Thinking about what we did

NAZA schmaza

Last week, Israelis were up in arms about the NAZA film. Generally, I try to understand what it is that people round here are thinking, and I might actually be too good at it, but here I’m at a loss. The policy of not placing significant emphasis on minimizing civilian casualties when pursuing military goals in Gaza enjoys broad, overwhelming support in the Israeli electorate. Killing Palestinian civilians in large numbers isn’t so much a consequence of the policy as part of the substance of the policy itself. It’s not the goal of the policy, but it’s not an unintended consequence either. Israelis generally believe that this is the correct thing to do morally - to put your own soldiers before the lives of the enemy, especially those belonging to a ‘death cult’ - and that opposition is borne of some kind of spiritual or psychological sickness. How can you call it a blood libel when someone points at something you are proud of doing and says you are doing it? If you believe it’s moral and correct, just explain that. Why freak out about it?

So, I turned to a Rabbi-intellectual Guy Alaluf who is good at taking inchoate sentiments of right-leaning Israelis and turning them into something coherent, without unduly worrying if it ends up sounding horrific:

To sum up:

1. The nations of the world are collaborators in an exterminationist agenda against Jews lasting thousands of years.

2. This campaign works by constantly upping demands for concessions from Jews until there is nothing left to concede, so you just have to kill them. Therefore, any time any gentile anywhere criticises Jews for any reason, this is a step in a campaign which ends in genocide.

3. The proof is that Christian churches complain about incidents of Jews spitting on Christians in Jerusalem. This is so clearly a trivial problem that no-one could be honestly aggravated about it and concern can only be motivated by antisemitism. [?!]

4. Therefore, it is forbidden to even think about the charges made in the film, and the only appropriate response is to pray for the death of its creators.

We are honestly so cooked. It’s important to get into your head that there is an extremely plausible path for this country in which it flames out in ever more outlandish acts of military aggression while rightoid pundits shriek still louder about ‘suicidal empathy’ and ‘Jewish syndrome’ of caring about your enemies more than yourself, decrying the exilic mindset that simply won’t see that you can just solve all your issues by killing some large number of people, and explaining why the numbers of people killed to date just aren’t sufficient. It’s not definitely going to happen because various forces are arrayed to stop it, but if they take their eye off the ball, then it could happen. Like AI existential risk, even if you think there’s a 10% chance of this going down (and I think that’s too low), then it’s worth thinking hard about how to prevent it based on weighted expected outcomes.

Back to the point though. I don’t understand Israeli outrage at the NAZA film and I don’t think there is anything to understand. There is obviously some kind of vague idea these people have that if only all Israelis stand their ground and insist on the absolute righteousness of our military efforts (whether it’s by denying we killed civilians or saying it’s good to kill civilians, doesn’t matter) then the goyim will have to admit it. Unfortunately, though, a few scabs don’t play ball and this is what permits the nations to condemn us. We saw this on display when various intellectuals declared that, after years of cabinet ministers shouting insane genocidal nonsense as loudly as possible to the entire world, it was really Yair Golan who had blackened our name. This is so obviously stupid that even Guy Alaluf can’t launder it, but that’s the best I can do. So, instead, I thought it might be good here to set out a framework for those who for whatever reason, want to think about the topic. Israeli war crimes, I think, should be divided into three categories.

1. Hunting Amalek

Some Israelis believe that it is good to kill civilians in Gaza because they are innately evil and eternally hostile. Some of these Israelis are in the army.

In this video, a young man eulogising his brother who died in combat declares that he went into Gaza to kill as many people as he saw, specifying women and children, this sentiment apparently endorsed by his family and other mourners. People say stuff when they are emotional, but I’ve heard similar sentiments expressed enough times by people who weren’t emotional. It stands to reason that those who want to murder women and children do, in fact, when given the opportunity, murder women and children.

