Atrocity Denial and the Israeli Military

They call it restraint. (David Silverman/Getty Images)

Ruthlessly impressive in war, the Israeli military is equally so at public relations.

Since the Israeli newspaper Haaretz began publishing accounts of Israeli soldiers detailing atrocities committed during the 22-day war on Gaza earlier this year, the Israeli military has been on the defensive as it hasn't been since the Sabra and Shatila massacre of Palestinian civilians in which it was complicit during the 1982 Lebanon war. Unlike in Lebanon, where the Israeli military's Christian militia allies carried out the massacres, it's the Israeli military itself that's implicated in the Gaza atrocities.

First, the Israeli military released its own set of casualty figures disputing the Palestinian Center for Human Rights' tally of 1,434 Palestinian killed, 960 of them civilian (a tally accompanied by a detailed list of names of the dead and circumstances of their death). The Israeli military retorted, for its part, that the majority of Palestinians killed were "terror operatives." The military's numbers: 1166 Palestinians killed, "709 of them are identified as Hamas terror operatives." How the military got its numbers, and how it defines a "terror operative," it never says.

For that, you can turn to Amos Harel, who explains how an innocent Palestinian civilian morphs into a terrorist: in the Israeli military's remote-controlled scopes:

Essentially, a person only needs to be in a "problematic" location, in circumstances that can broadly be seen as suspicious, for him to be "incriminated" and in effect sentenced to death. Often, there is no need for him to be identified as carrying a weapon. Three people in the home of a known Hamas operative, someone out on a roof at 2 A.M. about a kilometer away from an Israeli post, a person walking down the wrong street before dawn - all are legitimate targets for attack.

"It feels like hunting season has begun," says A. "Sometimes it reminds me of a Play Station [computer] game. You hear cheers in the war room after you see on the screens that the missile hit a target, as if it were a soccer game."

Also, the military included 250 policemen under “Hamas terror operatives.”

Second, the Israeli military has gone on an offensive to refute soldiers' accounts of atrocities. "Officers are stepping forward, some at the urging of the top command, others on their own, offering numerous accounts of having held their fire out of concern for civilians, helping Palestinians in need and punishing improper soldier behavior," The Times reports today in an article that calls accounts of the wanton killing of a woman and her two children an "urban myth."

Here's the thing: the refutations don't disclaim the killings. They recast them as justified: "Israeli commanders defend such actions because they say they confronted armed women in Gaza as well as Hamas gunmen dressed as women and in other guises, like doctors," The Times' Ethan Bronner writes. The he quotes an illustration by Brig. Gen. Eli Shermeister: “We had a woman run at us with a grenade in one hand and the Koran in the other.”

Understand the logic here: because there were reports of woman allegedly running at Israeli troops with a Koran in one hand and a grenade in the other, the killing of other women (like the one who was holding a child with one hand and another with the other) become justified. It's the same sort of brutal logic that justified the entire assault (called Operation Cast Lead, no less).

There's more in The Times story: “I’m not saying that nothing bad happened,” Bentzi Gruber, a colonel in the reserves and deputy commander of the armored division, said in an interview. “I heard about cases where people shot where they shouldn’t have shot and destroyed houses where they shouldn’t have destroyed houses. But the proportion and effort and directions we gave to our soldiers were entirely in the opposite direction.”

Harel doesn't buy it:

There is a discrepancy between the official military response, of denial and horrified disapproval, the testimonies of the Rabin pre-military preparatory course graduates, and the response to those reports by key officers, unwilling to be identified.

"What did you think would happen?" a senior officer wondered this week. "We sent 10,000 troops into Gaza, more than 200 tanks and armored personnel carriers, 100 bulldozers. What were 100 bulldozers going to do there?"

The IDF estimates that approximately 2,000 houses were destroyed in the fighting. The Palestinians say the figure is twice that. IDF officers, who were not surprised by the testimonies, recalled that during the Al-Aqsa Intifada, military courts convicted soldiers for killing civilians, including the British peace activist Tom Hurndall, who was killed in Gaza in 2003.

Until the soldiers' testimonies were published, the IDF Spokesman's Office had been highly successful in promoting its version of events. The international media may not have bought it, but the army managed to sell the Israeli public an almost impossible package: We were victorious in Gaza, we suffered minimal casualties and we also came out of there smelling like roses.

Keep in mind that Lt. Gen. Gabi Ashkenazi, who is leading the PR effort, is also the military's chief of staff and commander of the investigators looking into the allegations of war crimes. Needless to say, this is not an independent investigation, and so far there's no word that such an independent inquiry will be conducted.

Coincidentally, the Jerusalem Post reports today on a new Web site "aimed at curbing Holocaust denial will include a history of Muslim-Jewish relations in English, French, Arabic and Farsi." Not to compare the two, but from Lebanon to the West Bank to Gaza, there's a pattern of atrocity denial on Israel's part that has given rise to its own cottage-industry of Web sites aimed at curbing that denial--the best of them Israeli: B'Tselem, Ta'ayush and Peace Now among them.

They could each be quoting as their motto Hannah Arendt, who wrote Gershom Scholem in 1963, during the Eichmann trial in Jerusalem: "In this entire affair I can confess to you one thing: that injustice committed by my own people naturally provokes me more than injustice done by others."