The IDF's "Environmental" Tank

A kinder, gentler tank? Not exactly. The Israeli military is working what it calls a "dust remover" tank--a tank with undiminished destructive capabilities, except for the environment. (Israeli military photograph)

"From a mockery the tanks have become a terrible weapon. Armoured they come rolling on in long lines, and more than anything else embody for us the horror of war. We do not see the guns that bombard us; the attacking lines of the enemy infantry are men like ourselves; but these tanks are machines, their caterpillars run on as endless as the war, they are annihilation, they roll without feeling into the craters, and climb up again without stopping, a fleet of roaring, smoke-belching armour-clads, invulnerable steel beasts squashing the dead and the wounded--we shrivel up in our thin skin before them, against their colossal weight our arms are sticks of straw, and our hand-grenades matches."--From Erich Maria Remarque's All Quiet on the Western Front.

Maybe it was too early in the morning. Maybe I was hallucinating. Maybe I'd come across a distinguished winner of the Orwellian Awards. But no. This is as real as a smack upside the head at an Israeli checkpoint. You can read it on the Israel Defense Forces' web site, without a dust particle's shadow of irony:

The IDF is currently dealing with environmental damages caused by the dust created during the usage of tanks and other armored vehicles, as a part of its commitment to the environment. The Quality Testing Department of the Technological Brigade of the Ground Forces believes that it has found the solution. They call it, the Dust Remover.

Don't you love the Aldoux Huxley type Quality-Testing vocabulary (is was Huxley, after all, who wrote Eyeless in Gaza), the self-congratulatory tenor of the prose, that dramatic pause-inducing comma just before "the Dust Remover"?

Imagine reading this from the perspective of, say, a Lebanese who's experienced the effects of Israeli tanks firsthand and with crushing regularity for most of the past 30 years, or a Palestinian in the West Bank and Gaza, where Israeli tanks have a longer (but less lethal, if you can believe it) history. The dust the machines kick up has not been, it's relatively safe to say, these people's greatest concern. It gets worse:

The stirred up dust makes it difficult to breathe for humans close to the vehicles, and makes it impossible for small animals to move on the routes the vehicles passes through.

Are they serious? Is the concern really the little rabbits who scurry across tank tracks? Of course it is. At least we know who matters and who doesn't. The implied message here may not be intended, but it reflects the Israeli military's attitude, so evident in Gaza earlier this year or in Lebanon in 2006, the more accurately for it: the human beings at the receiving end of tanks' lethality are worth less than the rabbits in their wake.

Let's not be startled. This is ancient history, not breaking news. "The attitude of the colonists to their tenants and their families is exactly the same as towards their animals," the Russian-Jewish essayist and Zionist Asher Zvi Hirsch Ginsberg wrote in 1891 of early Jewish settlers' attitudes toward Palestinian Arabs. The settlers, he wrote, commonly referred to their laborers as "mules."

So it's not that nothing has changed but that, considering the Israeli military's evident concern for "small animals," Arabs have dropped further down the scale. Not merely less than human anymore, they're less than animals.

See Also:

• Waltz With Hamas: Israeli Atrocities in Gaza
• Atrocity Denial and the Israeli Military
• "Most Moral Army" and Other IDF Myths
• The 2006 Lebanon War: Israel and Hezbollah Square Off
• Israel's 1978 Invasion of Lebanon
• Arab Shame: A League of Theirs Blown