The Most Moral Army
Mary Turfah examines Israeli officials’ weaponization of language, particularly that of medicine, in an attempt to reframe their ongoing genocide in Gaza.
By Mary Turfah October 1, 2024
IN JULY, Benjamin Netanyahu’s opposition, Benny Gantz, tweeted that Israel’s military “target[s] terrorists in surgical fashion.” The comment was made in direct dismissal of the mounting horror at what appeared—for those with eyes to see—to be yet another tent massacre carried out by his country’s military against the people of Gaza, which killed at least 90 Palestinians and injured hundreds. For precision’s sake, by “tent massacre” I mean the dropping of bombs on people several times displaced and sheltering in makeshift tents tentatively planted in sand in designated “safe zones” (in this instance, Al-Mawasi) along Gaza’s coast. As an intended consequence of the bombs, many of the tents caught fire. People nearby later testified to the screams, how they found themselves emptied. Unable to intervene.
Some days, Israeli military leaders feign the urge to protect enemy civilians. Yet measured rhetoric is not politically viable in Israel. When used, it’s aimed at the West: in 2022, the commander of Israel’s Palmachim Airbase, Brigadier General Omri Dor, described the work of his forces as “starting with a very surgical event of finding a person or a single launcher and neutralizing it without causing collateral damage or harm to another person.” In June 2024, almost 10 months into carrying out a genocide, the head of the IDF Spokesperson’s Unit described a so-called rescue operation as “a surgical operation, like a brain operation; it has to be so accurate.”
Surgical—like brain surgery. Yes. By way of elaborating on these self-imposed, rigorous expectations, Israel’s military spokesperson asked listeners to “imagine” that such an operation would be carried out “on a civilian street with a lot of people around with trucks and cars.” The words presented the military operation as an exceptional feat. Perhaps the brain surgery in question was a lobotomy, performed on the listener: the actual mission—one that killed 274 Palestinians and retrieved four Israelis while killing multiple other hostages in the process—involved Israeli soldiers (and, more than likely, American Special Forces) committing one of the most sadistic cases of perfidy documented, against a population their government is actively starving, by disguising themselves as aid workers and riding in an aid truck allegedly en route to deliver food to those starving people. As the diversion arm of this heroic mission, Israeli forces cloaked themselves in the blood and dust of hundreds of civilians who were repeatedly bombed as they walked the streets of a crowded market.
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Israeli officials employ terms like “surgical precision” often, to modify words like “operation” and “strike.” They also, as in the case of Dor, routinely stress their attacks’ “accuracy.” Anyone who has taken an intro-level chemistry course in college will have encountered this visual in lecture: a figure displaying four targets variously scored with darts, and labeled “low accuracy, low precision”; “low accuracy, high precision”; “high accuracy, low precision”; and “high accuracy, high precision,” respectively. Taken together, the targets are intended to illustrate, for learners, the difference between accuracy and precision. Accuracy is a question of how close to the bull’s-eye the darts, on average, reach. Precision describes how the darts aggregate, how closely they clump together. (The illustration of “high accuracy, low precision” shows darts scattered closer to the bull’s-eye but not all that close to one another; the “low accuracy, high precision” target shows darts clustered together along one of the target’s outer rings.) Both accuracy and precision are meant to tell us something about the intrinsic properties of an instrument, as well as the conclusions at which, based on our results, we can safely arrive.
The effective precision and accuracy of weapons of war depend on two things: the aforementioned properties of the instrument, and the proficiency of the user. Israel, which possesses some of the highest-grade military technology in the world and trains soldiers to use it correctly, has earned its right to claim both accuracy and precision. And, as an exporter of these military technologies, which it “battle-tests” against the civilian population it cages, Israel relies on its technologies’ intrinsic accuracy and precision—and its ability to demonstrate these with consistency—to sustain its economy: Israel’s tech sector, welded to its defense industry and serving as a pipeline for former IDF personnel, accounts for roughly one-fifth of its GDP, and employs about 14 percent of the country’s workforce.
