The viral atrocities posted by Israeli soldiers
JVL Introduction
In this war of retribution, says cultural anthropologist Sophia Goodfriend, destruction is the point.
In a sobering discussion Goodfriend shows how photography has served to trivialize the atrocities of war over the last 75 years.
But she now detects a change of tone. Israeli soldiers in the past were supposed to “shoot and cry”. No longer.
“They are shooting and dancing, shooting and grilling, shooting and praying, or just shooting and mutilating. Soldiers post TikTok reels from the frontlines filled with laughter, celebratory songs, prayers, and inspirational messages. Prominent politicians and thousands of regular users respond with exclamation points and flame emojis in widespread demonstrations of support.”
These images are widely accessible which suggests that the view that most Israelis have no idea of the havoc being wrought in Gaza may be well wide of the mark.
In the long term this war may bring economic catastrophe, pariah status internationally, and rampant insecurity. Change may come from it.
But for now, fears Goodfriend, “Nowhere in these images is a viable political future to be seen for anyone in the region.”
RK
This article was originally published by Sapiens on Wed 20 Mar 2024. Read the original here.
The viral atrocities posted by Israeli soldiers
Tracing 75 years of Israeli war photography, an anthropologist explains how images that reframe disproportionate violence as proof of victory have intensified in the war on Gaza that erupted in 2023.
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I have now seen several articles on here, repeating the claims of “Hamas militants …. massacred around 1,200 Israelis …. on October 7, 2023” ~ with no introductory comment that this is a hasbara figure.
Even Haavetz has debunked this. Whilst no cumulative figure is agreed about how many of the 1,200 were killed by IOF and Israeli security forces, it is known that some kibbutzim, partygoers escaping and/or hostages on the way back to Gaza in cars, were killed by tank shells and Apache helicopter fire.
I would have expected JVL commentary on this.
JVL responds
You are of course right on this point and we could have taken it up here. But it isn’t central to the argument of this article and we can’t comment on or correct everything questionable in every article we repost.
On the issue of how many were killed, we have carried a number of articles including a repost of the very recent What happened on October 7th…, Norman Finkelstein’s critical comments on a recent UN Mission report in Evidence -v- propaganda; sexual violence on October 7th or even Wartime propaganda often creates or exaggerates stories of atrocities. We could perhaps have more consistently queried the Israeli hasbara figures and indeed overall portryal of the event. RK
One of the most chilling passages I’ve ever read (in “The Black Earth” I think) was an extract from an ordinary Wehrmacht soldier’s letter written to his wife. The soldier wrote that he’d found it difficult to shoot the first baby in its mother’s arms – his bullets shredded it – but now he found it easier. The soldier’s moral sense had been wholly corrupted, even though he was probably not a bad person to start with. He in his turn through his letters home was corrupting the moral sense of his wife and family.
I think when societies reach the levels of depravity we saw in Nazi Germany, Cambodia and Israel,-the only way for them to regain their humanity is with the help of an externally imposed judicial process the powerful guilty can’t evade.
We need Nuremburg style prosecutions of all those guilty of the horrors in Gaza, the West Bank and Jerusalem. We also need IJC and ICC prosecutions of all the foreign and home-grown enablers of those horrors – the politicians, the suppliers of arms and the lobbyists / funders facilitating criminal actions.
Justice should be timely. I cling to the (vain?) hope there’ll be speedy arrests of the alleged leading wrongdoers and that the subsequent trials and long prison sentences will renew everyone’s sense of what is right and wrong as well as punish the guilty.
These descriptions remind me of those of Russian soldiers when they occupied towns in Ukraine (this was in the early part of the invasion, before they had to reduce a place to rubble before they could take it over). The double standards adopted by the West in the two cases, Russia and Israel, could not be starker. In fairness, the same double standard is applied in reverse by Putin’s propagandists, who deplore what is happening in Gaza while ignoring Russian war crimes in Ukraine.
I’d like to add a recommendation to a brilliant oral history: ‘Grassroots Fascism, the war experience of the Japanese people’ by Yoshimi Yoshiaki . Absolutely groundbreaking in 1987 and only translated into English in 2015, this showed from the letters of Japanese soldiers how at first they pitied the starving Chinese populations they had invaded. But when the Chinese started fighting back, and when looting became so easy and corrupting, those same soldiers found themselves committing atrocities and genocide… After the end of WW2 came a long silence until Yoshiaki’s researches broke it. He is still alive and very eminent. It is good to have these cross-cultural comparisons. Although they prompt despair about the human race, they prevent us from thinking that everything to do with Jews is unique, timeless and insoluble.