The spokesman for the Israeli Defense Forces, Rear Admiral Daniel Hagari, did little to acquit himself, or the cause, as to why more Palestinian civilians had been indulgently killed in yet another Israeli air strike. The strike, despite resulting in deaths in a camp of displaced Palestinians in Tal al-Sultan, was soberly designated and professionally targeted. “The strike was based on precise intelligence,” Hagari tells us. “Their deaths saved lives.”Away from the glove handling reflections of Hagari, the returns of the May 26 strike showed that Palestinian civilians were also seen as miscellaneous detritus, fundamentally dispensable. It is one noted by such unflagging scribes as the late Robert Fisk: the justification of violence with seemingly sound process, decency with the stuffing of crime.