Instruments lack intention. (Granted, there are only so many ways to use a Hellfire missile.) An instrument’s effects reflect the intentions of its user, although this somehow becomes less obvious for machines we imagine to have minds of their own. Media coverage of Israel’s use of artificial intelligence to generate kill lists has quoted Israeli intelligence officials celebrating their technologies’ ability to execute “coldly” and “easily.” The wording of one such article even suggests that the technology itself is “directing” the “bombing sprees”—a framing that not only implies distance between actor and machine but also, in so doing, subtly shifts responsibility away from the former and onto the latter.
Accuracy and precision are technical measures; missing from their calculus is morality. Here, Israel finds itself in a bit of a bind. Both to demonstrate its technology’s “lethal” capability (to borrow the unfortunate adjective invoked, no doubt with intention, by presidential candidate Kamala Harris during her Democratic National Convention address) and to attain its military goals, Israel needs its weapons to hit their intended targets. This must happen with requisite fanfare: smoke, charred bodies, and so on. The weapons must offer potential buyers what they seek, which is generally something between control and deterrence, a balance most easily struck—for those without ethical qualms—through terror. At the same time, Israel must be, for the ever-shrinking international audience that steadfastly supports it, the “most moral army in the world” (to quote Gantz’s July tweet), a position it has maintained since it created the title for itself (a title in which we might hear echoes of “leader of the free world,” coined and kept by Israel’s main benefactor, the United States).
So, the Israelis have found a work-around. For the interested buyer, their weapons work. Bomb after bomb after bomb lands in the same vicinity. That is precision. And each time, the target—a school, a group of people gathered to receive aid, the rescue crew that subsequently approaches them—is acquired. That is accuracy. But it’s not the quality of the instrument that’s in question. If we’re expected to recognize the Israeli military as the moral actor they claim, ad nauseam, to be, we can only conclude that it’s the nature of the Palestinian targets that has shape-shifted, under our untrained watch. You and I, we lack the ability to discern. Where we should see existential threats to the state of Israel, instead we see a cancer hospital, a UN compound, a group of people praying at dawn, two journalists in press vests, an ambulance, children playing football, a flock of sheep, fishermen casting their net, a rib-baring cat, a flour mill, a water pipe. You and I, our gazes lack surgical training.
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“Surgical” preempts words like precision in a way that doesn’t only add degrees (as in, take us from precise to very precise). “Surgical” is a qualitative modifier; the substance of the precision itself changes with the addition of the word. We live in a society that grants doctors a presumed goodness, in which doctors are understood to be moral at an average exceeding that of the general population. By associating its actions with medicine, the Israeli military borrows this presumed morality to lend those actions certain moral valences—which are otherwise not self-evident at all.
As someone who has jumped through the hoops of medical training and chosen to spend her time in operating rooms, I can say that exposure to neither medicine broadly nor surgery specifically necessarily makes one a good person, although it can certainly make a person less patient, more confident—for both better and worse. Medicine, like any technical skill set, is a tool, wielded one way or another depending on the user’s intentions. And doctors, who are more attuned than most to the vulnerabilities of the human body and how it unravels, have played a frontline role in stitching together torture regimens from Guantanamo Bay to Abu Ghraib. In Israeli torture prisons today, it is surgeons who perform generous above-knee limb amputations—instead of limb-salvaging procedures, which are presumably a waste of Israeli resources—on prisoners whose toes have necrosed or grown infected, whose extremities have been made to lose circulation, zip ties on just tight enough, medical neglect ongoing for just long enough. It is doctors who decide that a hostage facing “enhanced interrogation” to extract false testimony can handle a little more—that a prisoner decompensating from his injuries doesn’t need to be transported to a hospital just yet.
It was doctors, approximately 100 Israeli ones, who in November 2023 signed a letter declaring that, despite significant evidence to the contrary, Palestinians hospitals are “terrorist nests,” that Palestinians are trying “to take advantage of western morality, they are the ones who brought destruction upon themselves […] Attacking terrorist headquarters is the right and the duty of the Israeli army.” The “western morality” they cite has been on full display for the last year: these doctors, bound by this supposedly moral framework, do not see Palestinians as people.
