How precisely do you reckon Israel to be the most moral army in the world ?
When Israel forced the displacement of 1.1 million Palestinians—many of whom are descendants of refugees—from their homes in northern Gaza before its ground offensive, I pondered about the extent of additional slaughter and devastation required to fulfill this genocidal impulse.
The assault by Israel on civilian structures and infrastructure and killing over 41,000 Palestinian children, men, and women received a silent response from Western leaders. Furthermore, Israel's decision to cut off electricity, restrict water supply, and flatten extensive areas of the Gaza Strip has elicited less condemnation from the West, despite these actions representing blatant war crimes.
To comprehend the lack of moral outrage among the Western elite regarding the deaths of Palestinian civilians, as well as the anticipated future for Palestinians in Gaza, it is essential to examine prevailing Israeli narratives of previous attacks.
In 2014, during Israel's incursion into Gaza, over 2,250 Palestinians were killed, including 556 children. In comparison, only 71 Israelis were killed, including 67 soldiers, four settlers, and one foreign worker.
How is it that, despite Israel's disproportionate and brutal aggression in 2014, the West mostly maintains the belief that the Israeli army is "the most moral in the world," while Palestinians are consistently portrayed as "violent aggressors"? Why do Western politicians refrain from publicly condemning Israel for war crimes?
Several factors are involved. Israel's manipulation of the laws of war, for example, has effectively portrayed Israeli brutality as ethical.
Israel's legal manipulations exploit gaps and exceptions within international law, demonstrating that the laws of war favor states over non-state actors and the powerful over the weak, and consequently might not be the best tool to shield civilians in Gaza.
Let us consider specific examples. The orders issued to Israeli forces entering the Gaza Strip in 2014 were clear: Palestinians who refused Israel's evacuation warnings and failed to relocate south were deemed as valid military targets. A soldier explained to the Israeli organization Breaking the Silence that:
“There weren’t really any rules of engagement … They told us: ‘There aren’t supposed to be any civilians there. If you spot someone, shoot’. Whether the person posed a threat or not wasn’t even a question; and that makes sense to me. If you shoot someone in Gaza it’s cool, no big deal. First of all because it’s Gaza, and second because that’s warfare. That, too, was made clear to us—they told us, ‘Don’t be afraid to shoot’, and they made it clear that there are no uninvolved civilians.”
Given that more than half of the 2.3 million Palestinians residing in the Gaza Strip are children, and because the laws of war require warring parties to distinguish between civilians and combatants at all times, as well as to prohibit the intentional targeting of civilians, one could assume that a military order allowing indiscriminate firing at civilians would be considered illegal under international law.
The irony lies in Israel's utilization of wartime laws to present itself as the ethical actor. This month, as in 2014, the Israeli army directed hundreds of thousands of Palestinians to evacuate their residences and relocate to the south, fully aware that those living in the area are thousands of elderly and sick people and that the allotted time for evacuation was inadequate.
However, Israel is aware that warning Palestinian civilians and instructing them to flee will enable it to deny their presence in northern Gaza. The phrase “there are no uninvolved civilians” signifies that all individuals remaining in the area, despite the majority being civilians unable to evacuate, are categorized as “participants in hostilities” or “voluntary human shields." According to some interpretations of the laws of war, such terminology designates these civilians as "killable."
The claim of morality relies on adherence to the laws of war, thereby rendering the lethal force employed by Israeli soldiers against civilians in their homes as morally defensible and even ethical.
In conjunction with this legal discourse, Israel disseminates a colonial narrative portraying Palestinians as "human animals," lacking comprehension of the laws of war. By merging these colonial images and legal jargon, it characterizes Palestinians as immoral savages who “deserve to die." This rhetorical strategy, thus, depicts Israeli soldiers as the opposite, specifically, the "civilized" and ethical "combatants.".
Moreover, the association of international law with colonial tropes—termed colonial legal discourse—facilitates the justification of extensive violence. Months ago, CBS News's 60 Minutes program had an interview with Shira Etting, an Israeli pilot involved in the protests against the Israeli government's efforts to reform its legislative system under Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. “If you want pilots to be able to fly and shoot bombs and missiles into houses knowing they might be killing children,” she stated, “they must have the strongest confidence in the [politicians] making those decisions.”
Etting nowhere acknowledges any intent on murdering children. She concedes that when she and her colleagues pilots embark on a mission over Gaza, they recognize that the missiles they launch may indeed result in civilian casualties, which frequently occur.
In short, Israeli pilots, like Etting, are aware that their deployment of large bombs on urban centers results in killings of children; nevertheless, because they did not “intend” to kill them, international law, along with media organizations like CBS News and Western leaders, deems their conduct morally justifiable. This occurs despite the fact that the bombardments conducted by these pilots result in a significantly higher number of civilian casualties, including children, compared to those caused by Hamas's retaliatory attack. Western media outlets depict them as heroes who did not aim to cause civilian casualties, referred to as "collateral damage."
Recognizing that this colonial legal language portrays both the perpetrators of violence and the victims as morally separate is important. Israeli casualties have names and life stories. These are depicted as people deserving of being grieved.
In contrast, Palestinian victims are often rendered nameless and depicted merely as numbers rather than as people whose lives deserve to be grieved. This also contributes to the perpetuation of the myth regarding how moral the Israeli military is.
Ultimately, those who utilize the weapons of the powerful are deemed more ethical not only due to their ability to kill innocent people from a distance but also because colonial legal discourse categorizes their victims as "human animals," "collateral damage," or just statistics.
As long as the dead are dehumanized in this manner and hence deemed undeserving of mourning, the death drive will persist unchallenged. This, I fear, constitutes a formula for genocide.