Ben Buckman.net

From the NY Times and UK Times (and many more sources no doubt) come stories about IDF atrocities in Gaza. And my response is: well, duh. Watch Waltz with Bashir and say that the Israeli army is immaculate. Watch any war documentary and say that any military force fighting in a civilian population doesn't commit atrocities. It's the nature of the thing: put a bunch of kids with big guns in a hostile zone where other kids with big guns are trying to kill them, and they're going to do fucked up things. Waltz depicts it perfectly: they land on the beach in Lebanon and start shooting wildly at everything that movies. A car with a family drives up, it's blasted to smithereens. Look at all the US soldiers returning from Iraq with PTSD and say with a straight face that war by its nature does not involve cold-blooded murder of innocents. Fallujah didn't make the US Marine Corps evil. Gaza doesn't make the IDF evil. But every war proves again that war is a fucked-up endeavor from the get-go.

What bothers me about Israeli advocates - be they in the Israeli government, the Israeli embassies on twitter, the kids trained in AIPAC seminars, the kids who don't know any better - is this failure to acknowledge, or willful ignorance, of the human cost of military policy. Gaza 2008 was a brilliantly executed engagement. They destroyed thousands of enemy objectives at minimal cost to the invading force. Bravo. Now acknowledge that they killed babies and blew up sleeping families to do that. And acknowledge that really, really, if terrorism is evil because it kills innocents, then the line between terrorism and war is really not a line but a big blob of bloody gray, and defending yourself against insanity makes you insane yourself. There is no virtue in war. That's the dilemma Israel faces every day. Make of that what you will.