, former chief of education for the armed services. "The ethics and morals of Israeli society are more important than killing the heads of Hamas or Islamic Jihad...

JERUSALEM... -- Four former chiefs of Israel's powerful domestic security service said in an interview published Friday that the government's actions and policies during the three-year-old Palestinian uprising have gravely damaged the country and its people.
The four, who variously headed the Shin Bet security agency from 1980 to 2000 under governments that spanned the political spectrum, said that Israel must end its occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip, that the government should recognize that no peace agreement can be reached without the involvement of the Palestinian leader, Yasser Arafat, and that it must stop what one called the immoral treatment of Palestinians.
"We must once and for all admit that there is another side, that it has feelings and that it is suffering, and that we are behaving disgracefully," said Avraham Shalom, who headed the security service from 1980 until 1986. "Yes, there is no other word for it: disgracefully. . . . We have turned into a people of petty fighters using the wrong tools."
The statements to Israel's largest-circulation Hebrew-language daily newspaper, Yedioth Aharonoth, added to recent public criticism of Prime Minister Ariel Sharon by Israeli political, military and civic leaders for his failure to stop terrorism or negotiate peace as the uprising enters its fourth year.
The former security chiefs said they agreed to the two-hour interview -- the first time the four have ever sat down together -- out of "serious concern for the condition of the state of Israel," according to Carmi Gillon, who ran Shin Bet in 1995 and 1996.
Maj. Gen. Ami Ayalon, who headed the agency from 1996 until 2000 and is co-author of a peace petition signed by tens of thousands of Israelis and Palestinians, said: "We are taking sure and measured steps to a point where the state of Israel will no longer be a democracy and a home for the Jewish people."
Shin Bet is Israel's dominant domestic security and intelligence service, with primary responsibility for the country's anti-terrorism efforts. It often plans and directs armed forces operations that support its own activities, including raids into Palestinian towns and villages in search of alleged terrorists, assassinations of suspected militants and interrogation of suspects. The current Shin Bet chief, Avi Dichter, is one of Sharon's most trusted and influential advisers, according to administration officials.
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The four former Shin Bet leaders said they recognized the contradictions between some of their actions as security chiefs and their opinions today.
"Why is it that everyone -- [Shin Bet] directors, chief of staff, former security personnel -- after a long service in security organizations become the advocates of reconciliation with the Palestinians? Because they were there." said Yaakov Perry, whose term as security chief between 1988 and 1995 covered the first Palestinian uprising, or intifada. "We know the material, the people in the field, and surprisingly, both sides."
The security chiefs denounced virtually every major military and political tactic of the Sharon administration, adding their voices to the dissent in Israel against the prime minister's handling of a conflict that has claimed the lives of more than 2,500 Palestinians and nearly 900 Israelis and foreigners.
In recent weeks, the country's top general has criticized Sharon's clampdown on Palestinians in the West Bank; active and reserve Air Force pilots have publicly declared the military's use of missiles and bombs to kill militants in civilian neighborhoods to be "immoral"; activists have initiated independent peace proposals; and opinion polls have indicated that faith in Sharon is plummeting. ..

Crime Pays

There is something a bit surreal about the idea that the Israeli government is negotiating with Hezbollah over the return of an Israeli hostage and the remains of three soldiers while continuing to insist that the only Palestinians fit to serve as “partners” for negotiations are those without blood on their hands.  It suggests that Israel will negotiate with anyone, even Hezbollah, for the return of the dead, but has a far more restrictive policy when it comes to achieving peace for the living.
Former Israeli Minister of Defense Moshe Arens points out that it would be difficult to find anyone with bloodier hands than Hezbollah leader Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah, with whom Israel has been openly dealing for months. Writing in Ha’aretz, Arens says that “the total of lost innocent lives makes Nasrallah a close second to Osama Bin Laden as a mastermind of mass murder.”
Arens, the long-time Likud Member of Knesset, Cabinet official and diplomat, points out that Hezbollah -- which the Bush administration has at the top of its list of terror organizations -- is responsible for the 1983 killing of 242 United States Marines in Beirut, 63 Americans at our Beirut embassy, the deaths of 115 in the bombings of the Jewish Center and Israeli embassy in Buenos Aires, and numerous other terror attacks and kidnappings. 
How then, Arens asks, can Israel deal with Nasrallah?
Arens is not the only Israeli asking that question.  Although most Israelis believe that Israel must do everything in its power to achieve the return of captured nationals, many are wondering if the price in this case is too high.  Some have commented on the odd double standard that the Hezbollah negotiations seem to demonstrate.
Writing in Ma’ariv, Ben Caspit asks how Prime Minister Sharon can refuse to talk to Yasir Arafat  “because he engages in terrorism” while dealing with a far more dangerous character.  “Nasrallah denies our right to exist here, plants bombs on our northern border, kills Israelis, yet continues to talk to Sharon as if nothing had happened.”  As Caspit points out, Nasrallah is not even in the same terrorist league as Arafat.  Arafat, at least formally, supports Israel’s right to exist in peace, and during the Oslo period worked with Israelis to thwart terror and achieve an agreement.  Nasrallah wants Israel eradicated.
Why would any Israeli government want to enhance Nasrallah’s prestige, which is precisely what his success at achieving the release of 400 prisoners in Israeli jails will do?  Veteran journalist Ze’ev Schiff writes in Ha’aretz that “handing over Palestinian prisoners to Hezbollah raises the question of why Israel couldn't have done the same for the Mahmoud Abbas government.”  And that is putting it mildly.  In Israel today, even top IDF officials have criticized the Sharon government for offering Abbas so little during his tenure, and therefore hastening his demise. The contrast with the Hezbollah deal is jarring.
Abbas, who strenuously opposed terrorism, couldn’t achieve a significant release of prisoners.  What does it say if an arch-terrorist like Nasrallah can? 
Caspit has the answer: “Crime pays.” And Nasrallah’ s success will “shoot him up to the top of the pyramid, from which it will be difficult to bring him down.”  Actually, he may already be at the top of the pyramid because of the widespread perception in the Middle East that Nasrallah succeeded in achieving a unilateral and unconditional Israeli pullout from Lebanon in 2000, an interpretation as common as it is inaccurate. 
This isn’t the first time that the Israeli government has dealt with the most extreme anti-Israel terrorists while refusing to negotiate with others whose positions are more nuanced.  In the 1980’s, the Shamir-Peres National Unity Government reportedly funded Islamic elements in the territories, including Hamas’ Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, as alternatives to the PLO.  That mistake helped transform Hamas into the force it is today.
This bit of history helps illustrate that the whole idea of applying purity tests to would-be negotiating partners has become questionable. No standard can possibly exist that legitimizes Hezbollah while proscribing anyone else. There is no group that is more dangerous, no leadership bloodier.
This is not to condemn Israel’s decision to engage with Hezbollah to get its people back.  It is simply to say that once Israel crosses that particular Rubicon, it cannot jump back onto shore and refuse to negotiate with Palestinians because they are tainted by terror.  But maybe Israel is getting beyond that.  Top officials in the Sharon government favor immediate negotiations with the new Prime Minister, Ahmed Queria, despite his close ties to Arafat.  This may suggest an evolving understanding in Jerusalem that it is not in Israel’s interests to apply arbitrary standards to Palestinians who are willing and ready to negotiate with Israel.  As the saying goes, you don’t have to negotiate with your friends; it’s your enemies you must engage with...