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
