Nouvelles d’Orient

►http://www.haaretz.com/opinion/.premium-1.733743

They weren’t killed by the hand of God. Ideological pilots, conscientious artillerymen, humane tank crews and moral infantrymen killed them at the order of their no-less virtuous commanders.

They didn’t kill them in a real war, facing a significant military force, nor in a war of no choice. They killed most of them with bombs from the air or by shells from a distance, without even seeing them. In most cases all they saw was their tiny figures playing on the beach, huddling in their shabby homes, sleeping or running for their lives on the sophisticated computer screens and joy sticks of the no less sophisticated soldiers and pilots. They didn’t mean to kill them, but they pressed the button and killed them. Hundreds of soldiers who killed hundreds of children.

Two years later, the huge headline “The parents’ outcry” (in Yediot Ahronoth yesterday) doesn’t, of course, refer in any way to the outcry of the bereaved parents over there. Israel has never paid any heed to its actions there. If a commission of inquiry is set up to look into the Gaza conflict, it will be over the tunnels.

Israel hasn’t even looked straight at the facts and confessed. It was all for security’s sake, inevitable, Israel is the victim, they are Satan, that’s how it is in war, that’s how it always is – a 100 times more Palestinian fatalities than Israeli ones in Cast Lead, 30 times more in the 2014 conflict. (“So, did you want more Israelis to be killed?”)

This ghastly lack of proportion doesn’t raise any question or doubt, not to mention criticism. Nor does what’s left – 90,000 residents still homeless, living for the past two years among the debris or in wretched tin huts. A Swedish journalist who visited Gaza for a few days last week returned with the pictures – tin boxes housing people whose homes were destroyed in Huza’a, near Khan Yunis.

There’s no point in continuing to describe the magnitude of the disaster in Gaza. It’s of no concern to anyone in Israel. Human compassion over Gaza? Funny. Even the fact that, due to the bombardments and the siege, 90 million liters of raw sewage flow from Gaza into the Mediterranean Sea, the same sea our children bathe in, doesn’t bother anyone here.

But it’s inconceivable how Israelis can go on being so pleased with themselves and their army in view of the facts of the 2014 Israel-Gaza conflict. How come, even as time goes by, their stomachs don’t turn, if only for a minute? What can we make of people who say seriously about an army that killed hundreds of children only two years ago, that it’s the most moral army in the world? And what should we make of the society and state that has this as its discourse?