It’s not clear from the letter which of the hospitals in Gaza should be considered terrorist nests. The doctors who wrote it refuse a world where a Palestinian might need a hospital to be a hospital because their body is a body. Or they have decided Palestinians in Gaza lack even the basic right to tend to each other’s bodies. “Those who confuse hospitals with terrorism,” the letter goes on, “must understand that hospitals are not a safe place for them.” It is within these doctors’ domain of expertise to decide who is confused, and about what—within their domain to decide for whom a hospital should be safe, and for whom it should not. Their approach resembles that of an oncologist offering a patient chemotherapy: better safe than sorry, the “sorry” being hospitals left standing, the cancer being Palestinians. I assume these doctors took the same Hippocratic Oath that I did and promised to do no harm. Their definition of harm leads them here, precisely. From these doctors’ perspective, it is their duty to obliterate the final lifelines of a people whose existence is, for their state, harm incarnate. From these doctors’ perspective, this obliteration is a matter of life and death.
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Where oncologists have chemotherapy—or what one internal medicine physician I worked with liked to call “nuking the body”—surgeons seek to remove rather than shrink a tumor, excise to clean margins. The more significant implication of the Israeli military’s use of terms like “surgical precision” lies in its attempt to neatly remove even the possibility of certain realities, denying that which our eyes can see—to perform a procedure colloquially termed “gaslighting.”
In early August, news spread of a massacre of Palestinians sheltering at a school. Those killed had gathered at the earliest hours of morning to start their days with prayer—to start their days by reaching for a world beyond the one in which they found themselves. A Haaretz update that day cited claims by the Israeli army’s international spokesperson that “Hamas’ death toll of some 100 Palestinians in the airstrike on a Gaza City school was exaggerated.” The Haaretz brief added, by way of balance, that “rescue services in the enclave have reported that over 90 people were killed.”
Earlier, an Israeli military spokesperson claimed that, “according to an initial review, the numbers published by the Hamas-run Government Information Office in Gaza, do not align with the information held by the IDF, the precise munitions used, and the accuracy of the strike.” (“Hamas-run Government Information Office in Gaza” is a lot of words to use to say Gaza’s Civil Defense, the verbosity intended to give a diabolical tinge to a collective that, along with Gaza’s Health Ministry, has its hands full at present trying to uncover and tally the martyred.) After the strike carried out on people gathered to pray, the spokesperson of Gaza’s civil defense stated that there were “unidentified remains” among the “more than 93 martyrs.”
More than 93. The imprecision of this language reflects a commitment to accuracy. It was challenging to determine the final number of martyred: many of the bodies were charred, disfigured beyond human recognition. Encountering the remains, doctors at Al-Ahli Hospital struggled to identify where one person stopped and became another. In group prayer, we stand with shoulders touching, reciting the same verses in unison, signaling—starting with our bodies—our shared commitments to God, and to each other.
The doctors at Al-Ahli resorted to collecting the unidentified body parts and weighing them. In medicine, 70 kilograms is the weight of “the standard man.” In Gaza, doctors gave families whose loved ones couldn’t be recovered 70 kilograms of remains, gathered into a plastic bag, to allow for burial, for some semblance of closure. One father, unable to find his six-year-old son at the prayer hall after the three Israeli missiles struck their target, went to Al-Ahli. He was looking for the smallest something through which he might be able to identify his son’s body—a fragment of a shirt, a wrist. The doctors eventually offered him a plastic bag of human remains that weighed 18 kilograms, around the average weight of a child of six. The doctors said, “This is your son; go and bury him.” The father told Mondoweiss, “I don’t know if this is my son or not, I don’t know what I’m carrying in this bag. They said he’s my son […] I don’t see anything of my son in this bag.”