This is the easiest category of war crimes for Jews to think about because we are not officially corporately responsible. In theory, even Otzma Yehudit is against just shooting Gazans without tactical justification, even though everyone knows that they aren’t really. Indeed, the entire right-wing of Israeli politics will fight tooth and nail against anyone who does so being prosecuted, while centrists will mumble and change the subject for fear of looking weak. Still, we’re not ordering it.

In reality, though, if you don’t set up law courts to punish things, you are responsible. Long before the war, Israeli soldiers had almost complete immunity for killing Palestinians. To face time, you have to literally do it on camera, and walk over and shoot someone on the floor, and even then you get 18 months and it will be commuted to 9.¹ As long as you don’t do anything on camera, you can even just murder a Jew and you’ll be fine. If it is on camera, then the family of the victim will have to spend years lobbying to get anyone to prosecute you.

In order to not be classified as completely lawless, the IDF runs a military prosecutor unit, whose job is to file lots of paperwork to show that claims of crimes have been investigated, and once every so often to actually prosecute a particularly black and white case and give a small sentence. This is very important. The Palestinians have on their side one of the best activist networks in the world, able to draw on a vast well of generic leftist organisational experience and Gulf oil money. One of the things they want to do is use established mechanisms of international law enforcement to make it so that Israeli politicians, high level generals, and even ordinary soldiers who posted something unfortunate to social media can’t go abroad without getting pinched. The response of western governments who want to avoid that kind of thing is that prosecuting Israelis is outside their jurisdiction because Israel has its own robust system of investigating and prosecuting abuses committed by its military. Of course, they know that it doesn’t, but it does have the ability to provide formal evidence of such robustness and that’s probably good enough unless some rogue judge kicks off and then you can call him an antisemite.

Unfortunately for us, the Right Wing is one big machine for the systematic elevation of human shit, and so they were not willing to tolerate this arrangement. They want their cookies now. At one of the military prisons where literally everyone knows that Palestinian prisoners are being beaten up every day, one turned up in hospital with his rectum torn, apparently consistent with having had a metal object stuck up it. The military prosecutor ordered some soldiers to be arrested prior to investigation (note: did not pre-emptively declare guilty and throw in a dungeon, nor even hold without charge for years as is routinely done to Palestinians), and there was a riot including MKs. Some of them said the soldiers were innocent, some said they did a good thing, some said both, the ones with laughable pretensions to intellectual accomplishment spewed out some word salad about class warfare. It doesn’t really matter; the point is it’s not OK to arrest a soldier on suspicion of a crime just because you have probable cause to suspect him of a crime. At this point, a power struggle ensued in which what is left of the secular Ashkenazi elite showed their usual ineptitude and cuckdom in the face of internal adversaries. The military prosecutor leaked some footage to the press like a dumb cow and got caught, she was arrested, and the case was dropped. We’re no longer going to pretend; that’s goyish and we don’t play that no mo'.

Of course, what that means is that now we have lost both plausible deniability and implausible deniability about enforcing the law against our own war criminals, so a simple application of accepted international norms is that other countries have to do it for us. We can lean on our other weapons - German dweebs wracked by Holocaust guilt, obese boomer lunatics, open perversion of the American electoral process - and maybe that will buy us some more time. At some point though, Corporal Major Yossi can’t go for a relaxing holiday on the beaches of Croatia anymore; he’s going to have to settle for Eilat.

Oops, we got distracted again. More important than after-the-fact investigation, or its absence, is how much this stuff happens in the first place. October 7th drastically increased the number of Israelis who think this, the number of Israelis who already thought it and are now willing to say so, the number of Israelis who aren’t quite there but are willing to look the other way etc. The Gaza war also increased the practical ability of people to act on such sentiments. Maybe 5% of Israelis think this way, but it’s higher among those still young enough to be serving, and higher still among those in combat units. Perhaps it’s 10%, but they won’t be evenly distributed. The army is large enough that there must be some platoons where they are the majority. Boys will be boys.

