Ill-disciplined IOF left its mark in Gaza

Amnesty International has a new blog carrying extracts from field reports made by its researchers. In this post, Friday, Donatella Rivera writes about the physical detritus the IOF soldiers left behind them in many of the private homes they took over and occupied in Gaza. (HT: Badger of Missing Links.)
She wrote:

Every one of these houses we visited was in a shocking state. All the rooms had been ransacked, with furniture overturned and/or smashed. The families’ clothing, documents and other personal items were strewn all over the floors and soiled and, in one case, urinated on. In one house in the Sayafa area in north Gaza, several cardboard boxes full of excrement were left in the house – although there was a functioning toilet which the soldiers could have used.
Walls were defaced with crude threats written in Hebrew, such as “next time it will hurt more” and, in one house, a drawing of a naked woman…

This is very reminiscent of the traces left behind by IOF soldiers on various rampages including in West Beirut in 1982, where the excrement was often left on the belongings of city residents.
Rivera added this:

Chris Cobb-Smith, the military expert in our team who was an officer in the British Army for 20 years, was staggered at what he saw and the behaviour and apparent lack of discipline of the Israeli soldiers.
“Gazans have had their houses looted, vandalised and desecrated. As well, the Israeli soldiers have left behind not only mounds of litter and excrement but ammunition and other military equipment. It’s not the behaviour one would expect from a professional army,” he said.

No, indeed it is not. And nor are the numerous, well-reported incidents in the Gaza rampage in which IOF soldiers shot Palestinian civilians at point-blank range.
Col. Pat Lang provided a partial explanation for the IOF’s lack of discipline in this early-January blog post.
Writing about the close contacts he had with Israeli military during his time as a professional US soldier, he observed that, unlike in the US when it had a mainly conscript army, the IDF/IOF does not routinely have any professional cadre of well-trained sergeants capable of enforcing discipline and standards– including standards of keeping within the requirements of the Laws of War– on the often poorly trained infantry brigades made up of reservists or conscripts.
Regarding the conscript units in the IOF ground forces, he wrote:

As a result, a non-reserve infantry or tank company in the field consists of people who are all about the same age (19-22) and commanded by a captain in his mid 20s. What is missing in this scene is the voice of grown up counsel provided by sergeants in their 30s and 40s telling these young people what it is that would be wise to do based on real experience and mature judgment. In contrast a 22 year old American platoon leader would have a mature platoon sergeant as his assistant and counselor.
– As a result of this system of manning, the IDF’s ground force is more unpredictable and volatile at the tactical (company) level than might be the case otherwise. The national government has a hard time knowing whether or not specific policies will be followed in the field. For example, the Israeli government’s policy in the present action in the Gaza Strip has been to avoid civilian casualties whenever possible. [Well, its stated policy, anyway… ~HC] Based on personal experience of the behavior of IDF conscripts toward Palestinian civilians, I would say that the Israeli government has little control over what individual groups of these young Israeli soldiers may do in incidents like the one yesterday in which mortar fire was directed toward UN controlled school buildings.
… One might say that in war, s–t happens. [See above ~HC] That is true, but such behavior is indicative of an army that is not well disciplined and not a completely reliably instrument of state policy. In my travels in the west Bank in March of 2008, it was noticeable that the behavior towards Palestinian civilians of IDF troops at roadblocks was reminiscent of that of any group of post-adolescents given guns and allowed to bully the helpless in order to look tough for each other. I think the IDF would be well advised to grow some real sergeants.

I think this provides a valuable part of the explanation of what happened in Gaza. But the other part, surely, has to do with the racism that’s so prevalent in Israeli society: the sense that the Palestinians– living in Gaza or elsewhere– are not really fully human, and certainly not deserving of the basic human decency that all fellow-humans deserve.
Back in West Beirut in 1982, my recollection is that it was some of the apartments owned by the more middle-class Palestinians there that got trashed (and excrement-dumped) the worst… As though the IOF soldiers, were so taken aback to see Palestinians living lives that looked just as clean and well-ordered as their own (or cleaner?) that they felt the need to trash all that cleanliness and good order… to drag the Palestinians down into the muck where they felt they all belonged.
(See also this account by the BBC’s Jeremy Bowen of what the IOF soldiers did in the home of a little girl called Mona– along with killing both her parents, that is.)
I am just recalling, too, that in Caroline Elkins’s excellent book about the British military’s colonial campaign against the Kenyan independence movement in the 1950s, one of the notable punishments meted out in the massive concentration camps the British erected was to force those stalwarts who refused to bow to their demands to run around for hours, in public, with leaking buckets of excrement on their heads. As Elkins wrote, part of the intention seemed to be to buoy up the view of the British and other soldiers there– who might otherwise have been forced to have some grudging admiration for the steadfastness and dignity of their captives– that the captives really were just muck-covered sub-humans, after all.
Regarding the IOF, one of the stated goals of those who launched this latest Israeli “war of choice” was to “restore the credibility of Israel’s military deterrent” by demonstrating that the Israeli ground forces– which had performed extremely poorly, from a military point of view in Lebanon in 2006– had now been rebuilt and were “back in tip-top condition.”
Militarily, well, yes perhaps that is so. But after all, what on earth use could tank battalions ever really be, militarily, within the close and crowded confines of Gaza’s cities and refugee camps? And massed infantry was never sent in, lest– presumably– too many Israeli soldiers’ lives should get lost to Palestinian fighters well dug into their very familiar and complex home terrain.
So actually, what got proven about the ground forces at the level of military capability? Not very much.
But at the moral level, a lot was proven, namely their ill-discipline (including in leaving useful military goods behind them) and the wanton brutality, arrogance, and vengefulness with which they behaved.
I am repeatedly surprised by the wilful blindness of Israeli political and military leaders who can’t see that these traits and behaviors are massively counter-productive to their people’s longterm wellbeing. How on earth do they think that such behaviors will help make the region in which they live more peaceful and thus provide the basis for Israel’s own longterm security?
Ah well, I guess that critique is equally applicable at the “macro” level, in terms of the decision the Israeli pols made, in the first place, to launch yet another in the now-lengthy series of its wars of choice that attempt to force their neighbors to submit to their will. This was the sixth such war since 1982. And none of them has ever, from 1982 on, turned out well for Israel in the political-strategic arena.
But it’s important not to lose sight of the micro level, either. For in the crucible of the micro level of the way actual human persons relate to each other a long-overdue regional peace can be significantly hastened– or once again delayed.