"Pogroms, the IDF and Palestinians: How Israel's Military Is Desecrating Its Moral Code"
"Settler
attacks against Palestinians are surging, but the IDF's lethargic
response, veering towards acquiescence, is not only a violation of
Israeli and international law. It is also a horrific debasement of
Jewish history"
(Haaretz 27. oktober 2022, HELE artikkelen nederst under Kilde)
En historisk gjennomgang fram til dagens situasjon.
Før var det unge israelske "hilltop youths" som var angriperne.
Nå er de voksne med, sammen med barna.
Og nå deltar også IDF-soldater i pogromene på Vestbredden.
Skudeneshavn 28. oktober 2022
Jan Marton Jensen
Kilde:
https://mitvim.org.il/en/team/yonatan-touval/
HELE artikkelen i Haaretz 27. oktober 2022:
Pogroms, the IDF and Palestinians: How Israel's Military Is Desecrating Its Moral Code
Settler attacks against Palestinians are surging, but the IDF's lethargic response, veering towards acquiescence, is not only a violation of Israeli and international law. It is also a horrific debasement of Jewish history
Israel's military occupation of the West Bank is at a perilous juncture. The IDF is not merely under scrutiny for a growing number of fatalities of Palestinian civilians – most the result of shootings by Israeli soldiers, but others due to brutal manhandling or sheer emotional terror, such as the deaths of a 78-year-old Palestinian-American or of a seven-year-old boy last month.
The IDF is also losing its ability, and perhaps its will, to prevent violent attacks by Jewish settlers against Palestinians.
Within a period of 10 days alone this past month, settlers have reportedly committed around 100 nationalist crimes against West Bank Palestinians. The number of attacks is itself staggering (an average of 10 per day). Yet two additional factors render this development particularly worrisome.
First, the attacks are no longer perpetrated by the usual suspects – the fringe groups of younger settlers commonly known as "hilltop youth."
While these violent extremists may be the prime instigators of the
attacks, joining them are older adults, women and children. In other
words, provoking and attacking Palestinians has become a popular,
communal, even family, pastime among some settlers in the West Bank.
Second, and no less troubling, the Israeli security authorities on the ground – both the IDF and the police – are doing little, often nothing, to prevent these attacks.
Such inaction reflects multiple realities, including the rising numbers of settlers within IDF troops – most notoriously embodied in the ultra-Orthodox battalion known as Netzah Yehuda (“Judea Forever”), whose members are responsible for countless war crimes, including the death of the 78-year-old.
But there is also the timid, if all-too-often silent, response from the IDF’s upper echelons, including Chief of Staff Aviv Kochavi himself, who fail to take action, let alone express public interest, in many of these attacks, thus giving IDF officers on the ground, in spirit if not in letter, free rein to act as they see fit. Just last week, an Israeli security guard joined forces with Jewish settlers as they attacked Palestinian civilians.
Such conduct raises serious questions about the orders – or rather, lack thereof – that Israeli soldiers receive when facing incidents of violent attacks by settlers against Palestinians. And they challenge the centrality of the issue of “rules of engagement,” which has long defined the framework through which IDF actions in the West Bank have been viewed.
Indeed, only a month ago the Biden administration rattled Israeli nerves when it announced that it would "press our Israeli partners to closely review its policies and practices on the rules of engagement." The statement came a day after the IDF had published the conclusions of its probe into the May 2022 killing of Palestinian-American journalist Shireen Abu Akleh, and provoked a sharp rebuke from the Israeli leadership.
Rebuffing what he cast as unwelcome foreign interference, Defense Minister Benny Gantz declared that the army chief of staff, “and he alone, determines, and will continue to determine, the rules of engagement in accordance with our operational needs and values of the IDF.”
Except that now, it seems, at issue is not – or not merely – the IDF’s rules of engagement that should be reviewed; it’s also, and more pressingly, the growing trend of its soldiers’ disengagement: of disengagement from the duty, of their dereliction of duty, to act to prevent injury to the Palestinians under Israeli occupation.
This dereliction is not only a violation of Israeli and international
law. It constitutes a horrific irony for an army whose ethos lies in the
historical trauma of the Jews at the beginning of the twentieth
century. We need not invoke the Holocaust, for which the cultural and
political reasons for America’s callous indifference is the subject of Ken Burns’ recent documentary.
For if there is one historical moment that marks a radical turning
point in the Jewish relationship to arms, it was actually the pogrom in
the city of Kishinev in April 1903.
