What have we become?
JVL Introduction
Faced with the unspeakable cruelty IDF soldiers have meted out to Palestinians, we can lose sight of how brutalised these soldiers are too.
Testimonies posted below, like those assembled on a regular basis by Breaking the Silence, are important evidence substantiating the world’s criticisms of the savagery we are witnessing but all too often dismissed by IDF spokespeople as “hearsay” and slanders on “the most moral army in the world”.
Here soldiers speak out about what they have witnessed – or done.
One soldier says simply: “There’s no forgiving what I’ve done. No atonement.”
As the same author, Tom Levinson, reported a few weeks ago, the IDF is under severe pressure suffering from serious shortages of personnel to do its bidding. It has been demanding that reservists suffering from psychological injury report for duty and threatening those who don’t with arrest.
There is no satisfaction to be gained in seeing the army chew up its own, just dread at the moral degradation that war and genocide has brought to its perpetrators.
And while the IDF may be moving towards some recognition of the damage it is inflicting on its own soldiers there is none of the wider crimes against humanity it continues to commit and the human cost the Palestinians are forced to bear.
RK
This article was originally published by Haaretz on Fri 17 Apr 2026. Read the original here.
'I Felt I Was a Monster': IDF Soldiers Talk About the 'Moral Injury' – and the Silence
Some of them killed civilians in Gaza; others just looked on, or witnessed abuse and cover-ups in the name of revenge. Now they’re trying to cope with something a bit different than PTSD
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Facing the ghastly deeds one has done is only the start of the process in redeeming one’s soul. These soldiers haven’t been helped to take the next steps – and they ought to have been.
They can’t heal until they do their best to undo the harms they’ve done their victims, their victims’ families and / or similarly wronged victims whom they can assist and apologise to. The “restorative justice” approach works just as well for soldiers who’ve committed war crimes as for ordinary murderers.
There’s nothing in the Haaretz article that shows these soldiers were ready to accept their personal responsibility for undoing whatever harms they could undo or prevent from happening in the future. Did any of them join organisations like Standing Together (trying to protect Palestinians from settler violence and similar wrongs)? Did any of them join the protests in Israeli cities against the IDF’s killing of children?
There’s nothing in their accounts of the mental health treatment they received that shows the medical staff understood the true evil of what these soldiers had done – and were prepared to help them heal their lives by designing, facilitating and providing support through the programmes of “reparations” they could commit themselves to.
Sickening and heartbreaking to read. My fear is that we will stop being shocked and become complacent. God help us….
The Israeli Military does not even care about its own soldiers pushing them to return to active duty while awaiting assessment, for example. See, eg https://archive.md/BERVC
Of course in many ways it is too late after the terrible deeds are done but more likely to be done again if these soldiers’ voices are silenced.
Israel have damaged a whole generation of young people by insisting they take part in a bloodbath. Lets hope those damaged youngsters now use their energy to get rid of Netanyahu and his killing crew.
“Lets hope those damaged youngsters now use their energy to get rid of Netanyahu and his killing crew”
Yeh, because it’s just him, not Zionism, that’s the problem. Hopefully those colonizers will use their energy to leave Palestine.