Even before the establishment of Israel, the Zionist Yishuv worked tirelessly to cultivate a certain image for itself. Civilized, democratic, inventive, and above all, moral. This is why the claim of the moral superiority of the Zionist militias, and later the IDF, is central in the narrative of the Israeli state’s foundation.
Similar to other elements of this narrative, such as depicting the Zionist settlers as outnumbered underdogs facing an Arab goliath, this talking point becomes impossible to argue when presented with a factual historical record. As Shlaim notes, especially when it comes to the history of the 1948 war that:
“Most of the voluminous literature on the war was written not by professional historians but by participants, by politicians, soldiers, official historians and by a large host of sympathetic chroniclers, journalists, biographers and hagiographers.”
Therefore, much of the written “history” of the 1948 war is bare-faced propaganda with little basis in reality. This becomes exceedingly clear when it turns out that, for example, Israeli military forces outnumbered and outgunned the entirety of the Arab armies in the 1948 war, which is the complete opposite of the popular narrative of the scrappy Zionist underdog, persisting against the odds. [You can read more about this here]
A central aspect of the claims to the IDF’s morality is the concept of the “purity of arms”. Shlaim continues:
“Of particular relevance here is the precept of tohar haneshek, or the “purity of arms,” which posits that weapons remain pure as long as they are used only for defensive purposes. This popular-heroic-moralistic version of the 1948 war is the one that is taught in Israeli schools and used extensively in the quest for legitimacy abroad. It is a prime example of the use of a nationalist version of history in the process of nation building.”
Needless to say, these claims about the IDF use of weapons only for self-defense have no bearing on reality.
Let us take a brief look at the conduct of the IDF and its predecessors over the years, to show just how baseless this talking point. Naturally, this is by no means an exhaustive list, otherwise this article would be hundreds of pages long.
If the purity of arms dictates that weapons can only be used in defense, I find this difficult to reconcile with the Zionist assault and depopulation of approximately 600 Palestinian villages during the Nakba. I know what you are thinking, perhaps these villages were simply the battlefield and their destruction was a byproduct of the war?
While this claim is put forward by many advocates of Israel, it has no evidence to support it. The evidence actually points to the purposeful ethnic cleansing of Palestinians to create a demographically viable Jewish ethnocracy, which went far outside the proposed borders of the UN partition plan [You can read more about this here].
Deir Yassin is probably one of the better-known examples of Zionist war crimes during the Nakba.
Deir Yassin was a small, pastoral village west of Jerusalem. The village was determined to remain neutral, and as such refused to have Arab soldiers stationed there. Not only were they neutral, they also had a non-aggression pact signed with the Haganah. This, however, did not save it from its fate, as it was in the territory of the Jewish state lined out in Plan D [You can read more about this here].
This meant that not only was it to be destroyed and have its population ethnically cleansed, an example needed to be made of it as to inspire terror in the surrounding villages. As a result this massacre was particularly monstrous.
On April 9th 1948, Zionist forces attacked the village of Deir Yassin under the cover of darkness. The Zionist forces shot indiscriminately and killed dozens of Palestinian civilians in their own homes. The number of those murdered ranges from roughly 100 to over 150, depending on estimation.
Perhaps one of the most graphic witness testimonials comes from Othman Akel:
[Warning: Explicit descriptions of torture and violence. Click here to skip]
“I saw the Zionist terrorist soldiers ordering the bakery man of the village to throw his son in the oven and burn him alive. The son is holding the clothes of his father tightly and crying from fear and pleading to his father not to do it. the father refuses and then the soldiers hit him in his gut so hard it caused him to fall on the floor. Other soldiers held his son, Abdel Rauf, and threw him in the oven and told his father to toast him well-done meat. Other soldiers took the baker himself , Hussain al-Shareef, and threw him, too, in the oven, telling him, “follow your son, he needs you there”.
Other stories include tying a villager to a tree before burning him, rape and disembowelment. Dead villagers were thrown into pits by the dozen. Many were decapitated or mutilated. Houses were looted and destroyed. A number of prisoners were taken, put in cuffs, and paraded around West Jerusalem as war trophies, before being executed and dumped in the village quarry.
[End of explicit descriptions of torture and violence]
It is important to note that this massacre was carried out before the 1948 war. It posed no threat and was not part of any military action. More recently, Zionist revisionists have tried to frame the massacre as a battle because the village guards put up resistance to the invading militias. In typical Zionist fashion, I’m certain that even had the villagers lain on the ground and died without resistance, they would have found a way to blame them for their deaths anyway.
It is also noteworthy that because the village had a non-aggression pact with the Haganah, it was the Stern and Lehi that carried out this massacre. The Yishuv offered a few words of condemnation, but later the name of Deir Yassin would be seen listed next to successful operations. In the future, there would not even be the charade of caring about non-aggression pacts or the neutrality of villages that were designated for ethnic cleansing.
But Deir Yassin is far from the only example. Al Dawayma was a Palestinian village that lay west of Al-Khalil (Hebron). According to Haganah records, the village was considered “Very friendly”. Meaning it had not host or participated in any attacks against the Yishuv. This, like Deir Yassin, did not spare them the brutality of the Zionist militias.
On October 8th 1948, the village was occupied by Battalion 89 of Brigade Eight, who committed some depraved acts upon the villagers. 20 armored cars invaded the village while soldiers attacked from another flank. The village guards couldn’t even respond, and the village fell with very little resistance.
The soldiers got out of their vehicles and started indiscriminately shooting villagers to force a panic and hurried depopulation of the village. Hundreds were killed, many of which were women and children. Villagers attempted to seek refuge in mosques and a close by shrine were shot by the dozens. Acts of barbarity were also reported by Zionist troops:
[Warning: Explicit descriptions of torture and violence. Click here to skip]
Babies skulls cracked open, women raped and burned alive in houses, villagers stabbed to death.
