The long and imbecilic arm of Israel

The robbery of the safe deposit boxes at the Israel Discount Bank arouses professional awe. The was brilliant planning, flawless inside information, skillful execution, a right choice of timing, and scrupulous attention to detail to the point of using a vacuum cleaner to remove all traces of evidence.

What has the State of Israel come to, if the only thing that goes right is a bank robbery?

Where are the days before the IDF word-laundry turned "assassination" into "preventive strike"? The days when missions of this type were carried out in secret, most of them successfully? When an operative dressed as a woman and bumped off a wanted Palestinian in Beirut without harming his family? When today's chief of staff oversaw the liquidation of Abu Jihad at his home in Tunis and departed without a hair falling from the head of his wife and children?

Where are the days when the perpetrators of the massacre of our athletes in Munich were struck down with surgical precision, one by one, and no one would have been the wiser if not for a little identification mix-up in Lillehammer? Where are the tweezer operations, like the capture of Eichmann, who was brought to Israel to stand trial? Some liquidations have never been reported or spoken about, but at least they were all the product of an orderly decision making process, and not the whim of one man.

Israel's long arm had become a trademark. But not everything that could be done in the past can still be done today, because of our diplomatic relations and because the rules have changed. And not everything that was effective and served as a deterrent in the past does those things equally well today. Expulsions, house demolition, andcollective punishments, do more harm than good. Times and circumstances have changed. Our long, legendary arm has gone from smart to imbecilic.

"We used to catch elephants with tweezers," says Avi Gil. "Today, we catch tweezers with elephants." Yossi Sarid, who once sat on secret committees that decided matters of life and death, says that there are times when you don't have to be a military expert - you just have to be an expert in the brains department. When 180 people, including women and children, are killed or wounded in a "surgical strike," it's clear they weren't in bed with Salah Shehadeh. They are among the hundreds of people who live in tin shanties nearby.

It is hard to believe that no one knew they existed. Dropping a bomb that weighs a ton in such a teeming place is either an intelligence failure, a case of bad judgment, or the work of an evil mind, and God only knows which is worse.