The lead story in the Feb. 4 Ha’aretz is that the Israeli army legal office has ruled that killing terrorists may only be done if: they are on their way to commit a crime, and not if their crime was already committed; Israel first asked the PA to arrest the killers; and the Israeli army first tried to arrest them itself.

What does this ruling mean, and is it an exception or a rule? It means what was expressed in the latest Institute op-ed posted Feb. 3 on this website; for any reader who wondered how the points made would appear as events rather than as ideas, this is a concretization of the ills therein discussed. Or, as IASPS has repeatedly noted, Israel is the advanced case of Western afflictions.

This ruling means of course, that given the absolute relativism that is the only Divinity facing policymakers in Israel and elsewhere, there is no qualitative difference between the terrorist killer and the Israeli citizen victim and that therefore the Israeli army cannot kill its enemies.

Far from being an exception, this is the rule: Last week an Israeli court ruled that the PLO flag could be displayed in violation of state law in Tel Aviv’s main square; and the attorney general ruled that he couldn’t prosecute a fifth columnist Arab MK who voiced support for terrorists killing Israelis on Tel Aviv’s streets. Also last Friday, Israeli papers carried the remarks of a former GSS chief who said he was saddened by the low number of Israeli soldiers who refused to carry out orders in the territories, for such orders are clearly illegal.

What, again, does all this mean? It means the people who are making the laws and policy in Israel do not want to survive; they do not want to have a state; they do not want to be a nation. Thus defeating an enemy is out of the question, for that is what a real country planning on sticking around would do. Thus having an army, much less using it, is a problem; and killing killers is immoral and now illegal.

Some pundits wrote after September 11 that the US should learn from Israel how to deal with (what they mean is live with) terror. This would be most unfortunate.