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One of the most incredulous things that people say about
the Israeli Defence Force is that it is “the most moral army in the world”. Putting
aside how ridiculous this is in the context of the current war on Gaza, this
should be incredibly offensive to members of the military of Switzerland, among
other places. Switzerland has long take an stance of neutrality in many of the
world’s wars, creating for itself a large level of prosperity, but also keeping
it from being accused of a variety of war crimes that many modern armies are
accused of. It is hard to be immoral in war, if you say no to invading other
countries, bombing other countries, and aligning in battle with other
countries.
Part of the basis of this statement about the morality of
the Israeli army is the assertion that they go more out of their way to prevent the deaths of
civilians than any other state force. But after having read more deeply into the
history of the war on Palestine in the last 100 years, I can say that this is
certainly not the case. There have been many instances of the IDF targeting civilians.
That is not to say that their enemies are particularly moral, because they are
not. I wrote about how evil and counterproductive how Hamas fights is, in a
previous piece. They are not moral in any way. Fighting hard and dirty appears
to be the norm in the Middle East, as it is in many contexts where wars are
unceasing. Constant war hardens people. A very good example of this is when you
look at how in World War 2 at the start of the war Americans were horrified at
Britain’s tactic of bombing civilian cities, but by the end of the war they
were going above and beyond what even the Brits had done. War is a corrupting
force, it hardens the human soul, especially if it is ongoing.
I also think it could be argued that one of the natures
of war anywhere in the Middle East is that it corrupts all sides equally and
drags them all down to a pretty deplorable level. A friend of mine has a saying, “Don’t
argue with stupid people, because they will drag you down to their level and
beat you with experience.” You could adjust this to say, “Don’t get involved in
fighting quarrelsome people, they will drag you down to their level and beat
you with experience.”
Khalidi shows in his book, The 100 Years’ War on Palestine,
just how ridiculous the assertion is that the IDF always goes out of its way not to
target civilians. He writes about what happened with Israel’s war in Lebanon
against the PLO in the early 1980’s,
“It is not hard to
understand the reasoning of these leaders and the communities they represented.
Southerners, most of them Shi‘ites, had suffered more than any other Lebanese
from the PLO’s actions. Besides its own violations and transgressions against the
population in the south, the PLO’s very presence had exposed them to Israeli
attacks, forcing many to flee their villages and towns repeatedly. It was
understood by all that Israel was intentionally punishing civilians to alienate
them from the Palestinians, but there was nevertheless much bitterness against
the PLO as a result.”[1]
I want to stress here that this is not an argument from
Khalidi or myself asserting that the enemies of Israel are any more moral, as he
notes here, they too were committing crimes against civilian populations in Lebanon.
But the point stands that Israel are happy to use collective punishment when they
believe it suits their aims. The current war in Gaza is an example of this,
with the IDF setting up a medieval style siege against the Gaza strip to limit severely
any food or supplies coming into the city. When Hamas numbers around 30,000
fighters, whereas the population of Gaza is over 2 million people, this amounts
to collective punishment and starvation of a civilian populace. This is targeting civilians, but Khalidi goes on to show how Israel have done this previously, as well,
“For the Sunnis, in
particular those in West Beirut, the bombardment and siege of the Lebanese
capital put an end to their staunch support for the PLO...This was a crucial shift: without the
support of Beirut’s largely Sunni population, together with its many Shi‘a
residents, prolonged resistance by the PLO to the Israeli offensive was
ultimately futile...
...A few more weeks into the war, however, the leaders
of the three Lebanese Muslim communities changed their position significantly
and became more supportive of the PLO. This shift came after the PLO consented
to withdraw from Beirut in exchange for ironclad guarantees for the protection
of the civilians who would be left behind.
