r/JewsOfConscience • u/Ornery-Honeydewer • 3d ago
Op-Ed The Israeli newspaper “Haaretz”publishes testimonies from IDF soldiers detailing incidents of war crimes
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u/Ornery-Honeydewer 3d ago
IDF soldier: "I felt like, like, like a Nazi ... it looked exactly like we were actually the Nazis and they were the Jews."
"A new commander came to us. We went out with him on the first patrol at six in the morning. He stops. There's not a soul in the streets, just a little 4-year-old boy playing in the sand in his yard. The commander suddenly starts running, grabs the boy, and breaks his arm at the elbow and his leg here. Stepped on his stomach three times and left. We all stood there with our mouths open. Looking at him in shock…. I asked the commander: "What's your story?" He told me: These kids need to be killed from the day they are born. When a commander does that, it becomes legit."
Source: https://x.com/suppressednws/status/1871281517646778476?s=46
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u/oncothrow 3d ago
Similarly, a reservist doctor stated: "There is total dehumanization here. You don't really treat them as if they are human beings ... in retrospect, the hardest thing for me is what I felt, or actually what I didn't feel when I was there. It bothers me that it didn't bother me. There is normalization of the process, and at some point, it just stops bothering."
Something that could be termed "The Banality of Evil". But apparently we're not ready for that conversation yet.
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u/Carlsen021 Anti-Zionist 3d ago
This story is shocking.
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u/Szygani 3d ago
What a lot of people have been saying has been happening, though
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u/Carlsen021 Anti-Zionist 3d ago
The name of that commander should be made available to the ICC and Hind Rajab Foundation. He needs to be put in jail.
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u/musingmarkhor Non-Jewish Ally 3d ago edited 3d ago
The atrocities I read in the article and freely admitted by the IDF soldiers are harrowing. We know they’ve committed even worse. Not a single one of them expressed regret for what they did. They are wicked and are nurtured in a society that normalized and encouraged the way they think and the way they act. The soldiers are not victims. They are fully responsible for their own actions. It is even more concerning that most Israeli adults serve in the IDF. They will passionately defend this. Think about how your communities talk about Palestinians and Muslims. How do they contribute to these attitudes of dehumanization and vitriol?
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u/Spartan_DJ119 irish anti zionist 3d ago
That i feel like a nazi line is telling especially with the fact he said it in a way that says he likes feeling like a nazi have we learned nothing from history
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u/cupcakefascism Jewish Communist 3d ago
This was the worst thing I’ve ever read. We’ll look back on this like Babi Yar, or the Nanjing Massacre.
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u/wowitsreallymem 3d ago
It’s a failure of governments that it takes so many years to recognise atrocities. I pray there is accountability.
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u/velvetjacket1 3d ago
https://archive.ph/O8rGB to see the whole article. It contains (extremely disturbing, sob-inducing, be warned) testimonials from 30 years ago. The angle of the article is shoot-and-cry, as the author's concern seems to be to protect soldiers committing atrocities from the potential mental health impacts and the "moral injury" of their acts.
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u/korach1921 Reconstructionist 3d ago
Do you think that moral injury isn't a real thing?
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u/Delicious_Ad_6823 2d ago
I hope it is. And if it leads them to off themselves for what they did to those children, we wont shed a tear.
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u/korach1921 Reconstructionist 2d ago
I'm not sure if you read the article, but there were clear distinctions between soldiers who had no remorse for war crimes and those who consciously chose not to do them or report war crimes to superiors.
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u/Love2Eat96 3d ago
I hope these soldiers have PTSD for life before they die a horrible agonizing death like they inflicted on these innocent people.
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u/EvelKneidel 2d ago
The most striking part of this article was not the descriptions of violence. It was the framing the psychologist is focused, mostly on the effect of these crimes on IOF soldiers (the moral injury) and not the scale of brutality that has been visited upon the people of Gaza. Even he dehumanizes them, by posing them as objects of the soldiers’ narrative. He says from the get-go he still believes in the mission of the IDF, despite a mountain of evidence of their savagery.
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