Taking Responsibility
According to Ha’aretz, the IDF is investigating 600 suspected cases of abuse of Palestinians since September 2000.
I have always been immensely frustrated by claims that Israeli soldiers abuse Palestinians indescriminately. While I have no doubt that it occurs, the IDF has and will hold soldiers accountable for any crimes they commit. These are the actions of a morally responsible nation.
Having said that, the number 600– including 88 shooting deaths and 217 other violent offenses– is simply appalling. I hope that the IDF takes the next step and makes the institutional reforms necessary to curb abuse.
take into consideration that most cases arent investigated at all, and out of the 600, most wont be convicted probably.
Not every shooting requires investigation, because not every shooting is illegitimate. And if most of the 600 aren’t convicted, than I doubt that most are guilty. No government is perfect, but it seems that people reserve a special cynicism for Israel– I see no justification for it.
i am not talking about every shooting. i am talking about hundreds and hundreds of minors who were killed, tens of thousands injoured.
If a minor is shooting at soldiers, or if militants are using minors for cover, the blame does not rest on the IDF for protecting its forces. The blame rests on the people who deliberately put those minors in danger. They are child abusers, nothing less.
So spouting statistics like that is pretty much meaningless. If you go case by case, I believe that you will see that generally the IDF is taking responsibility when a soldier acts inappropriately and is otherwise using force when it is deemed necessary. There is no IDF sponsored campaign to kill off Palestinian kids– that’s just silly talk.
“If a minor is shooting at soldiers, or if militants are using minors for cover, the blame does not rest on the IDF for protecting its forces. The blame rests on the people who deliberately put those minors in danger. They are child abusers, nothing less. ”
do u have facts to base this claim?
http://www.4law.co.il/te1.htm>This site calims that:
Since the beginning of the violence in 2000, 29 suicide attacks were carried out by youth under the age of 18.
Since May 2001, 22 shootings attacks and attacks using explosive devices were carried out by youth under the age of 18.
Since the beginning of 2001, more than 40 youth under the age of 18 were involved in attempted suicide bombings that were thwarted (of them, three during 2004).
(I’m not sure of the source for these statistics– but there are other articles on the site reprinted from legit new sources)
Who can forget the case of the near suicide attack by a slightly mentally disabled Palestinian youth last spring or the 17 year old Palestinian girl who blew up an Israel girl the same age in a supermarket a couple years back. How can you say that this is not exploitation?
From what I understand (I did not see it), the HBO doc Death in Gaza has some shocking confessionals by militants who claim not to care if a boy dies because there will always be another one to take his place.
even if your statistics are accurate, they in no way explain or justify the following statisics:
http://www.btselem.org
damn the website is down or something. later.
The fact that Palestinians kids have been killed does not automatically mean that the IDF is trying to kill kids on purpose. There is no evidence of that, and again, it’s silly talk.
However, there is evidence that the IDF is concerned when individual soldiers act contrary to IDF regulations (see original post). Furthermore, there is evidence that these children are being put in danger by the Palestinians themselves– who are using them for cover or involving them directly in the violence.
So yes, your B’tselem stats can be explained. Justified? that’s probably subjective, but this is clearly not a lawless blood-thirsty army we’re talking about.
There is more info on the abuse of Palestinian children by militants here, http://www.jcpa.org/jl/vp441.htm“>here, and here. Note the articles discussing use of children as human shields.
children as human shileds – used by IDF too. plenty of reports on that.
the issue is of responsibility- soldiers dont get exact orders – thus soldiers are persecuted while higher ranks are exempted from such scrutiny.
from btselem:
“2,683 Palestinians were killed by Israeli security forces in the Occupied Territories, of whom 533 were minors under the age of 18.”
“Ages of the minors killed: One hundred and one minors were age 17, one hundred and eight were age 16, seventy five were age 15, seventy three were age 14, forty seven were age 13, twenty seven age 12, eighteen were age 11, twenty one were age 10, eleven were age 9, ten were age 8, eight were age 7, seven were age 6, three were age 5, six were age 4, five were age 3, six were two years old, four were one year old babies, one was an 11 month old baby girl, one was a 6 month old baby girl and one was a four month old baby girl.”
“At least 149 of the Palestinians killed were extrajudicially executed by Israel… 100 additional Palestinians were killed, 90 of them minors.”