Where Palestinians, tasked with describing bodies disfigured beyond the possibility of either accuracy or precision, are often verbose, Israel has its economy of language: “precise munitions,” “accuracy.” Where the Palestinians have a “Hamas-run Government Information Office in Gaza,” Israel has its “IDF.” Israel does not refer to “numbers published” but “information held.” Here, the abstraction—information—is so rigorously couched in concrete, material evidence that one can “hold” it—not feel it, no. Of course, the spokesperson does not say Gaza’s Civil Defense is “lying”; the word carries too much pathos. Or rather, he says as much, but from a rational, abstracted distance. Palestinian numbers “do not align” with Israeli sources.
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The Israeli military sees what we do not, what we cannot see—terrorists, endangering everything around them. The surgeon, after all, is detached, and this detachment confers the requisite objective distance to see things as they are. It isn’t pleasant to cut into another human being, but the surgeon does it for the greater good. They tolerate the sight of blood appropriately, recognize it as no more or less than a bodily fluid, and, in the case of hemorrhage, learn to maintain the composure required to tend to the life before them without allowing fear to get in the way.
In the immediate aftermath of the morning prayer massacre, one surgeon at Al-Ahli tweeted a description, in Arabic, of “one of the most difficult and horrific bloody scenes [he] witnessed” that day: that of “a young boy, 16 years old, who arrived to us with his lower body shattered and crushed, his left hand amputated, and deep wounds and burns all over his body.” The boy was taken back for emergency surgery, and the surgeon continued to express his shock to find “another person’s head crushed between the bones of his shattered legs,” only recognizable “by his mouth and chin. It was a scene,” he added, “beyond the capacity of the heart and mind to bear!!!!” Here, the surgeon brings his heart and mind into his practice. Here, the surgeon refuses the denigration of feeling. He refuses detachment so long as it means the separation of the stakes of his interventions from what he owes his people—from what he is, through medicine, resisting. “Despite all our efforts to save him,” the surgeon said of the boy, “he died on the operating table after severe bleeding that did not stop.”
Watching the Israeli military target Palestinian life, the feelings to which you and I are susceptible render us unable to perceive a “school” according to its true nature. You and I, emotional, are vulnerable to the propaganda ploys of the “terrorists”: the mother hugging her shrouded baby; the boy with his skull cracked open, carried by his ghost-faced father; the upper half of a little girl hanging from something, maybe a pole, I’m not sure—my attention was fixed on what was left of her. You and I hear about a young man with Down syndrome mauled by military dogs unleashed against him by the most moral army in the world, and we believe it.
The surgeon exacts a small violence against the body. They do it only to the extent that is required. Israel, according to its spokespeople, keeps its margin of error minimal, the radius of its unavoidable harm slim. The Palestinians are wrong about their death counts. The massacres aren’t as bad as they say. And what we’re seeing with our eyes—it’s not that we should disregard it, simply that we need perspective. It is the surgeon’s duty to help the patient see the good, see the necessary. Yes, this is genocide, but it’s a genocide of Hamas. You and I, we’re not surgeons.
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In their defense, Israeli officials did offer—for those with ears to listen—their present intentions for Gaza. As early as October 8, 2023, the Israeli newspaper Israel Hayom published an article by a former Israeli national security advisor titled, “Israel must make it clear: The era of surgical strikes is over.” Let us put aside for a moment that such an “era” never existed so that we can follow the author’s logic. “Without getting into complex analyses,” he wrote, “the first goal Israel must achieve in the Gaza campaign is to reduce the harm caused to its deterrence by exacting a very high price from Hamas. Unfortunately, in our neighborhood, the price is determined primarily by the extent of casualties.”
This second sentence is astonishing for a number of reasons, one of which is that the Israelis (who participate in Eurovision, and so on) only ever choose to characterize Arabs as their “neighbors” to distance themselves from their own actions. They do so by advancing the racist notion that the violence they enact is (1) foreign to Israelis and (2) inherent to Arabs. Never mind that Zionist militants introduced the car bomb to the region, that the British used Palestinians as human shields by tying them to their cars (a tactic the Israelis have since adopted). No, no. The Israelis, a people to whom violence is fundamentally alien, have tried to shelter themselves—physically, with the Iron Dome, and ideologically, through racial supremacy—from their “neighbors.” But that has worked only to a certain point. What follows, then, is not their fault. They’re stuck in an unfortunate neighborhood and, as latecomers, they didn’t make the rules. They’ve been left with no choice but to play by them, harder than anyone else.
