Is Israel the 'most moral' army?
To say as much isn't quite hypocrisy. It's something much more frightening.
I might as well admit my priors from the start. Anyone who thinks that Israeli military is “the most moral army” in the world—which is quite literally what Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said the other day—can’t be taken as a good faith interlocutor. My open-mindedness, it seems, has limits, and I feel like it would be a waste of time to pretend I can be tolerant of completely absurd positions. If you think Israel is minimizing civilian harm, or even just something vaguely along these lines, you are actively refusing to see what is squarely right in front of you. Either that or your conception of “morality” is twisted. This is basically
’s position. Because Palestinians are savages and, as a whole, “morally culpable” for Hamas’ atrocities on October 7, it is at the very least not immoral to kill large numbers of them if the ultimate goal is to eliminate Hamas (something that, to this day, no one has been able to define).It is impossible to square what Israeli officials say about desiring revenge with the claim that Israel is even merely a “moral” army (forget the ludicrous claim of most). In a recent post, Freddie deBoer captures the run of the mill eliminationist rhetoric that is now simply is the mainstream of Israeli public conversation. At some basic level, it’s possible for large numbers of people to want to kill large numbers of other people who are not them. We don’t necessarily need to find other explanations when the most obvious explanation is staring us right in the face.
Which brings me to the incongruousness of how we’ve been debating the war and its domestic implications the past couple months. Campus protestors, who are powerless, were smeared round-the-clock as extremists, radicals, Hamas supporters, and anti-semites. You could get away with saying that in mainstream debates and no one would even think twice. It was in the air we breathed. Yet these pro-Israel commentators couldn’t summon even a thousandth of outrage at actual eliminationists who were actually killing Palestinian civilians and plunging the Gaza Strip into mass starvation. How could they summon such moral opprobrium for students—desiring to unleash the police on them and, if possible, ruin their lives—while seeming indifferent to the atrocities that were actually happening against actual human beings and not just imaginary ones?
The eliminationist rhetoric that Israelis were routinely using wasn’t exactly a secret. Here’s Freddie with just a few examples:
That isn’t true of their antagonists in Israel, where Israel’s Defence Minister, Yoav Gallant, said “We are fighting human animals, and we are acting accordingly, we will eliminate everything.” Where Moshe Feiglin, the founder of Israel's Zehut Party and a former representative in the Knesset, said “There is one and only (one) solution, which is to completely destroy Gaza before invading it. I mean destruction like what happened in Dresden and Hiroshima, without nuclear weapons.” Where Nissim Vaturi, deputy speaker of the Knesset, openly supports the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian territories. Where a popular Israeli song Stack references says “There is no forgiveness for swarms of rats/They will die in their rat holes.”
But it wasn’t just rhetoric of course. It was policy. Where the U.S. military killed about 14,000 Iraqi civilians in the 8 years from 20003 to 2011 in a population 15 times the size of Gaza’s, according to the Iraq Body Count database, Israel managed to cross the 14,000 threshold in about four months. (If you think my numbers are incorrect or can’t quite believe for whatever reason that the U.S. would be more moral than the Israel, then it may be because you’re looking at the total number of civilians killed, which is completely different than the number killed by the U.S. military).
You might say, well, they weren’t killing them on “purpose” but of course morality isn’t just about intentionality (and, in any case, the intentions clearly were not pure, if we take the statements of Israeli officials either seriously or literally, or both). If morality can mean killing such a large number of Palestinian civilians in such a short span of time, then at the very least it means that you don’t care a whole lot about Palestinian civilians. This isn’t hypocrisy. This isn’t just a moral blindspot. We all have such blindspots. This is something else.
You must be out of your mind. Any normal military or nation would have long ago literally flattened Gaza Strip and blotted “Palestinians” out of existence given their multiple decades of Jew-murder, society-wide from the cradle to the grave genocidal antisemitism, and their unrelenting desire to want to kill every Jew forever.
The idea that you would be complaining about “eliminationist rhetoric” from Israelis after the slaughter that the “Palestinians” perpetrated on October 7th, and their daily glorying and celebration of that slaughter since then, is laughable.
It is striking that you cannot complain about “eliminationist actions” by Israelis, given that there have been none - and I challenge you to name even a single major “genocidal” incident or deliberate mass civilian casualty incident by Israel in this war.
Literally every aspect of Palestinian society is geared towards empowering and celebrating Muslim eliminationism of Jews and you pretend this is somehow Israel’s fault. Laughable.
IDF is most definitely not the most moral army by any stretch, but it is fairly par for the course.
I cannot think of another conflict where the attacker (Hamas) is so much weaker than the attacked (Israel), and the attacked is asked to respond with caution. Where the attacker hides behind civilians and the attacked is asked not to kill any civilians to get to the attacker. What is Israel to do when the Gaza civilians show no signs of revolting against Hamas? Given the intense hatred an average Palestinian harbors towards Israelis, can one blame the Israelis for hating them back as well?
The Gaza civilians have agency too; if only they had demonstrated in some form before October 7 that they are not happy being led by Hamas, that the Hamas does not represent them, things would be different. Even now, there is no evidence Gaza civilians have seen the light and don't want to be represented by Hamas.
The thing is, it does not even matter if they want to be led by Hamas or not - they'll be regardless unless the Hamas is weakened enough that they no longer can keep a grip on power. That should be Israel's goal.
I also think Israel must allow the civilians into the Negev region temporarily so Hamas can be targeted and weakened. But Israel probably worries that they may end up with a population that refuses to leave. Egypt won't take them for the same worry - that they will be stuck with them forever. How does one get to this point where NO ONE is willing to help the Palestinians?