IDF soldiers are given strict orders in terms of combat procedures as per IDF moral code; the IDF tells them when it is appropriate risk their lives, to save others, and to shoot. The details are numerous, but the basic outline is as follows:

IDF soldiers have three priorities in combat, and they are listed here in order of priority (all quotes in italics are taken directly from the IDF Moral Code):

1. Accomplish the mission

"The IDF soldiers view their service in the IDF as a mission; They will be ready to give their all in order to defend the state, its citizens and residents."

2. Protect oneself and comrades

"The IDF servicemen and women will act out of fraternity and devotion to their comrades, and will always go to their assistance when they need their help or depend on them, despite any danger or difficulty, even to the point of risking their lives."

"The IDF servicemen and women will act in a judicious and safe manner in all they do, out of recognition of the supreme value of human life. During combat they will endanger themselves and their comrades only to the extent required to carry out their mission."

3. Avoid collateral damage (damage to civilians and their property)

"The IDF servicemen and women will use their weapons and force only for the purpose of their mission, only to the necessary extent and will maintain their humanity even during combat."

Believe it or not, it's moral and lawful for those guns to be used. Among other things, implicit in the IDF moral code is the fact that soldiers risk their own lives in two cases: in order to accomplish a mission and in order to save the lives of their comrades. Individual soldiers are not permitted to risk their own lives in order to avoid collateral damage or to save civilians, and there is nothing peculiar or immoral about this in terms of military protocol. The United States Army, along with most standing armies, have the same principle.

The IDF warns civilians about incursions and goes through leaps and bounds to plan missions, on a strategic level, that are designed to keep civilians in mind. During Operation Cast Lead, the IDF even went as far as to reroute missiles already on their way to targets in Gaza, due to the fact that too many civilians 'gathered' (they were most likely being used as human shields by Hamas) near the original targets. Individual soldiers, however, must first accomplish their missions and protect themselves and their comrades-- these are the rules of war, and you'll be hard-pressed to find a military that does not follow the same protocol. Naturally, in this case, there are civilian casualties.

Even though the IDF's moral code is listed on its official website and is written in various publications for all to see, the IDF's PR front doesn't exactly advertise the fact that combat soldiers have a defined list of priorities that does not call for sparing the lives of civilians in all cases. Given the indisputable fact that this moral code is lawful, it should be advertised. During Operation Cast Lead, those speaking for the IDF repeatedly said that the IDF does 'everything that it can' to prevent civilian casualties. This is overwhelmingly true when it comes to senior officials planning missions, but the IDF failed to make it clear that there are situations in which it views civilian deaths as unfortunate, but justified. The obvious example is one in which civilians are killed because they were used as human shields by Hamas, who wouldn't allow them to vacate buildings, homes, schools, and other areas that Hamas used as military targets, despite having been warned before attacks by the IDF; the IDF considers these deaths to have been caused by Hamas, and rightfully so. The other example of civilian deaths that the IDF considers within the bounds of morality and legality is less obvious, and those are the deaths that happen due to a soldier's adherence to the IDF moral code and its list of priorities. Why should the IDF make this clear in the press?

The fact that IDF Moral Code is not made clear worldwide is a major part of the reason that much of the media call the IDF a bunch of liars, though not always in so many words. We say that we do everything possible to avoid civilian deaths, and next to these quotes from senior military officials, you'll find photos of dead Palestinian civilians. The truth is that, like any other military at war, we have a list of priorities. Contrary to popular belief, the principle of proportionality within the realm of international law does not relate to the number of civilians that are killed during war. Rather, it demands that the civilian casualties and property damage must be in proportion to the significance of the military target as it directly relates to the completion of military objectives. If the IDF kills 15 civilians when bombing a house that a Hamas operative once visited for a cup of tea, that is disproportionate. If , during a war whose objective is to decrease the ability for Hamas to carry out attacks against Israel, 15 civilians are killed when the IAF bombs the Hamas Government Complex, from which the planning of terror attacks occurs, this is not disproportionate. In addition, a soldier's life comes before a civilian in enemy territory, and even those that ideologically massacre principles of war in the name of 'international law' specifically when talking about the IDF, can't argue that this principle is illegal. As such, it would be to the IDF's benefit if it were forthcoming about its moral code. Those tragic photographs of dead civilians may be tragic, but why make it easy for the media to call us liars? Our moral code doesn't state that we protect civilians in all cases, and we need to explain that to the world.

