by Yonatan Biomfeld, Breaking the Silence
How does a dead 13 year old girl fit with an acquitted Captain and a moral army? How does it happen that time and time again the IDF emerges out of the fogginess of its "military operations" and explains to us all what morality is?
It is unclear why "the acquittal of Captain R. indicates the morality of the IDF", as one Brigadier General was quoted claiming. We have here a curious reasoning, for how does a dead 13 year old girl fit with an acquitted Captain and a moral army? How does it happen that time and time again the IDF emerges out of the fogginess of its "military operations" and explains to us all what morality is?
Too little and too late we discover that the IDF operates in our name according to two moral codes – the first is fit for air-conditioned neon-lit rooms, and the other fits the reality of the operational world. Well, this is a problem. Moral codes cannot be tailored to fit reality. They are kept in test tubes. That is why they stay clean and pure, and that is why we get dirty trying to stay within the borders of sane red lines. The IDF failed at the moment it gave up its independent morality, and began bending and tailoring its moral codes to different areas, and to random open fire orders.
And 13 year old girl was killed, and the judges thought it appropriate to tell us that "the media should recognize its own limits, especially when it comes to military operations, which necessitates thorough understanding, and professional knowledge that journalists do not always possess." Honorable court – the media was not interested in operational questions, but in moral ones, and when it comes to morality the army does not have a monopoly; on the contrary.
The IDF whitewashes and bleaches terms like "kill verification", "neutralizing a threat", "extermination zone", and "unlawful use of weapon", while we, citizens, are expected to nod in approval and be proud. But proud in what exactly? Proud that our soldiers operated like robots? That they did not wait for certain identification to put bullet holes in a little girl? Or perhaps we are meant to be proud of the Captain who followed procedures?
Captain R. claimed in court, "I didn't think of anything except of my duty to push back the terrorists, push back the treat, and make sure that the contact line is not broken, as it had happened in Morag." Every word is carved in stone. Except there were no terrorists, no threat, and no contact line that was about to be broken. We are left with a dead 13 year old girl, and an acquitted Captain. What does that have to do with morality? Captain R. was acquitted. The IDF and Israeli society as a whole are guilty.
We are guilty of allowing every control and inspection system – military or civilian – to collapse in front of our very eyes. Once again we have judges that tell us that the military police investigations are unprofessional and that they have become a sad joke. But mostly and above all we are all guilty of sending generations of youngsters to a moral twilight zone, while not really feeling like knowing what that means. We have invented a sophisticated word-whitewasher to hide all that was uncomfortable for us to hear. Instead of talking about "extermination zones" and "a 13 year old girl that was killed in the name of the state of Israel" we talked about "exceptional cases" and unlawful use of weapon". The military judges today have acquitted the recent exceptional case, but we must not think that this exempts us from the need to make the real discussion.
Yonnah Biomfeld, of the founders of "Breaking the Silence"
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