There is enough blame to spread around if you want to find a villian in the most recent bloodletting in the Middle East. Part of the problem is that there is almost no debate in the U.S. about a more even-handed approach to the Israeli-Palestine conflict. Here’s a voice from Israel that shows that, inside Israel, many people are questioning the country’s response to the recent developments, including Yossi Sarid, a respected legislator from Meretz, a left-of-center party:

Until American enlightenment brings the world its redemption, it is destroying it and “innocent people” continue to be blown up in Mumbai, in London, in Madrid and everywhere else. Never was there a World Cup of blood such as the one that began with the U.S. invasion of Iraq, where 50 people are murdered each day in the capital alone.

From overuse, Israel, too, lost its regional deterrent capability. A pistol that is aimed and in a safe mode is in most cases more threatening and deterring than a pistol that fires all the time and only rarely hits the target. For example, people continue to suggest that we deliver a crushing blow to Beirut. But we were in Beirut not so long ago and conquered it lock, stock and barrel, and very quickly it sent us packing. What will the aerial bombardments do now that the ground occupation did not do before? The noise of the tanks, preparing for a renewed incursion, sends shivers up my spine and makes me break out in a cold sweat.

Deterrent capability consists not only of military might, but also of moral might. After all, Bush himself, and not the defeatist bleeding hearts, often talks in the name of the Moral Majority and world morality and cites it as the culmination of his vision. The trouble is that you cannot set rules of behavior and serve as an example to others when your own soldiers are daily attacking people who have done no wrong, torturing prisoners, sending suspects to “black holes” that are as far as East from West, and holding detainees indefinitely without judicial review. The president himself is violating human and civil rights by ordering mass wiretapping, by the wholesale penetration of private bank accounts and by unrestrained assaults on journalists who are faithfully doing their job. Most of these phenomena are of course not foreign to Israel, which encountered difficulties when, in the biblical metaphor, it did the deed of Zimri and demanded the reward of Pinhas.

This is not deterrence; this is joining the evildoers and strengthening them and their arguments.

I am not ideologically opposed to the use of force when needed, and woe to us if our force fails us. I do not represent pacifists, not even individuals who refuse to do army service, and I have never represented them. I am still trying to represent acquired skepticism and to speak in favor of perplexity and in condemnation of whitewash. We have too many whitewashers in the government and in the General Staff.

Amid all the militant machismo, the voice of moderation must also be raised and heard, and it says now that force alone will simply not cut it. It is better for the ministers and officers to remember what Gaza did to us in the past 40 years and what Beirut did to us, and what Vietnam and Iraq and Afghanistan and Somalia did and are doing to powerful America – and to calm down. It is best to arrive at the crucial meetings calm and sober-eyed….

Iraq is destroyed, Afghanistan is destroyed, the Gaza Strip is destroyed and soon Beirut will be destroyed for the umpteenth time, and hundreds of billions of dollars are being invested solely in the vain war against the side that always loses and therefore has nothing more to lose. And hundreds of billions more go down the tubes of corruption.

Maybe the time has come to put the pistol into safety mode for a moment, back into the holster, and at high noon declare a worldwide Marshall Plan, so that the eternal losers will finally have something to lose. Only then will it be possible to isolate the viruses of violence and terrorism, for which quiet is quagmire and which in our eyes are themselves quagmire. And once isolated, it will be possible to eradicate them one day.

Read the entire piece here.