Still the World's Most Moral Army
Andrew Sullivan says that the killing of 13 year-old Iman al-Hamas is unspinnable. I'm not so sure. A little background: during a massive anti-terrorism operation in Gaza, the girl walked into a closed Israeli military zone in between active fire-fights (in fact, there would actually be a fire-fight during the course of this incident). A little before-hand, the Israeli military had recieved intelligence that, during this exact operation, Palestinians were planning to use teenagers to lure soldiers into snipers' nests. In the past, of course, Palestinian murderers have dispatched children strapped with suicide belts to blow themselves up for the sake of killing soldiers. Pre-teens have been given schoolbags rigged with bombs.
Now, another young teen carrying a schoolbag ran into buffer zone seperating Israeli soldiers from the people who were firing at them. Before realizing that she was just a young girl, the soldiers saw her enter the closed military zone and shot her. A certain "Captain R" went out to investigate. From what I've read, he clearly seems to be a sadistic lunatic - though the girl was either fatally injured or dead, he emptied his gun into her.
And then we're off to the races. Everyone gets a hold of this story. Finally, proof that Israeli soldiers are child-murderers! Al-Jazeera, BBC, and (discovering this story a little late), the Guardian, whose story Sullivan linked to. Check out the lede:
An Israeli army officer who repeatedly shot a 13-year-old Palestinian girl in Gaza dismissed a warning from another soldier that she was a child by saying he would have killed her even if she was three years old.
What's missing from this paragraph? First of all, there's the minor point of not mentioning that the girl was probably already dead when she was shot again (later in the story she is described as "wounded" - factually correct but clearly misleading).
But more than just massaging the lede, this article is eggregious in its lack of context. Writing about dead Palestinian children provides a cheap emotional punch to uninformed British audiences (and American college students), but any article about Palestinian children that doesn't mention Palestinian military indoctination can only be described as willfully dishonest. It is the Palestinians who have created the impossible situation where Israeli soldiers have to be afraid of schoolchildren carrying schoolbags.
More significantly, what I never see is any appreciation for the wonder that an act committed in the heat of a war is recognized, investigated, and punished by the offending soldiers' own country. The very fact that this story could be written at all gets no mention - no one seems to find it at all remarkable that Israel regularly goes after its own for being immoral. The world just quietly holds Israel to a higher standard - precisely because Israel holds itself to those higher standards:
In a time of relative calm after four years of a Palestinian uprising, these events have renewed soul-searching for the Jewish nation: Is this who we are? Is this what we've become? "It's touched a nerve," said Jessica Montell, the executive director of B'Tselem, a leading Israeli human rights group. "What's surprising is that whereas usually these kinds of things are treated as one bad seed, the case of the girl in Gaza has opened a Pandora's box and unleashed a range of issues we have been dealing with for four years."
Israeli prosecuters went as far as to actively beg the girl's parents to allow them to exhume her body so that they could find evidence to really nail the soldier. But the more that Israel tries to stay moral during the horrible war that they have been forced into, the more their own human rights institutions are used to incite murderous rage against them. There's a nauseating irony in Al-Jazeera using B'Tselem data and Israeli government testimony as evidence that Israelis and Jews are wicked and immoral. Where else in the world do governments demand that their highest-ranking army chiefs publically call out unethical soldiers? Where else are human rights organizations who do nothing by attack the army invited to lecture that army on morality?
Israeli soldiers are not perfect. Every 18-21 year old in Israel is in the IDF - inevitably, some not too bright and not too stable teenagers will slip in. All of them are placed in situations which would test the morality of even the best of us. Inevitably, some of the worst will find themselves in situations that enable them to act inappropriately - even atrociously. The way that this Captain R acted turns the stomach - the visual of confirming that a 13 year old is dead by emptying a clip into her is sickening. But when the IDF makes these incidents public in order to highlight their unacceptability - whenever they launch investigations into immorality - their findings used to prove how Israelis don't care about morality.
This leaves the IDF in a double-bind: either cover up atrocities committed by soldiers to avoid fueling more international condemnation, or expose inhumanities to make the rest of the army more ethical. The people in charge of the IDF consistently choose the latter. But having prominent editors of prominent left-of-center magazines smugly asserting that the IDF's actions are "unspinnable" and recommending subtly misleading articles is not helping anyone.
UPDATE:Israel-Line (no link up yet) has this summary of this morning's Hatzofeh (Israel's far right newspaper) editorial:
Hatzofeh praises OC Manpower Branch Maj.-Gen. Elazar Stern's recent remarks to the Knesset Constitution, Law, and Justice Committee: "In every generation, IDF officers must see themselves as if they left Auschwitz - not to do what was done to us and to see to it that what was done to us will not be done again."
Damn right. The world's most moral army.
