Ashes, Ashes, We All Fall Down

I have not updated my blog in nearly one month.  My initial plan was to simply describe, in the simple style of a travelogue, my final weekend in Israel, and my return to North America.  The kidnapping of the three Israeli settler teens from Hebron had occurred shortly before my departure, and the search was still underway when I left.  Before I had even had time to recover from my flight, they had been found to have been murdered, and around 150 rockets had been fired from Gaza into Israel.  In response to a friend's repeated anti-Israel posts on Facebook, I then resolved instead to write about terror and the ongoing occupation of Gaza and the West Bank, in an attempt to show that Palestinian Arabs were not the only victims, that many Zionists such as myself condemn the actions of the תג מחיר (Price Tag) vandals regularly committing hate crimes against Palestinian Arabs.  I began composing such a post, but then left Ithaca rather immediately and without much premeditation, and was away from my keyboard for nearly a week.  It was while I was visiting friends in New Jersey, New York City, and Philadelphia that war broke out, and I first heard the phrase "Operation Protective Edge," or, in the original Hebrew, "מִבְצָע צוּק אֵיתָן."  Although I returned to Ithaca, I was overwhelmed with material, personal and geopolitical, and, also prioritized finding a job for the coming year over my literary pursuits.  Now that I have found a job, and the IDF has launched a land operation in Gaza, I feel compelled to publish my thoughts on the newest horrific chapter in the Israeli-Palestinian.

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On Thursday morning, I listened to the report on the radio of the Israeli Air Force bombing of a mostly-empty beach, lacking any apparent military targets, or even civilian buildings converted for military use.  The beach was located near a hotel where a large number of international war correspondents were residing, hence the series of heartbreaking photos that emerged following the killing.  According to the New York Times article issued that same day, "the Israeli military acknowledged later that it had launched the strike, which it said was aimed at Hamas militants, and called the civilian deaths 'a tragic outcome.'"  Although I agree that the murder of the four Arab children is certainly "tragic," I cannot possibly comprehend how four children in beach clothes could possibly be mistaken for the scarf-wearing, gun-bearing Hamas militants firing rockets at Israel.

This brings me to an important point.  Among defenders of Israel's occupation of Gaza, as well as of Operation Protective Edge (and before that, Operations Pillar of Cloud and Cast Lead) is that Israel's military is morally clean, even to the point of being immaculate.  I could chose among dozens of quotations, past and present, but I will content myself with citing President Peres, who said the other day, following the foiling of Hamas's terror tunnel, "There is no more humane army than the IDF."  Mr. President, your statement is empty of meaning.  I do not care if you find Tzahal less repugnant than the rest of the world's armies; even if that oft-repeated claim were to be true, it merely shows that warfare, no matter who conducts is, is brutal and inhumane by its very nature.

IDF Propaganda attempting to create a strong moral
dichotomy between the IDF and Hamas.