The former security advisor goes on to explain for Israel Hayom that Israel’s current circumstances “necessitate a departure from the policy of surgical strikes,” which, “while they provide precision and show Israel’s special capabilities, […] cannot constitute a sufficient price tag for the severe attack carried out by Hamas.” Here, “sufficient price tag” is a euphemism for the killing of a large number of civilians (as price typically is—see Madeleine Albright’s infamous “the price is worth it”). The author makes an unintentional admission that undermines his argument: if the supposed shift from militants to civilians is a conscious decision, then it’s not the precision of the weapons, the surgical quality of the strikes, that has changed, but the extent of the target. An instrument’s effects reflect the intentions of its user, a dynamic that becomes truer the more accurate and precise the weaponry gets. If the goal is an expanded radius of destruction, the maximization of “collateral” damage, the damage in question can’t accurately be called “collateral.”
For almost a year, Israel has denied entry into Gaza for reporters who are not embedded with its military. With surgical precision, it has targeted and killed over 165 Palestinian journalists for covering their own people’s annihilation. Western legacy media has peddled the idea that because Palestinians are themselves experiencing the genocide—which Western legacy media doesn’t call a genocide—they can’t represent it objectively. (Meanwhile, the Israeli military should be left to investigate itself.) Palestinians have video footage. Palestinians have declarations of genocidal intent. Palestinians have the knowledge that three-quarters of people living in Gaza arrived there as refugees. Palestinians have the understanding that Gaza was locked in a cage well before last October. Palestinians have the keys to their homes. Palestinians have a land “without a people,” as Zionists declared a century ago, even as Palestinians, the people of the land, lived in full view.
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If you asked a Palestinian today what Israel is doing in Gaza, they might tell you that many Palestinians have disintegrated—as in, vanished completely, as a result of various bombs that seem, from their unfamiliar explosion patterns and effects on the human body, to be in their demo phase. There is nothing to hold: the only way to capture a disappeared person is through their absence, a feeling felt by those left behind.
Or they might tell you that thousands of bodies, at various stages of decomposition, have been unearthed across multiple mass graves, each containing hundreds of people whose loved ones are looking for them. Bodies, to the trained eye, can testify to a person’s mechanism of death; many of these bodies suggest that those who inhabited them were tortured or buried alive. Palestinians, trained and untrained, took videos and photos of the mass graves and their insides as soon as they were uncovered, in the vicinities of various hospitals, and broadcast these across social media, in the hope that the scenes would stir foreign consciences to tangible action. The reality is much worse than what is pictured—for one, images can’t capture smell.
So, we’re at the end of an era: surgical strikes are over. Or they’re not. It depends on whom you ask, on what day, for what audience. What remains consistent is that Israeli officials insist we can’t trust our eyes. And if we can’t trust our eyes, we certainly can’t trust a gaze mediated by Palestinians. No, better we trust Israeli spokespeople to be our eyes, our ears, our minds.
At the end of August, a Palestinian journalist tweeted that he had “just arrived at a recently bombed location to find a young girl, her head decapitated, both her legs severed, and the rest of her body scattered among the rubble.” He did not include a photo. I do not need a photo. I do not want a photo. I have seen enough decapitated bodies, and had I not seen a single dead child during or since 2023, I carry already those of 2021, 2014, 2006. I have seen images, read testimonies, from September 1982. From 1948.
If you asked a Palestinian, anywhere in the world, today, what Israel is doing in Gaza, they might refuse the question. They might ask instead what it means, for almost a year—almost a century—for a person to reject their senses, to refuse to know. And they might suggest that, by the very act of refusal, you already do.
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Featured image: A Man Standing in the Middle of the Rubble in a Bombed House, 1982. The Palestinian Museum Digital Archive, The Palestine Red Crescent Society (PRCS) Collection (0002.06.1625), palarchive.org. Accessed September 25, 2024. Image has been cropped.