In Israel, the silence is broken but many abroad are still deaf

New testimony from within Israel's army sheds light on the inhumane and illegal acts its soldiers carried out in Gaza last year. But, writes Chris Doyle, too many in the West remain deaf to the facts

Illustration by Pep Montserrat for The National

In all of Israel’s many wars on Gaza, there has never been a true military contest. Israeli forces always delivered a huge overwhelming attack pummelling this small strip of Mediterranean coastline. With each successive war, Israeli actions have been even harsher and more destructive.

Yet what is harder for Israel is to win the narrative, to translate the short-term hard power victory into a soft power result. Flattened homes and moonscape scenes do not make for a comfortable public relations exercise.

In the last seven-week operation that kicked off in July 2014, 18,000 homes were rendered uninhabitable and 2,200 Palestinians killed, most of whom were civilians.

In scale, it was more severe than any other. The Israeli military used 3,000 exploding shells back in 2009 during Operation Cast Lead. In 2014, they used 19,000, a six-fold increase. The sheer destructive firepower was overwhelming and whole neighbourhoods such as Shujaiya were levelled.

The full and final narrative of the events of the summer 2014 war is not yet written. However, a very damning and damaging publication has served to undermine the well-honed Israeli official discourse on “Operation Protective Edge”.

The Israeli NGO Breaking the Silence published this week a 237-page report with testimonies from nearly 70 soldiers who had participated in the Gaza war. A quarter of these are officers, including three majors. What unites them all was the belief something was wrong.

The testimonies are raw, compelling and distressing. They highlight the unclear and lenient rules of engagement including testimonies that soldiers were instructed to shoot at any threat if imminent or even if just suspected.

In the 2014 war, “most of our targets were random”, according to one testimony and echoed in others. Even a movement in a house, somebody passing a window hundreds of metres away could trigger a shelling.

The stories reveal a carefree attitude to targeting. “I personally asked my commander: ‘Where are we firing at?’ He told me: ‘Pick wherever you feel like it.’”

Another reflected: “The good and the bad get a bit mixed up, and your morals get a bit lost and you sort of lose it, and it also becomes a bit like a computer game, totally cool and real.”

Yet Israeli spokespeople were at the time insisting in international media that no army took more care not to hit civilians and civilian infrastructure. Now its own soldiers are telling a very different story.

Much was made by Israeli army spokespeople of how Israel gave warnings including by phone and airdropping leaflets as well as by “roof knocking”. This procedure is when they dropped a small missile onto the roof of a building to warn those inside to leave immediately. Yet testimonies undermine this, showing that the building would be bombed almost “immediately” some 30 seconds to a minute after, not giving people enough time to leave.

A new doctrine was in use that lays out a hierarchy of life, with Israeli civilians first, soldiers second, then Palestinian civilians and finally militants. If there was even a possibility of a threat to soldiers then action was authorised, whether or not civilians were or were not present. It is a zero risk strategy – for Israelis only, of course.

Yehuda Shaul, a co-founder of Breaking the Silence, told me that “the problem is not the soldiers. It is the rules, the doctrines. Who approved the rules of engagement?” For him “this was the assassination of international law and Israeli military doctrine”.

The evidence suggests that the Israeli armed forces have abandoned any attempt to make a distinction between military and civilian targets as they are compelled to do under international law.

Israeli officials and far right groups have attempted to smear and discredit the report, just as they tried with earlier ones.

They argue that the testimonies are anonymous, cannot be verified and that Breaking the Silence refused to engage with the Israeli authorities.

Mr Shaul is clear. “It is just a lie. We actually wrote a letter to the Chief of Staff on March 23. We asked for a meeting. We are still waiting to schedule a meeting.” Perhaps most bizarre of all was when a Likud member of the Knesset gave false testimony to Breaking the Silence under an assumed name hoping that if they published it, that he could then smash their credibility. His story did not check out as accurate and he was outed by the group in the Israeli media.

In Israel, Breaking the Silence aims to burst the social and cultural barriers to an honest debate about service in the Israeli armed forces. There is a silence to be broken.

Internationally there is another story. There is not silence about Israeli actions but actually a firestorm of noise and outrage among the global public, even in the United States.

The issue is not how to break the silence but how to cut through the noise.

Most importantly it is how to break the deafness – the deafness of the political elites who stubbornly refuse to hold Israel to account for its actions, who look the other way and, worse, continue to arm it for future atrocities.

Once again, despite credible testimonies about crimes in Gaza, Israel will not be held to account.

Its own investigations are neither transparent nor credible. B’tselem, the Israeli human rights group, are convinced on past experience there would be a “whitewash”.

The UN Human Rights Council inquiry has been delayed and although the report may be excellent, the institution’s record on human rights is poor. The messenger will be shot down. The UN Secretary-General’s report into attacks on and from UN installations also knocked gaping holes in the Israeli narrative but, as in 2009, there will be no action.

So while Israel holds Hamas to account for its criminal shelling of Israeli civilians by punishing all of Gaza, nobody is protecting Palestinian civilians.

The end result is that when Israel and Hamas square up once again, as they certainly will, the Israeli commanders will still be using these devastating illegal doctrines with zero fear of any consequences. As one soldier reflected: “If you shoot someone in Gaza, it’s cool, no big deal.”

Chris Doyle is director of the London-based Council for Arab-British Understanding