Israel would have much less of an image problem if its PR front had the strength of the IDF's convictions.

If you visited Jewcy in the past couple of weeks, the sheer abundance of the word "Gaza" in our headlines probably gave you the impression we'd been bought out by Ted Turner.  Or, if you hide under a rock during the holiday season like yours truly, you were completely bewildered. I thought rounding up Jewcy's coverage of the recent disarray in the Middle East, along with some background info, would prove helpful for those who were left in the dust of the Israeli tanks breezing into Gaza.

Back in June, Egypt brokered an informal and rather nugatory six-month truce between Israel and Gaza.  Throughout the summer, Hamas continued firing rockets into southern Israel, and the country's border with Gaza was repeatedly violated. While Americans celebrated the election of their first African-American president, Israeli Defense Forces entered Gaza to destroy a tunnel used to traffic weapons, casting further doubt on the truce's efficacy. Cross-border raids and attacks expectedly increased, leading up to the decision to take the already comatose truce off life-support in late December.

A new, twenty-four hour truce was called, again at the behest of Egyptian mitigators, to put a damper on the rapidly intensifying exchange of fire. Yet, as soon as it expired, six rockets were fired into the Negev and clashes insued along the Israel-Gaza border fence.  This, along with a downpour of dozens of mortar shells launched by Gaza fighters on Christmas Eve, prompted a heavy Israeli offensive.

On December 27, Israel began a series of intense air strikes throughout the Gaza strip, killing upward of 200 and wounding countless others.  Strikes continued unabated the next day, as the international community began voicing its concern. Edmund Standing posted on what he sees as blatantly biased press coverage of the attacks. Meanwhile, Shira Danan gave a voice to those discomforted by Israel's course of action.

As attacks roared on, Jewcy correspondents Paul Widen and Haim Watzman both reported from Jerusalem. Widen updated us on the politics inside Israel while giving unique insight on how Israelis are responding to the offensive. Watzman is hosting his daughter's fellow students who have been evacuated from Sapir College, which is located near Sderot, a southern Israeli city within missle range of Gaza.

Jewcy editor Michael Weiss posted an essay on why Hamas is a political failure.  Meanwhile, Tel-Aviv declared the area around Gaza a "closed military zone," the Gazan death toll rose to over 350, and Jewcy received a letter from Beersheva.

By New Year's Eve, a solution had yet to be reached by the UN.  The Gazan death toll reached 400, while the Israeli death toll remained in the single digits. Gershom Gorenberg reported on the innocent children caught in the crossfire of a childish conflict, the effects of which, he says, Israel has not fully understood. 

Shira Danan gave us some first-hand accounts from Gaza on New Year's Day. Israel denied an EU truce requesting forty-eight hours for the delivery of humanitarian aid into Gaza.  Deaths in the embattled region brushed 420, while the Israeli body count broke ten.

On January 2, foreigners were ushered out of Gaza while Israeli officials begin planning a ground invasion. Andrew Bostom posted an essay displaying Hamas' abhorrence of the Jews.

On January 3, tanks rolled into Gaza to begin a ground offensive.  Neal Ungerleider reported from the "bubble" of Tel-Aviv.  Howard Schweber contemplated the value of pragmatism in the tango between Israel and Hamas.

By January 5, the EU decided it was about time to send an envoy to broker a solution.  French President Nicolas Sarkozy began a tour of the region in search of a long lost truce. Michael Weiss wrote a post pointing out that Hamas is not just a threat to the Jews, but to Islam and Palestinians as well.

The most recent news is all the more disparaging. By now, Gazans have buried over 500 of their compatriots.  Haim Watzman posted on the moral choices involved in the war on the very day Israeli attacks hit refugees outside a UN school. Hamas continues to launch rockets into Israel. The US has only recently begun voicing its concern for a ceasefire.  

