THE LOGIC OF A ‘RELIGIOUS REVENGE WAR’
What happens when Israel’s extremists determine policy
During the Nixon years, as the Vietnam War wound down, the American GIs had a sadistic running gag about how to end the conflict: collect a fleet of passenger ships and put the remaining Vietnamese civilians on board, then sail the ships far out to the South China Sea, and sink them.
Late last month Haaretz, Israel’s most distinguished newspaper, which has been consistently skeptical about the war in Gaza, published a series revealing that Israeli combat soldiers assigned to guard newly created food depots for the starving masses were ordered by a senior commander to open fire on—that is, to shoot to kill—Gazans who were lining up for food before the official opening hours of the depots. The newspaper cited Gaza Health Ministry figures saying that 549 Gazans have been slain by Israeli bullets and more than 4,000 wounded in this way since the depots opened in late May. It reported that the senior officer whose name came up most frequently in interviews as issuing the shoot-to-kill order was Brigadier General Yehuda Vach, a regional IDF commander and a favorite of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
“This is Vach’s policy,” one IDF officer told the newspaper, “but many of the commanders and soldiers accepted it without question.” He said the Palestinians “were not supposed to be there”—before the official opening hours of the food centers. Was his point really that those executed were responsible for their own demise?
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to Seymour Hersh to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.