Israel's military condemned soldiers for wearing T-shirts of a pregnant woman in a rifle's cross-hairs with the slogan "1 Shot 2 Kills," and another of a gun-toting child with the words, "The smaller they are, the harder it is."
I can't say that I'm surprised, and there are many reasons for my reaction. As I said over and over again in defense of American soldiers after the Abu Ghraib incident, in a war zone, a soldier has to learn how to de-humanize his enemy, or else he can't do what a soldier has to do in war. I have to think that this would be even more the case for a young Israeli soldier, who has to serve in the military regardless of his opinions on the IDF, unless he's willing to face a year of solitary confinement in jail. I'd like to say that I would, in that position, have the moral fortitude to be a refusenik, but the fact is that I'm not in that position, and I'll never know how I would respond. I do know that, despite my moral fortitude, I can be taken in and brainwashed as easily as the next guy, even if Rotary Youth Exchange brainwashing (not better, not worse, just different! peace one friendship at a time!) is pretty benign in comparison! What both Israelis and Palestinians have endured over the last 60 years is frankly beyond my comprehension, and I just know that it must make it that much easier for each side to demonize the other!
Nor am I saying that the bad taste in cartoons is one-sided, either! My pro-Israel friends will surely point out that
Hamas-controlled media consistently glorify attacks on Israelis, and cartoons in Palestinian newspapers frequently use anti-Semitic images of Jews as hook-nosed, black-hatted characters.But in light of recent reporting by the United Nations, I find this kind of talk on Israel's part to be, at best, disingenuous, and at worse, pure hypocrisy:
Hamas also mocked Israeli suffering, staging a play about its capture of an Israeli soldier in which it makes fun of the serviceman crying for his mother and father.
On Monday, the military chief of staff, Lt. Gen. Gabi Ashkenazi, defended his troops.
"I tell you that this is a moral and ideological army. I have no doubt that exceptional events will be dealt with," Ashkenazi told new recruits. Gaza "is a complex atmosphere that includes civilians, and we took every measure possible to reduce harm to the innocent."
Hamas and other Palestinian militant groups fire rockets from heavily populated areas, and Israel says Hamas is to blame for the civilian deaths because it leaves the military no choice but to attack them there.
U.N. human rights experts said Monday that Israeli soldiers used an 11-year-old Palestinian as a human shield during the Gaza offensive. The military ordered the boy on Jan. 15 to walk in front of soldiers being fired on in a Gaza neighborhood and enter buildings before them, said Radhika Coomaraswamy, the U.N. secretary-general's envoy for protecting children in armed conflict.
Israeli army spokesman Capt. Elie Isaacson denied the military used human shields, saying "morals and high ethical standards are paramount" in the army. [all emphasis mine]
Reuters has provided more examples of UN claims as to how Israel violated human rights and international law in their Hannukah offensive last year:
In one [incident], [the Sri Lankan human rights lawyer] said, Israeli soldiers shot a father after ordering him out of his house and then opened fire into the room where the rest of the family was sheltering, wounding the mother and three brothers and killing a fourth.My hat goes off, as well, to UN special rapporteur Richard Falk, who was banned from entering Gaza previous to the Hannukah offensive because of what Israel perceived as an anti-Semitic bias, but who continues to call for
an independent experts group to probe possible war crimes by Israel and Hamas. [He] also suggested that the U.N. Security Council set up an ad hoc criminal tribunal.
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It becomes an unfortunate thing when a soldier begins to dehumanize his/her (with respect to the IDF's policy of not restricting women to support roles), enemy, in respect to that soldier's humanity and ability to relate to others around him. But war is unfortunate, and seeing friends die through the actions of others is so much more than merely unfortunate. It becomes necessary for your average combat soldier to learn to compartmentalize him/herself and to put their own little cricket in a locked box in the back of their mind, only to be taken out when safely away from the front.
It becomes no surprise then, that with some of them, the cricket dies, and that no place becomes "safe." Again, it is unfortunate, because then, that soldier is no longer able to reintegrate back into a "civilized" society.
I would point out the recent (and not so recent) troubles that the United States has had with veterans of their numerous (of late) conflicts reentering civilian life, and their troubles readjusting, and this is a country that has been involved in brouhahas for at least 200 years. Is it any wonder that Israeli citizens, who live only miles from an active front have trouble humanizing their perceived enemy?
All of this is in no way defending the poor taste of the Israeli soldier for wearing that t-shirt in public, but it points out an unfortunate reality of the situation. And, is it any worse than the motto of the United States' own sniper/scout? "You can run, but you'll only die tired."
It wearies me, that war is considered to be an acceptable extension of politics, to paraphrase Clausewitz, but until people become less willing to use force to enforce their own ideas, I will continue to be weary.
On the other hand, if more people actually read him, rather than misquote him, perhaps war would become a much less grand ideal than it is now.
Anonymous said...
9:54 PM