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.
