There Are No Israeli Civilians
A population of draftees, nearly unanimous in their approval of the brutal genocide of Palestinians and even the use of rape as a weapon of war, cannot be meaningfully considered "civilian."
An elderly man who, in a non-fascist state, might be enjoying a life of rest and peace, but who remains as steeped in blood as all other Israeli current and former combatants. Yachin took part in the 1948 Deir Yassin massacre.
Despite Israeli suppression and manipulation of information and the deliberate targeting of journalists, a deluge of horrifying images and reports emerge weekly from the besieged civilians in Gaza and the West Bank. On Monday, a school housing refugees will be obliterated by an airstrike, with desperate survivors collecting human remains in grocery bags. On Tuesday, a displaced persons camp will be destroyed and many dozens more will perish. On Wednesday, images of starving children might emerge in the media, with only the willful destruction of infrastructure, roads, and the blockading of aid by Israel to blame—an entirely avoidable tragedy. On Thursday, videos of IDF soldiers desecrating and looting Palestinian homes will be shared, to silence and rapidly changed subjects in the West and lockstep cheers of approval from Israelis. On Friday, the US will approve billions of dollars more in weapons shipments to the state committing all of these atrocities, a state which has become more and more brazen in its barbarity as it tests the waters and receives undeniable confirmation that no mainstream politician in the US will stand up with even a politely raised voice. The overwhelming horrific and endless nature of the images has spurred a nascent tendency among putatively leftist humanists in the US to “look away” for their own mental health, lest they be reminded of the real, visceral outcome of the war of extermination we are all obliquely helping to wage.
This has been the distressing situation for nearly a year now, as the death toll climbs to 200,000 according to the Lancet (the official death toll has lingered at 30-40,000 for many months, certainly a significant undercount), nearly all preventable deaths and most of them women and children. At the onset of the invasion, Israelis were quick to argue that because rockets intermittently emerge from Palestinian territories, all Palestinians in the vicinity must be aiding and abetting the organization responsible for firing them, despite the easily-uncovered fact that most Gazans for example were too young to have voted in the last popular election. Ignoring these facts, the Netanyahu government argues that their military action was justified self-defense and necessary for the prevention of further violence, yet Hamas remains steadfastly in power and rockets continue to fall in Israel, and the possibility of a wider regional conflict with Iran and Hezbollah would endanger many millions of people. Israeli warmongers argue for a collective punishment of Gazans with a rote and performative justification one would expect from an aggressor who knows they will never be challenged and will never require further clarification or support, as if the Netanyahu government was a thoroughly spoiled child caught with their hand in the cookie jar, aware that they need only stammer out some obvious excuse to be forgiven immediately. Yet their logic, as I argued in the previous entry, applies to Israel wholly, who are in effect a nation of warfighters mobilized by their democratically-elected government to commit daily atrocities which they full-throatedly support (and would be culpable for even if they only carried out the orders with hesitation and a heavy heart).
One might read this essay from November and wonder whether it was too harsh on the Israelis, perhaps veering uncomfortably into anti-Semitic territory. The intervening year (in fact all years prior to the 2023 Hamas incursion into Israel) prove that the Israeli government has knowingly and systematically sought to eliminate Palestinians from the land they consider to be theirs, utilizing their settler army to invade Palestinian land and homes and stir up conflict which they respond to with military force, knowing such clashes will inevitably occur (a trick from the well-worn Manifest Destiny playbook). There has been no mitigating circumstance uncovered since 2023, and an endless supply of reasons to biliously dislike not only the Israeli government, but its citizenry as well.
Indeed, what has changed? Have the Israelis, thoroughly propagandized though they are, opened their eyes to the abhorrent suffering their government and their warfighters (who are for all intents and purposes them) are visiting upon a captive population who only occasionally fights back and whose actions have been overwhelmingly studiously peaceful and patient, all things considered? Not at all: just after October 7, almost all Israelis were in favor of the “military action” and over half wished it was more severe, and these numbers remain unmoved. Opposition to the genocide is effectively dead is Israel, with the few protesters brave enough to risk social alienation being brutally put down by Israeli police (another dual civilian/military role in essence) and conscientious objectors numbering, as far as available data indicates, no more than double digits. Incriminatingly for the average Israeli, social pressure to take part in the genocide is far more powerful a deterrent than the short prison sentence now required for “draft dodgers”:
He feared being called a “mishtamet”. A draft dodger. Someone who shrinks from their responsibility.
But at age 17, Jewish social worker Asaf Calderon made a fateful decision: not to participate in the mandatory military service required of nearly all Israeli citizens.
Instead, he pursued and was granted a medical exemption for mental health reasons. Still, his choice came with a cost.
A soft-spoken man with round glasses and a tender smile, Calderon, 34, noticed that, afterwards, his friends started to seem distant. Members of his family fell out of contact.
He realised his decision had left him a pariah in Israel, even among his loved ones. He eventually moved away to New York City.
“It doesn’t matter why you do it,” Calderon said of becoming a conscientious objector, someone who refuses to participate in military service on ethical or moral grounds. “You are going to get ostracised in a way.”
But the war in Gaza has amplified the pressures he and other conscientious objectors face. Since October 7, Israel has led a military campaign in the Palestinian enclave, with ground forces and aerial bombardment levelling entire neighbourhoods…
“The main thing that I’ve been told ever since the war started, by Israeli people who oppose me, is that I have lost my Israeli-ness. That I’m no longer Israeli,” Calderon told Al Jazeera.