On July 8, the PLO presented
its Eleven-Point Plan for withdrawal of its forces from Beirut. This plan
called for establishing a buffer zone between Israeli forces and West Beirut,
coupled with a limited withdrawal of the Israeli army, the lasting deployment
of international forces, and international safeguards for the Palestinian (and
Lebanese) populations, which would be left behind virtually without defenses
once the PLO’s fighters had departed. On the strength of this plan, the
Lebanese Muslim leaders were convinced that the PLO was sincere in its
willingness to depart as a move to save the city. Also, they were deeply
disconcerted by mounting evidence of Israel’s overt backing for the mainly Maronite
LF, since it underlined the vulnerability of their communities in a post-PLO
Lebanon dominated by Israel and its militant allies.
These concerns had been
reinforced by the arrival of the LF militias in the Shouf in late June, and the
widespread massacres, abductions, and murders that they carried out there and
in the areas of the south under Israeli control. At this stage, after seven
years of civil war, such sectarian slaughter was commonplace, and the PLO’s
forces had served as a primary defender of the country’s Muslims and leftists.
The Sunni, Shi‘a, and Druze leaders therefore redoubled their backing for the
PLO’s demands in its Eleven-Point Plan.
There is a vital thread of
US responsibility that must be followed to understand what happened next. The
consequences were not just the result of decisions by Sharon, Begin, and other
Israeli leaders, or of the actions of Lebanese militias who were Israel’s
allies. They were also the direct responsibility of the Reagan administration,
which, under pressure from Israel, stubbornly refused to accept the need for
any formal safeguards for civilians, rejected the provision of international
guarantees, and blocked the long-term deployment of international forces that
might have protected noncombatants. Instead, to secure the PLO’s evacuation,
Philip Habib, operating via Lebanese intermediaries, provided the Palestinians
with solemn, categorical written pledges to shield the civilians in the refugee
camps and neighborhoods of West Beirut...An American note of August
18 to the Lebanese foreign minister enshrining these pledges stated that
Law-abiding Palestinian
non-combatants remaining in Beirut, including the families of those who have
departed, will be authorized to live in peace and security. The Lebanese and US
governments will provide appropriate security guarantees . . . on the basis of
assurances received from the government of Israel and from the leaders of
certain Lebanese groups with which it has been in contact.
These assurances were taken
by the PLO to constitute binding commitments, and it was on their basis that it
agreed to leave Beirut.”[2]
So, having lost the support of the Lebanese population,
the PLO agreed to leave the city of Beirut, clear the region, and give it over
to Israeli control on the provision that the United States and Lebanon made
sure the Palestinians civilians, and others, were protected. But what actually happened? This:
“On August 12, after epic
negotiations, final terms were reached for the PLO’s departure. The talks were
conducted while Israel carried out a second day of the most intense bombardment
and ground attacks of the entire siege. The air and artillery assault on that
day alone—over a month after the PLO had agreed in principle to leave
Beirut—caused more than five hundred casualties. It was so unrelenting that
even Ronald Reagan was moved to demand that Begin halt the carnage. Reagan’s
diary relates that he called the Israeli prime minister during the ferocious
offensive, adding, “I was angry—I told him it had to stop or our entire future
relationship was endangered. I used the word holocaust deliberately & said
the symbol of his war was becoming a picture of a 7 month old baby with its
arms blown off.” This sharp phone call impelled Begin’s government to halt its
rain of fire almost immediately, but Israel refused to budge on the crucial
issue of international protection for the Palestinian civilian population as a
quid pro quo for the PLO’s evacuation.”[3]
So, Israel continued to bomb the area, even though negotiations to cease fighting were ongoing. This bombing was so horrific that even Ronald Regan,
a famously pro-Israel President, called on Israel to stop the onslaught. That is an incredible fact. Note, though the PLO had not yet left, this was still an area filled with civilians, but this did not stop the relentless Israeli bombing. Let’s
keep reading,
The departure from Beirut of
thousands of the PLO’s militants and fighting forces between August 21 and
September 1 was accompanied by a broad outpouring of emotion in West Beirut.