[End of explicit descriptions of torture and violence]
The village posed no threat, and was merely in the way of the expanding Jewish state that necessitated a Jewish demographic majority. So, it had to be eradicated.
Despite how often this accusation is hurled at Palestinians, there is actually scant evidence to support it. However, perhaps the most overlooked aspect of this accusation is that it is a case of pure projection on part of Israel. Israel has been notorious in its use of Palestinians as human shields. As a matter of fact, many of investigations into alleged Palestinian use of human shields found that it was actually Israel that was using Palestinians as human shields. For example, they would force Palestinian civilians to check houses for traps, or handle suspicious objects, or tie them to military vehicles to discourage stone throwing.
Even a simple search reveals hundreds of cases of Palestinians being used as human shields. In fact, using Palestinians as human shields was so popular that when the Israeli high court attempted to outlaw the practice the IDF actually appealed to have the decision reversed. I find it difficult to imagine any weapon or soldier remaining “pure” after using a child as a human shield [You can read more about this here].
Arbitrary arrest and standing trial in a military court is a staple of daily life for Palestinians. This also applies to Palestinian children who are not spared this blatantly illegal practice. Not only were children abducted from their homes in the middle of the night, most were tortured or abused in one way or another.
According to Defense of Children and based on 739 testimonies of arrested children, approximately 74% of them experienced physical violence following their arrest. 95% had their hands tied, 86% were blindfolded, 49% were taken from their homes in the middle of the night. 64% faced verbal abuse, humiliation or intimidation. 74% were not informed of their rights. 96% were interrogated without the presence of a family member. 20% were subjected to stress positions, and 49% were forced under duress to sign documents in Hebrew, a language most Palestinian children do not speak or understand.
The destruction of non-military infrastructure and incurring massive losses in civilians is a deliberate policy which has come to be known as the Dahiya doctrine, where it was first practiced in the Dahiya area of Beirut.
Gadi Eizenkot was quoted as saying that:
“We will apply disproportionate force on it (village) and cause great damage i destruction there. From our standpoint, these are not civilian villages, they are military bases.”
This is a direct admission that Israel sees civilian areas as military targets, and preemptively justifies their bombardment with accusations that Palestinians are using these civilians as human shields, which there is no evidence of.
The execution of captured prisoners of war by the IDF has been documented, Prior writes that:
“The Israeli daily Ma’ariv (2 August 1995) exposed the killing of some 140 Egyptian prisoners of war, including forty-nine Egyptian workers in 1956 by the elite paratroop unit 890, on the orders of Rafael Eitan, who later became the IDF Chief-of-Staff, subsequently founded the Tzomet party and now serves as Minister of Agriculture and Environment Quality in the Netanyahu government. Israel’s ‘purity of arms’ culture was further rocked by the revelation of former Labour MK, Michael Ben-Zohar, that he had witnessed the fatal stabbing of three Egyptian PoWs by two Israeli chefs during the 1967 June War. Military historian and also former MK, Meir Pa’il knew of many instances in which soldiers had killed PoWs or Arab civilians. In response to these revelations Prime Minister Rabin regretted that ‘things have been said so far. I won’t add anything to this’“
I don’t know about you, but I personally find that torturing children, taking civilians as human shields, massacring hundreds of defenseless villagers and executing prisoners of war does not sound very “pure” to me. And if you consider all of these atrocities to be committed under the guise of “defense” then we have very different definitions of the word.
At the end of the day, the IDF is an army, and like other armies it is there to commit violence. The difference is that other armies are acknowledged as such, while the IDF baselessly claims an elevated moral position for itself. But how does the IDF act when such atrocities come to light? Surely if it is such a moral army, then it would punish the perpetrators of these acts.
Predictably, this is also an area where the IDF fails miserably to live up to its desired image.
The first instinct of the IDF in such circumstances is to deny the existence of the event, or even try and blame it on the Palestinians. They frame the event as “faked” or part of Pallywood [You can read more about this here]. Only after the overwhelming evidence of these atrocities becomes viral and widespread, do the IDF admit that it was caused by them, and promise to investigate. As usual, these investigations are shams that are designed to shield the IDF from ICC prosecution, rather than seeking actual justice for its victims.
The case of Razan al Najjar is emblematic of this operational mode. She was a volunteer nurse who was shot tending to the wounded during the Gaza 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. The whole issue was buried under the IDF’s “internal investigation” routine.
But 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. 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 when these insulting sentences are given, it’s rare for an Israeli soldier to actually serve their full sentence.
Ultimately, the goal of propaganda is not to paint an accurate image of reality. The most effective variants of it is short, easy to remember, and corresponds to your worldview and biases. This is the case for all Israeli propaganda, much of which was considered the conventional wisdom when it came to the question of Palestine. However, thanks to the efforts of scholars and historians from all over the world, these myths and talking points no longer hold the sway they used to. This is not lost on advocates of Israel, which is why they have moved to try and censor and stifle Palestinian voices through legislation. It is up to us to make sure that Palestinian voices are heard and centered and let no Israeli myth pass unchallenged.
- Khalidi, Walid, Sharif S. Elmusa, and Muhammad Ali Khalidi. All that remains: The Palestinian villages occupied and depopulated by Israel in 1948. Institution for Palestine Studies, 1992.
- Shlaim, Avi. “The debate about 1948.” International Journal of Middle East Studies 27.3, 1995: 287-304.
- Pappe, Ilan. The ethnic cleansing of Palestine. Simon and Schuster, 2007.