There is plenty of IDF propaganda attempting to show how dronestrikes avoid populated area (this video is an excellent example).  Those of you who are regular readers might remember the Security and Diplomacy Shabbaton of November, 2013, when I met Colonel Bentzi Gruber, a sub-commander in the IDF Reserves who has around 20,000 soldiers serving under him.  His talk was about "Ethics in the Field," and he tried to give the audience an idea of what it is like, as a soldier and officer in the IDF, to be in charge of protecting Israel from rocket fire, suicide bombs, and other terror threats.  Bentzi was a highly competent communicator, and although he was clearly convinced of the importance of his work, he did not present himself as overtly emotional. Some of the topics that he discussed included the blockade of Gaza, Gaza's economic reliance on Israel, Israel drone strikes and the warnings it gives beforehand, Israel's policy regarding demolishing houses, the use of U.N. ambulances by terrorists, PA and Gaza school curricula, medical treatment of terrorists, Israel's targeted assassinations of terrorist leaders, the IDF's anti-suicide-bomber-car tactics, and his own portrayal as a war criminal.  After the talk, I asked the Colonel whether people were ever injured in the IDF's tactic of "knocking on the roof" (the dropping of smaller bombs on houses where Hamas hides weapons, and that are still occupied by their civilian owners) that he had described to us, and his response was bluster.  Afterwards, one of the facilitators commented on my question, saying that of course civilians are injured in "knocking on the roof."  The IDF is not going to publish and circulate its civilian casualties, and any person relying entirely on Facebook updates by the IDF for their most accurate news of the conflict is denying the IDF bullets and bombs that have already killed too many Gaza civilians, of all ages, and of both sexes.
  Describing the initial occupation of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip following their capture in the Six-Day War of 1967, Israeli historian Benny Morris writes that "Israelis liked to believe, and tell the world, that they were running an 'enlightened' or 'benign' occupation, qualitatively different from other military occupations the world had seen.  The truth was radically different.  Like all occupations, Israel's was founded on brute force, repression and fear, collaboration and treachery, beatings and torture chambers, and daily intimidation, humiliation, and manipulation" (Righteous Victims, 341).  (As a volunteer working in the English Center in Ramla, I had the opportunity to help teach a group of Arab teenagers who were the children of such informants.  Their lives had been severely disrupted because of their parents' involvement, and, to be frank, none of them had any chance of a decent score on the Bagrut, Israel's matriculation exam taken at the end of high school.)  As a student of history, I cannot think of any campaign across time or space that qualifies as a "clean war," no matter how compelling the ideology motivating one side might have been.  Israeli apologists and American Jews need to get over the fact that Tzahal is an army, and, by the very definition of an army's function, will commit horrible acts of violence upon innocents, children included.  Already, on Friday evening, on the second day of the ground invasion of Gaza, the death tolls among Palestinians has risen to nearly 270 (according to NPR's Evening Edition), 70-80% of whom were civilians, and at least thirty of whom were children.  These statistics alone should make anyone hesitate to make blanket statements in support of Israel.

George Orwell, perhaps my favorite among 20th-century political thinkers, has a penetrating passage concerning warfare and atrocities in his 1943 essay "Looking Back on the Spanish Civil War."  Orwell himself had fought in the war a decade before, had been shot in the neck by the Fascists, and, while recuperating in Britain, wrote Homage to Catalonia, describing his experiences, in the hopes that he could encourage the British to support the Spanish Republicans against Franco's Italian- and German-backed rebellion. Concerning the cruelties in Europe and the war, he wrote "atrocities are believed in or disbelieved in solely on grounds of political predilection. Everyone believes in the atrocities of the enemy and disbelieves in those of his own side, without ever bothering to examine the evidence... But unfortunately the truth about atrocities is far worse than that they are lied about and made into propaganda. The truth is that they happen... The raping and butchering in Chinese cities, the tortures in the cellars of the Gestapo, the elderly Jewish professors flung into cesspools, the machine-gunning of refugees along the Spanish roads — they all happened, and they did not happen any the less because the Daily Telegraph has suddenly found out about them when it is five years too late."  We might add that mentally-ill Israeli Zionists set Palestinian teenagers on fire in revenge for the kidnapping and murder of three Israeli teens.  All of these deaths really happened, and the fact that, even while the search for the three teens continued, Arab MKs refused to refer to the event as a "kidnapping," insisting that the teens were merely "missing," is as sure a proof of any of Orwell's thesis that belief in atrocities is determined largely (entirely?) upon political alignment, or simple tribalism.  When I participated in a pro-Israel student rally nearly two years ago in support of Israel's launching of Operation Pillar of Cloud in order to stop rocket fire from Gaza, I honestly wondered how many of my fellow protestors had anything but a vague notion of the events since 2009 (or 1967, or 1948, or 1917, or 1871, or 1492, or 136, or 73, or 516 B.C.E... you get the picture).

Example of IDF Propaganda
cited by Al-Jazeera.  The
sub-text: "civilian houses
are legitimate targets."