Weeping, singing, ululating crowds lined the routes as convoys of trucks carried
the Palestinian militants to the port. They watched as the PLO was forced to
evacuate the Lebanese capital, with its leaders, cadres, and fighters going to
an unknown destiny. They ended up scattered by land and sea over a half dozen
Arab countries...
...As their
convoys rolled through Beirut, no one was aware that a sudden and unilateral
American decision, taken under Israeli pressure, meant that the international
forces supervising the evacuation—American, French, and Italian troops—would be
withdrawn as soon as the last ship left. Israeli obduracy and US acquiescence
had left the civilian population unprotected.”[4]
The PLO had agreed to leave, but they did not know that
America was not intending to keep up their end of the bargain. And of course, it was not an official agreement, as Khalidi notes. The Palestinians had not
read their American history, if they had, they would know that America has a long track record of betraying those it makes treaties or agreements with, when it suits
them. The Native American peoples found this out the hard way, continually. We read a little
further on,
“…The next day, September
16, I was sitting with Kerr and several of my AUB colleagues on the veranda of
his residence when a breathless university guard came to tell him that Israeli
officers at the head of a column of armored vehicles were demanding to enter
the campus to search for terrorists…On the same night, September 16, Raja and I
were perplexed as we watched a surreal scene: Israeli flares floating down in
the darkness in complete silence, one after another, over the southern reaches
of Beirut, for what seemed like an eternity. As we saw the flares descend, we
were baffled: armies normally use flares to illuminate a battlefield, but the
cease-fire had been signed a month earlier, all the Palestinian fighters had
left weeks ago, and any meager Lebanese resistance to the Israeli troops’ arrival
in West Beirut had ended the previous day. We could hear no explosions and no
shooting. The city was quiet and fearful.
The following evening, two
shaken American journalists, Loren Jenkins and Jonathan Randal of the
Washington Post, among the first Westerners to enter the Sabra and Shatila
refugee camps, came to tell us what they had seen. They had been with Ryan
Crocker, who was the first American diplomat to file a report on what the three
of them witnessed: the hideous evidence of a massacre. Throughout the previous
night, we learned, the flares fired by the Israeli army had illuminated the
camps for the LF militias—whom it had sent there to “mop up”—as they
slaughtered defenseless civilians. Between September 16 and the morning of
September 18, the militiamen murdered more than thirteen hundred Palestinian
and Lebanese men, women, and children...
...In Waltz with
Bashir, Folman refers to concentric circles of responsibility for the mass
murder that was facilitated by this act, suggesting that those in the outer
circles were also implicated. In his mind, “the murderers and the circles
around them were one and the same.”
The statement is as true of
the war as a whole as it is of the massacres in Sabra and Shatila. A commission
of inquiry set up after the events, chaired by Israeli Supreme Court Justice
Yitzhak Kahan, established the direct and indirect responsibility of Begin,
Sharon, and senior Israeli military commanders for the massacres. Most of those
named lost their posts as a result of both the inquiry and the general
revulsion in Israel over the massacres. However, documents released by the
Israel State Archives in 201246 and the unpublished secret appendices to the
Kahan Commission reveal even more damning evidence of these individuals’
culpability, which was far greater than the original 1983 report lays out. The
documents expose long-deliberated decisions by Sharon and others to send the
practiced Phalangist killers into the Palestinian refugee camps, with the aim
of massacring and driving away their populations. They also show how American
diplomats were repeatedly browbeaten by their Israeli interlocutors and failed
to stop the slaughter that the US government had promised to prevent.”[5]
What is important to note here is that the Israeli investigation
itself found the senior Israeli military leaders responsible for this massacre. One of those leaders would eventually become the Prime Minister of Israel. We also read,
“According to these
documents, after the entire PLO military contingent had left Beirut at the end
of August 1982, Begin, Shamir, Sharon, and other Israeli officials falsely
asserted that some two thousand Palestinian fighters and heavy weaponry
