Playing the Occupation Game

Via Unfair Witness, here's a post fromLawrence of Cyberia: The Banality Of Evil. It's worth checking out. Short version: Three Israeli soldiers on border patrol arrested, without cause, two Palestinians, and proceeded to beat them silly. Unusually, the Palestinians decided to take legal action (the post notes that most Palestinians have little faith in the Israeli legal system).

I'm reminded of something I saw this morning over at The Angry Arab News Service. This article, from The Guardian, mentions that humiliation of refugees seems to be pretty much routine for Israeli soldiers assigned to patrol Hebron--which is about as bizarre a place as one could imagine. The Israelis who've settled there are about as hard-core as it comes. You might recall that Baruch Goldstein, an Israeli, killed twenty-nine Palestinians at a mosque in 1994.

We're already seeing many of the same things in our own occupation. And, like the Israeli experience, I doubt we'll see an improvement--ever.