I hope this post has helped catch you up on the exploding conflict in the Middle East. Let's hope there isn't much more to follow.

How does it feel to be living in Gaza or have family and friends in Gaza right now? Not many people are blogging from Gaza today because of the lack of electricity. But a little research yielded a few bloggers out there either with personal connections in Gaza or an internet connection. Take a look at these blogs.

In Gaza, a Canadian human rights activist named Eva Bartlett:

How to explain this feeling? I am physically numb to the explosions, not that i am in any way brave, but just physically unaffected. This is useful, it allows me to continue to write, to photograph, to speak. But my rational side which is continuing these things. Alberto, a Spanish journalist sitting next to me, helps me to recall that last night I told him: "I'm so focused on conveying the eyewitness account that i'm not thinking about danger."

 

Life must go on in Gaza and Sderot, a blog written by two friends: one in Gaza and one in Sderot:

I am asking the international community to stop what is going on in Gaza I hope to return to ceasefire and move away from violence Because violence will bring more violence.

 

From Gaza, Dr. Mona El-Farra, a Gazan woman currently in England:

 

I am travelling from Manchester to Cairo this week to send medication, emergency supplies, and very important orthopaedic equipment, for Al Awda hospital and the Red Crescent society. Also, some very important children's medication, and medications for chronic diseases. While the hospitals are overwhelmed with the injured, it is important to secure the rest of the patients - a very difficult balance for us in such crisis, with the health services at the point of collapse.

 

Rafah Kid, reports from Rafah: 

And what shall I say? I will not speak of my daily misery having to put up in Friday with a 24 hour power cut; nor will I like to mention my father standing in a long queue in front of the bakery at 7 a.m. to buy some bread; nor will I mention the 3 empty gas cylinders awaiting to be filled since a month; nor will I lament the patients living on respiratory support or kidney washing machines and are afraid the hospitals will have no electricity ; I find it enough to say that all those I meet,including myself and my family, are psychologically and emotionally tired.

 

Raising Yousuf and Noor, a blog from a mother in North Carolina in touch with parents in Gaza: 

"It's strange, my whole body is shaking. Why is that? Why is that?" she rambles on, continuous explosions audible in the background. "There they go again. One boom after another. 15. Before that, one or two, maybe 20 total so far."

 

Mideast Youth, a collection of blog posts and podcasts from young men and women in the Middle East: 

300 dead and over 1000 injured, and Israel is promising more.

 

Below is an urgent email from journalist Neal Ungerleider, who is currently in Beersheva:

So it looks like Beersheva is now within range of rockets from Gaza. Two rockets just hit near my apartment— we heard them land audibly and saw the ambulances bringing injured to the hospital.

I'm okay and everyone in the apartment complex is safe. Both rockets hit within densely populated areas in central Beersheva. One exploded directly opposite a kindergarten—I'm just happy this happened at night and not at day.

It's increasingly obvious there will be a ground invasion here—soldiers are being called up and many students at our university have gone on duty this week. Things are a bit quiet and my thoughts are with the soldiers and the civillians on the ground in Gaza. This situation is a mess and ... hell ... what can I say?

But I'm safe and am getting the real Israel experience, apparently.

For everyone whom I owe emails, I'll be in touch soon. Have been overloaded with classes lately.

Best, Neal Ungerleider

 

 

I’ve got war refugees in my home today. I mean my daughter’s fellow second-year students from the animation program at Sapir College, located right next to Sderot. The campus is under fire and has shut its gates, so these budding cartoonists are unable to work on their projects or attend their classes. The studies are so intense, and the creative energy so high, that they all look like lost souls when they are denied their storyboards and cameras.

Their displacement is nothing compared to the suffering the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip have been enduring since Saturday, nor compared to that of the permanent residents of Sderot and other southern Israeli towns near Gaza, those who don’t have homes up north to flee to.

When my daughter and her classmates enrolled at Sapir, they knew they’d be studying under fire. But that advance knowledge doesn’t mean that they don’t long to study and draw in peace.