remained in the city, in violation of the evacuation accords. Shamir made the
claim in a meeting with an American diplomat on September 17,49 even though the
United States government knew for certain that this was not the case—Sharon
himself told the Israeli cabinet a day earlier that “15,000 armed terrorists
had been withdrawn from Beirut.” Moreover, Israeli military intelligence
undoubtedly knew that this number included every single regular PLO military
unit in Beirut.”[6]
Consider the import of these words. This was planned and
carried out and the United States did not stop it. The US knew that all of the fighters had left, but they did nothing to actually stop this event. And the reason why this is significant will be seen soon. The Israel military did not do these attacks directly, but through their proxies,
...Unbeknown to Draper or the US government, at that
very moment the LF militias that Sharon’s forces had sent into the refugee
camps were carrying out the killing of which he spoke—but of unarmed old people,
women, and children, not supposed terrorists. If Sharon’s forces did not carry
out the actual slaughter, they had nonetheless armed the LF to the tune of
$118.5 million, trained them, sent them to do the job, and illuminated and
facilitated their bloody task with flares.”[7]
This is incredibly chilling. As is how closely America
supported its ally in this attack which killed thousands of civilians, by arming them in this conflict. To avoid
American interference in this war, which they had faced in 1956 when they wanted
to attack Egypt, Israel made sure that they had full US backing before they
attacked,
“Now, in 1982, launching
this “war of choice,” as many Israeli commentators called it, was entirely
dependent on the green light given by Alexander Haig, a point confirmed by
well-informed Israeli journalists soon after the war. The new and fuller
details revealed in previously unavailable documents make the case clearly:
Sharon told Haig exactly what he was about to do in great detail, and Haig gave
his endorsement, amounting to another US declaration of war on the Palestinians.
Even after a public outcry over the deaths of so many Lebanese and Palestinians
civilians, after the televised images of the bombardment of Beirut, after the
Sabra and Shatila massacres, American support continued undiminished.
In terms of what Ari Folman
called the outer circles of responsibility, American culpability for Israel’s
invasion extends even further than Haig’s green light: the United States
supplied the lethal weapons-systems that killed thousands of civilians and that
were manifestly not used in keeping with the exclusively defensive purposes
mandated by American law…
…Because of this knowledge,
because of American backing for Israel and tolerance of its actions, its
supplies of arms and munitions for use against civilians, its coercion of the
PLO to leave Beirut and refusal to deal directly with it, and its worthless assurances
of protection, the 1982 invasion must be seen as a joint Israeli-US military
endeavor—their first war aimed specifically against the Palestinians."[8]
They say history does not repeat, but that it rhymes. And when it
comes to Israel’s wars against Palestinians, there have been previously recorded
and investigated examples of civilians being targeted. The United States is on
record having known what was happening and supplying them the weapons which
they used in these attacks. And yet still Israel claims that it has "the most moral
military in the world." What we see recorded in history with these attacks is
being repeated today and yet still people make this claim.
This all does not mean that Israel’s enemies are any more
moral, Hamas is known for targeting civilians regularly, they are not the
friends of civilisation or the West. But Israel is guilty of targeting civilians as well, and the US is guilty of not doing anything to stop it. And this is on record. Many people are ill-informed about the nature of
the ongoing war in Gaza. It stretches back about a century now, and both sides
have committed atrocities. This is not a situation where westerners should be
getting involved in defending one side as “good”. It is a situation where the
entire world should be divorcing itself from the problems of the Middle East,
cutting aid, especially military aid, to the any of these nations, and judging
each nations actions according to an objective standard. Israel is not the innocent
party many westerners think it is. And getting involved in wars in the Middle East is a recipe for moral corruption.
List of References
[1] Khalidi,
Rashid . The Hundred Years' War on Palestine: The New York Times Bestseller,
Profile. Kindle Edition. Chapter 4.
