Israelis cling to the foundational creed: belief in the IDF’s morality
Palestinians stripped to underwear in Yarmouk stadium, still from video taken by a journalist embedded with the Israeli army in Gaza
Noa Limone writes in Haaretz on 3 April 2024:
Communications students at Sapir College demanded last week that the college fire Dr. Regev Nathanson, a lecturer who had signed a petition calling on Joe Biden to stop supplying Israel with offensive weapons and funds, lest they be used to commit genocide in Gaza.
College administrators hurried to dissociate themselves from Nathanson, declaring that he does not represent the college. At Hebrew University, student pressure had led to the suspension of Prof. Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian following her statement that Israel is committing genocide. When her suspension was lifted, students started protesting again, demanding that she apologize.
In enlightened countries, student bodies are usually pacifist, mainly taking critical positions that counter the reigning establishment. But in Israel, a country with a people’s army, groups that usually challenge establishments, such as students (certainly communications students), journalists, artists, musicians and academics toe the line touted by the IDF spokesman, accepting his statements as though they were cast in stone.
“How many times must the cannonballs fly before they’re forever banned?” sang Bob Dylan, John Lennon called to “give peace a chance.” And here? Calls for fire and brimstone. Journalists like [Channel 12 News’] Nir Dvori state nonchalantly that “there is no starvation in Gaza,” and if they do have some criticism for the army, it’s that it’s not sufficiently lethal.
In Israel, the art world, journalists and academics are all mobilized; everything is mobilized for the benefit of “total victory,” with almost no one daring to cast doubt on the credibility and morality of the army. Every piece of evidence indicating that the army is perpetrating war crimes in Gaza is immediately categorized as evidence of antisemitism.
Over 32,000 dead Gazans, 70 percent of them women and children, thousands of others buried under the rubble; testimony from soldiers about the indiscriminate shooting of uninvolved people (even our own hostages); videos on social media by soldiers (not by an antisemitic algorithm) documenting war crimes; reports by 12 UN agencies and aid groups that Israel has adopted a policy of mass starvation, which experts say will lead to tens of thousands of deaths – all this has not undermined Israelis’ trust in the IDF.
If the coordinator of government activities in the territories says there is no famine, there is no famine. If the IDF declares that it calls on civilians to evacuate and that it does not demarcate “killing zones” (and if mistakes are made, we’ll investigate), this is undoubtedly true. After all, even the huge failures which enabled Hamas to carry out its nightmarish attack on October 7 did not undermine the public’s trust in the army.
This is a clear case of self-deception, of clinging to a certain belief even though evidence of its falsity keeps piling up before our very eyes. Belief in the IDF’s morality and in its just cause is not just any old belief. It is a foundational one, part of the underpinnings of all our other beliefs, of our entire worldview.
If this is undermined, everything collapses. Nothing will persuade us that the IDF should be criticized since we identify with the army, and all societal groups that usually provide the antithesis to the establishment thesis are mobilized, in two ways: in being committed to the same goal, and in that we are all past, present or future soldiers, and we are all parents, brothers and friends of soldiers engaged in combat.
As Noa Landau wrote in Haaretz on Sunday, there is no political or parliamentarian opposition in Israel, a phenomenon that endangers Israel. But there is no civil opposition here either, making it difficult to claim that there is a civil presence here in the true sense of this term.
This article is reproduced in its entirety