Several weeks after the Israeli operation in Gaza, Danny Zamir, director of the Yitzhak Rabin military preparatory academy at Oranim College, organized a meeting of his graduates. There they chatted behind closed doors and shared their experience from the operation. A transcript of their conversation was initially published in the College paper, but was picked up by Israeli mainstream newspaper Ha’aretz and sensationalized on the front page.
The soldiers’ testimonies described cold-blooded murder of Gaza civilians and unreasonable commands passed during the operation. This lead to a promise by the military to form an investigation which was recently concluded, resulting in no file charges against any of the soldiers as their descriptions were based on hearsay. Their names have not been released in order to protect their identity, and the military investigative police did not publish any more information about the case.
Zamir’s efforts haven’t sat well with a certain patriotic constituency within Israeli society. The IDF is seen as a sacred national institution that is beyond reproach. I’m sure Zamir didn’t expect to be lionized for his efforts, he probably didn’t expect to be vilified either. Not only have Israelis accused him of smearing the IDF, they’ve accused him of aiding and abetting the nation’s enemies who are only waiting to pounce upon such stories to justify their hatred of Israel. The IDF itself initiated this campaign by revealing that Zamir had been imprisoned briefly in the 1990s when he refused to guard a settler group holding a provocative religious ceremony at Joseph’s Tomb. They attempted to shoot the messenger. (link)
While doing research for my Global Voices Online post, I scoured through Israblog, Tapuz and other Hebrew portals, trying to find posts from soldier first-hand witnesses who wrote about their experiences in Gaza. To my dismay, I could not find any. It is such a taboo topic; an Israeli must not help those haters validate their claims against our country. We were all soldiers. We all realize that these situations are not black and white. And even if these stories are somewhat true on a micro level, it is certainly not an IDF-wide phenomenon. But when they are taken out of context and amplified to the masses, it is easy to forget the source, while letting our emotions play out. Especially when messages are rapidly amplified through Twitter, the effects can be devastating ( a.k.a. what we saw last week re: #amazonFail)
Ever more often, we are witnessing the implications of living in a society with fast-paced, worldwide media coverage that can easily spin stories out from their original context. This is precisely how a closed door session between school colleagues turns into a worldwide news sensation against the reputation of one of the most powerful armies in the world. We must remember that the truth usually lies somewhere in-between, and make an effort to fact-check before letting our emotions passionately take over our logic.
Here’s a link to my GVO article:
[tags]Israel,global voices oline,testimonials,context,idf,soldiers,war,palestine,gaza[/tags]
Looks exactly like the kind of confusion Israel intended to create.
Israel armed with internet savvy
http://www.thenational.ae/article/20090104/FOREIGN/882042198/1002
Israel seeks airwave supremacy
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/7823887.stm
Israel recruits ‘army of bloggers’ to combat anti-Zionist Web sites
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1056648.html
Thanks for the links.
I did read those articles back then, and thought the same thing. Israel has to understand that with the internet, it cannot have as much control over messages as it has been used to. There needs to be transparency with regards to its political actions, and there needs to be made more of an effort to highlight the internal judicial and prosecution processes – otherwise, the world sees only a narrow image of the conflict.
Great post, Gilad. A thought: The U.S. discovered in Vietnam that atrocities are often committed by a violent minority. In the “fog of war” some small percentage of soldiers are likely to snap and kill indiscriminately, or perform criminal sexual acts. The armed forces tracked and investigated incidents meticulously during the Vietnam War; the files were made public only decades later through FOIA requests.*
My point is that there is often a false dichotomy between the vast majority of our armed forces acting professionally and their perpetrating war crimes. The fact is that even though this behavior is difficult to predict on an individual basis, in aggregate the likelihood of war crimes can be quantified quite easily. In modern warfare, it seems like atrocities are almost always the actions of “a few bad apples.” But it seems equally true that these bad apples are still a reality of any fighting force.
I think we have to admit that sending young men into terrifying life-or-death situations will result in a predictable level of unconscionable action. We don’t have to condemn the average soldier to do this.
* These files were made public in 1994, but did not come to public attention until 2006: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vietnam_War_Crimes_Working_Group_Files