Israel’s attack on Gaza is unlikely to achieve that. Israelis should be wary by now of national leaders who promise that this war, finally, will end Palestinian (or Hezbollah, or whatever) attacks on Israel. It’s unlikely to bring an end to Hamas rule in Gaza, as Tom Segev noted in yesterday’s Ha’aretz. Gazans aren’t the prisoners of Hamas tyranny—this is the government they chose, and pressure and suffering simply reinforces their solidarity and their loyalty to their leadership. And as my South Jerusalem blogging partner Gershom Gorenberg noted yesterday, we shouldn’t necessarily want Hamas to fall. A chaotic, leaderless Gaza Strip will be even worse for Israel than one ruled by Islamic militants.

The current operation is the bloodiest one Israel has ever launched against its Palestinian neighbors. Inevitably, in a place as densely populated as the Gaza Strip is, the civilian death toll is high. That will increase Palestinian and Arab resentment against Israel and lead again to charges from foreign governments and human rights organizations that Israel is guilty of war crimes. The death and destruction that Israel is wreaking on Gaza, they have already begun to charge, is incommensurate with the damage to property and only occasional loss of life inflicted by the missiles and mortars that Palestinian fire from Gaza into Israel.

Continue reading...

The Israeli security cabinet's latest decision to reclassify Hamas as an "enemy entity" is a nice recognition of the obvious, but does nothing to explain its more dangerous proposal of withholding electricity and fuel to the Gaza Strip, which is now also re-designated "enemy territory." (Thanks for clearing that up.)

As someone who's been a vocal opponent of Islamism in both its cave-dwelling and people-powered manifestations, I'm left queasy at the prospect of blacking out an entire region that, at least under its current political leadership, is already living in the Dark Ages. Under international law, the Occupied Territories are still within the demesne of Israel, meaning that Israel is in effect giving the signal to take one of its own neighborhoods off the grid.

This is a scandal for even a nasty neocon like myself because one of the acknowledged early snafus of securing a post-Baathist Iraq was the Army Corps of Engineers' failure to get basic utilities like water and power up and running on time. As the last few years have demonstrated, these were utilities that would have gone, per force, to plenty of sectarian thugs and Al Qaeda riffraff skulking in the midst of -- and in some cases, governing -- the innocent and suffering. If the U.S. now admits that it should have run the risk of unintentionally giving this kind of aid to the enemy in Iraq, then why is Israel more reluctant to do so with respect to Palestine?

As I've said before, the surge is really a militarily-implemented rescue operation of Iraqi infrastructure, and it is being conducted under much more violent conditions than what now exist in Gaza. Gen. Petraeus rightly understands that an occupier's inability to deliver basic resources for daily living is a fine way of doing the enemy's recruiting for it. (Hamas is already losing steam because of its own rancid ideology. Why allow even the hint of a chance for it to regain momentum by pointing to the evil Zionist pigs as the source of all its constituents' heating and lighting woes?)

Collective punishment is morally and pragmatically wrong.

Israel should learn from its past mistakes. As recently as last month, Tel Aviv decided to stop the shipment of paper into Gaza, thus threatening the on-time publication of schoolbooks for Palestinian students. The proffered rationale for this blockade -- that those textbooks would instruct young minds in the ways of jihad -- didn't quite wash because the schools in question were run by the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA), and thus had an international charter. Moreover, even if Haniyah-worshiping lesson plans did manage to find their way into the curriculum, this would have only proved the point of Israeli hawks: another feckless attempt at "peace-keeping" by the dire and irrelevant U.N.

Largely thanks to the efforts of Gershon Baskin and Hanna Siniora of the Israel/Palestine Center for Research and Information, enough textbooks and paper were eventually approved by the Israeli Foreign Ministry in late August so that Gazan UNRWA students were prepared for the first term.*

Pro-Israel Jews should fax Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni (her number is: +972-2-5303506) and Defense Minister Ehud Barak (his is: +972-3-697-6218) and let them know fighting Jew-hating militants and rocket launchers is a worthwhile and necessary cause, but denying an entire population energy and fuel is not.

* In my original post I mistakenly said there should be enough textbooks for the second term. The IPCRI has only requested this of the Defense Ministry. Sorry for the error.