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Israeli soldiers’ accounts of the fighting last winter further undermine the official rationale of the war.
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March 26, 2009
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The soldier had served as a squad commander during the Israeli army’s invasion of the Gaza Strip last winter. His unit was assigned to advance into Gaza City. His initial orders, he recalled, were that after an armored vehicle broke down the door of a building, his men were to enter, spraying fire: “I call it murdering … going up one floor after another, and anyone we spot, shoot him.” The word from his higher-ups was that anyone who hadn’t fled the neighborhood could be assumed to be a terrorist. The orders fit a pattern: In Gaza, “as you know, they used lots and lots of force and killed lots and lots of people on the way so that we wouldn’t be hurt,” he said.
Before the operation began, he recounted, the orders were softened. The building’s occupants would be given five minutes to leave and be searched on their way out. When he told his squad, some soldiers objected. “Anyone there is a terrorist; that’s a fact,” one said. The squad commander was upset. “It’s pretty frustrating that inside Gaza you’re allowed to do what you want,” he explained at a discussion in February among graduates of the Yitzhak Rabin Academy, a pre-army training course.
A transcript from that gathering, published in an academy newsletter, reached the Israeli media late last week. (The full Hebrew text is here; a Ha’aretz report in English is here.) Predictably, it set off a storm. In contrast to earlier criticism of the Gaza campaign, this time charges of disregard for civilians’ lives came not from Palestinians or the foreign media but from Israeli soldiers. Their testimony challenged the story of the war that is widely accepted in Israel and indicated a change, apparently dictated from above, in the Israel Defense Forces’ rules for fighting.
The soldiers who spoke at the academy hadn’t served together and weren’t talking about a breakdown in a single unit. Instead, they described an atmosphere in which “the lives of Palestinians were, let’s say much less important than the lives of our soldiers,” as one put it. Every civilian was presumed dangerous, a potential suicide bomber. In one segment of the testimony that received wide media attention, a soldier told of marksmen shooting a mother and her two children after they took a wrong turn as they fled their home. (In response, the army hastily announced that the brigade commander had investigated and that the marksmen had only fired warning shots, without harming the mother and children.)
There were counter-instances. A soldier identified as Binyamin (not his real name) described leading a patrol along the fence between Israel and Gaza. If the soldiers saw a Palestinian come within 300 meters of the fence, the orders were to treat him as a potential terrorist: Shoot in the air; if the “suspect” didn’t flee, shoot at his legs; then, if necessary, shoot to kill. But the 300-meter zone included farm land. Binyamin spotted an old man working in the fields. At first, the patrol’s marksman fired over the farmer’s head. The old man, apparently inured to gunfire, didn’t respond. Binyamin and the marksman looked at each other. “We simply understood that neither of us … wanted a farmer on our conscience.” The patrol drove on. Telling the story, Binyamin added, “Anyone who thinks I hurt Israeli security can come talk to me afterward.” His defensive tone suggested that his restraint was an exception to the wider atmosphere during the Gaza fighting.
Israel’s “Operation Cast Lead” in Gaza began with an air campaign in late December, followed by the ground invasion in early January. The immediate catalyst was heavy rocket fire from the Hamas-ruled Strip at southern Israeli communities, after a six-month ceasefire between Hamas and Israel ran out. (The actual chain reaction leading to war was more complex, as I wrote at the time.) From the start, Israel deflected charges of causing excessive civilian casualties with several arguments: Palestinian casualty figures were inflated; many of the supposed civilians were really combatants; and by fighting from within urban areas, Hamas had turned the civilian population into human shields. The Israeli army also feared that nearly anyone in Gaza could be a suicide bomber. None of those arguments should be dismissed out of hand. The Palestinians were also engaged in a public-relations battle. Hamas did base itself in urban areas, and it is infamous for its use of suicide bombers.
Most Israelis regarded the war as defensive, and the reports from Gaza have gained little traction in the Israeli domestic arena. The soldiers’ accounts may boost domestic criticism. As one of the soldiers commented, their experience reflected “a change in the rules for ‘purity of arms'” — meaning military ethics — compared to previous Israeli wars. Another soldier explained massive use of firepower as a response to Israel’s heavy casualties in the Second Lebanon War of 2006. “The intent was … to protect soldiers’ lives,” he said.
Any army will seek to minimize its losses. That said, the Israeli army does have a code of ethics that demands a balance between protecting its own forces and avoiding harm to noncombatants. If the code were not simply violated but superseded by new orders this time, a critical question is, who gave the orders — mid-level commanders, the top brass, or the country’s political leaders?
