Even before the inception of the Israeli state, the Zionist movement was very conscious about the desired image it wished to project. This has remained a constant feature of Israeli hasbara to this very day. However, this image usually did not reflect reality, and had little basis in practice.
For example, when Zionist settlers wanted to appear ingenious and industrious, they projected that image by claiming they “made the desert bloom“. Naturally, they strategically left out any information which could contradict this, such as the inconvenient fact that the amount of cultivated desert actually shrunk after the establishment of Israel, or that early Zionist farmers could barely make anything grow and only survived due to financial support from abroad. [You can read more about this here].
Similarly, the appearance of righteousness and morality was paramount if Israel wanted to gain the sympathies of the world community. This led to the often-touted idea that the IDF is the “most moral army in the world“. While this claim is nonsensical and has been shown time after time to be fictitious [You can read more about this here], a natural extension of it is the claim that due to the IDF’s superior moral fiber, it holds itself accountable for any atrocities or violations against Palestinians. Unsurprisingly, this talking point is equally as baseless.
Let us take a look at some examples of how Israel has purposefully manipulated evidence, lied and created propaganda to cover up its human rights violations. This is not in an attempt to finally prove that Israel has no credibility on this front, that is a given, a colonial system will never serve justice to the very people it oppresses. The point, rather, is to show how hollow and easily refutable this talking point is, and the fact that it continues to hold any water whatsoever is a testament to the dehumanization of Palestinians who can never be believed as victims.
In 2014, and during the annual Nakba day protests marking the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians, Nadim Nuwarra and Mohammad Abu Dhaher were both shot and killed by Israeli forces in front of the Ofer military prison in Beitunia.
They were unarmed and far away from anything that could possibly be constituted as a risk to the soldiers. They were killed with live ammunition, and one of them was even shot in the back while walking away from the soldiers. They were standing over 90 meters away from the soldiers, for reference, that’s close to the length of a professional football field.
What followed, was the typical song and dance that the IDF performed every time it is accused of war crimes and human rights violations against Palestinians.
First, they denied that there was any use of live ammunition. The soldiers were only supposed to be firing rubber bullets. This was “corroborated” by an internal “investigation” that concurred that no live ammunition was used. Second, they claimed that these two teenagers were shot by the soldiers in self-defense, as they were partaking in violent attacks against the soldiers who felt threatened. But before that, the idea was floated that they were actually killed by Palestinians who were firing at the IDF and killed them by mistake. The IDF changing its story multiple times is a staple of its damage control modus operandi, and can clearly be seen in other cases as well, such as the Mohammed Al Durra murder.
Then the videos began to surface. Taken from multiple CCTV cameras in the vicinity, they showed that the teens were standing far away and were shot while they indisputably could not have been posing any threat, debunking the entire defense the IDF had been running with prior. As a matter of fact, one of them was actually walking away, with his back turned to the soldiers.
Naturally, instead of investigating further, Israel ramped up its denial. The videos, they alleged, were faked and doctored. They were simply created to defame Israel and its army. As a matter of fact, Micahel Oren, former Israeli diplomat, resorted to the racist “Pallywood” trope, and accused the dead Palestinians of being crisis actors, and that nobody really died in the first place. [You can read more about this here]
Shortly after, the spent bloody bullet was found in Nuwarra’s backpack, it had landed there after it exited his body. Of course, Israel claimed the bullet was planted there, and that it wasn’t even a real bullet used by the IDF. To challenge this, the family exhumed the body of their murdered child and had an autopsy confirm that indeed, the bullet wounds were consistent with this kind of live ammunition. However, the final nail in the coffin was when new footage from CNN surfaced, showing the soldier clearly shooting in the direction of Nuwarra at the same time of his death.
Finally, after all of this struggle lasting months, and in the face of indisputable proof and evidence, the case went to trial.
From the get go, the case of the murder of Abu Dhaher was thrown out for “lack of evidence”. Seeing the impossibly high standards of evidence needed to even get to court, it is not a surprise that 90% of investigations related to crimes against Palestinians never qualify for court. In typical Israeli fashion, these evidence standards are never consistently applied when it comes to prosecuting Palestinians in their 99% conviction rate military courts, where guilt is determined based on the flimsiest of excuses.
The soldier was initially charged with manslaughter, but later in a plea deal it was reduced to “causing death by negligence”. This joke of a sentence meant that he would only get a sentence of 9 months in prison, and since he had already been in custody for 2 months, only 7 months of his sentence remains. That is assuming he would even complete his sentence. This kind of sentencing is the norm.
Another case, is the case of Razan al-Najjar, which is also emblematic of the IDF’s operational mode. She was a volunteer nurse who was shot tending to the wounded during the Gaza march of return protests of 2018, even though she posed no danger. The IDF began its usual mantra, blamed Hamas for her death, and even released an edited video to try and defame Al-Najjar and make it seem that she was being used as a human shield.
This backfired when the full video was released that made no such claim. What it actually showed was how deceptively the IDF had edited the video to try and put words in Razan’s mouth. It seems killing her was not enough, now they needed to assassinate her character and shift the blame onto her as well. The whole issue was buried under the IDF’s “internal investigation” routine and nobody expects anything will come of it.
But, as shown, even in the extremely rare cases where the investigations lead to a trial, and in the infinitesimally rarer cases it actually finds a soldier to be guilty, the “punishments” are rather laughable. If you think the case of Nadim Nuwarra is an infuriating mockery of justice, it gets much worse. For example, the commander found to be responsible for the Kufr Qassim massacre where 49 Palestinians were murdered in cold blood was fined 10 measly pennies for giving the order to open fire on civilians. His accomplices were sentenced to very light jail time, but were all pardoned and set free within a year. So even in the rare case where these insulting sentences are given, it’s rare for an Israeli soldier to actually serve their sentence in full.
But these are far from exceptions to the rule, in Israel it seems like normalized savagery towards Palestinians is a prerequisite for a successful political or military career. We say this without any kind of exaggeration, it is difficult to find an Israeli Prime Minister who has not been part of vicious war crimes against the Palestinians, from Rabin, Sharon, Shamir, to many others.
At the end of the day, the IDF is an army, and Israel is a settler colony. Violence and injustice are inherent parts of these entities. Nobody was expecting that Palestinians would receive a crumb of justice from these colonial institutions, however, it remains important to challenge the myth of the moral superiority of Israel, which is a central feature of its propaganda efforts.
- Hajjar, Lisa. Courting conflict: The Israeli military court system in the West Bank and Gaza. Univ of California Press, 2005.
- Puar, Jasbir K. The right to maim: Debility, capacity, disability. Duke University Press, 2017.
- Erakat, Noura. Justice for some: Law and the question of Palestine. Stanford University Press, 2019.
- Azarov, Valentina. Institutionalised Impunity: Israel’s Failure to Combat Settler Violence in the Occupied Palestinian Territory. Al-Haq, 2013.