The Los Angeles Review of Books (LARB) has just published “The Most Moral Army”- an excoriating review of Israel’s continuous reliance on deceitful medical imagery to disinfect its horrific abuse of power in Gaza
On October 7, the former Australian Prime Minister, Tony Abbot, after a transitory lament about civilian casualties in Gaza added, “and we admire the way that Israel has been so incredibly fastidious in trying to avoid them”.
Dr Mary Turfah does not share this perspective. She begins her essay in the LARB by emphasising how Israel has weaponised medical language, in particular, in an attempt to reframe their genocide in Gaza. Turfah continues by spelling out that a “tent massacre”, once the medicalised excuse-fog is removed, means:
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.
Later she provides more fine-grained, traumatising detail of another surgical strike:
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 recognisable “by his mouth and chin. It was a scene,” he added, “beyond the capacity of the heart and mind to bear!!!!”
Meanwhile, lethal Israeli censorship of media coverage in Gaza (over 120 journalists killed) continues: “’We’ll come for you next: Israel Threatened to Kill Teen Journalist – Then Did”. Research by The Guardian has also just revealed that the oldest recorded, fastidiously-unlucky Gaza genocide victim so far is a great, great grandfather aged 101 and the youngest, a baby girl who lived for two hours.
Another theme addressed in the LARB article is the way thoughtfully crafted reporting helps to shift responsibility from human actors towards the military equipment employed:
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.
Which brings to mind a singular essay entitled, “The Knife Went in”, written 30 years ago by Theodore Dalrymple, observing how convicted killers regularly explained their lethal attacks by ascribing determinative power to the murder weapons employed:
As it happens, there are three stabbers (two of them unto death) at present in the prison who used precisely the same _expression_ when describing to me what happened. “The knife went in,” they said when pressed to recover their allegedly lost memories of the deed. The knife went in—unguided by human hand, apparently. That the long-hated victims were sought out, and the knives carried to the scene of the crimes, was as nothing compared with the willpower possessed by the inanimate knives themselves, which determined the unfortunate outcome.
Turfah also highlights a remarkable letter sent by 100 Israeli doctors in November 2023 where:
Despite significant evidence to the contrary, [they argued that] 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.”
In fact, Turfah’s article (along with many others) documents what astonishing progress Israel has made over the last year – backed by the US and its most obedient pilot fish – in recasting Western morality as an increasingly entrenched, globalised contradiction-in-terms.