Dean Issacharoff Opinion The Big Lie: How Apologists for Israel’s Occupation Justify Killing Unarmed Palestinian Protesters
In a recent article
by the IDF spokesperson in the Wall Street Journal, Brigadier General
Ronen Manelis laments the damage to Israel’s image caused by the
shooting of thousands of unarmed demonstrators in Gaza. Brig. Gen. Manelis writes, "Part of the Western press aided Hamas
through publishing its lies instead of checking the facts. If in order
to win world public opinion I must lie like Hamas, I prefer to speak the
truth and lose."
Pathos – check. A semblance of morality – check. Reflection of reality? Now that’s a different story.
I
saw the massive destruction of the Gaza Strip from inside during
Operation Protective Edge in 2014. I was a platoon commander fighting in
northern Gaza. Hamas combatants killed my friends while we flattened
entire villages with bulldozers and our tanks crushed agricultural
fields abandoned by those who fled. Artillery and air strikes thundered
over our heads into one of the most densely populated areas on earth,
taking the lives of thousands of Palestinians, including 547 children.
My
encounter with our unbridled destruction in the summer of 2014
ultimately convinced me that, contrary to Brig. Gen. Manelis’ claim,
Israel’s problem is not public relations or "hasbara" – but a moral
problem. And again, since the Palestinian "March of Return" began, we
see the same process of distorting reality taking place, as the IDF
spokesperson and other occupation propagandists justify our lethal
response to the protests along the separation fence.
Over the past two months, Palestinian
demonstrators – the vast majority of them unarmed – have marched toward
the fence that symbolizes the 11-year-blockade we have been enforcing on
two million Gazans. Having served as an officer in both the West Bank
and Gaza, I am not surprised that all Palestinian protests are perceived
as terror threats, regardless of how violent the protesters are.
But this time our response was different. The
poorly equipped hospitals of Gaza were overwhelmed as close to a hundred
Palestinian protesters were killed, and thousands more were wounded by
live sniper fire. Meanwhile the IDF tweeted, and then erased, "We know where every bullet landed."
In hindsight, such an aggressive and deadly response was foreshadowed by Defense Minister Avigdor Liberman’s direct threat,
issued in Arabic, to the people of Gaza a day before the first march:
"Anyone approaching the fence endangers their life." The orders given by
politicians were clear. Unfortunately, to our sincere dismay, some IDF
officers don’t simply follow orders – they also feel obliged to justify
them.
The
biggest lie occupation apologists are spreading to justify the killing
and injuring of unarmed protestors is that we are defending our border.
While Israelis recognize the importance of
maintaining secure borders with neighboring – often hostile – countries,
the Gaza fence is simply not an international border. The fence
separates the legitimate state of Israel from 2 million Palestinians
living under its effective military rule.
As long as we in Israel control Gazans' water
supply, electricity, land and sea crossings, and airspace – and also
their future – we must accept their right to protest without ordering
our snipers to open fire from behind a fence.
Another false claim is that the killing of
unarmed protestors is legitimate because of their political affiliation.
Even if 80 percent of the Palestinians killed were in fact affiliated
with Hamas, the snipers pulling the trigger couldn’t have identified who
among the tens of thousands of protesters were plain-clothed Hamas
operatives in real time.
This
claim entails a twofold admission – that serving as a low-ranking Hamas
member is punishable by death and that we may retroactively issue death
sentences to unarmed protesters whom we kill.
But
these simple truths don’t prevent the IDF spokesperson from continuing
to justify our "right" to kill and injure Palestinians who live under
our control. Those who side with the policy of occupation and try to
conceal its moral implications, like using live fire against the
unarmed, reinforce blindness to this reality. They have given up on the
war being waged for the moral character of our society in order to
partake in an international propaganda battle.
So long as these senior officers and officials
remain more loyal to the government’s decisions than to the citizens
they serve, so long as they refrain from revealing to Israel and the
world the degenerating consequences of controlling millions of
Palestinians – they will continue to pave the way for the next
unnecessary war.
We have recently witnessed yet another reminder
of these consequences and we’ve seen the speed with which escalations
can quickly become operations, and operations can become ground
invasions. So long as senior officers and officials continue to maintain
blindness and silence, the public will continue to believe that we were
sent to fight in Protective Edge, and to shoot down demonstrators, to
preserve our national security.
Thus,
we, the simple soldiers and junior officers who carried out orders, are
breaking our silence. Because we know what carrying out the occupation
looks like, and that the goal of the reoccurring operations and firing
at demonstrators is not national security, but rather maintaining our
control over millions of Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza.
Dean
Issacharoff served as a lieutenant in the IDF infantry during Operation
Protective Edge in 2014 and is the spokesperson for Breaking the
Silence. Twitter: @Iss_Dean
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