Israeli foot soldiers show themselves proudly on TikTok, You Tube, Instagram and other social media, blasting to bits mosques, shops and whole universities and apartment blocks in Gaza. As major US TV channels recently telecast, these Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) troopers have even used videos of some of the more spectacular blasts as their wedding invitations and birthday greetings. There was one particularly revolting one where they shot dead three totally innocent sheep.
Military analysts across the world are amazed at this flagrant indiscipline by a professional military cadre. Most State militaries are not only professionally concerned with their own institutional integrity (which discipline foregrounds) but they are aware that even any opposing insurgent militaries also foreground their force integrity and effectiveness on similar iron discipline. That is the whole purpose of court-martials and punishments, especially in battlefield conditions, that often include summary military execution.
Rigid discipline
Without such rigid discipline, military endeavours cannot succeed.
Discipline is that critical. It must ensure that troops are unwaveringly ready to risk death – their ultimate community sacrifice – in coordinated, iron-strong, defence of their nation or, in the case of insurgent struggles, their community/class. That is why, despite all the political propagandising by the enemy on both sides, the militaries themselves know that military “indiscipline” (‘rape’, ‘direct civilian massacres’ and so on) is not the norm but the exception.
Even death squad action – whether by the Nazi Einsatzgruppen or more recent – are precisely actions by distinctly separate units that are not part of the main militaries. This is why, to see Einsatzgruppen-style actions by the mainstream IDF, is unnerving to professional militaries across the world as well as to civilian commentators. To the ordinary civilians, not versed in Nazi history, such behaviour has the added impact of creating generalised impressions that such behaviour can be ‘normal’ for any military.
Worse, the very flaunting of this barbarism serves to legitimise such uncontrolled behaviour in any circumstances – even by teenage gangs and ad hoc racist mobs. In short, such unchecked and un-condemned behaviour is helping create a terrifyingly bastardised “civilisation’.
The non-checking and non-mitigation of such indiscipline is what enables such large-scale troop behaviour and their public display for all the world to see. This is simply the hardest evidence of the sheer impunity of the troops in the ongoing offensive in Palestine.
Even the mainstream Western TV channels that, till recently played down such barbaric behaviour by the very military forces they are supposed to champion, has now begun to report this troop indiscipline. With such reportage of military behaviour by the IDF is done by the West’s own media, the continuation of the West’s financing and re-supply of the Israeli war effort is stark evidence of deliberate acquiescence.
Are Western, so-called, ‘democracies’, that desperate as to ignore such flagrant barbarism – not by thugs but by trained military which depends on their support? Nothing like this comes out of the Ukraine War from either side.
And this military indiscipline is only the smallest aspect of the overall regional conflagration that is being sustained – despite all exposure, condemnation and negative reactions – by the Western powers in Israel-Palestine and in the Levant as a whole.
What is this desperation of the West that motivates it to ignore what is being done by its colonial progeny, Israel? Surely this must challenge all forms of reasoned analysis by even the most dispassionate and non-moral observers. After all, the issue of military discipline has nothing to do with morality (as discussed above). There is only one ‘desperate’ motive that is identifiable in terms of even a limited (closed) rationality in the West’s grim, determined, deployment of the Israeli war effort (President Joe Biden recently called it “our operations” in a stunning ‘Freudian slip’). That ‘desperate motive’ is one of a crudely colonial strategy of Europeanised control of territory in what is seen as a strategic location crucial to the West’s heartland of Europe.
Israel-Palestine, is, after all, the very last colonising endeavour by the West. It was, even then, clearly out of its time. Already, other colonies were poised to free themselves of colonial rule or, colonising powers were beginning to withdraw from something they could no longer sustain.
Colonial progeny
Israel is that last colonial progeny. It is now being desperately sustained by its cynical imperial progenitors even at the cost to the civilised integrity of the progeny itself. Even as the death toll from the IDF offensive topped 28,600 yesterday, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) rejected plaintiff South Africa’s follow-up request for more interim strictures on the military offensive. South Africa’s additional plaint for further ‘provisional measures’ to be stipulated by the Court, was made in the light of the unmitigated mass deaths in the military offensive.
Most analysts did not expect any other response from the so-called ‘World Court’ given that the Court had rejected South Africa’s original plea for provisional measures that would actually halt the military activity on both sides. Instead, the Court, paradoxically, simply asked Israel to ensure that its military operations would not cause genocide, thereby virtually acquiescing to the continuation of the offensives – even though its own ruling acknowledges “plausible” genocide as already occurring.
Thus, the world community is beginning to learn the sheer extent of the rigidity of the international supposedly ‘legal’ machinery, most of which have been set up by the Western Powers that continue to dominate the globe. What the Global South, most of which are nations formerly colonised by those same Powers, have now realised is that the ICJ and the United Nations system itself, was set up at a time before the Global South was freed of Western colonial control.
The UN that began in 1947 and functioned for the first few decades “free” of these colonised subject nations, was comfortably manipulated by the colonial powers to design a world system fully catering to their continuing imperial dominance. Their machinations were largely supported by the other UN members at the time, comprising some tame, Europeanised, former colonies – Canada, Australia, New Zealand and in Latin America.
Blind eye
That was how the UK and the UN turned a blind eye to the European Jewish colonialist movements during the 1940s who funded and transported European Jewish (i.e. ‘Ashkenazi’) settlers escaping both racist persecution and poverty in their home countries. These European Jewish private – but often Government-encouraged – settler movements were funded and facilitated by the Zionist Movement, most prominently, but there were many other powerful and wealthy Jewish lobbies.
The Ashkenazi Jewish community was originally historically most significant for Europe. The Jews’ transnational networks across the continent played an invaluable role in the medieval age as finance infrastructure between medieval states, at that time.
In doing so, they helped build modern European capitalism into a new, vibrantly expansive, world phenomenon. Once continental capitalism enabled various European medieval polities become strong ‘nation-states’, that original networking role of the European Jewry became less important for the new capitalist political-economies.
That loss of Governmental patronage and protection as well as the socio-economic decline of Jewish communities, resulted in their marginalisation and, gradual discrimination as ‘economic parasites’ by an European society that was no longer dependent on the Jews’ inter-state networking. Hence, for example, the demonising of Shylock by Shakespeare in the era of transition from the medieval to the capitalist-modern.
Thus, by the early 20th century, the West was happy to create yet another colony in the Levant (which includes Palestine, Lebanon and Syria) in order that Europe could re-settle the unwanted Jews of Europe. It must be noted that those same Western powers, at that time, thought nothing of allowing the forcible expulsion of the indigenous Palestinian population to make way for the European settler colony of Israel.
It was an effort in old-style colonialism that was already going against world trends of de-colonisation. In the same year that Israel was forcibly created by the West, the whole of South Asia, including Sri Lanka, was declaring itself “free” from colonialism. The very country that supervised the establishment of Israel, the UK, was, at the same time, formally handing over colonies all over the world to their indigenous nations.
Firstly, there must be a recognition of the anachronism that is Israel, and the entirely anachronistic – leave aside barbaric – nature of that attempt to continue a colonial program of European territorial annexation in a post-colonial age. Following such a geopolitical acknowledgment, there arises a wholly new challenge for the perpetrators of this anachronism to abort this whole enterprise that is in discordance with today’s geopolitical realities.
Fortunately, world governance is no longer the monopoly of the colonial West. Not even though the mechanisms of governance are only now being grudgingly released by the former creators of the UN. It is up to today’s largely postcolonial humanity – a whole era away from the colonial regime – to determinedly revamp the UN system as part of the process of ridding the world of even this truly horrific remnant of Western colonialism.
