This week I read an article in Al Jazeera describing the killing in one day of hundreds of Palestinian civilians. The same day I read a piece in CNN, “Israeli soldiers returning from war struggle with trauma and suicide”. The article tried to elicit sympathy for soldiers who were traumatised from bulldozing Palestinians.
According to the testimony of IDF bulldozer driver Guy Zaken on many occasions he and others had to “run over terrorists, dead and alive, in the hundreds.”
“Everything squirts out,” he said. Seeing all that “meat and blood” had made eating meat difficult for him.
We know that Hamas fighters do not gather “in the hundreds” so almost certainly what was being described were large-scale war crimes against civilians – but we are supposed to weep for the perpetrators. It also seemed to escape CNN’s attention that running over wounded combatants would also be a war crime. Palestinian Lives Matter.
Zaken had rationalised his actions by describing most of his victims as terrorists. He is quoted by CNN as saying, “There is no such thing as citizens,” suggesting the ability of Hamas fighters to blend with civilians.
Reading that I thought: we need to talk about the........