The following Al-Jazeera article does, I believe, highlights the subtler messages of IDF propaganda.  The writers explain the Israeli logic that "insofar as Hamas hides weapons in houses (illegitimate), Israel can bomb them as if they were military targets (legitimate). Within this framework, a single function (hiding weapons) out of many existing functions (home, shelter, intimacy, etc) determines the status of an urban site (in our case the house), so that the edifice's form loses its traditional signification.  The question 'when does it become a legitimate military target?' is merely rhetorical. Its real meaning is: 'All houses in Gaza are legitimate targets' since all houses are potentially non-homes."  The authors treat the issue of "human shields" in Gaza as if the "human shields" issue were merely one of lack of alternative places to seek refuge, i.e. that civilians passively acquire the status of "human shield" because the house, school, mosque, or factory where they happen to have taken refuge from the bombings outside is always and only forced upon them by cruel circumstance.  However, although the title of the article is "On 'human shielding' in Gaza," the authors fail to mention how the Hamas leadership encourages civilians to stand on the roof, and to quite literally protect weapon caches with their bare bodies.  In fact, the author makes no mention of why the IDF would have any interest in bombing such a target!  I find Al-Jazeera to be a dependable news source, and I agree completely with the authors' statement that "in the context of contemporary asymmetric warfare, the weak do not have many options. When there are no bomb shelters, people remain at home during extensive bombardment."  The war is very asymmetric, but the writers seem entirely uninterested in the fact that in Gaza, some civilian homes contain stockpiles of arms, and some schools are filled with rockets.

Gaza City has one of the highest population densities in the world, with 5,046 people per square kilometer, more than twenty times the population density of my own capacious home town.  Hamas's weapons stores are scattered indiscriminately, and wherever they hide weapons, civilians are certain to be found nearby.  Let's think for a moment about a man who decides that the best hideaway is near his local mosque (or, better yet, someone else's local mosque), or across the street from his children's school (or, better yet, someone else's children's school).  The graphic below showing the Hamas gathering site should look familiar to you; it's very similar to the graphic released by the IDF in Operation Pillar of Cloud, showing a Fajr-5 launch site in Gaza, located in the very near vicinity of mosques, factories, and a school.  Why the writers of this Al-Jazeera article that protest the bombing of civilian sites fail to mention this reality is beyond me.  

As if the my lack of satisfaction concerning a relatively respectable international media outlet's coverate of events, consider how I view social media reports on Gaza by pro-Palestinian activists, after having read how Hamas instructs its cyber-reporters to describe the war.  The following excerpts are taken from Hamas Interior Ministry's Facebook page.  They include instructions to social media activists reporting on the war: "Anyone killed or martyred is to be called a civilian from Gaza or Palestine, before we talk about his status in jihad or his military rank. Don't forget to always add 'innocent civilian' or 'innocent citizen' in your description of those killed in Israeli attacks on Gaza... Begin [your reports of] news of resistance actions with the phrase 'In response to the cruel Israeli attack,' and conclude with the phrase 'This many people have been martyred since Israel launched its aggression against Gaza...' Avoid publishing pictures of rockets fired into Israel from [Gaza] city centers. This [would] provide a pretext for attacking residential areas in the Gaza Strip. Do not publish or share photos or video clips showing rocket launching sites or the movement of resistance [forces] in Gaza... To the administrators of news pages on Facebook: Do not publish close-ups of masked men with heavy weapons, so that your page will not be shut down [by Facebook] on the claim that you are inciting violence."



Likewise, in case you chose not to view the above video of a Hamas leaders encouraging Palestinians to stand on their roofs in order to protect Hamas weapons with their bodies, the two pictures below should be clear to see.  The first is Hamas propaganda, which states that a "strong people" (apparently a wordplay on Operation Protective Edge's Arabic translation) stands on the roof in times of airstrikes.  All that is needed is to reprint and translate what they are telling their followers to do; no embellishment is necessary.

