The Israeli Killer and the Authority of Obedience and Compliance

The killings carried out by Israel during the war waged on the Gaza Strip, which various entities acknowledged as having reached an unprecedented peak of brutality, have sparked a few attempts to explore new features that may have emerged, considering that Israel's wars, particularly against Gaza, are almost perpetual.

 

One of these attempts was represented by the testimony of an academic specializing in Israeli military affairs, Professor Yigal Levy, who observed that there is a common obsession among Israeli army elements in this war centered around revenge. The ongoing war on Gaza has elevated this motive to a social contract where the motive for killing arises from the thought process of the vast majority of the forces, reflecting a level of liberation from any moral or humanitarian constraints, even concerning innocents.

Levy focused on ground fighters, noting that there are two main motives behind this revenge inclination: the first is the theological significance of the religious Zionist movement, while the second is related to what he calls "blue-collar fighters," from lower social classes who see military service as a bridge to proper social standing.

However, in reality, as he elaborates, there was also a large and significant group that exercised an unprecedented level of violence in the history of Israel's wars, being responsible for most of the civilian casualties in this conflict—this group consists of the children of elite units, particularly intelligence and operations units, and air force crews.

In fact, this expert did not approach the issue from the perspective of whether this group was influenced by the discourse of revenge but concluded that this group displayed a high level of compliance and obedience throughout the war, a phenomenon that has never been seen in the history of the Israeli army, particularly in the history of the air force, in any previous war, which in his opinion witnessed cases of objection or refusals to intentionally harm civilians.

This level of blind collective obedience became a subject of contemplation and investigation for Professor Ori Bar Yosef, a political science professor specializing in national security, who did not dismiss the motive of revenge but added other explanations, including environmental ones, such as the absence of physical contact with bombing targets and the division of responsibility among multiple parties, which obscures the sense of individual responsibility, the tendency to rely on technological means, replacing moral dilemmas, and the use of professional language that neutralizes feelings and intuition.

In his view, there are further explanations that relate fundamentally to the Israeli education system, which does not encourage asking difficult questions and fosters compliance, secondly to the ongoing occupation (referring to the territories of 1967), which obscures the Palestinians' identity as humans, and thirdly to the way Israeli media has conveyed the realities of the war. Additionally, certain elements in global culture in general, and Israeli culture in particular, make the inclination towards compliance and obedience more dominant than any other inclinations.

It must be said here that breaking away from all these systems and structures requires, first and foremost, that individuals liberate themselves from them and practice what can be described as a voluntary self-infanticide of the process of transforming into a mere echo of the inclination towards blind obedience and compliance.

Naturally, Bar Yosef condemns the media in Israel, which the writer of these lines has previously stopped to critique for its impaired pre-ideological performance and self-censorship, but at the same time emphasized that this does not excuse anyone from personal responsibility that entails following foreign channel broadcasts to understand what is happening in Gaza. Additionally, there have been rare instances where some Israeli media reported war crimes committed, which could disturb the human conscience, such as the case of Muhammad Abu Qumsan, who went to obtain birth certificates for the twins his wife had given birth to and returned to find that all three had been killed in an airstrike, a report even mentioned by the Israeli site "Yedioth Ahronoth."