The most notorious of a series of pogroms that took place in the Russian Empire during the first decade of the twentieth century, the bloodbath of Kishinev sent shockwaves across the Jewish world and beyond. Yet the shock was not merely at the brutality of the atrocities; it was also at the helplessness of the Jews in the hands of the pogromists and the complicit role of the Russian authorities.
It was this shock that Haim Nachman Bialik's "In the City of Slaughter" powerfully captured, an epic poem that was a catalyst for the emergence, for the first time in the modern era, of organized Jewish policing groups which went under the name of “self-defense” (in Yiddish, zelbstshuts).
In fact, it is the emergence of these policing groups that lies at the
origins of similar formations in Palestine in the following years –
first, the small Bar Giora group, which operated from 1907 to 1909, and
later HaShomer, which operated from 1909 until 1920. Transplanted into
the political realities of Palestine, they held on to the spirit of
"self-defense," adapting their mission from defending the Jewish shtetls
against the pogromists to defending the newly established Jewish
settlements from, initially at least, Palestinian-Arab pilferers and
looters.
Throughout those years, it was clear to the leaders of the Yishuv that, regardless of whether the Ottomans were in charge or the British, the Jews in Palestine were on their own. This recognition fueled the ethos of self-defense of the Haganah (Hebrew for "Defense"), the successor organization to Hashomer, and the leading armed force in the Yishuv from 1920 until the establishment of the IDF in 1948.
Over the years, the ethos of self-defense has come to be articulated by the oft-used phrase of “defend itself, by itself,” a trope that Israeli leaders regularly assert, and that Israel’s closest ally dutifully echoes.
“Israel's first and foundational security principle is that Israel must have the means to defend itself by itself. The self-reliance has always been at the heart of Israel's national identity and the ethos of the Israel Defense Forces,” a U.S. congressman eloquently put it during a hearing in the House of Representatives a few years ago. Israeli lawmakers, who might have read Bialik but certainly not Ralph Waldo Emerson, could not have expressed it better.
And yet, if Jewish and Israeli military power has been successful at meeting the challenge of defending Jewish lives in the Yishuv and, later, the state, it has been less successful at preventing violence against non-Jews, and specifically Palestinians, living under its military control.
The most horrific instance in which the IDF turned a blind eye to attacks against Palestinians was not in the West Bank or, for that matter, the Gaza Strip, but in Lebanon. That the September 1982 massacre by Christian Phalangist militiamen of Palestinian civilians in the Sabra and Shatila camps in Beirut happened under the IDF’s watch is an indelible stain on the moral record of the IDF and, more specifically, the defense minister at the time, Ariel Sharon.
But that horrific oversight (in either sense of the term, depending on the version of events) was not unique to the IDF. The Dutch army, in its role as UN peacekeepers, was responsible for a comparable calamity in the form of standing by while the Serbs massacred Bosnian Muslims in the Srebrenica massacre in 1995.
To be sure, what is happening in the West Bank now is not a massacre. Moreover, the daily attacks against Palestinian civilians do not reflect, by and large, the spirit of the political leadership. In 1982, the ethno-nationalist Likud leader and Prime Minister Menachem Begin famously dismissed the outcry over the IDF’s imputed role in the Sabra and Shatila massacre with the apothegm, “Goyim killed goyim, and here they are accusing us.”
Prime Minister Yair Lapid and Defense Minister Gantz, in contrast, are perhaps more genuinely distressed by the violence. The only problem is that they are politically powerless to decry it, let alone act to stop it.
On some level, none of this is entirely new. It has been the story of the occupation from the very beginning. Israel itself has formally acknowledged as much over the years, as, for instance, in the 1984 Karp Report, in which a panel of Israeli jurists, headed by the country’s deputy attorney general, outlined the Israeli police's failure to protect Palestinians against Jewish settler violations of the law, including explicit violence, in the occupied territories.
Yet these failures are no longer merely a pattern, but the make-up of everyday life in the West Bank. Worse still, in too many instances the IDF’s blind eye is interpreted by the settlers as a sinister wink. Willy-nilly, the Israeli army is desecrating the memory of the Jewish victims in the slaughterhouse of Europe. And it is undermining the historical and cultural foundations on which modern Jewish military power came into existence.
Yonatan Touval is a senior foreign policy analyst at Mitvim: The Israeli Institute for Regional Foreign Policies. Twitter: @Yonatan_Touval
