If this were Blossom I would say "no duh!"
Does anyone except hard-core Israel supporters really believe that 18 to 22-year-old men (and women, but mostly men), given large guns and a license to kill, will not do unspeakable things? Particularly when many of those young men are motivated not least by religious and nationalistic zeal? Jesus Christ, people: war is hell.
I am not about to trivialize this development. Though everyone should already have known that Israeli soldiers performed "abuses," an actual document illustrating actual abuses is very important,* and hopefully it will lead to some sort of public addressing of the issue on the part of the Chief of Staff, which may or may not actually fix anything, because there will still be 18 to 22-year-old men with large guns and licenses to kill.
This story, however, doesn't mean shit. It is along identical lines as "who broke the cease-fire" or "who is to blame." These questions are meaningless. It doesn't take a genius to realize that armies do bad things. It doesn't take a genius to realize that terrorist organizations do bad things. 1300 dead Palestinians: how many were murdered in cold blood by Israeli monsters, how many were thrown in front of a gun barrel by Hamas to protect a stockpile of Qassams or to attract a reporter's attention? I don't know. Nobody fucking knows. Both scenarios happened, and most likely in very large numbers. Armies are not moral bodies. That's not their job.
This is the problem with this sort of reporting. It's not "anti-Israel" and it's sure as hell not "anti-Semitic;" it's journalism, it's a reporter telling the public what has happened. That is good. And I don't expect reporters to put "the whole picture" into a single 500-word article. But it's telling people what people should already know, without pointing out that they should already know it, and by doing so are preventing them from realizing that in war, horrible things happen, and they're going to happen on both sides.
*Keep your eyes peeled for right-wingers to tout this as evidence that Israel's military is more moral because of its transparency as illustrated by the release of this report.
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I understand what you're saying and to a certain extent I agree. But even if everyone ought to know that war is in fact hell and that these kinds of things are bound to happen under the circumstances, I still think the story--and this kind of reporting in general--is worth a little more than shit. While the "whole-story" of the war, of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, of war in general might go untold, the specifics of this story--that Israeli troops are openly refuting the official government line--are what make the story.
ReplyDeleteYou compare this piece to those that try to address fundamental questions like "who broke the cease-fire" or "who is to blame"? But I don't think this is a "who is to blame" piece. It's primarily a "what happened and which public statements are lies" piece, just as was Seymore Hersh's My Lai article. In that case, Hersh could have pointed out that the North Vietnamese have also done horrible things, but that really wasn't the point.