by James M Dorsey
Two incidents in the past week shine a spotlight on Israel’s loss of a moral compass.
The incidents highlight the failure of Israel’s government, society, and institutions to enforce universally recognised moral, ethical, and professional norms and hold to account military and civilian professionals.
The incidents also suggest that stepped-up US and European pressure is needed to save Israel from itself as the Jewish state’s Western supporters conclude, albeit belatedly, that they no longer sing from the same music sheet as Israel.
Recent US and Western pressure related to humanitarian aid in Gaza and the funding of the internationally recognised, West Bank-based Palestine Authority could be the monkey wrench that sparks an Israeli wake-up call.
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This week, US Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen and her Japanese, Canadian, EU, British, Dutch, French, and Australian counterparts warned Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu that his finance minister’s efforts to deny West Bank access to financial resources endanger Israel’s security and threatens to destabilise the Middle East further.
The warning came as humanitarian aid increasingly emerged as a catalyst that could put the United States and its allies on a collision course with Israel.
US Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin and Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken set the stage earlier this month by giving Israel 30 days to boost humanitarian aid access in Gaza or risk having some US military assistance cut off.
The deadline falls after the November 5 US election, when electoral politics no longer inhibit the outgoing administration that will have a relatively free hand until the next president takes office on January 20 next year.
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Credit: ABC
In an act of defiance condemned by US and Western leaders, Israel this week took the unprecedented step of banning a United Nations agency, the UN Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), the leading humanitarian organisation in Gaza, from operating in Israel and the territories it occupies, including the Strip.
“Even MKs (Members of Knesset) from the Democrats – the newly formed alliance that includes the Labour Party and is led by Yair Golan, seen as the Israeli left’s most promising leader in years – could not bring themselves to take a stand against the ban,” noted journalist Rachel Fink.
With no alternative structure in place, Mr. Netanyahu’s policy of no policy or plan increasingly looks like a policy and a plan. The banning of UNRWA with no substitute in place is likely to leave Israel no choice but to administer Gaza itself.
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Protesters gather in front of UNRWA’s Jerusalem office. Credit: Flash90
Despite repeatedly asserting that Israel would not reoccupy Gaza, administering the territory as an integral part of Israel fits in Mr. Netanyahu’s far-right civilisational world and the policies of his ultra-nationalist coalition partners.
Middle East affairs analyst Zvi Bar’el predicted that “Israel will begin shifting from the initial takeover phase to the full civilian occupation phase that will include the reconstruction of civilian infrastructure, the reconstruction of hundreds of schools that were destroyed in the war, the reconstruction of hospitals and clinics, the paving of roads that were demolished by tanks and by airstrikes, the construction of a justice system and a police force. That is only the beginning,” Mr. Bar’el said.
Israel describes UNRWA, whose real crime is maintaining the notion of a Palestinian refugee and Palestinian national rights, as a terrorist organisation infiltrated, if not affiliated with Hamas.
Israel’s loss of its moral compass makes a mockery of its rejection of assertions that rather than committing war crimes, the Jewish state adheres to the highest standards of warfare and fields “the most moral army in the world.”
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Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu and ICC Chief Prosecutor Karim Khan. Credit: Dawn
It calls into question claims that Israel’s military can police itself or that its judiciary can credibly investigate senior government officials.
The questions constituted the basis for International Criminal Court Chief Prosecutor Karim Khan’s indictment of Mr. Netanyahu and Defence Minister Yoav Gallant and three since assassinated Hamas leaders on war crimes.
The court is considering Mr. Khan’s request to issue arrest warrants.
While implying Israel was unlikely to credibly investigate itself, Mr. Khan suggested he could drop charges if and when an Israeli court initiated a prosecution.
Mr. Khan’s pursuit of Messrs. Netanyahu and Gallant may be jeopardized by reports that the court’s in-house watchdog was investigating the prosecutor for sexual harassment.
Even so, Mr. Khan’s alleged legal problems do not discredit the validity of the charges he levelled against the Israeli leaders.
This week’s incidents prove the point. They follow an incredulous recent public debate, including in the Knesset, the Israeli parliament, of the legitimacy of raping incarcerated Palestinians.
To be sure, the incidents are but two additions to an impossibly long list of potential war crimes and seemingly cruel episodes of more than a year of inhuman suffering inflicted on Gazans and Lebanese civilians.
This includes the throttling of the flow of humanitarian aid into the Strip in what amounts to a disproportionate and indiscriminate response to last year’s October 7 Hamas attack on Israel.
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Israeli television anchor Danny Kushmaro blows up a house on a journalistic tour of Gaza. Credit: @tomersimon
The attack, the worst and most traumatic Palestinian assault in Israel’s history, has brought to the surface the country’s dark side that threatens not only Middle Eastern stability but potentially Israel’s already jeopardised future as a democratic, majority Jewish state.