In a perverse way, those Israelis are correct: genocide, apartheid, and colonial expansionism are indeed crucial to Israeli identity, which is a stirring indictment against Israeli identity. But are we not equivalently jingoist in the US? How were draft dodgers treated in Vietnam and does the popular disdain for their actions among most Americans not cast us as similarly homogenous warmongers who lent our consent to equivalently egregious and damaging post-9/11 wars in the Middle East?
What of the Israeli charge that Americans, having supported and facilitated the jingoism and wars of aggression following the September 11 attacks, are hypocrites for criticizing the Israeli nationalist fervor and wars of aggression which followed their own “September 11” (a common rhetorical comparison in the Israeli media, an inaccurate but still more apt image than the other popular reference, the Holocaust)? To begin with, this attack is a red herring to excuse Israel’s barbarity by leveling what amounts to an ad hominem against any American, who may well have criticized US wars at the time (this author did) and even might have acted in some way to attempt to thwart it. If a single such person makes the argument, the Israeli criticism of hypocrisy is rendered invalid. Additionally, America is not an ethnostate composed of conscripts and former conscripts. To be sure, every American who fought in any “war on terror” capacity would be culpable for their actions under any moral conception and should see the inside of a prison cell before any Israeli. Yet we are not all warfighters but instead passive observers and reluctant tax-paying participants, captives of an illegitimate government we are powerless to overthrow. We are still culpable for our passive participation, but not in a way which renders us warfighters and therefore valid targets, as is the case with Israelis who fail to actively conscientiously object or move out of Palestine for good. They make the choice to remain on stolen land; they make the choice to fight to oppress others and expand this stolen land with the use of indiscriminate bombing, torture, rape, and the deliberate targeting of women, children, civilians and journalists and aid workers (note the deliberate fire pattern in the first image):
Israeli destruction in Rafah. Are we to believe all of this was “terrorist” infrastructure?
In a similar vein to the above “glass houses” ad hominem highlighting US bellicosity, critics of Israel and Zionism are often offensively smeared by Israelis and their apologists with the “anti-Semitism” brush by pointing out that certain anti-Zionist arguments were occasionally utilized by actual anti-Semites, such as the (verifiably correct and widely common) accusation that the US government is co-opted to a disproportionate degree by Zionist interests such as AIPAC:
From Jake Johnson at Common Dreams:
The American Israel Public Affairs Committee, a powerful lobbying group widely known as AIPAC, has officially spent more than $100 million in the 2024 election cycle so far, pouring staggering sums into Democratic primary races in an effort to unseat progressive opponents of Israel's war on the Gaza Strip.
Citing new Federal Election Commission filings, Sludgereported Tuesday that AIPAC's political action committee had spent $44.8 million as of the end of last month, mostly on donations to political campaigns and party organizations. The United Democracy Project (UDP), AIPAC's super PAC, has spent $55.4 million so far, bringing AIPAC's total spending this cycle to just over $100 million—surpassing its reported spending target for 2024 races.
AIPAC money has already made a significant impact, helping a pair of pro-Israel Democrats defeat progressive Reps. Jamaal Bowman (D-N.Y.) and Cori Bush (D-Mo.)—two of Congress' most vocal critics of Israel's assault on Gaza—in recent primary contests.
"Supporting Palestinian rights is becoming so popular among American voters that pro-genocide groups have to spend over $100 million to hold on."
Sludge noted that UDP's financial support for Bowman's primary opponent, George Latimer, "set a record for spending by an outside group on a House election."
Zionist interests rely on dark money, underhanded rhetorical tactics, bullying, propaganda, and suppression of information because their own attempts at real arguments, insofar as they care to employ them, apply more aptly to them than to the opposition. Every accusation is an admission, and the accusation that all Palestinians are collectively liable when armed freedom fighters occasionally employ reactive violence applies doubly so to a population which has proven itself to be tolerant of any kind of atrocity. They are the Wehrmacht and ex-Wehrmacht of post-war Germany at best; at worst, they would be sentenced at Nuremberg for crimes against humanity.
There are no Israeli civilians, only willing and happy participants in the extirpation, immiseration, and ethnic cleansing of Palestinians in the service of religious and nationalistic fervor, and more prurient interests which might be explained by the billions of dollars gifted to Israel by the US, to be spent on US weapons, in the shabby, nakedly kleptocratic tradition of the Bush administration’s no-bid contracts for companies overseeing the disastrous wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. And business is good:
The world’s largest aerospace and defence companies are set to rake in record levels of cash over the next three years as they benefit from a surge in government orders for new weapons amid rising geopolitical tensions.
The leading 15 defence contractors are forecast to log free cash flow of $52bn in 2026, according to analysis by Vertical Research Partners for the Financial Times — almost double their combined cash flow at the end of 2021.
Five top US defence contractors are forecast to generate cash flow of $26bn by the end of 2026, more than double the amount in 2021. The figures exclude Boeing, given its recent problems and heavy weighting towards civil aerospace.
Even by their own justifications for the use of force, the Israelis have established beyond any shadow of a doubt that they are all a clear and present danger to those around them and will continue to be so until their violent, expansionist ethnostate is no longer propped up by fanatical Western interests.