[from assasinations! 100 not including those 149 people targeted!]
i’ve been hesitant to post this, because it’s really long– but i think it’s an important point that’s been completely missed in the media:
suicide bombers are suicidal. to exploit suicidal people is criminal.
imagine this scenario: in an effort to stop the gross over-consumption of resources by americans, greenpeace activists brainwash anorexics and bulimics to blow themselves up in supermarkets and all-you-can-eat chains nationwide (the Red Lobster indeed).
or perhaps this makes more sense: angry scientists, who feel that their research is not adequately funded by the government, convince old people suffering from colon cancer and skin cancer, young women with terminal breast and ovarian cancer, men with prostate cancer, and children dying from leukemia to explode themselves in hospitals across the country– with the hope that, in the future, more money will be granted to labs researching a cure for cancer.
that’s pretty much what it’s like when politicians and religious cult leaders condone and encourage suicide bombing in israel, madrid, new york, baghdad, or anywhere else in the world.
suicide is the result of a very painful, severe mental illness. i know about suicide– both as a neurobiologist (who understands the brain chemistry behind this biological dysfunction) and as the partner of a young man who died from suicide last year. suicide is a response to disease. it is similar to the weakness and ultimate death experienced at the end of a cancer patient’s life, or at the end of life for someone suffering with bulimia.
we must recognize suicide bombing as the extreme and ugly exploitation of very sick young men and women. 90% of those who die from suicide have a diagnosable mental disease*. young men are particularly vulnerable to suicide, for biochemical and hormonal reasons. for every young woman who dies from suicide, 7 young men will die by this cause**.
to abuse these young men and women by exploiting their pain and dysfunction is monstrous. to glorify death from the disorder that these people suffer is animal. promises of money, a comfortable afterlife, or fame to a sick young man experiencing emotional and mental distortion are barbaric. think of the young kid dying from leukemia, being taught that she should explode herself in the local hospital gift shop or emergency room, so that other people like her can be saved some day– and then maybe you see can how ugly this phenomenon is.
but it is also ugly to condemn suicide bombers as amoral, as criminals. these people are exploited. they are mentally ill and suffering from a biological disorder. and since mental illness is genetic and heritable, the families of suicide bombers are also likely to be susceptible to suicide and severe depression. the solution to terrorism is not to punish would-be suicide bombers or harm their families.
the solution to terrorism is to educate people about suicidality. the solution is to disempower those animals who would encourage the death of very disabled, unhealthy men by suicide. in america, we have a ban on physician-assisted suicide, because we understand that people who are suffering from disease, who seek a quick death to end their pain, may tomorrow feel some ease, some restoration from the diseased state, that allows them to continue living.
we need to stop the vicious power brokers in the middle east and elsewhere who condone the suicides of the suffering. it is unethical to stand by and watch the exploitation of the sick and dysfunctional. such exploitation should be considered a human rights violation. yet it is also cruel to focus all blame for terrorist attacks on the suicidal men and women who carry out these attacks. yes, they do make the choice to kill and to die. but they are not the pernicious warriors of an evil cause, as misinformed pundits would have you believe. rather, they are distraught and disabled people who are mistreated and abused by those seeking power.
focusing our blame on terrorists who abuse the mentally ill will require educating the world community about suicide and suicide prevention. it will require our understanding suicide bombers as a public health problem.
Here’s a good place to learn more:
http://www.who.int/mental_health/prevention/suicide/
please forgive me for the length of the posting.
*NIH/NIMH 2004
** US Surgeon General
Asaf– 100% of Israeli civillians killed in this intifadah were killed “extrajudiciously.”
Please let go of the statistics… they lack context and meaning. (though I don’t really see you doing that, seeing as you’re completely mesmerized by them…)
Asaf, since you brought up the detailed statistics, I suggest a little exercise – plot the distribution of deaths by age, and compare it to the same graph for Israeli minors. For the latter, you see a more-or-less even distribution across all ages (there’s a increase at 14, which is mostly due to the Dolphinarium bombing), which is what you’d expect from indiscriminant attacks. For the Palestinians, OTOH, there’s a sharp increase in deaths at about 12-13; most of the deaths are above 14 (I plotted the data upt to 17). To me, that suggests that many of them were killed by getting onvolved in the violence, including being used as shields by “militants”.
“To me, that suggests that many of them were killed by getting onvolved in the violence, including being used as shields by “militants”.”
good work with the statistics, but your conclusion are a bit weird – what about the possibility that palestinian civilians are exposed to military attacks much more than israeli ones? considering the fact that most israelis dont live under a military regime, this makes a lot of sense.
