Rabbis told Israeli soldiers Gaza offensive was religious war

March 21st, 2009 By: Michael van der Galien

http://www.poligazette.com/2009/03/21/rabbis-told-israeli-soldiers-gaza-offensive-was-religious-war/

More horrifying testimonies from Israeli soldiers were published in the Haaretz yesterday:

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.”…

A shirt printed up just this week for soldiers of the Lavi battalion, who spent three years in the West Bank, reads: “We came, we saw, we destroyed!” – alongside images of weapons, an angry soldier and a Palestinian village with a ruined mosque in the center.

Obviously terrible shirts How can it be explained? Well, a sociologist agrees with my take on the IDF’s behavior in Gaza of yesterday:

Sociologist Dr. Orna Sasson-Levy, of Bar-Ilan University, author of “Identities in Uniform: Masculinities and Femininities in the Israeli Military,” said that the phenomenon is “part of a radicalization process the entire country is undergoing, and the soldiers are at its forefront. I think that ever since the second intifada there has been a continual shift to the right. The pullout from Gaza and its outcome – the calm that never arrived – led to a further shift rightward.

“This tendency is most strikingly evident among soldiers who encounter various situations in the territories on a daily basis. There is less meticulousness than in the past, and increasing callousness. 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.”

Meanwhile, McClatchy reports that Israeli soldiers testified that rabbis with the army told them the war in Gaza was a religious war.

Rabbis affiliated with the Israeli army urged troops heading into Gaza to reclaim what they said was God-given land and “get rid of the gentiles” – effectively turning the 22-day Israeli intervention into a religious war, according to the testimony of a soldier who fought in Gaza.

Literature passed out to soldiers by the army’s rabbinate “had a clear message – we are the people of Israel, we came by a miracle to the land of Israel, God returned us to the land, now we need to struggle to get rid of the gentiles that are interfering with our conquest of the land,” the soldier told a forum of Gaza veterans in mid-February, just weeks after the conflict ended.

A transcript of the testimony given at an Israeli military academy at the Oranim college on Feb. 13 was obtained on Friday by McClatchy Newspapers and also published in Haaretz, one of Israel’s leading dailies. The soldier, identified as “Ram,” a pseudonym to protect his identity, gave a scathing description of the atmosphere as the Israeli army went to war.

“The general atmosphere among people I spoke to was … the lives of Palestinians are … let’s say far, far less important from the lives of our soldiers,” Ram said. The religious literature gave “the feeling of almost a religious mission,” he said.

That particular point comes back time and again: Palestinians aren’t human beings. Their lives don’t count. The following is also constantly repeated by the witnesses:

When the orders were changed, Aviv said that another soldier protested: “Everyone in there is a terrorist; that’s known.” His comrades joined in, “We need to kill every person found there; everyone in Gaza is a terrorist.”

Everyone in Gaza is a terrorist. It’s repeated often by soldiers. This explains the hateful shirts, many civilian casualties, and destroyed homes and mosques. If every Gazan is a terrorist or will grow up to be one, why spare them? Why leave their property untouched?

Ironically enough, that’s also what Hamas et al. say about Israeli children and women.

This is becoming a public relations nightmare for the IDF. If the testimonies are correct, there’s a lot of reason for concern. The IDF isn’t a terrorist organization, it’s the army of one of the few democracies in the Middle East and staunch ally and friend of the West. It has to be held to those standards – and when it acts in breach with them, it has to be criticized. If the testimonies are correct the IDF did indeed act in breach with those standards; for that, someone – several probably – has to be held responsible, accountable and be punished.