This week’s incidents spotlight what happens when institutions and significant population segments lose their moral compass and abandon morals, ethics, and professionalism.
In one of the incidents, Danny Kushmaro, an anchor on Channel 12 News, Israel’s most-watched commercial channel and the country’s most recognizable journalist, crossed a red line to crown a year in which he consistently dropped his professional obligations as a fair and accurate observer and became a partisan.
On a military- guided tour of southern Lebanon, Mr. Kushmaro accepted the “honour” of pressing a button that detonated explosives in a building in the village of Ayta ash Shab, one kilometre north of the Israeli border.
Reporting from southern Lebanon, Al Jazeera correspondent Imran Khan said Ayta ash Shab resembled devasted towns and villages in Gaza.
In a rare criticism of the Israeli media’s Gaza war coverage, Haaretz journalist Maya Lecker described Mr. Kushmaro as an “adrenaline junkie known for his…Friday night dispatches on fast cars and machismo-reporting trips on motorcycle rides across Europe” who had “adjusted to the never-ending war by embedding with the Israeli military in Gaza and Lebanon” and “quickly turned himself into a useful part of the propaganda machine.”
Mr. Kushmaro’s acceptance of the “honour” broadcast in a 26-minute report in which the journalist said, “Don’t mess with the Jews,” crowned a year in which Channel 12, like most Israeli media, refused to offer the public a picture of the devastation of Gaza and Lebanon and their populations.
Much of Mr. Kushmaro’s audience does not want to be informed, but that does not relieve him and his colleagues from their professional obligation to report the facts and show multiple sides of a story.
Rather than live up to his professional and ethical obligations, Mr. Kushmaro, like many of his Israeli colleagues and television pundits, portrays Gazans and Lebanese “as bloodthirsty, greedy, religious fanatics who could have had wonderful, quiet lives – but chose instead to attack innocent Israel and brought destruction upon themselves,” Ms. Lecker said.
Mr. “Kushmaro is not alone, of course. The Israeli media is full of propagandists who consider themselves to be liberal, critical journalists,” Ms. Lecker added.
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Journalists killed in Gaza. Credit: AA
Israeli journalists and media have further been quiet about the killing of at least 128 predominantly Palestinian journalists in Israel’s Gaza and Lebanon wars and its stepped-up crackdown on Palestinian militancy in the West Bank.
Israel has further sought to stymie critical reporting by banning Al Jazeera from reporting from Israel and the occupied West Bank.
Mr. Kushmaro and the Israeli media’s abandonment of professional standards makes a mockery of Israeli assertions that Al Jazeera journalists and their Lebanese colleagues working for media outlets associated with Hezbollah are propagandists and terrorists rather than professionals.
In a similar vein, the Israeli media opted last week not to report on family and friends eulogizing the likely criminal actions and intent of Shoval Ben Natan, a vigilante West Bank settler-soldier killed in Gaza in the last week of October.
Nor did the media note that the military ignored the eulogy that should have rung alarm bells.
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Uriah Ben Natan eulogises his brother Shoval. Credit: Midde East Eye
At Mr. Ben Natan’s funeral, Yedidya Efrati recalled the soldier burning down a house in Gaza “for the fun of it.”
In an indication of the military’s failure to infuse soldiers with the internationally binding legalities of warfare, Uriah Ben Natan noted that his brother had “entered Gaza to take revenge as much as possible on women, children, everyone you saw, as many people as possible, that’s what you wanted…We thought we would massacre the enemy. massacre them all, drive them out of the land,” Mr. Ben Natan said.
In his eulogy, Mr. Ben Natan vowed that the entire nation of Israel will be able “to avenge your revenge, blood revenge, not the revenge of burning houses, not the revenge of burning trees, not the revenge of burning cars.”
The militant settler was referring to the bread and butter of vigilante attacks on West Bank Palestinians that often occur under the military’s watchful eye.
So far, Israel has brushed aside US and British sanctioning of vigilante settlers and their organisations much like one swipes aside a fly, suggesting it will take starker measures to halt Israel’s fall off a moral and ethical cliff.
Even so, Mr. Kushmaro’s crossing of the line between journalism and partisanship and the eulogy of Mr. Ben Natan, alongside the endless daily other examples of Israel’s loss of moral compass, frame the dire picture that Israeli analyst Ori Goldberg paints.
“Leave aside our complete moral corruption, our embrace of ‘their’ death as the only option for ‘our’ life. More than a year after October 7th, we have begun to die again, this time by conscious choice. God commanded us to choose life. We have chosen death,” Mr. Goldberg lamented.
Dr. James M. Dorsey is an Adjunct Senior Fellow at Nanyang Technological University’s S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies, and the author of the syndicated column and podcast, The Turbulent World with James M. Dorsey.