In retrospect, Moti Shklar is probably cursing the day he agreed to the production and broadcast of the film "The Shaked Spirit." The road to hell is paved with the best of intentions. As director general of the Israel Broadcasting Authority and as a former commander in the special operations unit Sayeret Shaked, Shklar had excellent reasons, both public and personal, to take pride in Ran Adelist's documentary work. Not only does the film nurture the myth of the unit as an elite force with much derring-do, it also glorifies its moral heritage as a force that insists on the purity of arms as its top priority in the war on terror in Gaza.

A considerable part of the film is devoted to fighters' testimony regarding the strict distinction they make between terrorists and civilian populations, with the aim of preventing injury to the innocent. The message that emerges from these testimonies is that had the Israel Defense Forces adopted the unit's combat morality in the war against the Palestinians, we could have spared ourselves the first intifada, and the entire conflict with the Palestinians would have looked different.

However, a short segment in the film, not more than two or three minutes in length, messed everything up. The segment deals with a mission that was given to the unit at the end of the Six-Day War: to pursue and wipe out a crumbling Egyptian commando unit that had fought in Gaza and was retreating in a disorderly fashion into the sands of Sinai in an attempt to reach safety in Egypt. "Two days later," Adelist narrates in the film, "250 killed commando fighters were counted."

	Advertisement

The great irony is that this segment was intended in fact to demonstrate the moral concerns of the fighters in the unit in face of the controversial order, a kind of retroactive fighters' discourse from a remove of 30 years. After all, the Egyptian soldiers were fleeing for their lives and were not endangering anyone. Was there an operational need to eliminate them?

Adelist took testimony from three people: the commander of the unit, Brigadier General (res.) Benjamin Ben-Eliezer (now minister of national infrastructures), Brigadier General (res.) Amatzia Chen and Lieutenant Colonel (res.) Yariv Gershuni. Here are the main points of their interviews:

Gershuni: "We were given two Sikorsky helicopters. The Pipers would locate them from above, direct us, and we would land, assault and kill them. Fuad [Ben-Eliezer] would write on his pants how many we had killed - They were pretty scared, they dug into pits in the sand, they tried to hide, to cover themselves with palm fronds. Few returned from the war."

Chen: "This has to be related to, and it has to be said that it was unnecessary. The forces were not endangering us and we came from the air."

Ben-Eliezer: "This battalion, it was what we had suffered from most [during the war]. Every night they caused us some incident or another!"

Gershuni: "There was an element of revenge there. We had a lot of anger and fury after the war... This was kept secret. They didn't talk about it for a long time, because there was an element of an unofficial action there, irregular, not with an aim that everyone could explain."

Chen: "The problem was that we did it. This is what is grave. We did not apply appropriate judgment. At the end of the war we were crowing about our victory, I don't have any other word for it."

Gershuni: "Everyone who participated had no problem in real time."

Ben-Eliezer: "The [Egyptian] battalion had weapons, and the task was to carry out the pursuit of them... the guys didn't ask questions. The guys were imbued with the sanctity of the mission."

Chen: "We did not use appropriate judgment... In retrospect, if we had then what we have today, we would have been able to stop, and even to refuse to obey an order."

Gershuni: "I don't have any problem with the matter. By and large, I don't think that there is any debate about this today either, from a historical perspective."

In the end, Sayeret Shaked has no cause to glory in the operation, but it is not a matter of killing prisoners, as was claimed by the Egyptian newspaper Al Ahram after the film was broadcast. It was a revenge action, an organized hunt of helpless soldiers who had no chance of fleeing from the firepower of the Israeli fighters who were assaulting them from the air. It was not "fair play," but it is doubtful that the action falls into the category of war crimes, as defined by law. One thing is clear: Had someone's explicit intention been to document a massacre of prisoners that took place or did not take place in the Six-Day War, there is no chance the film would have been broadcast.

Where are the bodyguards?

"This is is what a meeting of the Israeli cabinet looks like: The defense minister stamps his feet and yells at the prime minister"; "Peretz got insulted. He stood up, stamped his feet, waved his arms and yelled"; "Peretz's yelling was so loud that the prime minister had to stop the meeting until the defense minister calmed down" (Yedioth Ahronoth reporting from the most recent cabinet meeting). The picture that the mass-circulation daily Yedioth Ahronoth paints is unambiguous: Defense Minister Amir Peretz lost his cool. He was so insulted he could not control himself. He does not know how to behave in society. He "stamps his feet," "waves his arms" and "yells." This is not how a grown-up behaves. This is how a baby behaves. No wonder then that the prime minister, a responsible grownup, "had to" stop the meeting, so that the baby having the tantrum would "calm down."

Yedioth Aharonoth could have described the same incident in a different way. For example: "After Olmert refused to let Peretz speak, Peretz called out: 'This is neither an autocracy nor a tyranny.' Olmert told Peretz to calm down and suspended the meeting." This for example, is how Haaretz reported the event. Alternatively, it could have attributed the graphic description to ministers who were present at the meeting, as its rival mass-circulation daily Maariv did ("Following Olmert's remarks, according to those present at the meeting, Peretz waved his arms and began a yelling performance").

Instead, Yedioth chose to present the incriminating testimony as its own. After all, this is Amir Peretz, the strange alien from Sderot. How dare he break into the respectable club at Givat Ram and break the accepted rules of politeness? Next time we will call in the bodyguards.