One lesson that generals and politicians, including Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, may have learned from Lebanon, and from wars elsewhere, is that public support for a war can turn to opposition when the number of fallen soldiers increases. Similarly, direct media coverage from the battlefield can spur political debate. During the Gaza fighting, the Israeli army prevented both local and foreign journalists from entering the Strip.
There is at least one more reason that domestic support for a war can evaporate: failing to achieve the war’s goals. At the outset of the Gaza campaign, Olmert said its purpose was to “change the situation in the south part of our country” — a deliberately modest and ambiguous goal. Other officials spoke of weakening Hamas and restoring Israeli deterrence. While Israel decided to stop the fighting unilaterally in January — just before Barack Obama’s inauguration — it sought a new ceasefire arrangement with Hamas, negotiated indirectly via Egypt. Olmert then injected the additional goal of a prisoner exchange to free captive Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit, who has been held in Gaza since 2006.
There’s still no agreed ceasefire in place. Since Israel withdrew from Gaza in January, over 180 rockets have been fired from there at southern Israel, according to the Israel Defense Forces. That’s less than the rate last November and December, as the ceasefire unraveled and expired. But it’s much more than the sporadic launchings when the truce was in place. Arguably, Gaza’s rulers have not been deterred from launching — or from allowing other groups to launch — missiles at Israel. Meanwhile, the talks on a prisoner exchange broke down last week, just before the soldiers’ testimony was published nationally.
This is the familiar arc of a poorly conceived war. At first, it looks like necessary defense. The public rallies around in the adrenaline rush of solving an intolerable problem by force. The critics are few, or foreign, and easily dismissed. As time passes, it becomes more difficult to name what has been gained amid the horror. The moral price reveals itself. Criticism becomes mainstream and respectable and is entirely too late.
Peace and Justice Post 
Taking Off the Blinders in the U.S.
March 28, 2009By A.M. Khan | ZNet, March 28. 2009
A.M. Khan’s ZSpace Page
“There has been anti-Semitism, the Nazis, Hitler, Auschwitz but was that their [the Palestinians] fault? They only see one thing: We have come here and stolen their country.”
–David Ben-Gurion, one of the founders of Israel and the first Prime Minister
Now that Israel’s bombardment of Gaza is off the front page and the Gazans are left to deal with the aftermath outside of world media attention, it makes sense to step back and review how the Israel-Palestine conflict is depicted in U.S. mainstream media. This depiction shapes how the U.S. public views the recent events in Gaza. It also shapes how the public understands what constitutes a just resolution to the conflict.
The nature of U.S. mainstream media coverage of events in Gaza and of the Israel-Palestine conflict renders Americans grossly misinformed. U.S. media representations are largely absent of historical context and omit the fact that for decades Israel has committed human rights violations against the Palestinian people and occupied their land. The media lens in mainstream U.S. coverage (print and television) obscures core issues and creates a false framework of the conflict. In the U.S., the Israel-Palestine conflict is framed as “a cycle of violence” between two adversaries of equal power engaged since millennia in a conflict based on religious and ethnic difference. Not a single element of this frame is true.
Myth Number 1: The conflict has been ongoing since millennia.
The conflict is less than 100 years old. Before 1900, Jews, Christians, and Muslims lived together in the Holy Land mostly peacefully in a quiet agrarian society. While some European Jews immigrated in the late 1800’s to what was then Ottoman Empire-controlled Palestine, their numbers were small. In 1917, as World War I was coming to a close, the British government became the colonial power in control of historic Palestine (the area known today as Israel, the West Bank, and the Gaza Strip). With the 1917 “Balfour Declaration” the British made clear their support for a Jewish state in Palestine. After 1917, immigration of European Jews to Palestine escalated, increasing each year as time wore on. Many of these new immigrants were in flight from anti-Semitism in Europe.
As the Nazis came to power in Germany in the early 1930’s and began their oppression and later genocide of European Jews, the numbers of European Jewish immigrants to Palestine increased dramatically. Through these early decades of the 20th century, between the British commitment to creating a Jewish state in Palestine and as more European Jews flooded in, tensions between the European newcomers and the native Palestinian Arabs began and increased over time. After the genocide and near annihilation of European Jewry by the Nazis during World War II, the movement to make a Jewish homeland in Historic Palestine found understandable sympathy. The fly in the ointment was the fact that another people already lived in that land.
