Recently fifty four Israeli soldiers were interviewed by an Israeli organization known as Breaking the Silence. These soldiers told of their orders and activities while invading Gaza. Their tactics in many cases were nothing a moral army should be proud of.  Using white phosphorous, utilizing Palestinian civilians as forced scouts and even using the locals as human shields were just some of the testimony that came out of these interviews. What makes these accounts controversial is they were done anonymously to protect the Israeli soldiers from prosecution within Israel. A very balanced look at this report was written by Josh Mitnick of the Christian Science Monitor. Specifics of the treatment of Gazans at the hands of the Israelis leaked out of the Strip during what the Israelis dubbed Operation Cast Lead despite Israel’s media lock down during the offensive. The “Breaking the Silence” report was published Wednesday and just one day later a US Jewish group contested the accounts of the Gaza War with their own web site. The web site is sponsored by a pro-Israel lobby group Stand With Us International. Shouldn’t a counter to this report come from Israel and not from the US? This just goes to show how thick we are in the morass of Israeli domestic policy, never mind foreign policy.  Though these assertions made by Israeli soldiers are not flattering (indeed in most western armies they would be criminal), at least they are revealed for the world to dissect. The transparency of nations is something all countries should aspire to become. Unfortunately for Israel their behavior in recent decades during armed conflict has been less than chivalrous. The Breaking the Silence report can be read in its entirety here.