Only half the Israeli’s killed were civilians – the majority were Israeli military personnel. This is not intended to belittle all those useless and tragic deaths. But reading Jewish apologists for Israel’s war crimes, you would think that far more Israeli civilians were killed and are under attack, while Palestinian children and civilians who die somewhow “deserve” what they g. This is in fact a war against a civilian population – but as Asaf points out, it is Israel’s war against the Palestinian civilian population,
The claim that Palestinians use children as human shields ignores the fact that the Israeli army is bringing the war inside Palestinian civilian terriitory. One small example of how this works and how this leads to civilian Palestinian deaths: the army announces a temporary lifting of a curfew. Palestinians rush to market to buy food having been cooped up in homes for days under a military siege. The army decides to end curfew early without informing Palestinians and starts shooting tank shells into a Palestinians shopping crowd. A couple of civilians die. This is an actual event that happened on more than one occassion.
The army says: “We were enforcing the curfew” But the very framework of this act is an act of state terror no different than a suicide bombing in terms of its moral implications – it is the use of violence against civilian populations to achieve a political aim.
Indeed the Hamas justifies its terror by claiming that the Israelis brought terror to the Palestinian civilians first (Baruch Goldstein’s act of terror preceded all Hamas suicide bombings). Violence breeds more violence as both sides use the violence to justify their own immoral acts.
One last point. If you are horrified by children as human shields, how can you justify the Jewish parents who raise their kids in such dangerous places as Gaza and Hebron and who use their families as a tool to blackmail the Israeli army into continuing the occupation?
I, for one, am not in favor of raising your Jewish kids in Gaza or Hebron. Just wanted to clarify that– I don’t want to respond to the rest of your post, because your logic is insane. I will say this– if Israel needs to enter Palestinian territories in order to secure its citizens, I consider that a legitimate action. We tried to avoid that during the Oslo years, and it didn’t work. But keeping the Palestinians out of Israel proper in conjunction with actively prosecuting a war on those responsible for planning and executing attacks on Israeli civilians has brought much greater security to Israelis over the past months, and you need a military to do that.
“if Israel needs to enter Palestinian territories in order to secure its citizens, I consider that a legitimate action.”
thats a big fucking if. what about a separation wall on the green line separating between jews and arabs instead of invading towns and bombarding crowded cities? oh wait, we cant do that because israel’s policy in the last 37 years was to build settlements in the west bank. damn where is the security in that?
There are settlements we need to leave and settlements we need to keep, at least for now. Maybe it was a mistake to build them 37 years ago, but 20/20 hindsight isn’t so helpful.
The hilltoppers are a danger to our security and a waste of our resources. But at this point, settlements like Ma’aleh Adumim and Efrat (which has a long pre-48 history) need to be protected– evacuating them leaves us with no bargaining power, signals weakness to the Pals and other Arab states and also might spark a civil war (which would be bad).
As far as the “big fucking if,” it really isn’t. There are people in the Palestinian territories who are plotting attacks against Israeli civilians. It is Israel’s duty to seek them out and do everything possible to stop them. Pretty simple.
“There are settlements we need to leave and settlements we need to keep, at least for now. Maybe it was a mistake to build them 37 years ago, but 20/20 hindsight isn’t so helpful.”
Who’s talking about hindsight? Sharon is still building settlements in the west bank. nothing changed.
“The hilltoppers are a danger to our security and a waste of our resources. But at this point, settlements like Ma’aleh Adumim and Efrat (which has a long pre-48 history) need to be protected– evacuating them leaves us with no bargaining power, signals weakness to the Pals and other Arab states and also might spark a civil war (which would be bad).”
bargaining power? is the whole point for us to have a normal border, not bargaining power (very cynical term for a city with human beings in it, if u ask me). if returning to the green line signals weakness, i guess we should be contuining to build settlements not evacuate them. this line has been repeated so many times in order to continue the settlement project.
“As far as the “big fucking if,” it really isn’t. There are people in the Palestinian territories who are plotting attacks against Israeli civilians. It is Israel’s duty to seek them out and do everything possible to stop them. Pretty simple.”
true, but its kinda hard to do that when u cant even build a wall to secure your people because there are palestinians to the west of it. if israel gives a shit about the lives of its citizens, it must evacuate all settlements (whoever wants to stay in the new state is welcome) immediately.
if israel is not able to do so, the next option is working toward a long term solution, probably bi-nationalist democratic state. if thats what you want, so be it. the other option is continuing the current undemocratic regime beyond the green line.