The most moral army in the world?
Yanai Israeli served in the IDF from 2000 until 2004 as a lieutenant in an elite unit of the artillery corps. He is a graduate student at the University of Tel Aviv and a member of Breaking the Silence, an Israeli watchdog group of ex-combatants.
The conduct of Israel’s military in Gaza during the past three weeks raises disturbing questions about methods of warfare and their moral consequences. These questions have been powerfully and systematically silenced in Israeli discourse.
Over the past couple of weeks, the majority of Israelis saw questions about the legitimacy of the modes of combat in Gaza as self-hate at best and outright treason at worst. “You are either with us or with Hamas,” declared public opinion, “and if you are with us you don’t ask questions and you don’t raise doubts. Our fight is right and pure and Hamas is the one firing at civilians.”
Indeed, our politicians and the majority of the Israeli press have sought mightily to convince Israelis and international audiences that no other military in the world would behave with our high moral standards. But even a superficial analysis of the weapons and methods used by the IDF in Gaza points to the cynicism and hypocrisy of these statements.
As a lieutenant in the Israeli artillery, I trained to serve as a liaison between artillery forces and the forces on the ground, using the same weapons that figured in the current incursion into Gaza. As I ranged artillery fire and watched the strikes on the ground tens of meters from their targets, I learned that artillery is a very inexact weapon. Our commanders told us that artillery is a “statistical weapon”—if a shell hits fifty meters from its target, it is considered a good hit.
During the training exercises, I was also taught about the lethal consequences of this “statistical weapon.” Standard shells in the Israeli arsenal can kill anyone in a 50 meter radius of the hit and wound anyone within 200 meters. We were repeatedly reminded that the safety rules of the military prohibit, even during combat, firing artillery within 350 meters of our own forces (or 250 meters if they are in armored vehicles).
From this training, every soldier knows that artillery fire into a city will inevitably result in heavy civilian casualties. No commander who orders artillery fire into one of the most densely populated places in the world can hide behind hollow excuses of “we did not mean to harm innocent civilians.” Whoever gave that order knew that civilians would be hurt, results no different from those who shoot rockets into Israel.
Testimonies and photographs from Gaza leave no room for doubt that the Israeli military used unconventional artillery ammunition in this operation, white phosphorus bombs which exploded in the streets of one of the most crowded cities in the world. International law prohibits the use of white phosphorus in urban areas because of the severe burns that it causes. I ranged these bombs and watched them explode in training exercises during my military service, using them to signal to other forces. The shells can be set to explode some tens of meters before they hit the ground to maximize their effect, sending flaming wafers of phosphorus over an area up to 250 meters. Our commanders told us that the white phosphorus shells were labeled by the IDF as "exploding smoke” bombs because the ammunition was prohibited.
The wreckage left behind by Israeli tanks, artillery and aircraft is still being assessed. More than 1,300 people were killed in Gaza; hundreds of the dead are children. Even the most cautious of assessments state that most of the dead were innocent civilians who, under heavy bombardment, could not reach shelter in time. Hospitals hold more than 5,000 wounded Palestinians, many of them so badly hurt that they might not be able to recover.
The brutality of this attack surpasses that of all previous Israeli military incursions in the past decades. This new moral low of “the most moral army in the world” was enabled by our public silence about the methods used by the military during the previous war in Lebanon, which also included firing artillery ammunition with grave known civilian consequences (cluster bombs, in that case). If we do not hold our leaders accountable today for their complete disregard of the rules of engagement, the next time around will prove even deadlier.
Yanai Israeli, Breaking the Silence