 As if that weren't enough, the photograph below show Palestinians complying, and doing just what is depicted above:

Did you see my words "these people had it coming to them?"  Is that my message?  If that is what you think, you shouldn't even bother finishing to read my article.  Were the above house to be bombed by the IDF, it would be as much a tragedy as any other bombing killing civilians.  These people are civilians, period.  Complying with Hamas, and sitting on the roof does not transform a civilian into a "legitimate target."  The purpose of these photographs is to show how different the reality of Hamas's "human shields" is from the notion embedded in the Al-Jazeera article.  I do not care if the house in this photograph contains rockets; I would condemn an airstrike.  The existence and capability of the Iron Dome defense system does not exempt the Hamas terrorists shooting rockets out of Gaza at Israeli civilian targets from their actions, i.e. attempted murder, but it is reliable enough to lower the human cost of failing to bomb a bomb-filled, civilian-shielded house.  However, as one of my friends pointed out to me, if Iron Dome were less efficient, Israel might receive more international sympathy, because death Israeli death tolls would be much higher.  The stupidity of the situation is that because Israel defends its civilians so well from rockets from Gaza, "asymmetrical  warfare" becomes the slogan of those who cannot bring themselves to condemn Hamas for its terrorism.

Speaking of rockets, the accompanying graphic from the IDF shows the number of times that Hamas has fired on its own civilian population since the beginning of the conflict.  Hamas's goal is to create havoc, and cause death, no matter who the victim happens to be.  If a Hamas rocket falls in Gaza, it only increases the bitterness and acrimony, the sorrow of wartime, among the civilian population.  If the rocket lands in Israel, then even if the rocket results in zero Israeli casualties, the scream of the Code Red siren, the terror of the 15-second scramble to the nearest bomb shelter, the flash of the Iron Dome interceptor missile launch, and the ensuing explosion of shrapnel generates a deep fear among Israeli civilians, especially the children.


Speaking of children, I left Israel not even three weeks ago, and spent my past year working with elementary and middle school students, who are currently in range of Hamas's rockets.  I lived nowhere near Gaza, and had no reason to fear Qassam missiles throughout the year.  However, according to the teacher with whom I worked, sirens are going off at least once per day in the town where I spent last year working.  If you have read this far in my article, you should know from this that I cannot bring myself to be impartial about the war.  There are quite literally terrorists shooting rockets at my students, the students who were my reason for getting up in the morning, throwing myself into my work and my study of Hebrew each day, and continuing to live in Israel no matter how lonely I felt at times.  These men want nothing more than to kill my students; my ten-year-olds as well as my twelve-year-olds.

I cannot agree with you if you respect the above statement.
My reasons are entirely subjective.  Those are my kids under his fire.

I have just five minutes left before I need because of sundown, so I'll conclude with a few links, and perhaps pursue another, related post, after Shabbat. On Tuesday, the PA refused to allow MaDA (that's the Israeli equivalent of the Red Cross) to supply blood to Gaza.  Here is a fascinating video of Egyptian news anchors slamming Hamas leadership.  Yes, I know that Egypt is controlled by Sissi, who hates Hamas because of its MB ties, but the fury of these pro-Palestinian men at the hypocrisy of Hamas is still worth noting. Thank you, Brend♥, for posting this example of orthodox idiocy, callousness, and blatant male chauvinism.  

Oh, and one last piece of propaganda:

I predict that DY, KN, SL, SD, and, perhaps, AM are all going to be annoyed-to-furious with my Zionist bias, and that, likewise, LP, IC, and ES, among others, are going to be irritated with the way I portray IDF airstrikes.  And BF is just going to think that I'm an idiot.

A note on my media sources.  For the above information, I have consulted with, in alphabetical order, Al-Jazeera, Democracy Now, Haaretz, the IDF Facebook page, the Ithaca Journal (a Gannett newspaper), Jerusalem Post, National Public Radio (Morning and Evening Editions), the New York Times, On Point radio, Times of Israel,

~JD