Jerusalem ? The killings of a dozen Palestinians, most of them civilians, in less than a week have plunged Israel into a debate over how much force is permissible in its war on terrorism.

At the center of the storm is Israel’s new army chief, Lt. Gen. Moshe Yaalon, who laid out his doctrine in recent days that Israel is fighting a war of survival against Palestinian militants who must be crushed at all costs.

Critics says Yaalon, on the job for just two months, is encouraging excesses that could erode Israel’s moral high ground against the Palestinian suicide bombers who have killed hundreds of Israeli civilians and have badly disrupted normal life in the Jewish state.

Yaalon’s defenders say Israel must keep hunting Palestinian militants to protect Israeli civilians, and that while Palestinian civilian casualties are regrettable, they are also inevitable.

Defense Minister Binyamin Ben-Eliezer, leader of the moderate Labor party, has not criticized Yaalon in public, but he hinted at displeasure with the army chief by ordering him to complete an investigation into the civilian deaths by the weekend an unusually quick deadline for such a probe.

Different viewpoints

Ben-Eliezer also has supported tough action against the Palestinians, and has directed two major military offensives against Palestinian militias since March.

However, he and Yaalon appear to have opposite views about the broader aspects of the conflict.

The defense minister is trying to negotiate a gradual truce with Palestinian security officials, so far with little success. Ben-Eliezer believes that a wider cease-fire could lead Israel and Yasser Arafat’s Palestinian Authority back to peace talks, and he supports far-reaching Israeli concessions in the future.

Yaalon believes Arafat never accepted Israel and clings to a hope of gradually destroying the Jewish state. Israel’s goal in the current conflict must be to “burn into the Palestinian consciousness” that violence does not bring them political gain, Yaalon told the Haaretz daily over the weekend.

“If their (the Palestinians’) feeling at the end of the conflict is that they can defeat us by means of terrorism, our situation will become more and more difficult,” Yaalon said. “When you grasp the essence, it’s clear what you have to do. You have to fight for your life.”

Comparing the threat by Palestinian militants to a cancer, Yaalon said he was “applying chemotherapy.”

Akiva Eldar, a liberal commentator for Haaretz, said Yaalon was indirectly encouraging soldiers to pull the trigger, and that there was a connection between his recent statements and the killings of civilians.

“If the chief of staff says this is a war against cancer … you don’t need nuances, you kill it,” Eldar said.

Leah Tzemel, an Israeli human rights attorney, said Israeli officers have also become increasingly vulnerable to international war crimes charges. “I think that if one day we get to trials against soldiers, Yaalon will also have to explain himself. They (the soldiers) will say, ‘These are the orders we received,”‘ she said.

Bloody weekend

The debate was set off by the killings of 12 Palestinians in three separate incidents between Thursday and Sunday. Earlier reports put the toll at 13.

The latest deaths came five weeks after 14 civilians, among them nine children, were killed in an Israeli air strike in Gaza that also killed senior Hamas militant Salah Shehadeh.

Ben-Eliezer has apologized for the shelling of the Bedouin encampment and for the botched missile strike. However, there was growing concern that Israel was losing sympathy gained during Palestinian terror attacks.

“Every such incident (the killing of civilians) pulls Israel’s moral ground for fighting terror out from under its feet,” wrote military analyst Yoav Limor in the Maariv daily. “A weak apology is not enough to placate world opinion.”