Amidst a flurry of recent reports reaffirming Israeli criminality in Gaza, a seemingly marginal footnote to the atrocities: Israeli soldiers were caught making and wearing T-shirts that mock and glorify atrocities against Palestinian women and children.
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The T-shirts came to light just after an Israeli military college published soldiers’ accounts of the systematic murder of civilians and widespread crime and vandalism during the recent Gaza aggression. The publication came on the heels of a separate U.N. report accusing the Israeli military of systematic war crimes, including the deliberate targeting of civilians and the use of children as human shields for Israeli soldiers.
One solder’s account tells of a sniper killing a mother and children at close range after troops had told them to leave their home. In another case, a commander ordered troops to kill an elderly woman walking down a road, even though she was easily identifiable and clearly not a threat.
An infantry squad leader described what the facts lay bare: “The climate in general … I don’t know how to describe it. … The lives of Palestinians, let’s say, are much, much less important than the lives of our soldiers.”
Factual evidence has shown Israeli crimes in the course of the offensive to be far worse than imagined. The Gaza operation was an abject slaughter, fueled by imperial ambition and naked racism, stoked by religious fanaticism, carried out in direct violation of all the conventions of war and even basic humanity.
In a growing trend, the soldiers’ testimonies describe direct intervention by military and non-military rabbis, who circulated pamphlets describing the assault in religious terminology.
“All the articles had one clear message,” one soldier said. “We are the people of Israel, we arrived in the country almost by miracle, now we need to fight to uproot the gentiles who interfere with re-conquering the Holy Land.”
“Many soldiers’ feelings were that this was a war of religion,” he added. And indeed, the Israeli state has, throughout its entire existence, aggressively promoted the idea that the Jewish religion is inseparable from Zionism. Progressive Jewish people have soundly rejected this premise.
The U.N. investigation uncovered nearly identical accounts of war crimes. The nine U.N. investigators included experts on health, food, housing, education and violence against women. Their descriptions are horrifying.
In one such incident, Israeli soldiers shot a father after ordering him out of his house and then opened fire into the room where the rest of the family was sheltering, wounding the mother and three brothers and killing a fourth. In another, Israeli soldiers forced an 11-year-old boy to walk in front of them for several hours as they moved through a town—even after they had been shot at.
According to Radhika Coomaraswamy, the U.N. secretary general’s special representative for children and armed conflict, “Civilian targets, particularly homes and their occupants, appear to have taken the brunt of the attacks, but schools and medical facilities have also been hit.”
The reports to the U.N. Human Rights Council also called for an urgent end to Israeli restrictions on humanitarian supplies to Gaza and a full international investigation into the conflict.
Zionism is colonial racism
Israel is a colonial settler state. Its very basis is plunder and terror. The indefensible crimes that every settler state commits against the indigenous population demand an operative racism: an existential rationalization. This was true of both the apartheid regime in South Africa and in the U.S. wars of white settlement.
To illustrate this point in the context of Gaza, let us briefly touch upon the matter of casualties.
The Palestinian Center for Human Rights says 1,417 Palestinians were killed, of whom no more than 236 were combatants. The PCHR is on the ground in Gaza and has released a comprehensive list of the names and ages of every single person killed.
The Israeli military says 1,166 Palestinians were killed, and all but 295 were combatants. The Israeli military says it has a list but will not release or publish it.
Given the widely publicized and thoroughly documented charges of abuse aimed at the Israeli military, what possible explanation could it have for not releasing its own documentation? The only possible explanation is deception. The Israelis are lying.
Let us look more closely at the detailed numbers provided by the PCHR.
Of the 1,417 Palestinians killed in the massacre, 926 were civilians, including 313 children and 115 women; 255 were non-combatant police officers; 236 were combatants, representing just 16.7 percent of the total deaths.
On the other hand, 13 Israelis were killed, with a total of three non-combatants. Four Israelis were killed by friendly fire.
The colonial nature of the Israeli state, too, puts the issue of civilians and combatants under a different light. Israeli soldiers are charged with carrying out the military component of an illegal and racist occupation; Palestinian fighters are engaged in a struggle for the right of self-determination.
U.S. imperialists pull strings behind the scenes
The disproportionate brutality of the Israeli forces dwarfs even the worst atrocities carried out against Native Americans during settlement of the western United States. Looking at these figures, one must conclude that the defenders of the massacre thus consider an Israeli life to be literally hundreds of times more precious than a Palestinian life. Is that not the very definition of colonial racism?
In point of fact, the T-shirts are so chilling not because they are “tasteless” but because they are a true account of the massacre. According to every verifiable detail, they are almost a form of documentary. They are the shocking illustrations of the written accounts of the Israeli military’s atrocities.
For all this, the Israeli perpetrators of the Gaza massacre surely must be charged with war crimes and crimes against humanity. But any such charges will be meaningless if they do not include the patrons of the Israeli war machine who sit in the Pentagon.
The F-16 fighter jets and Apache helicopters that rained down thousands of tons of bombs and missiles on Gaza are made and supplied by the U.S. military-industrial complex. Israel is the largest recipient of U.S. aid in the world, taking in more than $15 million a day. It is inconceivable that the Gaza massacre could have taken place without the explicit consent of the U.S. government, which considers Israel an extension of U.S. power into the resource-rich Middle East.
The Gaza atrocities, now fully documented and verified, are horrifying in scale but hardly an aberration. Colonial settlement subsists on racist hatred, and violence is in its genes. The brazen savagery of the Gaza massacre cannot be ignored. Every person of conscience must demand the arrest and prosecution of U.S. and Israeli war criminals.