On the other hand, most power in the IDF is still wielded by people ranging from center-Left to soft Right and, at the very least, they consider that kind of thing to be a breach of discipline and do what they can to stop it. Perhaps more important is that the IDF has consistently cleared areas of civilians and then chucked in a lot of bombs before sending in troops. It’s perhaps telling that many of the clearest cases of intentionally targeting civilians are those of Palestinians who entered already cleared and designated killzones. The most sustained run of alarming shootings happened at the GHF aid sites, which was one of the few times that IDF soldiers were in sustained contact with large numbers of civilians. I’m inclined to think, therefore, that this is a relatively marginal problem in practice, responsible for 1 or 2% of Palestinian civilian casualties. But it’s definitely happened and it makes sense out of apparently senseless cases like that of Hind Rajab.

2. Laying waste

A lot of Gaza is rubble. At least 55% of buildings have been completely destroyed and more than 80% are damaged. It looks pretty bad.

As a result, the majority of Gaza’s population is living in tent camps or shacks, and these are pretty bad too. Sometimes it rains and that’s really bad.

By any standards, this is cruel. The policy of destroying most of urban Gaza emerged from the bottom up. The IDF was caught in a cycle of giving evacuation notices, going into urban areas and killing any paramilitary members present, then coming back a few months later and having to do it all over again. This was because the IDF didn’t have a plan, or at any rate a good plan, or maybe had multiple incompatible plans, and was trying to achieve ‘total victory’ by just killing everyone in Hamas. Zionists are prone these days to declaring that their critics ‘don’t understand the reality of war’ and that’s certainly true, but if they did understand it more they might be even more critical. There are not many cases of wars fought without either an attempt to hold territory or to create a political entity that will do it on your behalf, or even with a demand that the opposing side could accede to, but instead solely based on killing enemy troops faster than they can be replaced. Those that came closest to such a modus operandi (like Vietnam or the Soviets in Afghanistan) are case studies in failure. Feiglin loves to make that stupid face where he tells you that the point of war is kill your enemy unlike whatever it says in that cursed IDF ethics book written by godless snobs alienated from their true Jewish identity, but actually it isn’t. That’s a means to an end. If it’s all your doing, you aren’t doing anything good. Our friend Sam Kriss was very exercised about this:

Israel is not fighting to remove Hamas from power in Gaza.

Nothing about this war makes sense until you realise that what’s at stake here is something other than victory. The length it’s been going, for one thing. During the Suez War, it took Israel five days to capture the Gaza Strip from a well-armed and dug-in Egyptian army. In 1967, Israel had seized the entirety of Gaza by the end of the Six-Day War’s second day. The IDF of 2024 is not the IDF of half a century ago, and unlike the Egyptians, Hamas has nowhere to retreat. But I’m not sure that can explain why this conquest of Gaza has already taken seventy times longer than the last one. Or the other unusual events that keep happening. Not long ago, Israeli jets bombed the al-Shifa hospital complex in Gaza City. You might remember that last November, the IDF besieged the hospital: they cut off fuel and bombed solar panels while snipers shot doctors through the windows. Dozens died. In the end, the IDF captured the complex, which they claimed was a Hamas command centre; their evidence consisted of a few Kalashnikovs planted in an MRI room, a box of dates, and a calendar on a wall. So why are they bombing it again now? IDF strategy in Gaza appears to consist of a series of rapid advances, moving in to destroy houses, smash up shops, vandalise schools—and then equally rapid retreats, followed by aerial bombardment of whoever’s moved into the ruins. Outside a few strategic areas like the Salah al-Din Road, which runs the length of the strip, they’re not interested in holding territory in Gaza. They do not want to have to take over governmental duties for its population of two million (and shrinking) Palestinians. They don’t want to collect Gaza’s taxes, operate its sewage system, or pick up its litter. They just want to destroy.

I think this is unfair. The goal - and I will return to this - was not just to destroy, it was to destroy Hamas. A goal, even an incoherent impossible goal, is still a goal. It’s something, but it’s admittedly not much. There’s a left-wing critique of this (instead of pointlessly killing people, don’t kill people), but there’s also a right-wing critique (instead of pointlessly killing people, pointfully kill people). Kriss’s charge that the IDF wasn’t serious because it wasn’t holding territory was heard plenty in Israel, just not the way he wanted it.

