As he so often does, Gideon Levy cuts to the heart of the matter:

The soldiers' transgressions are an inevitable result of the orders given during this brutal operation, and they are the natural continuation of the last nine years, when soldiers killed nearly 5,000 Palestinians, at least half of them innocent civilians, nearly 1,000 of them children and teenagers.

Everything the soldiers described from Gaza, everything, occurred during these blood-soaked years as if they were routine events. It was the context, not the principle, that was different. An army whose armored corps has yet to encounter an enemy tank and whose pilots have yet to face an enemy combat jet in 36 years has been trained to think that the only function of a tank is to crush civilian cars and that a pilot's job is to bomb residential neighborhoods.

To do this without any unnecessary moral qualms we have trained our soldiers to think that the lives and property of Palestinians have no value whatsoever. It is part of a process of dehumanization that has endured for dozens of years, the fruits of the occupation.

It's honest, fearless Israelis like Levy who give me hope that Israel might just have a chance of pulling back from its insane descent into the moral abyss.

By the way, if you're wondering what he means by "the only function of a tank is to crush civilian cars", here's an example:

I took this picture in 2002 a few blocks from Arafat's compound in Ramallah (just before we headed to the compound). As you can see, the Israelis not only used tanks to crush cars, they actually used the crushed cars to build roadblocks. Hey, at least they weren't letting them go to waste.

The Israelis had crushed all the cars in the parking lot outside Arafat's compound, too. It's just a thing with them.