26 March 2024: Prof. Norman Finklestein on X
In a recent debate, someone seated next to Professor Benny Morris lectured me on the impossibility that Israel systematically breaches the laws of war. It was stated that Israel only approved and launched precision attacks directed at legitimate military targets: “I think that it’s important that when we talk about military strikes or we talk about things especially involving bombings or drone attacks, these are things that are signed off by multiple different layers of command, by multiple people involved in an operation, including intelligence gathering, including weaponeering, and they also have typically lawyers involved.” (from the official transcript)
It was further stated that the whole of my contrary evidence comprises “two or three quotes that you use to push people around.”
In 2014 Israel launched Operation Protective Edge against Gaza. Peter Maurer, president of the International Committee of the Red Cross, observed after touring the ravaged Strip, “I’ve never seen such massive destruction ever before.”
According to the vagrant seated next to Professor Morris, “I think Protective Edge was 2014, but I’m just saying that the coordination in the military is pretty tight.”
Was this destruction then the result of “pretty tight” precision attacks directed at military targets? An unimpeachable source definitively answers this question. Eyewitness accounts by Israeli combatants were compiled in a large dossier by Breaking the Silence, an Israeli non-governmental organization comprising former Israeli soldiers (“This is How We Fought in Gaza,” 2014).
None of the hundreds of testimonies collected by this organization over more than a decade has ever been proven false, and all of them were approved for publication by the IDF censor.
The leadership of Breaking the Silence is not conventionally leftist—it does not support the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement, opposes criminal prosecution of Israeli officers, and prudently fudges its own findings—while most of the soldier-witnesses themselves do not even appear contrite.
Here’s a tiny sample of the “pretty tight” precision attacks directed exclusively at military targets:
“Shooting to kill. This is combat in an urban area, we’re in a war zone. The saying was: ‘There’s no such thing there as a person who is uninvolved.’ In that situation, anyone there is involved.”
* “People who look at you from the window of a house that is in your designated area—they, to put it mildly, won’t look anymore.”
* “The inclination is to avoid taking risks—rather to destroy everything we come across.”
* “The assumption being that the moment we went into Gaza, anyone who dared poke his head out was a terrorist. . . , you are allowed to open fire.”
* “The idea was, if you spot something—shoot. . . . Whether it posed a threat or not wasn’t a question, and that makes sense to me. If you shoot someone in Gaza it’s cool, no big deal. . . . They made it clear that there were no uninvolved civilians.”
* “When we left after the operation, it was just a barren stretch of desert. . . . We spoke about it a lot amongst ourselves, the guys from the company, how crazy the amount of damage we did there was. I quote: ‘Listen man, it’s crazy what went on in there,’ ‘Listen man, we really messed them up,’ ‘Fuck, check it out, there’s nothing at all left . . . , it’s nothing but desert now, that’s crazy.’”
* “I remember that the level of destruction looked insane to me.”
* “The formal rules of engagement—I don’t know if for all soldiers—were, ‘Anything still there is as good as dead. Anything you see moving in the neighborhoods you’re in is not supposed to be there. The Palestinian civilians know they are not supposed to be there. Therefore whoever you see there, you kill.’ The commander [gave the order] ‘Anything you see in the neighborhoods you’re in, anything within a reasonable distance, say between zero and 200 meters—is dead on the spot. No authorization needed.’ . . . The working assumption states—and I want to stress that this is a quote of sorts: that anyone located in an IDF area, in areas the IDF took over—is not [considered] a civilian. That is the working assumption. We entered Gaza with that in mind, with an insane amount of firepower.”
* “The instruction was: ‘Anyone you identify in the area—you shoot.’” * “It all looked like a science fiction movie . . . serious levels of destruction everywhere. . . . Everything was really in ruins. And non-stop fire all the time.”
* “The instructions are to shoot right away. Whoever you spot—be they armed or unarmed, no matter what. The instructions are very clear. Any person you run into, that you see with your eyes—shoot to kill. It’s an explicit instruction.”
* “I remember it, all the tanks were standing in a row, and I personally asked my commander: ‘Where are we firing at?’ He told me: ‘Pick wherever you feel like it.’”