That wasn’t the only critique though, or even the most widely-held one. A good number of Israelis didn’t want to hold land, and knew that pointfully killing would actually end up landing them with a big headache they preferred not to deal with. What almost all Israelis agreed with, however, is that too many Israeli soldiers were dying. These numbers were indeed high. Not high by the standards of the mid-20th century wars to which Israelis invariably refer to when asked to justify their conduct. By these standards, they were so laughably low as to not even merit consideration. But Israel is not a mid-20th century state, it’s a cucked 21st century liberal pantomime just like everywhere else where kids who throw rocks at their headteacher go to the school counsellor to play a card game which helps them express their feelings. Israelis have more stomach than western European countries for military casualties, but not that much and certainly nothing like Russia or Ukraine has. Israelis wanted it to end.²

The solution the IDF hit upon was simple. Instead of going in and clearing an area and then leaving so both civilians and soldiers could return, just blow everything up before you go. The soldiers can’t come back now, and nor can the civilians, who will have to make their tent a permanent abode. Then when you’re sent to a new area, you do the same thing, and again, and again. Eventually you’ve destroyed most of it.

It’s important to be clear that this tactic definitely worked. Lives were saved. In every single case it was used, it could be justified on tactical grounds (or at least we can grant that this is so). That is why it was done. Each time, the guy on the ground put in a request to demolish everything, and each time it was approved. No-one needed to order anyone to raze the place like Carthage.

Nevertheless, it became clear at a certain stage that the policy was more than that. Each individual case had a tactical justification, but tactics are supposed to serve strategy, and the killing now was no more pointful, it just came at lower cost. Eventually, when you have fields of gray as far as the eye can see, you either come up with a strategy or stop, unless that is the strategy. Bit by bit it became clear that the idea was to create so many Palestinians with no homes to go back to that they would just have to leave.

The dual nature of the campaign allowed for the Israeli Right’s favourite pastime: being a mendacious crymurderer. In the most obvious example, a certain Rabbi called Avraham Zarbiv who claims credit for inventing the ‘blow everything up’ tactic made a name for himself by sending out videos giving inspirational divrei Torah³ about having the courage and emunah to do ethnic cleansing before blowing up a building and saying woohoo. A certain lib-leaning Rosh Yeshiva named Yuval Cherlow made a mild objection by quoting certain medieval Rabbis on the need to avoid allowing warfare to warp ethical sensibilities. Predictably, the rage machine erupted, accusing him of pOSTMODERNISM and aghast that he could decry a tactic that saved soldiers’ lives.

Regardless, though, whenever plausible deniability about this ran out, it’s certainly ran out by now. The Defence Minister has boasted of his accomplishment in destroying the houses more than a million of Gazans so they have no choice but to leave. This is government policy, with only the most superficial layer of deniability for international diplomacy. and if you can’t be held corporately responsible for government policy, what can you be held corporately responsible for?

For my part, I’m in favour of the ethnic cleansing of Gaza in principle. Gaza is a big mess, a place created to herd Arabs Israel didn’t want in 1948, with no plausible pathway to becoming something functional after having been developed into a booby-trapped lunatic asylum. Everyone would be better off if the Gazans went somewhere else, and, while I’m aware that Palestinians have a perfectly good claim to be considered natives of the land, I am generally unmoved by ethnonationalist claims to connections between soil and bloodlines. My chief objection to voluntary emigration as a strategy for solving the problem is that if you don’t do it in the required volume, it just makes the problem worse by removing the most reasonable and pragmatic Gazans and leaving behind all the hopeless nutters who then breed themselves back to the original level. So I get that if you are going to make it work then ‘voluntary’ is going to have to be ‘voluntary’ with a big fat asterisk attached.

