Yes, they must be anti-semites if they criticize Israel’s actions regarding its brutal invasion defensive anti-terrorist action against Hamas in Gaza earlier this year. The fact that they are Israeli soldiers who participated in that action in no way let’s them off the hook:
Israel has rejected charges by Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and UN agencies that its invasion of Gaza inflicted civilian death on an unjustifiable scale.
Now, some of the Israeli soldiers who took part say they were urged by commanders that it was ‘better hit an innocent than hesitate to target an enemy.’
In print and video testimony of unidentified soldiers published by the activist group Breaking the Silence, 30 troops said the Israeli army’s imperative was to minimise its own casualties to ensure Israeli public support for the operation.
The troops regularly used civilians as human shields during the December and January conflict, according to one unidentified soldier. […]
‘If you’re not sure, kill. Fire power was insane. We went in and the booms were just mad,’ says another. ‘The minute we got to our starting line, we simply began to fire at suspect places. In urban warfare, anyone is your enemy. No innocents.’
Remember that scene in Lawrence of Arabia where Lawrence has his Arab Army attack a straggling band of Turkish prisoners shouting “No prisoners” because they had just come across an Arab village where the Turks had killed everyone? Well that was just a movie, and those were Turkish military, and yet the purpose of the scene was to show the inhumanity of war. How much more inhumane to see such actions taken against non-combatants in real life and to know that this was not an accident. These were the Israeli rules of engagement. Kill everyone.
Ghastly. My thanks to those few Israeli soldiers who testified to what they witnessed.
My impression is that the goal of an operation like the invasion of Gaza is to destroy support for Hamas by making the population (civilians) think, “If you fire that rocket, you are going to get us all killed.”
So, it’s important to kill civilians and to do it in an unpredictable way that it’s impossible to protect yourself against. Otherwise, civilians will convince themselves that they can game out a strategy that will keep them alive.
It’s not killing civilians for its own sake. It’s quite strategic.
I think the Israelis feel that a failure to do this creates a predictable result where civilians become more supportive of their armed resistance when their territory is being defended. That’s normally true, but after it’s over, the civilians become skeptical of tactics of resistance that get them killed.
I am not defending Israel here…just explaining why the feel compelled to do things in this way.
Boo:
That’s all well and good. Only problem is when some of those soldiers have a crisis of confidence(like these did), it just makes Gaza residents(in this case) all the more hardened. So in the end it doesn’t win you a damn thing. After all, what would you do if someone invaded your homeland and then admitted to targeting civilians? You’d be really PO’ed, no doubt.
In the long run it is self-defeating. And, of course it is a war crime.
Like I said, I’m not defending it.
.
Nope .. you think too much behind an human face of occupiers. Remember the cartoons to dehumanize the palestinian people and the targeting of pregnant women. That’s no joke BooMan. Israeli IDF gang are pure war criminals and their leaders should be hanged for murder, at least send to a UN War Crimes Tribunal in The Hague. It’s about demographics, etnic cleansing and transfer of Arabs across the Jordan river.
(Haaretz) – 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 – 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.”
"But I will not let myself be reduced to silence."Which is of course a war crime and, if it were perpetrated by a non-state actor, would be best described as “terrorism”.
They may have a strategic reason for doing it, but that doesn’t mean that their strategy isn’t monstrous and condemned by just about every modern theory of warfare and just about every international treaty attempting to outline legitimate “rules of warfare” for the last century or so.
.
During the Israeli military aggression on the Gaza Strip between 27 December 2008 and 18 January 2009, called “Operation Cast Lead“, 1417 Palestinians were killed, of which 926 were civilians, according to the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights.
On 6 January 2009, the family home of Hussein Deeb, where many civilians had taken refuge, was hit by Israeli shells. 14 family members were hit, of which 11 died.
B’Tselem Israel’s Assassination Policy: Extra-judicial Executions
≈ Cross-posted from my diary — CIA Program of Illegal Targeted Killings Creates Uproar ≈
"But I will not let myself be reduced to silence."I can only imagine what Bibi is thinking right now, especially after calling Rahm and Axelrod what he did.
.
Obama is having a rough time lately with “old” friends:
Bibi Netanyahu and Honduran Elite.
"But I will not let myself be reduced to silence."Best anti-war movie of all time:
WALTZ WITH BASHIR
Having been anti-war prior to getting drafted in 1971 I have sympathy for the soldiers, whatever side they are on, in a war. They are also the victims of something they can’t control. I am absolutely against all the current American wars, but I support any and all benefits that vets should be getting after spending time over there.
The people who are used as the tool to impose the violence on others are often the ones who are the conscience of humanity in wartime.
What pisses me off is that every goddamn year some three billion of our tax dollars go to Israel in the form of military aid. We are, therefore, subsidizing these militant barbarians in their unholy and unjust wars against basically a defenseless people. Has our Congress become so corrupt that they have lost all decency and honesty? [Yes, this is purely a rhetorical question.]
.
EU foreign minister Solana is retiring and says what he thinks. The British with Gordon Brown decide to suspend export license for military parts to Israel. Russia is keeping its distance to Iran and are negotiating arms deals with Israel.
"But I will not let myself be reduced to silence."