“Moral Responsibility”, Israel’s Empty Words
Prof. As’ad Abdul Rahman
In the midst of the Israeli brutal carnage, which mostly targeted civilians in Gaza, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu declared that the army of Israel is “an army that strictly follows a very high standard of moral conduct and absolutely has no intention of harming any innocent human being”!! Such empty words could not hide facts on the ground with the world watching on TV stations, the horrendous blood-drenched images of the war, nor could Netanyahu hide that his army vented its revenge upon women and little children in frustration over its failure to face Palestinian fighters on the grounds of Gaza. The very low immoral conduct of the Israeli army in the battlefield of Gaza, and its impotent attempts “to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat” which utterly failed, were also witnessed by the whole world for (51) days in a row
A clear hint of Israel’s moral defeat came from one of its soldiers, Yuli Novak, a former air force officer who wrote in the Guardian that “Israeli military pilots no longer care about anything while dropping hundreds of tons of bombs on the heads of civilians in Gaza. In the past, the Israeli army tried to follow a moral conduct, but it is no longer the case anymore. And the past Israeli popular opposition to the army bombing civilian homes in Gaza has vanished now along with the red lines of a strict moral conduct.”
In Haaretz, Amira Hass sarcastically wrote that “If victory is measured by the number of Palestinians killed, then the mighty Israeli army has attained a great victory by killing 2170 and wounding and maiming 20 thousand Palestinians of whom 80% were mere civilians.” She said “All (such) victories are leading to our moral downfall which is really a moral defeat of a society that failed to meet a high moral standard in its conduct and we shall be haunted for years to come by our moral defeat.”
A great number of articles, especially in Britain and the United States severely criticized the Israeli military conduct in the war against Gaza. The abhorrence of the western news media reached its apex when little Palestinian children playing football in front of a hotel on the shore of Gaza filled with western journalists were instantly turned into shards of charcoal by Israeli rockets consisting of unconventional explosives barred by international law. The British Guardian wrote saying that “wars kill people including teachers in their classes, nurses in their hospitals and farmers in their fields, but when children become a target to be terminated by rockets, it becomes the lowest inhumane and immoral conduct ever committed.” The Daily Telegraph said “the so-called international community is no more than a bunch of silly actors competing against each other while Gaza is being consumed by tons of explosives.” The Economist saying that Israel is losing Europe, when it claims that it is “fighting terrorism in response to Hamas rockets and is trying to destroy tunnels used by Palestinian fighters, but the ones who are being targeted and having to pay the highest price during the Israeli onslaught are the civilians and the infrastructure of Gaza.”
Robert Fisk commented in the Independent on the Western indifference towards the Israeli crimes in Gaza, saying that “the number of civilians killed in Gaza is much greater than the civilians perished in the downed Malaysian plane in the Ukraine”. He said “the western outrage displayed over the loss of life in the Ukraine covered the whole western media, but the carnage in Gaza was met with silence in comparison.”
The immoral conduct of the Israeli military and the ruling right wing political parties has dragged down with it the vast majority of Israeli Jews. The Israeli community’s shift towards the religious far right is manifesting extreme abhorrence of anything pertaining to peace and peaceful co-existence with the Palestinians. Such a shift coupled with an egotistical sense of superiority, usually negates all who are outside its religious doctrine and ethnicity. In such a case, international law and universal human rights become empty words. Egotistical superiority pertaining to race or religion always employs brute force to attain its selfish aims of destructive evil and may generate an equally or similar act from the other opposing side of the equation. The superiority complex, usually a mask for an acute inferiority complex, showing itself here in the form of “The Chosen People of God” has drawn an opposing toxic waste on the Arab side as in the beastly example of ISIS in Iraq and Syria which is now infecting other countries around the world with its deadly virus.
Self serving, not God serving, religious doctrines ignite conflicts that are fought till death because they negate any compromise. The Palestinian/Israeli conflict has almost turned into a religious conflict that is beyond any peaceful resolution. According to many Israelis of conscience: “Israel is now being ruled by a clique who is religious and very tyrannical whose agenda is to negate any Palestinian presence in historical Palestine.” If no drastic action is taken now by the world community to stop and end the colonial occupation in Palestine, then the world must get ready to bid farewell to Israel and many existing Arab regimes and prepare to welcome ISIS and its toxic waste as the new reality ruling the Middle East.