On the other hand, putting people in tents and then leaving it up to them to find out where to go while they rot year after year in sub-medieval conditions is barbaric. If you want them to leave, then put at least as much effort in finding them a new home as into immiserating them. It would be a lot cheaper to pay someone to take them than to keep blowing stuff up and becoming an international pariah, but the fact is that too many Israelis hate Palestinians more than they love their own children. They don’t mind spending the money, but they sure as hell won’t put up with it being spent on them. So, because the two bordering countries to which Gazans would walk if they could are blocked off, we end up doing a bunch of the bad stuff associated with ethnic cleansing while not even doing very much ethnic cleansing, which sucks.

3. Death from the sky

The third category of war crime we have committed is in lowering the threshold for a legitimate military target for an aerial strike and raising the permitted level of collateral damage way, way beyond what is normal in contemporary warfare. This has happened all through the war, but it happened most, ironically or perhaps not, precisely when global support for the Israeli war effort was at its highest ebb during the opening month. The thought process went like this:

1. Following October 7th, Israel must achieve total victory over Hamas.

2. Because Israel must achieve total victory over Hamas, therefore it is possible to achieve total victory over Hamas.

3. Israel cannot incur the kinds of casualties likely to result from sustained urban combat in territory prepared in advance.

4. Therefore it must be possible to achieve total victory over Hamas without incurring such casualties.

This logic appeared impregnable to almost every Israeli and non-Israel Zionist. So Israel did what democracies tend to do when faced with a difficult military situation and fired bombs all over the place. True, these bombs were very not indiscriminate; they were extremely discriminate. If there was a local Hamas police chief in a building with 20, 30, 40 … well we don’t know because they won’t say, but we have allegations and a lot of circumstantial evidence.

This is something that Israelis aren’t just corporately responsible for. They are, almost without exception, individually responsible. I certainly was. Oh another tower block went down? FAFO I guess. There’s a neat interview with Naftali Bennet on Sky News:

That’s how pretty much everyone felt. But it turns out that it’s not true that just because you must do something therefore you can do it without paying the costs you won’t pay. So what you did was, if not for nothing, not for all that much, and killing people for not all that much is murder, and murder is wrong.

Darryl Cooper, back before he let himself get totally cooked by rightoid internet culture, actually had a pretty good take on this. If you found out your neighbour had walked into someone’s house and slit the occupant’s throat, you’d be very perturbed. If you found out, he was in the airforce and dropped a bomb on someone’s house, you might want to argue out the morality over a barbeque, or maybe you’d just avoid the topic. It is different. But it isn’t limitlessly different. The civilian to combatant ratio of Israelis on October 7th was 1.9:1, somewhat better than what the IDF achieved in Gaza and, of course, the overall quantity is a lot more. The IDF outperformed Hamas sometime around the 11th or 12th of October and kept going. Eventually it’s too much. When? Mr Borelli in the first week or so called it at 40,000. He was pretty prescient.

Does this mean that Israel is one of those irredeemable countries like the Third Reich that has to be disassembled and replaced with a gay version of itself? I don’t believe so. ‘I was angry’ is a legitimate excuse. It doesn’t justify murder for you, but at the state level it does, otherwise every state is illegitimate, at least in potentiality. International law wasn’t given to Malachei haShares. When you have calmed down, you just cook up what you need between some combination of heat-of-the-moment and rogue-actors and that-bit-didn’t-really-happen until enough time has passed that you can ask why people are being so woke and have their head stuck in the past. You move on. But you do have to move on. What you shouldn’t do is declare your crimes the highest expression of morality and thus commit yourself to committing ever more in the quest to turn your conscience into an accomplice. Don’t do that. Move on, while there’s still time. If there’s still time.

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No posts over Succos, so have a great Yom Tov everyone.

1. The man Elor Azariah killed was not, of course, a civilian, and plausibly deserved to be shot. The point of the example is just to illustrate the effective legal reality. I’m describing, not complaining.

2. I’m like this too. I’m not criticising.

3. For gentile readers who don’t know, an interesting quirk of Jewish dialects of English is that the word ‘inspirational’ is used to mean ‘inane’, ‘idiotic’, ‘devoid of semantic content’.