Israeli Soldiers' Vulnerability Is a Healthy Reaction From People Who Have Committed Horrific Acts - Opinion
Soldiers serving in Gaza and suffering from a 'moral injury' are crying over something obvious: People weren't born to flatten cities and use sophisticated technology to bomb a tent full of displaced people
The soldiers who took their own lives and will take their own lives, or those who tried and will try, the conscripts who strive to be released from combat duty and those who are emotionally scarred – they're all the sane ones. Their bodies and souls refuse to consider obeying an order a supreme value. And it makes no difference how many of them view their military service and the acts of their commanders, army and state as crimes.
Subconsciously, they oppose the seal of approval that the attorney general and the military advocate general granted the army, approval for the killing of 18,430 Palestinian children in Gaza within less than two years and the maiming of thousands of other children.
The soldiers' collapsing bodies and wounded souls are rejecting – even if belatedly and anonymously – the Israeli military ethos that loyalty to the members of your company justifies participation in crimes against masses of people. For example, crowding 2 million starved, exhausted, wounded, impoverished and bereaved people into pockets of scorched land about 78 square kilometers (30 square miles) large. (Until 2005, about 7,000 Israeli settlers in Gaza lived happily and well in a fertile area of this size.)
The soldiers' vulnerability is a healthy reaction that should be expected from people who participated and are participating in horrific acts. Haaretz's Tom Levinson describes fragments of the horrors in his article Tuesday, "'I Saw the Bodies of Children': Moral Injury and Mental Strain Breaking IDF Soldiers."
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As one soldier described it, a soldier shouted "'Terrorists, terrorists.' We go into a frenzy, and I … start spraying, firing hundreds of bullets. We then charged forward. … I saw the bodies of two children, maybe 8 or 10 years old. … There was blood everywhere, lots of signs of gunfire; I knew it was all on me, that I did this. I wanted to throw up. After a few minutes, the company commander arrived and said coldly, as if he wasn't a human being, 'They entered an extermination zone, it's their fault, that's what war is like.'"
While Israeli society is normalizing the annihilation of the Gaza Strip in all the news broadcasts and over a cup of coffee on upscale boulevards, the soldiers who wake up shouting and go to their mental health officer for an exemption are a straw to grab onto in the heavy darkness we're immersed in.
The soldiers who ended their own lives – whether they were haunted by the memory of their dead friends or the smell of the rotting corpses in Gaza – are crying out in their muteness to all Israeli parents: If your children are dear to you, don't let them go there.
The soldiers suffering from a "moral injury" are crying over something obvious: People weren't born to flatten cities and use sophisticated technology to bomb a plastic tent full of displaced people, even if that leads to higher prices on the stock market and paves the way to a salary with lots of zeros. Still, most Israeli parents continue excitedly to accompany their children to the induction center.
Aside from the soldiers who are itching to destroy, the army has another solution to the problem. This was pointed out by sniper Benny, who wets his bed like a 4-year-old. He has stopped counting how many people seeking food at the humanitarian aid stations he has killed, with the encouragement of his officers.
"The officers don't care if children die; they also don't care what it does to my soul. To them I'm just another tool," Benny told Levinson. He also explained why pilots aren't subject to the danger of an emotional wound: "You have to understand, a sniper isn't like a pilot – he sees his victims through the scope."
At the end of the day, the pilots, the suicide drone operators and the soldiers firing shells are responsible for the killing of most of the Palestinian civilians – and they do so from a great enough distance that their souls won't be wounded. That's how Israeli society can carry on unquestioningly with the task of annihilation.