Palestinian Girl, Interrupted
How Military Morality Makes Bad Apples of Us All |
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As published on Antiwar.com |
The world is left gasping, unable to speak, because it is clear to us now: No level of killing will ever qualify as a war crime... |
In the film Schindler’s List there’s a scene where Nazi soldiers are coming to take the Jews out of the ghetto, in which they’ve been forced to live as refugees in their own country. The soldiers look anxious and extremely “pumped up”, as would be necessary for any human being ordered to carry out such an odious task. They were to round up hundreds of Jews from their homes and take them to concentration camps. Like a SWAT team, the soldiers raid the apartment buildings without warning, to prevent the inhabitants from thinking of any way to escape. The screaming of orders and frightened voices overwhelm the senses. Chaos and noise makes it almost impossible to figure out what’s happening. The men in uniform storm the apartment building in an organized fashion, banging on doors and ordering the families out. Those who resist or don’t understand what they’re supposed to do are shot. |
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Out in the street, two troops drag a slender young woman back towards the trucks—she had tried to run away—but before they can get her to the truck, another soldier shoots her to death. She collapses, each soldier still holding a now-limp arm. One of them runs up screaming at the young man who’d killed their unarmed prisoner: He’d gone too far. He’d been trigger-happy.
The Israeli military, like the US military, seems to know no limits. Or if it does, those limits are not publicized, and are unimaginable to most people. Their remarkably similar “rules of engagement” may conjure up images of engagement parties or rules for good behavior. But “rules of engagement” are a set of guidelines for murder—which murder is okay, which is not. Which bullets fired are okay, which are not. Which bombs dropped are okay, which are not. When it’s okay to machine-gun a car full of people, when it’s not. How many civilians are okay to kill, and the number that’s one digit too many. But the moment you go even one inch further, things get dodgy. When pre-emptive killings and wars are carried out in the name of self-defense, they’re lynchings or assassinations or massacres. Whether or not you feel threatened, when you kill others because they might one day attack you, you’ve lost the high moral ground. Now you’re the threat. Was It Justifiable? We Must Begin to Think for Ourselves Are these actions justifiable as reasonable self-defense? And if not, who’s really to blame? Increasingly, we’re asked to wink at the kinds of torture and killing that civilized nations used to consider illegal, genocidal, or, well, uncivilized. The explanations our military and political leaders offer are uncritically passed along to us by news anchors, talking heads, and newspapers, so we’re going to have to start thinking for ourselves. Question what you’ve been told. Following are three questions that won’t be raised in your newspaper, on radio talk shows, or on the evening news. In fact, if you live in militaristic cultures like the US and Israel, you’re not supposed to think about them at all: 1. If someone isn’t currently trying to kill you but you feel threatened, are you morally justified in killing them (rather than monitoring their behavior, taking cover, or arresting them, etc.), just to be on the safe side?
2. If you’ve been brainwashed by your leaders to believe that the people you’re fighting are “Satan” or “a bunch of cold-blooded killers, and that’s the way we’re going to treat them” or “better to make their mothers cry than ours”, or that you should “go massive…sweep it all up. Things related and not” , is it you who should be punished if you go too far (intentionally or not), or the leaders who taught you, by word and example, to do so? When a system is set up for the killing of people under the heading, “war”, or its offspring, “occupation”, the deck is stacked for murder. This fact is camouflaged by constant references to “a few bad apples” who are to blame whenever word of a particularly savage killing gets out. “Bad apples”, so the argument goes, are found in any organization, so we should overlook these things. But what makes such extreme “bad apples” out of good men and women in the military is a system that knowingly places them in “truly insane circumstances.” “If and only if you purge your soul of your own moral values, the ones your mother raised you with, we will excuse you from whatever you do”. This Faustian bargain is at the root of US and Israel leaders’ slimy refusal to be held accountable, as other nation’s leaders and militaries are, to international courts that prosecute war crimes: If they did, they couldn’t hold up their end of the bargain…
As Phillip Zimbardo’s experiments have illustrated, even labeling a person as a “prisoner” or a “guard” changes their identity and their inclinations to act accordingly. Trading their own clothes for uniforms that represent authority is an especially quick and easy way to help people exchange their normal ways of thinking about good and bad, right and wrong, for that of their leaders, their coworkers, and their organization. It requires a huge violation to activate the suppressed conscience under the uniform, and in those who view the uniform as goodness itself. 3. Why does society condemn you more for shooting or desecrating a dead body, or for torturing and humiliating someone, than for actually killing people, even civilians? If you pay close attention, you’ll find that it’s not the killing itself that arouses opposition in militaristic cultures like the US and Israel, it’s the way it’s performed and what is done afterward. I was glad to see that soldiers are speaking out against this murder. But the stamp of militarism is visible in this man’s protest—it’s as if he realizes, at some level, that to rouse the comatose morality of his military leaders and his society, he must condemn not the killing itself (for they won’t care too much about that), but the unusual part…
Indeed, the only thing that can break through our numbed, military-worshipping psyches is something really unusual: beheadings, sexual torture, desecrations of dead bodies, or shooting somebody who’s already dead. Murder and massacres are no big deal—we’ve seen it all before. And if we ever do get upset, well there’s always a soothing TV or radio commentator to help us feel better about it. To get a little perspective. To understand that this is how they do things in the military. To tuck away our moral values and repeat to ourselves, “it’s for a good cause”. Even when a Marine was caught, on film, in the act of shooting an injured, unarmed Iraqi prisoner, this was quickly explained away as a “kill-check”, yet another heinously cute term for an inhuman policy. It seemed awful, yes, at first—until we understood it better, until the authorities explained why it was necessary to kill a man lying on the floor and begging for mercy. You know, “rules of engagement”. Thank Heaven for Little Girls A little girl running in fear from armed men is killed in cold blood. A wounded man is killed at point-blank range. Families who panic at roadblocks or don’t understand they’re supposed to stop are pumped full of bullets—babies, grannies, and all. The world is left gasping, unable to speak, because it is clear to us now: No level of killing will ever qualify as a war crime in cultures where military values override our moral values. The authorities are trying their best to come up with a reason why this schoolgirl was shot so many times after she was dead—because that’s the unusual part. But in no way will the Israeli government, nor the US government, decry the fact that Palestinian civilians like her are being shot on such a regular basis. Instead, they will decry Palestinian terrorism again (unnecessary because we despise terrorism already, but it’s a good tactic for diverting our attention) and remind us that soldiers have a right to protect themselves. If that doesn’t do the trick, they’ll bring out the ultimate weapon: “There are always a few bad apples, and they will be punished”. “Either make the tree good, and his fruit good; or else make the tree corrupt: for the tree is known by his fruit.” Jesus ------------ |
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