ANOTHER UPDATE: That was quick. I just got an angry email from a bright-eyed undergraduate (no caps or punctuation - because grammar is oppressive) accusing me of smearing the young girl by using the spelling "al-Hamas" ("of Hamas") for her last name, rather than the more popular, sanitized "al-Hams" being used by the Western press. His suspicion is that I'm implying that she deserved to die because her parents raised her in an environment that probably did somewhat less than condemn terrorism. But it's not me - it's the Palestinian Ministry of Education.
Now, another young teen carrying a schoolbag ran into buffer zone seperating Israeli soldiers from the people who were firing at them. Before realizing that she was just a young girl, the soldiers saw her enter the closed military zone and shot her. A certain "Captain R" went out to investigate. From what I've read, he clearly seems to be a sadistic lunatic - though the girl was either fatally injured or dead, he emptied his gun into her.
And then we're off to the races. Everyone gets a hold of this story. Finally, proof that Israeli soldiers are child-murderers! Al-Jazeera, BBC, and (discovering this story a little late), the Guardian, whose story Sullivan linked to. Check out the lede:
An Israeli army officer who repeatedly shot a 13-year-old Palestinian girl in Gaza dismissed a warning from another soldier that she was a child by saying he would have killed her even if she was three years old.
What's missing from this paragraph? First of all, there's the minor point of not mentioning that the girl was probably already dead when she was shot again (later in the story she is described as "wounded" - factually correct but clearly misleading).
But more than just massaging the lede, this article is eggregious in its lack of context. Writing about dead Palestinian children provides a cheap emotional punch to uninformed British audiences (and American college students), but any article about Palestinian children that doesn't mention Palestinian military indoctination can only be described as willfully dishonest. It is the Palestinians who have created the impossible situation where Israeli soldiers have to be afraid of schoolchildren carrying schoolbags.
More significantly, what I never see is any appreciation for the wonder that an act committed in the heat of a war is recognized, investigated, and punished by the offending soldiers' own country. The very fact that this story could be written at all gets no mention - no one seems to find it at all remarkable that Israel regularly goes after its own for being immoral. The world just quietly holds Israel to a higher standard - precisely because Israel holds itself to those higher standards:
In a time of relative calm after four years of a Palestinian uprising, these events have renewed soul-searching for the Jewish nation: Is this who we are? Is this what we've become? "It's touched a nerve," said Jessica Montell, the executive director of B'Tselem, a leading Israeli human rights group. "What's surprising is that whereas usually these kinds of things are treated as one bad seed, the case of the girl in Gaza has opened a Pandora's box and unleashed a range of issues we have been dealing with for four years."
Israeli prosecuters went as far as to actively beg the girl's parents to allow them to exhume her body so that they could find evidence to really nail the soldier. But the more that Israel tries to stay moral during the horrible war that they have been forced into, the more their own human rights institutions are used to incite murderous rage against them. There's a nauseating irony in Al-Jazeera using B'Tselem data and Israeli government testimony as evidence that Israelis and Jews are wicked and immoral. Where else in the world do governments demand that their highest-ranking army chiefs publically call out unethical soldiers? Where else are human rights organizations who do nothing by attack the army invited to lecture that army on morality?
Israeli soldiers are not perfect. Every 18-21 year old in Israel is in the IDF - inevitably, some not too bright and not too stable teenagers will slip in. All of them are placed in situations which would test the morality of even the best of us. Inevitably, some of the worst will find themselves in situations that enable them to act inappropriately - even atrociously. The way that this Captain R acted turns the stomach - the visual of confirming that a 13 year old is dead by emptying a clip into her is sickening. But when the IDF makes these incidents public in order to highlight their unacceptability - whenever they launch investigations into immorality - their findings used to prove how Israelis don't care about morality.
This leaves the IDF in a double-bind: either cover up atrocities committed by soldiers to avoid fueling more international condemnation, or expose inhumanities to make the rest of the army more ethical. The people in charge of the IDF consistently choose the latter. But having prominent editors of prominent left-of-center magazines smugly asserting that the IDF's actions are "unspinnable" and recommending subtly misleading articles is not helping anyone.
UPDATE:Israel-Line (no link up yet) has this summary of this morning's Hatzofeh (Israel's far right newspaper) editorial:
Hatzofeh praises OC Manpower Branch Maj.-Gen. Elazar Stern's recent remarks to the Knesset Constitution, Law, and Justice Committee: "In every generation, IDF officers must see themselves as if they left Auschwitz - not to do what was done to us and to see to it that what was done to us will not be done again."
Damn right. The world's most moral army.
ANOTHER UPDATE: That was quick. I just got an angry email from a bright-eyed undergraduate (no caps or punctuation - because grammar is oppressive) accusing me of smearing the young girl by using the spelling "al-Hamas" ("of Hamas") for her last name, rather than the more popular, sanitized "al-Hams" being used by the Western press. His suspicion is that I'm implying that she deserved to die because her parents raised her in an environment that probably did somewhat less than condemn terrorism. But it's not me - it's the Palestinian Ministry of Education.