In 1948 the state of Israel was established by these European Jewish immigrants, adherents of an ideology called “Zionism.” There were different opinions among Zionist leaders as to how to deal with the native Palestinian Arabs. Some advocated peaceful co-existence and others advocated dispossession and expulsion. There were also positions in between. In the end, the more regressive positions prevailed. In their writings, Zionist leaders like David Ben-Gurion, the first Prime Minister of Israel, were explicit and unapologetic about their aim to expel the native Palestinian Arabs and take their land.
The 1948 nation building of Israel was premised on dispossession of the natives, including a premeditated campaign of ethnic cleansing and massacre. In 1948, Zionist military forces expelled about 750,000 Palestinians from 78% of Historic Palestine into the West Bank, Gaza Strip, and exile abroad. After statehood, these Zionist forces became the Israeli army. In 1967, again through military means, Israel took control of the remaining 22% of historic Palestine (i.e., the West Bank and Gaza Strip). The Palestinians driven into the West Bank and Gaza Strip in 1948 (as well as those already there) came under Israeli military occupation in 1967, where they remain today 41 years later. Thus, in 1948 Israel proper was created on 78% of historic Palestine and since 1967 Israel has occupied the remaining 22% of historic Palestine.
Myth Number 2: The conflict is a cycle of violence between adversaries of similar power
The Israel-Palestine conflict is between two parties vastly unequal in power. Israel, the nuclear-armed occupier, has the fourth most powerful army in the world and cutting edge military weaponry. The Palestinians, an occupied and stateless people, are largely unarmed. The Palestinians have no army, no air force, no planes, no tanks, no gunships, and no nuclear weapons. This is why we see pictures of Palestinians throwing stones at tanks. If you possessed anything more powerful, would a stone really be your weapon of choice against a tank?
Myth Number 3: The conflict is based on religious and ethnic differences
The Israel-Palestine conflict is about possession and control of a small piece of land approximately the size of New Jersey. Israel believes itself entitled to all of the land because in the Bible God promised all of historic Palestine to the Jews. Since 1967, in violation of international law, Israel has moved 500,000 of its citizens into the West Bank. These settlers are connected to Israel through Israeli-only roads that crisscross the West Bank. West Bank Palestinians are not allowed to use these roads and must take circuitous routes on older roads in order to go around Israeli settlements, often adding hours to their journeys.
Regarding the “peace process,” Israel’s talk of making peace has been a rhetorical screen. Behind this screen each and every Israeli government since 1967,whether its flavor was left, right, or center, has continued the campaign begun in 1948, of land grab, human rights violations, and imprisonment of the Palestinians into multiple separate enclaves within the Occupied Territories of the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Since 1967 every Israeli government has continued a national construction project (based on a plan created in the late 1960’s by Labor Minister Yigal Allon)to separate, isolate, and enclose every Palestinian city and most towns and villages by surrounding them with Israeli settlements. Today, that project is essentially complete. In addition to the settlement building, Israel’s construction of the Wall (86% of which is in the West Bank rather than along the 1967 border) and ongoing annexation of land and water resources have created facts on the ground establishing Israel’s dominance over all of historic Palestine. Today, Israel’s mission of total dominance is near completion.
In 1988, the Palestine Liberation Organization (as representative of the Palestinian people) agreed to recognize Israel, forego claim to 100% of historic Palestine, and accept a nation on 22% of their original land (i.e., on the West Bank and Gaza Strip). Israel has never agreed to this. Israel has made clear that it wants a future Palestinian state to be a version of 80% of 22% of 100%. Such a “state” would be a non-contiguous series of disconnected cantons. Israel’s Wall cuts deep into the West Bank and incorporates into Israel West Bank settlements and aquifers. This is the desert after all, and water is treasure. The Wall and settlements segment the West Bank and make a contiguous Palestinian state unlikely, if not impossible. Israel also wants control over exit and entry from that 80% of 22% of 100%. An analogy for this: imagine that in each of the rooms of your house you can do as you wish but that someone with guns controls all the hallways between the rooms. Is this a viable structure for life?
What holds all this in place and allows it to continue is that Israel has the multibillion dollar per year financial support and diplomatic cover of the most powerful nation in history, the United States. The U.S. has agreed to provide Israel with $30 billion dollars in military aid over the next 10 years and has provided billions upon billions of dollars in aid to Israel in the past. For decades, Israel has been the largest recipient of U.S. foreign aid and receives one-third of the total U.S. foreign aid budget. The U.S., a veto-wielding member of the United Nations Security Council, has also vetoed each and every resolution put forward by the United Nations in response to Israel’s multiple violations of international law. In each of the U.N. votes on these resolutions against Israeli government actions, year after year, the U.S. and Israel (and a few small Pacific Island nations) stand alone against the rest of the international community in siding with Israel against international law and world opinion.
