Hiding in Plain Sight

Looks like a little crack here in the Zionist armor. Hopefully somebody will drive a tank through it.

The Israeli army has been forced to open an investigation into the conduct of its troops in Gaza after damning testimony from its own front line soldiers revealed the killing of civilians and rules of engagement so lax that one combatant said that they amounted on occasion to “cold-blooded murder”.

Forced. Because this is all so shocking, evidently. To some people at least.

The revelations, compiled by the head of an Israel military academy who declared that he was “shocked” at the findings, come as international rights groups are calling for independent inquiries into the conduct of both sides in the three-week Israeli offensive against Palestinian Islamists.

How can the head of anything in Israel profess to be shocked at brutality toward the Palestinians? It has been institutionalized since Israel's formation. (Also notice also how the Israeli offensive is now framed as being against "Palestinian Islamists." What happened to Hamas? Too narrow a definition when over 900 of the 1400+ victims were civilians, perhaps?)

“That’s the beauty of Gaza. You see a man walking, he doesn’t have to have a weapon, and you can shoot him,” one soldier told Danny Zamir, the head of the Rabin pre-military academy, who asked him why a company commander ordered an elderly woman to be shot.

Okay then. Some people have a pretty twisted idea of beauty.

"I gathered the graduate students of the course who fought in Gaza, to hear their impressions from the fighting. I wasn't prepared for any of the stuff I heard there. I was shocked,” Mr Zamir said. “I think that the writing was on the wall, but we just didn't want to see it, we didn't want to face it."

One non-commissioned officer told Mr Zamir, himself a deputy battalion commander in the reserves, that the army “fired a lot of rounds and killed a lot of people in order for us not to be injured or shot at.

"When we entered a house, we were supposed to bust down the door and start shooting inside and just go up storey by storey… I call that murder. Each storey, if we identify a person, we shoot them. I asked myself – how is this reasonable?"

There appears to be a little confusion or cognitive dissonance brewing in the minds of some Israelis. They seem to realize that something has gone wrong, but what could it be? Here's a hint.

Another disturbing element reported by the soldiers was the role of military rabbis in distributing booklets that framed the fighting as a religious war. “All these articles had a clear message: we are the Jewish people, we have come to the land by miraculous means, and now we have to fight to remove the Gentiles who are getting in our way and preventing us from occupying the Holy Land… a great many soldiers had a feeling throughout this operation of a religious war,” said one soldier.

There it is, that charming Zionist narrative, cherished and coddled in the minds of "a great many soldiers" with the help of military rabbis. This narrative is so very helpful because it allows the soldiers to murder the Palestinians willy nilly. That's the "beauty" of it, see?

So it's kind of like this...Zionism leads to violence against Gentiles. And since the Palestinians are the handiest Gentiles around Israel, they are always first in line to receive. But all Gentiles who "get in the way" of the Jewish people occupying the Holy Land, which they arrived at by the "miraculous means" of the Balfour Declaration and ethnic cleansing, well they could come in for some violence, too.