-OpEd-
BEIRUT — Former head of Israel’s Shin Bet security, Ami Ayalon, was blunt in a recent interview with CNN journalist Christiane Amanpour: “When you send us to war, you don’t send us to negotiate, you send us to kill. We are born with the idea of ‘You shall not kill.’ And now you tell me to go to war, kill all the enemies,” Ayalon said. “Now the idea that I have the right to kill, with time becomes natural. We don’t ask why. The only question that we ask when we go to war is how to kill.”
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Asked whether Israeli soldiers are losing their morality and humanity, Ayalon replied, “Not they, we are losing. We are losing our identity as people, as Jews and as human beings.”
His comments came following the spread of images showing a wounded Palestinian tied to the hood of an Israeli military vehicle in the West Bank city of Jenin. Palestinians said the Israeli forces used the man as a human shield when they raided the city.
It was not an isolated incident. Such violations occurred repeatedly without accountability. Over the course of the war in Gaza, social media platforms have been flooded with videos and photos documenting the Israeli military’s violations, including torturing detainees, killing civilians, and storming and destroying homes.
Many of these photos and videos were published by Israeli soldiers themselves, as a kind of boast. It’s a despicable moral phenomenon. These videos and images are considered legal documents that could be used against Israel before international courts for violating international law.
This documentation not only confirms the collapse of moral and humanitarian barriers among members of “the most moral army in the world,” but also shows that these soldiers feel that they are able to do anything, as long as they are protected by their country and its allies who support it politically and militarily.
Israel itself blasted international rights officials and barred them from visiting the Palestinian Territories to investigate alleged crimes. It revoked the residency visa of the United Nations Humanitarian Coordinator Lynn Hastings.
Dehumanizing Palestinians
Current and former Israeli officials have claimed that their army is the world’s most moral, in efforts to present an ideal image of the conduct of the Israeli army in the ongoing Israeli-Palestinian conflict. And they continue to stick to that empty claim, despite the accumulation of evidence indicating the occurrence of genocide in Gaza, as well a serious violations of international laws in the occupied West Bank.
Why have an increasing number of Israeli soldiers committed and documented such atrocities?
Perhaps the phenomenon of Israeli soldiers’ filming themselves while committing acts that amount to crimes against humanity, is one of the most prominent outcomes of the Israel-Hamas war.
But why have an increasing number of Israeli soldiers committed and documented such atrocities? What strategies does Israel follow to shape and formulate the Israeli human being, to produce this model of a soldier?
Dehumanizing the Palestinians could be the key to answering these questions. Turning extremist ideas into practical practices that could reach genocide requires a huge apparatus for disseminating propaganda, recruitment, polarization, financing, planning and implementation. It also requires developing a psychological and social strategy that makes an individual feels not guilty while committing a genocide.
The Israeli authorities, in cooperation with the media, succeeded in quickly dehumanizing the people of Gaza following Hamas attack on Oct. 7. Israel used the attack to disseminate lies that helped mobilize and recruit the Israelis, as well as international sympathy for the Israeli response no matter how excessive or hysterical.
Such lies included the beheading of 40 children, a lie that was repeated by U.S. President Joe Biden. Although White House corrected Biden and the officer of the Israeli Prime Minister denied it, the damage was already done.
Segregation and brainwashing
Turning an Israeli citizen into a criminal who participate in a genocide — directly as a soldier, or indirectly as a person justifying it — goes through many stages of normalization with violence. This includes separation and discrimination between Palestinian Arab and Jewish children in the Israeli education system. This segregation weakens the children’s human sympathy. It creates and enhances the contradiction between the “Palestinian” and the “Israeli.”
In addition to the educational system, a large segment of Jewish children are brainwashed by extreme right-wing media, publications and daily advertisements. Israeli families also play a major role in the brainwashing, especially in the closed settler communities, where children are brought up to be hostile towards the dehumanized Palestinian Arabs.
There are some Israelis, who are willing to criticize their authorities’ practices and show sympathy to the Palestinians as humans. But the far-right in the Israeli society and government have tried to sideline them, exploiting the Oct. 7 attack.
Fictional image
All of this has become evident in public statements by senior Israeli military and political officials, including Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. The establishment also provides protection and immunity to soldiers committing collective or individual crimes in the war even if they filmed themselves.
Israel has tried to propagate a picture of gender equality, freedom and moral superiority
Such violations reflect the collapse of all moral barriers due to the Israeli army’s systematic normalization of a culture of violence against Palestinian Arabs. To confront these facts, Israel has long tried to propagate a bright picture of gender equality, freedom and moral superiority among its soldiers.
This fictional picture has been repeated by Western journalists and officers, who claim that “The Israeli army is the most moral army in the world,” and who rely on false and fabricated information that completely contradicts violations documented by international rights organizations, that amount to genocide.