All of the facts above are available from easily accessible public sources. The facts are not in dispute. However, they have been obscured by a web of misinformation that hides the truth. Because the facts are what they are, when Israel is criticized, its proponents, who cannot rely on facts to support their cause, resort to personal attacks and charges of “anti-Semitism.” Their charges of anti-Semitism presuppose that all criticism of Israel as a state actor and all efforts to hold Israel, which is after all a nation state like any other, accountable for its actions are inherently anti-Semitic. When the truth cannot be bent to their narrative, proponents of Israeli government actions, no matter what those actions are, resort to the cudgel of anti-Semitism to silence and censor criticism of the actions of the state of Israel. So far, this method of silencing critics has proven highly effective in the U.S. Publicly criticizing Israel has cost academics their jobs and members of congress political office. These examples keep the rest of us in line as well.
Decades of misinformation and a mythical story (i.e., a land without a people for a people without a land), as well as the daily falsehoods we continue to be fed, can make the situation in Israel-Palestine seem more murky, complicated, and relativistic than it actually is.
When the American colonists were dispossessing the Native Americans, there was violent resistance. A people being dispossessed will resist. They resist because of their dispossession (not because they are crazy, evil, or filled with hate because of their religion). And, of course, violent native resistance hurts the occupier and harms innocents. However, when the occupier casts itself as the victim and says it is acting only in “self-defense” against native “attack”, it has turned logic on its head. Israel’s propaganda campaign over the last 41 years, casting itself as the only and perpetual victim, has been extremely successful in making this bizarre topsy-turvy spin seem logical and correct. It is yet another example of the effectiveness of saying the same thing over and over again until people start believing it is true.
There are many situations in history where two opposing perspectives are not of equal moral weight. The colonial campaign China continues in Tibet, the former British Empire’s actions around the globe, the apartheid system in South Africa, Belgium’s enslavement and killing of 10 million Congolese for natural resources, the genocide of the Jews by the Nazis, the genocide of the Armenians by Turkey all come to mind. The moral equation in Israel-Palestine is as simple and clear.
While discussion of U.S. national interest and geopolitical strategy take up much space in newspapers and conversation among the pundit class, the dimension of morality, the concern with doing the right thing, rarely enters our public discourse. In the end, the situation in the Occupied Territories of Gaza and the West Bank calls on our moral sense. It calls on our humanity, compassion, and sense of fairness. Our silence and complicity in Israel’s dispossession of the Palestinians and its ongoing human rights abuses over decades is a moral lapse of huge proportion.
Americans have a larger stake in this issue than citizens of other countries because we foot the bill to the tune of $8 million a day in aid to Israel. All of us who pay U.S. income taxes funded the recent atrocities in Gaza. We paid to drop white phosphorus on civilians. We paid to level homes, clinics, and schools. We paid to kill children and whole families as they slept in their beds. We are complicit in the bloodbath in Gaza. We are complicit in children starving to death laying next to their dead mothers buried in rubble as the International Red Cross documented in Gaza. We fund acts of state terror in which people watch their beloved daughter, son, father, mother be literally torn apart. We pay for a military machine that maims, kills, and holds captive an unarmed civilian population of men, women, and children, enclosing them in prison-like cantons within the West Bank and Gaza. For decades, we have been paying for the slow annihilation of a society and people who have done absolutely nothing to us.
So what can we do as individual citizens? Call your congresspeople to demand an even-handed U.S. policy in Israel-Palestine. Call the Obama White House to do the same. Learn about the growing Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions campaign against Israel (modeled on the anti-apartheid campaign against South Africa). Don’t buy Israeli products. Tell your local grocer you won’t shop there until they stop carrying Israeli products. Educate your neighbor. Educate yourself. Watch the documentary film “Occupation 101.” Read “The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine” by Israeli historian Ilan Pappe. Read the writings of Palestinian intellectuals Edward Said and Rashid Khalidi. Go to www.endtheoccupation.org to find a political group in your area working for justice in Israel-Palestine. Most of all, do something. Do not be silent. Do not be complicit.
A.M. Khan is an Indian American psychologist by day and an activist and beginning documentary filmmaker by night. She welcomes correspondence on her work and can reached at: amkhan601@gmail.com.
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Tags:anti-Semitism, Gaza, human rights violations, Israel, Israel-Palestine conflict, myths, Palestine, U.S. mainstream media, Zionist military forces
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