Israel tells its soldiers to stop filming themselves looting and carrying out revenge attacks
Israel is finally cottoning on to the fact that Israeli soldiers posting pictures and videos of themselves looting and destroying Palestinian homes don't look good.
For the last four months the world’s social media feeds have been full of pictures and videos of Israeli soldiers looting Palestinian homes and carrying out depraved attacks on Palestinian civilians.
Israel has finally seemed to cotton onto the fact that this depravity is not good for their propaganda efforts, and makes a mockery of their laughable claims to be "the most moral army in the world".
We’ve seen Israeli soldiers posting videos of themselves vandalising and targeting Palestinian homes for no strategic purpose, destroying civilian infrastructure, rummaging through Palestinian women’s underwear, wrecking children’s toys, destroying food, and larking around with the property of Palestinian civilians they’ve displaced and killed.
We’ve seen them wildly celebrating and dancing as they commit their atrocities; we’ve seen them killing Palestinian civilians carrying white flags; we’ve seen them outright defy the Geneva Convention ban on humiliation of prisoners by rounding up random Palestinian men, stripping them, and parading them for the cameras.
It doesn’t matter how many $millions Israel spends trying to pump social media full of pro-Israeli propaganda if their soldiers keep gleefully filming themselves doing stuff like looting private property, humiliating prisoners, and revelling in their atrocities, then posting the videos online for the world to see.
Hence the Chief of Staff of the Israeli occupation forces Herzi Halevi has issued an edict warning Israeli soldiers not to film "revenge videos".
'Stop documenting our war crimes' is hardly what you’d expect the self-declared "most moral army in the world" to have to tell their soldiers, especially four months into their barbaric assault on Gaza. And the fact it has to be said at all is absolutely telling.
The problem with this edict is that it’s virtually unenforceable. Israeli society is absolutely steeped in anti-Palestinian hate, and Israel’s leaders continually spout dehumanising and downright genocidal rhetoric (see South Africa’s submission to the ICJ for a comprehensive list of genocidal quotes).
Israeli kids are raised to view Palestinians as lower than animals, conscripted, armed to the teeth, and then sent off to enforce Israeli colonial apartheid in the Palestinian territories, and/or carry out barbaric ethnic cleansing campaigns like the assault on Gaza.
It’s absolutely clear from the gleeful tone of so many of the revenge and looting videos already posted that the perpetrators have no regard for international laws like the Geneva Conventions, and no conception that whet they’re doing is profoundly wrong and considered utterly reprehensible by the majority of the civilised world.
They have no conception or care that most of the rest of the world don’t see Palestinians as sub-humans as they do, or perceive their their looting, killing, humiliation, and destruction videos as just entertaining larks, but as depravity and war crimes.
It’s going to prove borderline impossible to stop Israeli soldiers from doing depraved things if they’re incapable of understanding what makes their behaviour so depraved in the first place.
I did not “like” or “heart” this post, as I did not wish to have anyone mistake that emoji for any approval of the shameful and shameless behavior of members of the “most moral” armed force in the world. The Zionist kleptocrat regime of Netanyahu and Co. must not be conflated with the Jews in general; the “Jews for Peace” members, who risk sniper fire by that “moral army” for publicly protesting genocide in the name of all Jews (assisted by AI-powered facial recognition) and they must not be killed for being a truly moral resistance to this barbarity. At the same time, we must direct our anger not primarily to the young IDF perpetrators of these atrocities, but to the dominant culture of Zionist hatred of Palestinians drilled into them in school from an early age. Their teachers learned the wrong lesson from the Nazis, and have turned the slogan “never again” into “now it’s our turn.”
By the way, it’s become clear to me that this “conflict” has used religion, culture and “revenge” as a cover story for the theft of land and oil/gas wealth from Gaza, onshore and off, to the tune of trillions of dollars. Creation and Demonization of an enemy is essential to create a moral justification for genocide. The kleptocrats don’t need justification, as they have no morals, and worship no god other than Mammon.