While Haaretz the Israeli newspaper is publishing articles about the atrocities committed toward civilians in Gaza by the IDF a few months ago, we seem to be moving closer and closer to understanding how Israeli defense forces could conceivably have been implicated.
They just did not occur in a vacuum.
Here’s a quote from the article, `Shooting and crying’ by Amos Harel, Ha’aretz, 20 March 2009:
Aviv: “One of our officers, a company commander, saw someone coming on some road, a woman, an old woman. She was walking along pretty far away, but close enough so you could take out someone you saw there. If she were suspicious, not suspicious – I don’t know. In the end, he sent people up to the roof, to take her out with their weapons. From the description of this story, I simply felt it was murder in cold blood.”
Zamir: “I don’t understand. Why did he shoot her?”
Aviv: “That’s what is so nice, supposedly, about Gaza: You see a person on a road, walking along a path. He doesn’t have to be with a weapon, you don’t have to identify him with anything and you can just shoot him. With us it was an old woman, on whom I didn’t see any weapon. The order was to take the person out, that woman, the moment you see her.”
(snip)
Ram: “What I do remember in particular at the beginning is the feeling of almost a religious mission. My sergeant is a student at a hesder yeshiva [a program that combines religious study and military service]. Before we went in, he assembled the whole platoon and led the prayer for those going into battle. A brigade rabbi was there, who afterward came into Gaza and went around patting us on the shoulder and encouraging us, and praying with people. And also when we were inside they sent in those booklets, full of Psalms, a ton of Psalms. I think that at least in the house I was in for a week, we could have filled a room with the Psalms they sent us, and other booklets like that.
Well, let’s give the rabbi a break, since he may not have known what was about to transpire or had transpired in Gaza. Who would tell a rabbi stuff like this, as reported today in another Haaretz article, IDF in Gaza: Killing civilians, vandalism, and lax rules of engagement.
But when we read something like this, ‘No virgins, no terror attacks’, the atrocities that occurred were destined to occur, because pregnant Palestinian women among others were dehumanized. Who cannot remember the My Lai incident in Vietnam? No, I’m not going near the Holocaust, but I can mention the similar dehumanization that occurred during WWII, when hatred induced in our own soldiers for krauts, japs, and gooks made their killing easier.
The hatred of pregnant Palestinian women and other “Arabs” among Israeli soldiers began in places like this one, a fabric printing shop in Tel Aviv.
The office at the Adiv fabric-printing shop in south Tel Aviv handles a constant stream of customers, many of them soldiers in uniform, who come to order custom clothing featuring their unit’s insignia, usually accompanied by a slogan and drawing of their choosing. Elsewhere on the premises, the sketches are turned into plates used for imprinting the ordered items, mainly T-shirts and baseball caps, but also hoodies, fleece jackets and pants. A young Arab man from Jaffa supervises the workers who imprint the words and pictures, and afterward hands over the finished product.
Dead babies, mothers weeping on their children’s graves, a gun aimed at a child and bombed-out mosques (see the graphic above) – these are a few examples of the images Israel Defense Forces soldiers design these days to print on shirts they order to mark the end of training, or of field duty. The slogans accompanying the drawings are not exactly anemic either: A T-shirt for infantry snipers bears the inscription “Better use Durex,” next to a picture of a dead Palestinian baby, with his weeping mother and a teddy bear beside him. A sharpshooter’s T-shirt from the Givati Brigade’s Shaked battalion shows a pregnant Palestinian woman with a bull’s-eye superimposed on her belly, with the slogan, in English, “1 shot, 2 kills.” A “graduation” shirt for those who have completed another snipers course depicts a Palestinian baby, who grows into a combative boy and then an armed adult, with the inscription, “No matter how it begins, we’ll put an end to it.”
There are also plenty of shirts with blatant sexual messages. For example, the Lavi battalion produced a shirt featuring a drawing of a soldier next to a young woman with bruises, and the slogan, “Bet you got raped!” A few of the images underscore actions whose existence the army officially denies – such as “confirming the kill” (shooting a bullet into an enemy victim’s head from close range, to ensure he is dead), or harming religious sites, or female or child non-combatants.
(snip)
The slogan “Let every Arab mother know that her son’s fate is in my hands!” had previously been banned for use on another infantry unit’s shirt. A Givati soldier said this week, however, that at the end of last year, his platoon printed up dozens of shirts, fleece jackets and pants bearing this slogan.
(Read the rest at the LINK; it doesn’t get better))
In the article, sociologist Dr. Orna Sasson-Levy, of Bar-Ilan University remarked: “There is a perception that the Palestinian is not a person, a human being entitled to basic rights, and therefore anything may be done to him…It establishes a masculinity shaped by violent aggression toward women and Arabs; a masculinity that considers it legitimate to speak in a crude and violent manner toward women and Arabs.”
It is in this context that the atrocities committed in Gaza may be understood.
UPDATE: And the news is not getting any better
IDF soldiers ordered to shoot at Gaza rescuers, note says
By Amira Hass, Haaretz Correspondent
GAZA STRIP – “Rules of Engagement: Open fire also upon rescue,” was handwritten in Hebrew on a sheet of paper found in one of the Palestinian homes the Israel Defense Forces took over during Operation Cast Lead. A reservist officer who did not take part in the Gaza offensive believes that the note is part of orders a low-level commander wrote before giving his soldiers their daily briefing.
