Even after decades of occupation, the brutality and savagery of the Israeli state can still startle. A report by the Israeli group Breaking the Silence has collected the testimony of Israeli soldiers on the crimes they committed during last year’s war on Gaza. It was published on Monday.
This particular admission bears repeating: an old man was shot by a soldier without legitimate justification. The soldier wrote: “The civilian was laying there, writhing in pain. Eventually we put him out of his misery and ... dropped a mound of rubble on him.”
There is much to dissect in that one instance but so much more that shouts out loud and clear about the Israeli army’s complete and utter lack of a moral ethic. Firstly, here was an old man murdered in cold blood. No accusation, no arrest, no trial. Just shot. And then he was “put out of his misery”, as if he were not human. And then, rubble was dropped on the man’s body, doubtless to suggest that he died as the result of a building collapse.
This is what the occupier has come to. With billions of dollars from US taxpayers and with an array of sophisticated weapons from the West, Israel simply murders civilians in cold blood. Or else it starves them in Gaza for years at a time. Or it condemns them to homelessness and statelessness.
Seeking to explain such hate towards a community (any community) is, in a sense, pointless. There can be no real explanation. Nothing can justify such acts. When similar brutality is exposed – think of Bashar Al Assad’s barrel bombs in Syria, or the institutional discrimination of apartheid South Africa – the reaction of the outside world has been to ostracise and boycott that state until the regime is changed. Or it changes its ways. That is what now needs to happen with Israel.
Israel’s politicians have dragged their people down a dark path. The radicalism of the Israeli political right is superseded only by the extremism of the settler movement. Together, these two have ignored the legitimate aspirations of ordinary Israelis to live peacefully – and happily. In the process, they have set about coarsening Israel’s own sense of right and wrong, destabilising neighbouring countries and destroying Palestine. The only solution is to recognise Israel for the rogue state it has become.