* “Before the entrance on foot to Gaza, a crazy amount of artillery was fired at the entire area. . . . Before a tank makes any movement it fires, every time. Those guys were trigger happy, totally crazy. Those were their orders, I’m certain of it, there’s no chance anybody would just go around shooting like that.”
* “The explosions’ effects cause major amounts of damage, but that doesn’t interest anyone. ‘Use it, use it, explosives can’t be taken back,’ the platoon commander says, ‘I don’t want to leave explosives on me.’”
* “I don’t really remember what was discussed in terms of formal instructions before we entered, and after we entered nobody really cared about the formal instructions anyway. That’s what we knew. Every tank commander knew, and even the simple soldiers knew, that if something turns out to be not OK, they can say they saw something suspicious. They’ve got backup. They won’t ever be tried.”
* “Our view was of the center of the Strip. Let’s say it was a real fireworks display. From a distance it looked pretty cool. . . . If you looked through a night vision scope you saw crazy wreckage, it was a real trip.”
* “You’re shooting at anything that moves—and also at what isn’t moving, crazy amounts. . . . It also becomes a bit like a computer game, totally cool and real.”
* “There were no rules of engagement. If you see anyone in that area, that person is a terrorist.”
* “They went in just to destroy stuff. Just to purposely destroy stuff.”
* “The rules of engagement were very, very lax. I wouldn’t say that they shot anything that moved—but they didn’t request authorization to fire either. There was no such thing as requesting authorization. Just fire.”
* “That’s how it was, really—every tank just firing whatever it wanted to. And during the offensive, no one shot at us—not before it, not during it, and not after it. I remember that when we started withdrawing with the tanks, I looked toward the neighborhood, and I could simply see an entire neighborhood up in flames, like in the movies. Columns of smoke everywhere, the neighborhood in pieces, houses on the ground, and like, people were living there, but nobody had fired at us yet. We were firing purposelessly.”
* “It was total destruction in there—the photos on line are child’s play compared to what we saw there in reality. . . . I never saw anything like it.”
* “We were firing purposelessly all day long. Hamas was nowhere to be seen. . . . And the rules of engagement were pretty easy-going—I was shocked when I first heard them.”
* “Everything is a suspicious spot. This is Gaza, you’re firing at everything.”
* “They explained what you do if you see a civilian. They explained that that’s the way it is in combat. It was shoot to kill immediately if you see stuff. . . . Really, they did say, ‘If you see someone—shoot him.’”
* “If it looks like a man, shoot. It was simple: You’re in a motherfucking combat zone. A few hours before you went in the whole area was bombed, if there’s anyone there who doesn’t clearly look innocent, you apparently need to shoot that person.”
* “The unfathomable number of dead on one of the sides, the unimaginable level of destruction, the way militant cells and people were regarded as targets and not as living beings—that’s something that troubles me.”
* “It’s destruction on a whole other level. . . . We just couldn’t believe it.”
* “The briefing on rules of engagement was [to open first at], ‘Anything you think you should [open fire at]. . . . Anyone you spot that you can be positive is not the IDF.’ The only emphasis regarding rules of engagement was to make sure you weren’t firing at IDF forces, but other than that, ‘Any person you see.’ From the very start they told us, ‘Shoot to kill.’”
* “The air force carries out an insane amount of strikes in Gaza during an operation like ‘Protective Edge.’”
* “Shells are being fired all the time. Even if we aren’t actually going to enter: shells, shells, shells. A suspicious structure, an open area, a field, a place where a tunnel shaft could be—fire, fire, fire.”
*** If “these are things that are signed off by multiple different layers of command, by multiple people involved in an operation, including intelligence gathering, including weaponeering, and they also have typically lawyers involved,” if “the coordination in the military is pretty tight”—then, doesn’t that, on the contrary, PROVE that Israel has premeditatedly, systematically and egregiously breached the laws of war?
*** The collection fittingly concludes with this testimony: “You leave Gaza and the most obvious question is, ‘Did you kill anybody?’ What can you do—even if you’ll meet the most left-wing girl in the world, eventually she’ll start thinking, ‘Did you ever kill somebody, or not.’ And what can you do about it, most people in our society consider that to be a badge of honor. So everybody wants to come out of there with that feeling of satisfaction.”
26 March 2024: Prof. Norman Finklestein on X