One of the main themes in news reports during the Gaza operation, and which appears in many testimonies, is that IDF soldiers shot at Palestinian and Red Cross rescuers, making it impossible to evacuate the wounded and dead. As a result, an unknown number of Palestinians bled to death as others cowered in their homes for days without medical treatment, waiting to be rescued.
The bodies of the dead lay outside the homes or on roadsides for days, sometimes as long as two weeks. Haaretz has reported a number of such cases, some of them as they happened. The document found in the house provides written proof that IDF commanders ordered their troops to shoot at rescuers.
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1072830.html
Sickening, and not a bit surprising.
I wish it were surprising, but you’re quite right, it isn’t.
I have come to suspect strongly that what has happened is that a certain segment of the Israeli ruling class looked at the Holocaust and concluded that this is a savage world, and the only way to survive is to be the most savage of all. The lesson they learned from the Nazis was not that oppression is evil and therefore to be avoided, but that there are two, and only two, kinds of people: perpetrators and victims. To choose to be a victim is to choose death, and the only way to choose life is to choose to be a perpetrator.
The logic is inescapable if you accept the premises. It may be that the failure of the West to persuade the Israelis to change course is that we have attacked the logic, which is unassailable, instead of the underlying false dilemma. (The failure of the East, which is essentially to be acting in bad faith, has only reinforced belief in the false dilemma.)
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Is an existential threat to Jews in Israel and determines public policy.
"But I will not let myself be reduced to silence."I’d say that just a little bit differently. It is not a threat to Jews in Israel, but it certainly is a threat to the Jewish majority, and therefore the “Jewish character” of the state. Therefore there has been a great deal of surprisingly open talk about Palestinians (not all of whom are Arabs) as a “demographic threat”, or a “demographic time bomb”, and of maintaining “demographic balance” (meaning, of course, not balance at all, but Jewish supremacy.
This, really, gets to the core of the reason why Israel does not deserve the support of the West: despite having our own radical fringe that has gotten out of control recently in the US and UK, the West is a culture of secular democracies. A citizen of a western democracy is a citizen, period, regardless of their ethnic or religious affiliation. And yes, I know we’re far from perfect in that regard, but it is an ideal toward which we strive and have enshrined in our constitutions and basic laws.
Israel is a Jewish state. Formally. It is the raison d’être of Israel’s existence.
It is hypocritical in the extreme for western supporters of Israel to ignore, tolerate, or worse, approve of this fundamentally unjust bedrock principle of Israeli statehood while simultaneously condemning — and rightly so — the theocratic Islamic states that surround it.
I may be accused of a western bias for saying this, but I can live with that: the only legitimate form of government is a secular democracy that does not discriminate against its inhabitants on the basis of religion, ethnicity, gender, language, sexual orientation, or — you know the usual list of targets of irrational bigotry. Israel is by no means the worst middle-eastern offender in this regard, but it is worth noting that there are several Muslim-majority states where non-Muslims have more rights than Arab Muslims in Israel, including some states that are nominally under Sharia law.
Israel is in other respects a western state. But it is not a modern western state. It will deserve our support if and when it chooses to join the post-1945 western world. The first of many steps on the road to modernity and basic human decency would be for Israel to cease to discriminate between its Jewish and Arab citizens. And yes, that will demolish the very reason for the existence of Israel, but it will paradoxically give Israel something it does not currently have: a legitimate claim to a right to exist.
“the theocratic Islamic states that surround it”
What ‘theocratic Islamic states’ are these? Lebanon? Syria? Egypt? Jordan? The Occupied Territories? Even Hamas didn’t institute a theocracy (though they may desire it).
The Hamas desire for a caliphate is nothing more than a propaganda ploy being touted around to suggest that Hamas is not really an organization resisting Israel’s occupation, but has theocratic plans for the Palestinian nation, or even the government in Gaza.
Truth is followers of Hamas constitute only 20% of the Palestinian population in the territories, and only 25% of the population in Gaza. Hardly the support needed for a religious-political movement.
The notion is nothing more than an Israeli ruse to justify the continuation of the occupation and colonization that has continued since 1967. If it isn’t one thing, it’s another.
I shouldn’t be surprised, yet am. Depressed, too.
That these attitudes are just an extension of anti-Arab prejudice in Israeli society has also to be considered. It would be interesting to read polls of Israeli attitudes toward the Gaza invasion after stories such as these have come out. 94% if Israelis otherwise approved of the invasion before it occurred.
As to Israeli attitudes toward Palestinians, I am also reminded of a remark made by Rahm Emanuel’s father, who is an Israeli citizen, after Rahm’s appointment to Chief of Staff, and how that might help Israel: “he’s not an Arab,” or something to that effect. Rahm apologized for it.
Hm, I did not know that. The Israel lobby sure has top-loaded this administration almost as effectively as they did the last one.
This is absolutely sickening-no other way to put it. There is a true sickness at work here. These people display this hatred to the world-and dare the world to do somehing about it. There are so many calls for an independent investigation of War Crimes and Crimes Against Humanity-Israel just may get their wish.
The absolute brutality of this is what gets to me. No place for this kind of disgusting conduct, based in absolute hatred, in a civilized world. No place whatsoever. Israel has become what they fear the most. Monstrous.